Watched this earlier. Some interesting things in this first part. Marcia looks like she is going to address being “erased” from SW history by George in a later episode. A few factual inaccuracies though. Looking forward to part 2.
Agreed. I definitely enjoyed it. What were some of the inaccuracies?
I’d have to go back and watch it again and note down them, but a couple i remember is that they said that George was refused the rights to Flash Gordon because Dino De Laurentiis beat him to it, which we know is completely false. The other one was that they were talking about shooting at Elstree studios but all the footage they were showing was of the Yavin Hangar scenes , which were shot at Shepperton Studios. In fact they never even mentioned Shepperton , just claiming it was all shot at Elstree.
After seeing the second episode, they have basically cut Gary Kurtz. The only brief times they mention him it’s negative. NO mention of the fact that he took over the second unit to direct many scenes in order to get the film finished on time before the studio pulled the plug. They just portray him as this “looming” figure who couldn’t control anything. Yet people who actually worked on the film have said the opposite and have been quite unhappy with the way he was portrayed in the first episode. God knows how they will feel after this second one.
We do now know about the different cuts of the film . It is said in this doc that the Biggs/ Luke scenes were cut very early on and BEFORE the rough screening George did for his friends ( De Palma, Spielberg etc) AND long BEFRORE ANY PUBLIC SCREENING. It seems that , for the one and only public screening prior to release, the only difference was the opening crawl. So all those people that have been claiming they saw a cut in the cinema that contained these scenes, are either flat out lying or completely misremembering.
It’s been interesting hearing just how much influence Marcia had on this film, finally. The fact that George let De Palmas comments about the force get to him and George started re-cutting the film to eliminate much of the force , with marcia going behind his back and adding them all back in. George worshippers won’t be happy with this doc though.
A good thing about this is that they are showing footage of the original cut of the film and not special edition. I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure they are using Despecialised for the footage in this doc.