Harmy said:
Well, you see, in the movie business, there's this job called "editor." And such a person takes what the director and all the others shot, very often without having anything to do with the process up to that point and cuts it into a coherent film, because that is their art. And, while of course the situation with fan editors is a bit different, I still don't see any harm with someone making their preferred cut of a movie, since they're only editing a copy of the film and it has no bearing whatsoever on the version preferred by the original creator. It's like if I bought a printed replica of a famous painting, I don't see why I couldn't make a photocopy of it and paint a few extra things on that copy before hanging it on my wall. And if my friend happens to like it, why not make a copy for him? In fact, many artists have done similar things, taking a photo or a copy of a famous piece of art and changing it, so that it became a new, different piece of art.
Even the editing fell under Lucas's jurisdiction---he may not have been involved directly on a day to day basis but everything that Marcia,Hirsch and Chew produced went through him for final approval in 77'.
And Lucas was a pretty shit hot editor himself back in his student days.
He also had the audacity to fire Jimpson whose initial edit(parts of which we have been able to see) was cumbersome at best-----a risk for sure given the studio pressures and time constraints that Lucas was already under in the fall of 76'.
How did George Lucas and Gary Kurtz ‘direct’ you? Did they have specific requests or guidelines?
Paul Hirsch:
Gary was not involved in aesthetic editorial decisions. George basically let me do my thing with each scene, and then would give me notes. And he consulted very closely with Marcia of course. And then at a certain point, he decided he preferred working with just one editor, and chose me to finish the film. I was the only editor on the picture over the last 5 months, during which they re-shot the Cantina sequence; R2 in the canyon, captured by the Jawas; some of the land-speeder shots; as well as the gearing-up of the planet-destroying weapon on the Death Star. It was during this period that we completed the blue-screen shots and I watched the space sequences come to life as the backgrounds were filled in.
http://starwarsinterviews1.blogspot.com/2010/07/paul-hirsch-editor-star-wars.html
Fan editors experience no such comparitive pressure when they sit in the comfort of their own homes behind computer screens with only themselves to act as judge, jury and executioner----on someone else's piece of work.