Broom Kid

Acknowledging that there are bad fan-edits (and a lot of them) isn’t cynicism, nor is it lack of imagination or “belief in possibilities.” It’s just… how it is. There are bad fan-edits. There are great ones too. And many of those great ones were concieved of and executed right here on this forum. And a lot of the “amazingly great” leaps in VFX and sound also happened here, and are happening almost daily anymore. That has nothing to do with my belief system or my imagination (or lack thereof) either.

Anyway: there’s no secret cut of The Rise of Skywalker. Never has been. And if there are deleted scenes, there’s no guarantee (until we see them) that they’ll be good, or usable, and even if they are, it’s up to whoever is making the new edit to implement them well.

The idea that fan-editors are somehow infallible or not susceptible to the same sort of bad decisionmaking professional filmmakers are just as prone to doesn’t make any sense to me. Fan-editors can get lost down rabbit-holes and lose the forest for the trees and make bad calls based on poor instincts just as easily as any of the people who turned out Rise of Skywalker or Batman v. Superman.

It’s what makes the successes (of which there’s been many) that we see here that much more enjoyable. If it was so easy to do, and so regularly done, it wouldn’t be as exciting and rewarding to watch a good one get made. That’s appreciating imagination, not evidence of lacking it.

I don’t think Justice League has actually changed any games at all. It’s an exception, and probably one that won’t pay off the way WB hopes, either.

Whatever unfinished scenes got cut from The Rise of Skywalker would likely need fans to do a lot of heavy lifting on the VFX and sound side of things - which is fine (fans have gotten amazingly great at that in the past 20 years) but there’s a huge, huge difference in someone saying “there’s a secret cut they’re not letting you see” and “there’s probably semi-usable odds & ends on the cutting room floor that fans could incorporate into their homemade projects.”

That’s a huge gulf. And as many a fan edit has proven, just because fans CAN edit stuff back into a movie doesn’t mean they should, or that they did it well. Plenty of fan-edits have just as many bad decisions put into them as the original films do.

schizopolis23 said:

George Lucas got involved, multiple endings were shot, even internet fan theories were on the table, etc. It sounded like a mess, which is completely antithetical to what we saw in that documentary The Skywalker Legacy released by the studio. Regardless, I’d love to see all that deleted/alternate footage.

George Lucas didn’t “get involved,” and multiple endings weren’t shot. Multiple versions of the same ending were shot, (multiple takes, really. Again - just normal everyday moviemaking stuff) but the ending was always essentially the same. It’s a thing with Star Wars - a ton of the trivia everyone “knows” about Star Wars is basically just guesswork and rumor repeated enough that everyone accepts it because it’s easier to win online arguments that way.

The multiple endings thing especially - that was some guy on Twitter incorrectly reporting a story he saw via some other guy on Twitter, IIRC. Or Reddit, probably. Part of why it’s so easy for all this to become a YouTube scam for ad money is because even the “upstanding insiders” or whatever are just faking-it-til-they-make-it. People want to believe they know something other people don’t, it makes all the time spent chasing this stuff feel sort of worthwile, and at that point it’s just a matter of figuring out which flavor of fandom you prefer, the angry stuff or the blindly hopeful stuff. If you’re starting with a story pre-tainted with misinformation because the people volunteering for their insider “job” - however well-intentioned they might be - don’t know how to do it, it’s really easy to then further twist that misinformation to fit your chosen grift. Once everyone involved tacitly agrees facts don’t really matter, the game is on!

Knowing what actually happened is almost always secondary to attaining the feeling of knowing what happened. This isn’t just a Star Wars thing, either. But as with all things fandom, you see it in Star Wars “communities” because that same phenomenon happens in places where it’s actually important, too. This is just the safer, less consequential version of it.

edit: Apple News didn’t publish that. Apple News aggregated a MovieWeb post that is, itself, nothing more than some poor employee having to make a post out of Doomcock’s video. It’s all part of the same scam, basically. Nobody involved is doing their jobs correctly. An algorithm is posting something it thinks you’d like based on your history, and it served up a poorly written post that exists just to gather clicks off the headline that describes the content of a complete sham of a YouTube channel. The point isn’t to educate you on anything. That’s why it literally doesn’t matter to anyone involved if what they’re saying is true or not.

