regularjoe

There is on YouTube a transfer of the Raiders of the Lost Ark reel.  I know it is YouTube quality but if you're just curious how the cut to a 400' reel was handled it is there for the seeing.  Some guy has about 40-50 old Ken Films, etc. copied and posted.  The quality leaves a lot to be desired but having owned a lot of these in the 70's and early 80's it was a nice stroll down memory lane watching these.  Funny, I don't remember my versions of Star Wars being cropped as severely as the ones that are posted are.

Look for the YouTube poster GhostHost1969, just checked his set and Jaws is there - lists it as the long version and the time tracker on the video says 30:48.

There's a few of these I would like to d/l but I am not finding anything anywhere.  I tried that Jloader thinger over on fanedit.org but it didn't do anything (I tried something that I figured would be popularly seeded, too (the new Star Wars Renascent edit).  Any help?  I'l looking for the ADM versions of Elf, Love Actually, Halloween and the Austin Powers trilogy.

#1 for me is Wim Wenders ''Until the End of the World.'' I have the 5 hour director's cut on dvd which for me was a film holy grail.  Coincidentally, it was reported in the news yesterday that scientists are learning how to tape record (so to speak) dreams and the images shown were dead ringers for how Wim imagined it in act III of this movie in 1991!

#2 Robert Altmann's ''Short Cuts'' - I generally like all things Altmann but the kicker with this movie is that most of the characters are genuinely unlikable people and by the end of the show you care about what happens to each one of them.

#3 Kristof Kieslowski's ''Three Colours'' trilogy (I consider franchises's one thing, sorry PT haters).  This trilogy should be required viewing for anyone interested in film.

#4 Network.  Brilliant movie making by adults for adults.

#5 SW franchise.  I'm an old sentimental fool.

#6 Wings of Desire - cinema as poetry, the last few minutes seem to me too long and tacked on, almost a cinematic speed bump.

#7 The Elephant Man - bests my love for Blue Velvet, damn near the closest that cinema comes to poetry.  This movie grabs me by the shirt and holds on tight every time I watch it.

#8 A Christmas Story - ditto sentimental foolishness.  Nearly every line, shot composition, etc is pitch perfect in this, I'd be hard pressed to change much about it.

#9 High Fidelity - you'd think if someone made a biopic you'd get royalties but it doesn't always work that way.

#10 Back to the Future trilogy - my feelings on the first one are much the same as A Christmas Story, a damn near perfect film.

I bought ''Race For Your Life'' on VHS a few years back and ripped it straight to avi.  It's the last good theatrical Peanuts film IMHO.  I went to the theatre to see it in '77 and was blown away by a trailer that was played for some movie called 'Star Wars.'  Wonder what ever became of that movie.

I had a massive library of laser disks, many of which still haven't come out on dvd, also worked for a few years in a store that sold them.  A couple years back I bought a dvd player/recorder and started to burn copies to DVD+R (which I have since converted to high quality DIVX files). The player/recorder had a 90 day guarantee and it died literally on day 91 with about 10 LD's left to convert, which I still have.  The only exception is the Director's Cut of Peter Weir's "Dead Poets Society.''  I foolishly parted with that thinking that if it was out on LD that it would surely come out on DVD.  

To the poster asking if the picture quality was better, basically a laser disk had more lines of vertical and horizontal resolution being presented than tape did.  Some folks even used line doublers to try to make the picture even better.  Anyhow, horizontal resolution was over 400 lines LD and just over 200 VHS.  Earlier disks are subject to something lovingly called laser rot, the two aluminum disks were glued together and the glue essentially eats its way out from the inside, destroying the data that the laser reads.  Only had one disk out of many fall prey to this, a copy of a Julian Temple long form music video for the UK band ABC called ''Mantrap.''

I wouldn't sink a ton of money into laser disk, if you weren't there when it was in it's heyday it's essentially no more than a fetish product like collecting 8 track tapes or super-8 mm digests of movies.

