American Hominid said:
Anchorhead - your post made me want to watch Graffiti, which made me check out the Wiki page too... according to that, George wanted Marcia to cut the movie but ended up doing most of it himself after the studio-chosen editor left. ?
I was going by an in-depth piece on Marcia Lucas, written by Michael Kaminski on his Secret History Of Star Wars site. The full article is here; http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/marcialucas.html
This is the portion dealing with the editing of American Graffiti;
Lucas looked at Graffiti footage every day and explained what he wanted from Marcia and Fields--the only time he ever spoke to his wife during the hectic post-production schedule. Walter Murch came onboard as sound editor, and they together collaborated on the difficult task of cutting the music to fit the scene.
Marcia argued George out of his original approach to the structure of the film, which depended on a more rigid construction of cross-cutting the different narratives, and she also was crucial in giving scenes longer time to breathe, as Lucas then insisted on cross-cutting much more frequently (as seen in Attack of the Clones--Marcia's criticism was that the scenes either never developed or they lost their dramatic momentum by aborting so quickly).
Verna Fields left once the rough cut had been assembled, since she had another job lined up, but the film was almost an hour too long, so for the next six months Marcia cut the film down along with Lucas and Murch. For the next cut, Marcia listened attentively to George and made the film the way he instructed. It was a disaster.
Because of the interlocking narrative structures, the film could not simply be trimmed up in a conventional sense because removing one scene, or part of a scene, affected the next narrative thread and threw off the rhythm of the film. Lucas remarks: "You literally can have a film that works fine at one point, and in one week you can cut it to a point where it absolutely does not work at all." [xxxix] Now it was Marcia's turn at bat- -she took over and re-cut the film on her own this time, while George worked with Walter Murch on the sound design.
By January 1973, Marcia had assembled the film for a test screening. The release would be controversial--the test audiences absolutely loved the film, yet the studio executives thought it was terrible.....
Eventually, the film was released, though the studio trimmed off a couple minutes of footage. It nonetheless won rave reviews........American Graffiti was a powerhouse hit that was an absolute audience-pleaser. It grossed over $100 million dollars, and when calculated in terms of budget-to-gross may be the most profitable film ever made
The highlight is mine. I think that is the thing that made Star Wars work so well. The time the audience is given, so they can feel the emotions. To me, that is a crucial element missing from Return & Phantom (can't speak to the last two films).
Glad to hear/see you're enjoying HTTE... the feel of the world (with respect to the OT as a whole, not just SW77, which probably matches better with the Daley novels and such) and the characters is pretty spot-on, I think.
Man, I am digging it. Got Dark Force & Last Command on order. Side note; When Mara is having dinner, she has a glass of wine with it - not a glass of fermented otranian hun fruit nectar, or some such bullshit from Reeves and Perry. Zahn is about story, not nerd fluff.
By the way, what did you think of American Graffiti?