“The Snyder Cut” is so ephemeral at this point nobody even knows if it’s going to be a movie. It’s still up in the air as to whether it’s going to be a miniseries.

NeverarGreat said:

Broom Kid said:

There is no secret cut. He put out exactly what he wanted to put out. Nobody made him edit the movie the way he did. He did that on his own.

Source?

JJ Abrams?

The fact there are movies that were “meddled in” (again - movies having turbulent production is a fact of movies. Was Empire Strikes Back “Meddled with?” Or just MADE?) doesn’t mean JJ’s was. I’m taking the history of the production (which is very public) and plenty of their own words (just as public) and also taking into account the man’s larger filmography, of which this is very consistent.

There is no “secret cut” - the question of one is clickbait from conspiracist YouTubers who are scumming for subscribes. It gains traction because people think the act of making movies is much more clandestine and covert than it really is, and they’re not familiar (despite watching hours upon hours of behind the scenes footage they’ve since mythologized) with things like “Assembly Cuts” so when they hear about a film having an Assembly Cut, they “report” it to their breathless subscribers as some sort of secret hidden cut that’s being withheld from the TRUE FANS.

Unless you’re trying to gain subscribers for Google ad money, there’s nothing in it for anyone to perpetuate any idea beyond “JJ Abrams made a bad movie.” He made a bad movie full of bad decisions. He’s done it before. So has George Lucas. Star Wars fans should, at this point, have come to terms with the fact it’s a 50/50 shot their movie is going to be ok when it comes out. There’s no real point in searching for excuses when it doesn’t, because it happens so frequently it shouldn’t be a surprise or a Miss Marple Mystery to dig into as to WHY it happened.

Abrams did this to himself. Dunno why anyone would think otherwise. All the evidence is out in the open and offered up freely. He’s not a beleagured artist being oppressed by suits. He IS the suits. If there was corporate meddling, he IS that meddling. He was called in to “fix” the movie, and this is what his fix looked like. He blew it, and that’s on him. It’s not really any more complicated than that. There’s no secret cut of this movie.

The problem with usenet is just that people just don’t upload to it with any regularity/reliability. It all gets trapped inside THE SPLEEN and that’s where it slowly digests for over 1000 years.

The sharing system at The Star Wars Trilogy dot com is a lot friendlier/easier, but I think new registrations are capped because their site hosting is on some sort of shared CPU thing (??) and the site has grown quite a bit in the past few years due to the amount of work (and the very high quality of it) so it’s causing the CPU to overheat/overload and it brings the site down. At least that’s what it seemed like had happened last time.

Most fan-producers of restorations don’t seem to have a problem with their projects being upped to other torrent trackers once it’s stashed safely on THE SPLEEN, and often all you need to do is find out the torrent file name of the version you’re searching for and plug that into google, and more often than not you’ll find a public tracker that’s got it available.

The cut that was released was his cut.

There is no secret cut. He put out exactly what he wanted to put out. Nobody made him edit the movie the way he did. He did that on his own.

Almost every movie ever made has a 3-4 hr cut at one point. It’s usually referred to as the Assembly Cut, and then there are cuts past that point that are sometimes almost as long as that initial Assembly Cut. And all “Assembly Cut” means is “Everything we shot, put it in the edit, and then we can see what we don’t need.”

The same logic that YouTube liars and grifters use to con viewers into subscribing to their channels (“There’s an ORIGINAL cut THEY’RE HIDING FROM YOU”) could have been applied to basically every movie you’ve ever loved. Jaws. Star Wars. Jurassic Park. Back to the Future. They all had super-long initial cuts that had a bunch of story elements that got deleted along the way. It’s not a conspiracy, or evidence of meddling executives. It’s just editing. That’s how stories are told and movies are made.

Sometimes they’re good, and sometimes they’re bad.

haha, I just saw this thread get re-upped and had come in here to mention you did those! And here you are!

Thank you for doing that work!

Hal 9000 said:

FWIW, I’d recommend the Rogue One style opening. ALTAIAGFFA card, then cut to an opening shot. I don’t imagine backstory or exposition via text would be any more useful for a movie adaptation than it was(n’t) for the original show.