The space slug is probably one of the worst scenes in the original trilogy.

TESB would be a better movie without it though you lose some character/story development on the Han & Leia arc if you cut it and all of the attendant scenes wholesale.

I'm a fan of the added breath stuff.  Lived in Wisconsin my whole life and trust me, you don't see your breath all of the time when you're outside in cold weather.  Nice touch of realism but it also strikes me as something you could slowly drive yourself nuts doing.  

muddyknees2000 said:

Ripplin said:

Didn't realize it was a Rinzler book. That means top quality! Could even help ESB:R somehow if the final designs are in it.

 Yep, I'll be scanning anything Ady wants or needs and sending it off to him when mine arrives in the mail

EDIT: some of the sample pages released online even show Vader's meditation chamber....and parts of the wall, but not the whole shape of the room, at least not on the page that I saw....it might be on another page that they haven't shown yet (not sure how far back this goes, but there was some discussion on the shape of that particular room)

That dead horse was beaten so badly the flies won't even go near it.  Please give that topic a rest.

I tired to do something very similar a loooong time ago with the Super 8 mm digests that were released in the 1970's and early 1980's.  I only had eps IV and V to work with and when all three movies came out on VHS I thought, well, I can now chuck these or.....

There are a lot of little things that may be moved around and some things work better than others.  The source material is what it is and imho I think that the audience has to suspend a lot of what they already know to try to enjoy a project like this.

The scenes on Hoth could be used to represent the northernmost/southernmost latitudes of the fourth moon of Yavin (i.e. there could be a walker assault on the rebel base concurrent to the battle with the Death Star....or is that something you're trying to get away from?).

In interviews with Lucas he talked about an early cut with the Biggs scenes and said that his reason for deleting them was that he preferred the presentation being:

The audience meets the robots & Leia.

Robots take you to Luke

The robots & Luke takes you to Ben

The robots, Luke & Ben take you to Han & Chewie

The robots, Luke, Ben, Han & Chewie take you back to Leia

He also felt (if I recall reading correctly) that having Luke in the beginning was adding too many characters to keep track of.

Personally, I would love to see them restore the scenes and re-integrate them.  I think it is Building Star Wars that restores them in sequence (or maybe Behind the Magic).  I don't think that the audience would have a hard time keeping track of who is who - Robert Altmann has made a career out of movies featuring ensemble casts (MASH, Nashville, Short Cuts, The Player, Gosford Park....heck, a bad Altmann movie is better than most of the dreck that comes out every week these days).  

One of the great things for me being a 12 year old watching the original movie was that the robots talked and they didn't subtitle it. Chewie talks and they didn't subtitle it.  The jawas talked and they didn't subtitle it.  But the audience understood what they were saying.  Treat the audience like they are smart and they will rise to the occasion. 

The main weakness of the prequel trilogy is that they are all foreground and no background.  I love the Adigitalman edits of 1, 2 & 3 that do nothing more than add the deleted scenes back in.  Anyone else notice that a lot of the deleted scenes are mostly exposition, backstory and character development?  I watched 4 & 5 as a kid and was riveted to every scene, whether there was a shoot out or Ben was telling Luke about his dad.  Then again, my pet theory about part of the appeal of the first movie at the time was that there was a generation of kids from the explosion in the divorce rate in the 70's and these kids didn't know their dads like other ones did and when Luke said, tell me about my father, these kids in the audience knew where he was coming from.  I don't think that part of the movie was intended, but it was certainly fortuitous timing.

Geez what a long time to be beating a dead horse.

I come here to read about what is happening with Adywan's work on TESB:R & I would rather see no new posts for days on end than this mush.  

Do any of you have a life? I don't mean that offensively, but reading through a lot of pages of people obsessing about a stair or a smile or a blob.....wow.

Walk away from the computers for a while guys, stop and smell the flowers.

