RogueLeader said:
I think it is a matter of balancing perspectives. Every writer or journalist is going to have their own bias. Obviously George deserves a lot of credit and responsibility for what he created (good or bad, however you feel about it), as well as surrounding himself with other talented filmmakers who also contributed heavily to these films. Filmmaking is inherently a collaborative process, so videos like “How Star Wars was saved in the edit” aren’t trying to say the editors saved a sinking ship that George was sailing, it is just trying to highlight the contributions of other artists who helped make the movie what it was too.
Yeah basically this, but also
MikeWW said:
I feel that “saved in the edit” is indeed a phrase that carries certain anti-GL-credit connotations. Otherwise, what is the implication? That the editors salvaged George’s mess. It implies a distance between the film being shot and the film being edited.
This feels true as well.
Regarding this though
What’s funny though is that the (pre Disney) Star Wars movie most altered in the edit is probably Revenge of The Sith, and even Mathew Stover who wrote the novelization (that people like to say is better than the movie) called George’s assembly edit-based reshoots “genius”.
AOTC was certainly altered more. A decent chunk of that movie was done in reshoots, probably a number not too far off from RO. Also the ROTS novelization is way better than the movie. But there I give Lucas the benefit of the doubt, because I have not read the script he was working from, I don’t know how much is Stover and how much is Lucas (and how much of the material which was not in the film was actually shot, which I think there was a decent amount). But reading that book definitely makes me think that George actually could have made a great movie out of that, had he cut it differently.