This is the thinking I had too, you just summed it up much more succinctly. Even with the way it’s edited currently, I don’t think a crawl actually adds anything that can’t be picked up almost immediately through context as the story unfolds. It’s actually more engrossing that way.

(FWIW I don’t know that the most recent cut that makes the crawl “necessary” is itself, necessary. I think the previous version of the edit with all that stuff intact worked better)

Also, on a technical level: The title treatment with the Mandalorian logo as the meat in the Star Wars sandwich looks very off, and the font/text of the crawl itself isn’t right

smudger9 said:

Solo also had an opening crawl.

I mean, It could have been a crawl, but it didn’t actually… crawl.

I feel like just cold-opening is the best call, but if you feel like you need it something up front to make it “feel theatrical” I’d agree with the post above that suggests you do it in the A Long Time Ago font like Solo did, and fade the text in and out between paragraphs

I think at this point, considering how well liked Rogue One is (and to a lesser degree, Solo) the argument can be made that “The Theatrical Star Wars Experience” can just cold-open after “A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away…” now. Maybe it couldn’t have done that before, but it’s fairly accepted now, and honestly - it probably just works better here.

I’d suggest just cutting the crawl entirely. You don’t need it for a Star Wars movie to still feel like a Star Wars movie.

omnimuffin said:

If anybody was looking for a less MIDI-ey version of the trailer music to use anywhere in their edit, Baltic House Orchestra did a version that seems to have been genuinely done by an, uh… Orchestra, so it might fit better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q8SLnk3BRE

That’s not an orchestra. It’s just different instrumentation plug-ins than what Kim used.

Firstly: No apologies wanted or needed! I only brought up that it wasn’t out yet to minimize confusion should someone go seeking it out after my recommendation for the D+ as the best possible at-home version of the OT (which it is!)

Secondly: That’s great to hear, and I can’t wait to see the fruits of all that hard work. Thanks again for taking on the job.

Knight of Kalee said:

+1

Though the Skywalker ghosts watching the Falcon/sunrise as an ending shot is a neat idea!

Hey, I remember pitching something like that a couple months ago 😃

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Rise-of-Skywalker-Ascendant/id/71835/page/116#1349475

Lightsideuser said:

what if we put ourselves in the shoes of someone that has never seen the movie and watches this cut, they have never seen any press about Palpatine’s return, but the first they see of it is on Exegol when Kylo meets him…what if, we keep the suspense going a bit longer…

The problem is that even in this hypothetical where someone’s never heard anything about Rise of Skywalker before, there’s never any suspense at all surrounding Palpatine’s presence. Adding more runtime to the movie isn’t the same as adding suspense to it. It just drags out the confusion and busywork. It doesn’t actually add suspense. I’d argue it’s more impactful just to drop him in the movie ASAP (skipping straight to Exegol) because there’s nothing to the atmosphere of Kylo’s “quest” to find him.

StarkillerAG said:

I guess it’s just a personal opinion, but I think that the 4KXX versions have much more than 720p of fine detail.

I don’t think it’s a personal opinion at all. It’s easily observable fact.

right now, D+ is best-of-both-worlds stuff. It uses the big increase in detail (and the reversal of numerous bad coloring/de-noising/crushing picture decisions from the last blu) of the “new” 4K restorations as a base, fixes what mistakes those had, and matches the 4KXX raw scans to that look as closely as possible before unifying everything with a great color-correction and film grain pass.

It’s easily the most watchable, and best-looking “original” versions of the OT currently available. It can be improved upon, certainly (Oohteedee’s improved it about 4 times already) but it’s current level of quality is such that only a completely new from-scratch attempt at the 4KXX scans could possibly beat it in terms of detail and uniformity of quality - and that’s exactly what’s happening with 4K77 right now (and arguably, with 4K80, even though it’s never actually been released). Although who knows: if Harmy can rotoscope, mask, and DNR his way to replacing individual elements on the Reliance remaster with 4KXX elements, the D+ versions might get topped there.

But at this point, I think the only other big leap that’s left to make in terms of fan-restoration is audio-based, not visual. If there are ways to even more-closely replicate how the movies sounded back then, or opportunities to directly capture straight-off-the-print the audio stems themselves, that’s the golden ticket, right there.