Captain Antilles said:

If everyone is so concerned about restoring the mention of Luke's full name, it might be worth trying to contact this guy. He does amazing impressions, and Palpatine is one of his specialties. There are a bunch of clips of him doing Palpatine impressions... here are just a couple of them:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z-i4NjNSeY

(Right around 2:37)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNwb1T_Xlfo&feature=channel

(At 1:59)

i dunno i think joe lieberman does the best palpy impression going.   

and i don't think that he's even trying (shhhh.....)

Jaitea said:

If you listen to JW's scores at the time of SW....like Jaws, CE3K, Superman, Raiders & ESB....they all have a similar feel,....interchangeable

J

 

They all sound like variations on the wedding march to me.

adywan said:

Give me the old '80's camerawork any day over this modern crap. 

 

(bad edit, still learning how quotes work on this forum, ady's stuff ends above)

 

Thanks for the sentiment.  The 1970's style has a lot to offer.

It is ironic that Lucas and Speilberg both cut their teeth in the 70's when there were some really spectacular movies made and they are jointly responsible for ushering in some of the worst aspects of modern movies.  Fact is that today movies are not made for adults.

Jewish family, too.  No PC nonsense here.

Lemonstein said:

That first pic also reminds me of something else, a face. The "hat" kinda makes it look Jewish,

Please explain that comment.  I'd like to think that you were referring to a yamaluke, but even if you are the comment is pretty inappropriate.

3D is a gimmick, not a product.

It is to cinema what Gatorade is to a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice.

Gee, I always just watched and thought, there's the rebel fleet out in space, they got chased out of their base and where the heck are they going to go from there?  At the end of IV they had a base at least, and had taken out the Death Star.  I didn't think, that's not even their galaxy (how would anyone even know this watching the movies without an external agent telling them that?), that's a star forming, I just thought, they're in space....

All of the movies move from light to darkness but some of the other ones have some light that returns at the very end (throne room in Ep IV) but this one is elevator that only goes down.  No resolution to Han being captured, Luke had his hand chopped off and Vader is his dad.  See ya' in a few years.  I think the end should stay dark-ish.  If you want to make this something forming you could find a way to make it look ominous.  I look forward to seeing how you portray it regardless.

The way I cut it the film works as Marty's parents look differnet(-ish) so for her to look somewhat different, too, doesn't really stand out.  Then off to the future and folks look different then, too (including the way that they handled the absence of Crispin Glover returning for the sequel).  Folks looking different just adds a bit to the time travel aspect....you mess with time and things, people included, don't look exactly the same.

I also did a chronological order version of this.  My source was the old laser disks and I did it a loooooong time ago before folks were doing stuff on computers with professional editing tools and TB hard drives.

Sat down with the movies first and made a list of disk/side/time for each cut and then tweaked it from there.  Spent hours with a VCR and the LD player going from disk to disk etc.  I had no problems with transitions from movie # 2 -3.  

My take was film 1 opens, pretty much as you see it.  When the car goes to the future I cut to when Marty comes back at the end of the show, taking it through his changed family.  When Doc comes back with the car we go to the future.  When they come back to the changed 1985 and head back to the past, that's where the fun began.  It took hours but I managed to get together all the 1950's stuff from 1 & 2.  BttF 2 ends and segues nicely into 3 which you have to watch to get the full deal.  

I still have it, a probably 15 year old videotape, recorded on EP setting to get all three movies on one tape.  Watched a bunch of times with my friends.  I have no intention of even trying it on a computer, got a baby on the way and real life will not allow me the indulgence of a project like this.

After BttF I did the same integration with Krystof Kieslowski's Three Colours Trilogy, probably the most obscure fanedit you'll ever see on these forums. Cut together Blue, White and Red the same way using LD and VHS and I loved it.  Loaned it to a friend and it didn't track well on his VCR so he thought the tape was junk and threw it away....without asking if I minded.  

You know, if a hard drive crashes there is some hope of recovering something but when this happens, you're just SOL.

