Save Star Wars Dot Com — Page 21

Kershner liked the windows. The wampa he seemed not sold on.

As time goes by, the labeling and preservation really is the main thing, since it gets creepier every year that so many people don't even know that anything has been done to the movies. That's the most orwellian thing about it. Yeah, that's melodramatic but hey, I don't know what else to call it when millions of people can be made to believe a falsehood purely from one guy being rich enough to make it seem true to them.

edit-probably worth repeating this kershner quote:

“I hate slick films, because to me slick means polished with all the bumps and seams taken out. I think Empire is not slick because it’s bumpy in places, and a little ragged, and terribly real… Those things lend a sense of something that has been handmade, not machine made. Empire is not a machine-made film. It’s a handmade film and it has all the imperfections of anything that’s handmade.”

Kersh said he appreciated the expanded Bespin, but he also said he was glad it was changed so little, and he seemd to diplomatically indicate he wasn't a fan of the new wampa. But the point is: he wasn't given the choice. It wasn't his doing and he had zero involvement or consultation. If it were up to him, he would have never touched the film, because it was what it was and he was proud of it and had moved on and didn't think it needed to be revisited. All Lucas did was give him an advance screening, not for approval but just to show him what he was doing to his film.

Kasdan, on the other hand, didn't see the film until it premiered. And of course Brackett and Marquand were long dead.

Essentially, according to the Berne Convention Lucas was so aggressively trying to get Congress to recognize, Lucas produced a million dollar fan-edit, since they were other people's films, even though he had a hand in them. Like all fan edits, his version is good in places, bad in places, with some changes that are appreciated and others that are bewildering, but at the end of the day you would never want them to replace the original.

msycamore said:

The old home video versions are Lucas' "restored original cuts", but the original theatrical releases should be preserved anyway IMO. One of the nice things about preservations of different cuts, is that you can study the films history.

My sentiments exactly, 100%.

The text of the epilogue card was only changed to match the sequel, right? (to better connect it to the Tragedy of John Milner)?. As for THX, imdb says it originally opened with a trailer for Things to Come, not the Buck Rogers serial. Is that for real or just one of those unreliable imdb things?

msycamore said:

The old home video versions are Lucas' "restored original cuts", but the original theatrical releases should be preserved anyway IMO. One of the nice things about preservations of different cuts, is that you can study the films history.

Yes, it's one of the things about Blade Runner that's interesting; being able to see the different versions and compare them. Ridley isn't just re-releasing the movie every few years with some minor or major changes and then erasing the preceding version of the film. He realises the place each version has in history.

1) The Atack of the Show link on the website is dead.

They keep moving all their content around, pain.  Might want to dump a copy on youtube/vimeo/dailymotion and link to them.  Here's where it currently resides:

http://g4tv.com/videos/12997/the-loop-is-george-lucas-ripping-you-off/

Thanks, None. :)

Harmy: I think someone should write to LOC and actually ask them about the matter. Hell, maybe I will, I guess I am technically a "member of the press" to some obscure degree. How does one go about doing this?

doubleofive wrote:

How does the LOC having the movie preserve it anyway if I can't go watch it?

Their idea of preservation at the moment is the right climate controlled conditions so that the films will exist when copyright expires.  So that some future generation a company/organization will ask the library to reproduce the work for profit or non-profit.  Copyright gives a window for the creator to reap the benefits of their work.  From a discussion of this in another forum, if George lives to 97, in 2111 Star Wars will go Public Domain.  100 years.  Happy Copyright everyone.  yeeha.

The whole idea of LOC is so that if there is a nuclear war or if a studio goes crazy and decides to junk all their prints or if people just simply forget about the films and they decay and get lost, this will be a safety back up that is protected by law from ever having harm come to it and safely stored in a very well-guarded federal reserve.

Of course, this assumes that the actual original is out there to be seen. No one can see the LOC prints, the whole point is to lock them away as last-ditch reserves. But in the case of SW and ESB they are "backups" to an "original" that no longer exists, in effect making them "originals" that we are incapable of viewing. Bizarre situation. Sending an email to them now, will report back if they confirm anything.

Harmy: I did a newsflash about ESB's preservation.

Also: not heard from LOC yet. As it is a government position, they may have monday off in order to satsify new years holiday hours since it fell on a weekend. Standing by.

US Government works at their own speed.  The FOIA requests I sent took between 3-5 months.  And even worse i'm in the process of getting my DVD into the Library of Congress and we're still ongoing just passed 21 months, but they did get back to me in month 20, so at least I know it's in the pipeline.  The problem your going to run into is, even though this contact is the point person, they might not have access to the info you're requesting, so it gets passed down the chain.  Via Bureaucracy.  What was the letter you wrote.  Might toss another on their pile from my own hand.  Was trying to determine what were the quickest ways for them to identify what they've got, if they are able to handle the merchandise.  SW is easy, check out the crawl.   Don't know the ESB reel changes well enough to identify a scene they could visibly identify without unrolling too much reel.  But the idea of them looking at the actual reels, seems farfetched.  Wonder if they are allowed to photograph the cases....