Nothing! I just went back in the thread and it seems pretty consistent with what I’m saying now? Basically - Abrams ruined his own film because he wouldn’t stop cutting it down.

The argument happening now seems to be that someone stepped in from above and forced him to ruin it, and I don’t agree with that. I understand the inclination to pursue that narrative, but I think there’s no reason to pursue it considering who Abrams is, what his filmography looks like, and the stories that have come out since Rise of Skywalker’s release.

If the film was “mucked with” it was mucked with by the director. He did the mucking on his own. Lemme see if I can find the exact quote from earlier in the thread that sums it up:

edit: here it is! This post - from January
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1322580/action/topic#1322580

specifically, this bit: "I really think that’s the big lesson here. It’s not a story about corporate interference, or meddling bosses.

It’s the story of a couple guys, under the gun and on the clock, delivering sub-par work because their instincts are inherently bad. That’s it."

NeverarGreat said:

For people doubting the studio meddling, of course there was. The studio threw out Trevorrow out of fear and brought in JJ because he made them money on the first film…ignoring the fact that he’s never been able to finish a story.

I said exactly that a couple posts up. JJ Abrams WAS the studio interference.

They almost certainly meddled in the script that JJ and Terrio made to make it more ‘safe’.

They almost certainly didn’t, and what little we do know from multiple sources re: the behind-the-scenes of this film’s making reinforces that. They gave Abrams and Terrio free reign to go for the big crowdpleasing ending and Abrams/Terrio botched it. I don’t think “interference” beyond Trevorrow’s firing was an issue at all (honestly, there wasn’t much time for Lucasfilm to do anything but simply accept whatever the hell Abrams & Terrio turned in), and there’s not really any reason to believe it was. Again - they don’t want excuses, so there’s no point to offering them up gratis.

It looks, sounds, and feels like a bad JJ Abrams movie. What’s in it for anyone to let him off the hook by trying to say it only ended up that way because the studio “interfered?” He wasn’t handicapped by upper management. They didn’t hamstring him. He made a jumbled, borderline unintelligible movie because that’s always a possibility with him. “They” didn’t make the cuts that rendered the film that way. Abrams and his editors did that themselves. All on their own. And they’re not the first creative team in movies to have done that, either.

Has anyone suggested just replacing the “Ghouls” with Adam Driver saying “Ghouls” from The Dead Don’t Die?

Like, if you’re going to wink at the audience, go all the way. Just give into the mugging.

I think people don’t really care about deleted scenes anymore outside of the fan-edit community. The large preponderance of them aren’t very interesting, and I wouldn’t be surprised if part of why there aren’t any deleted scenes is because whatever there is doesn’t really merit much attention.

That or stuff like spider-baby-head thing is just too weird for them to plop on a disc with not much context.

Of course, to provide the context you basically have to go all the way into the story of how and why that whole Mustafar scene is made more or less entirely pointless in the final edit, and how it was once built out of Trevorrow’s earlier Duel of the Fates ideas, and then you have to get into why Trevorrow got fired, and THERE I’ll fall in line with those who have noted Disney’s ownership of Lucasfilm isn’t very interested in the sorts of warts ‘n’ all behind-the-scenes stuff that independent Lucasfilm didn’t mind indulging - even WITH Lucas’ habitual retconning of history factoring in.

I’ll never understand why they didn’t just cut the whole Mustafar sequence out of the final edit. It’s beyond pointless and you learn nothing from its staying in that you dont learn contextually from the movie later. It’s just a confused mess of jumbled imagery that doesn’t tell a story or help the larger story make any more sense once its done. I mean, I understand why they did it, its just that the reasoning is so half-assed at best and bad at worst that it doesn’t make sense to me (especially since they were already in “Get it under 2:30 at all costs” mode, which was also a dumb decision).

I doubt that anyone really interfered. That the result feels chopped and meddled with doesn’t have to be a result of some outside influence forcing hands. Abrams’ movies all feel that way to some degree, both the ones that work and the ones that don’t.

