Originally posted by: auximenies

Originally posted by: THX
...or ROTJ (2004) to honor Sebastian Shaw?

I'll go with this one as the best analogy to the SE screening to honor the model work.

Some of Sebastian Shaw's performance was eliminated. And what remains was tinkered with. Hey, his eyebrow movements were part of his performance.

Clive has nothing left in ESB. And Prowse never participated in ROTS.

Absolutely. Sabastian Shaw had a short, but excellent and moving preformence. Tweaking his face with CGI alters his preformence. Eliminating him completely from the final scene shows that Lucas had no respect for the man.

But honestly, I think Lucas doesn't have respect for anyone that worked on any of his movies. The best movies are big collaberations where lots of people with lots of talents do thier best to bring a collective vision to the screen. Lucas's vision was the main vision for Star Wars (1977) but lots of other people had visions that went into it. Ralph McQuarrie's artwork fueled much of the modelwork and charecter design. The modelmakers themselves had a huge vision that they brought to the screen. But once the film is done, Lucas just selfishley says, "It's mine. I can do what I want with it. My precious..." and does whatever he wants with it.

I recently purchased the Peter Jackson's Kind Kong extended edition and watched the 3 hour documentary on making the film. It was a huge, great collaberation, and as much as the crew praises Jackson, Jackson prasies the crew moreso. It's the same on his LOTR documentaries. Jackson is obviously proud to have had that kind of collaberation, proud that he was part of it, and constantly thanks everyone for making such a great movie.

But when I watch Star Wars documentaries like Empire of Dreams, I see interviews edited down to just praising Lucas, and Lucas praising no one but himself and the "saga." I get the aura of a slave owner from him, like he just expects all his cast and crew to just do whatever he expects, and he doesn't have to mention them when talking about the final outcome of the films. Jackson's documentaries have tons of footage of other people, cast and crew, talknig about thier parts, obviously not as much as him (he's the director; more time to film later for documentary) but everyone gets a fair share of on screen time to show everyone thier part of the film. Where's the Star Wars documentary where we see modelmakers showing how they achieved it? Where are editors talking about how they edited it? Where's cameraman talking about the tough shots and how he accomplished them?

Lucas takes his films when thier done, and from that point on, they are his and no one else's and he can do whatever he wants to them. A director has that right on paper, but morally, directors need to share their films, and their success, with their crew. It's sad, because Lucas wasn't always like this. Back when the movies first came out, he didn't claim the films to be soley his own. But its so different now. Empire of Dreams even says Lucas wrote the script for ESB. It doesn't even mention the real screenwriters! That has got to be one of the greatest injustices.

I think its lucky Peterson is even getting to do this book...it was probably edited by Lucasfilm to add Lucas praise every other sentance.