I've been striving to preserve the OOT in the best possible quality, as many of you know.
Well, I've recently come into contact with a film collector who thinks he can help. He wants to stay safely anonymous, of course.
This collector has managed to assemble a complete 70mm/Dolby set of reels from the original 25-May-1977 run. He claims that most of the reels were used at the Triplex Paramus Theater in Paramus, NJ.
I took a trip up to NJ to meet him and he's definitely interested in telecining his copy of Star Wars.
He let me take a cellphone-camera picture of his collection, but made me promise to post it at a very low resolution. Note: Many of the canisters do not contain Star Wars. This is his entire collection and Star Wars is sitting somewhere in the middle.
We watched the film using his Cinemeccanica Victoria 8 projector (dual 35/70mm) in his home theater and each reel seems to be in tip-top shape. There's so little damage that I think just a bit of FilmGuard solution should do the trick. Honestly, it looks like his copy of the film has never ever been projected!
We have a lead on an 8K 70mm film scanner.
Stay tuned. Word to the spookies.