The idea that art is better if you get out of the artists way at all times doesn’t make sense, and isn’t borne out by the history of filmed art, either. It doesn’t have to be some shadowy conspiracy of invisible hands taking a beautiful thing and making it ugly behind the scenes (although that narrative exists for a reason, and everyone’s familiar with it - probably many people here first heard about it in regards to THX-1138 and Lucas’ “they cut the fingers off my child” analogy) it can simply be that the artist in question frankly screwed up the execution.

Which is what happened. The studio did interfere with Episode 9 - that interference was in the form of throwing out Duel of the Fates and bringing in the guys who had free reign to make The Rise of Skywalker, and did so pretty much exactly the way they wanted to, according to them.

If they don’t wish to accept any excuses on that part, I’m not inclined to offer them any.

JJ Abrams was the studio interference. Nobody interfered with him. He did what he wanted.

That’s what it ended up looking like, unfortunately.

I feel like currently D+ is as good as it gets (D+83 seems to have stalled out in the past month after being on the verge of releasing back in mid-June) but that’ll probably change if/when Harmy goes to town on v3.0.

But then again, 4k77 v2.0 could be even better than that.

It’s a veritable bounty of options to choose from and still be highly satisfied, really.

ok!

“The demand is actually high for the OOT”

It isn’t. Sorry.

“As for the ‘And it’s not hundreds of thousands, either’ - you’ll likely find it is.”

No, I likely won’t. The numbers aren’t hidden. Everyone knows what they are. Heck, you’re even noting that many of those downloads and bootleg purchases are double-and-triple dips by people who already got previous versions. There’s a post on this forum that features almost everyone who contributes here talking about the 5-6x they’ve bought the official OT. That doesn’t make the number of us bigger in the way you’re trying to make it look. It simply calls attention to how habitual our number is.

The numbers are known. And the numbers aren’t even really the point, because even when the numbers were large enough (and had yet to be hurt by the overall negative taint the phrase “Star Wars Fandom” now conjures up) to possibly justify making Lucasfilm answer our requests, it didn’t happen. Again, is this about the movies, or getting some sort of corporate validation after all this time? Because corporate validation doesn’t matter much. It probably shouldn’t. The OOT’s aren’t a “reward” for our vigilance. Especially not in the face of what’s happened since people realized they were going to have to do it themselves. Our reward is 1) the community and 2) the results of that community’s work to provide for itself in the ways the corporation wouldn’t. That’s a double-edged sword (or saber) of course, but such is life.

The numbers don’t matter outside of whatever feelings of security and validation they might provide in knowing you’re not alone in wanting this thing. I’m part of those numbers too. We’re not alone, and I never said we were. I never said anything about our numbers beyond that they’re obviously not enough by themselves, and they’re shrinking. And that total isn’t worth much beyond the cold comfort “We’re not alone” provides if they don’t translate into an official release, and they’re not going to. That official release, if/when it comes, has nothing to do with how many of us are out here, because it’s not a question of supply/demand, and hasn’t been for a very long time.

I’ll be happy if/when it ever happens, but I’m happy now, too. Because I don’t put any weight, validation, or satisfaction on whether or not Lucasfilm ever comes around. I don’t need to anymore. Honestly, I didn’t need to back then, either, haha.

just a correction to the end titles preview: There’s no “h” in Jon Favreau. Also, the directors credits should probably be all on the same card instead of split over two.

Also, it’s a thing I see a lot around here, but I feel like aiming for a runtime for the sake of hitting the runtime instead of letting the runtime be whatever it is naturally when you feel the pacing is perfect is a practice that only makes sense when you’re a studio actively trying to squeeze out as many screenings as possible.

If you’re fan-editing, and it’s never going to be in a theater, there’s no real reason to aim for runtime benchmarks for the sake of nothing other than hitting the benchmarks. Usually this concern goes the other way (people refusing to cut a movie under a certain runtime because then it’ll be “too short” despite the fact “too short” doesn’t mean anything in the abstract like that) but if you feel like you had the pacing really solid a couple edits back and the only reason you pushed it to go shorter is just so you can say you pushed it shorter, I’d suggest maybe re-thinking that inclination and really giving that longer cut a rewatch to see if it really does just feel better at the prior length.

Anyway, I’m very glad to see you’re back to fanediting and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how this project turns out.