It's been years since I watched the reels and when I penned my last post I was even doubting my own memory.   You know, back in the late 70's I bought some of those reels multiple times based on ability to afford, what my local K-Mart had to sell or I could find through LA Films and the various iterations of it released by Ken Films.  At one point I had a b&w silent reel because that was all that I could get my hands on.  Eventually we had a sound reel available but I didn't have a sound projector.  I was an ignorant kid and I thought if I ran the sound film through a silent projector that I would somehow damage the film, so I waited until I received a sound projector as a gift before setting my goals on the sound reels.

I recently found this site...

http://8mmforum.film-tech.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi

and in a thread about movie reviews other folks mention what I did here

http://8mmforum.film-tech.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=4;t=000045

specifically

The real gem to find here is the Ken 200ft version. It opens with this scene, but has Ben giving Luke his father's light sabre and Luke waving it around! It also has more at the end of the scene with Luke protesting about going to Alderaan with Ben!

There were some real blasts from the past for me in this forum, I had totally forgotten about the early TESB reel that I bought that was silent but came with a cassette tape that you had to try to sync with the projector.  

Couple weeks now and no luck with "live' torrents of this.

Quick question for you - are the transfers that you did just the 2 x 400' reels for Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back or did you use any film from the original 200' reel that came out for Star Wars?  If I recall correctly, the scenes in Ben's hut on the first reel that came out were mostly complete and then were reprised in truncated form on the first 400' reel that came out that had scene digests beyond Ben's hut and the escape from the Death Star.

Hey Pugo -

I am fairly new to the forums and just figured out via this forum your work on converting over the old Ken films super-8 condensed versions.  I would love to see these, haven't seen them since I did a mashup/fanedit of everything I had (including film I busted out of those Kenner toy cranked film viewers) back around '84.

Are they being actively shared on the torrents, do you know?  I'm fairly new to this fanedit thing and it seems to me that when these things first come out folks are trading them hot and heavy and then the interest seems to fade away in seeding them.

Longshot here.....you wouldn't happen to have a scan of an old mailer from LA Films, would you?  The old photocopied catalog they used to mail every now and then to 'regular' customers?  It was a legal sized sheet of paper, printed both sides that broke down the new releases and what scenes made the 8-17 minute digests.  I tell people about this stuff and they look at me like I am crazy.

I used to have a lot of Super-8 digests of movies (Ken Films, Castle Films, etc) and I have a few items of memorabilia left.

One of the items that I have is a catalog for public institutions to rent movies to show; it is very interesting, especially the section that breaks down licensing fees and collecting entry fees.  This specific catalog was printed in 1975 so you have to bear in mind that it is from before Star Wars and it is also before the ubiquity of home video product (Beta/VHS > LD > DVD/BLR).

However, despite its age, just about everything is in this catalog.  Classics, new movies, foreign, there's no porn in it but they make it clear that some of the foreign films may have content not for kids.  I suspect the 16mm print was struck for some entity like this.

When I was college in the mid-1980's our union had a film society and they showed movies in the union.  Sometimes they procured older movies and sometimes we had films that were fairly contemporary.  I saw a lot of movies this way because admission was often free or just a buck which is hard to beat when you are in college.  Being a bit of a film geek/retarded development AV geek I can say that I would check out the projection equipment and I can say that sometimes we were watching pan and scan cuts of theatrical movies on 16 mm and sometimes it was 35 mm.  I have no idea what was used for inflight movies on airlines in the 70's but I think that you may also have a candidate for your source there.

ray_afraid said:

Also, I've seen several posts about Luke and Leia's kiss in ESB and how it should be cut, or cut the revelation that she's his sister in ROTJ to avoid some kind of incestuous overtones. If anybody really thinks there was some kinda "love triangle" between Luke Leia and Han, then I doubt they've ever had much luck with the ladies. The moment Luke meets Leia it is clear that she has no romantic interest in him yet the moment she meets Han, the sparks fly- lot's of sarcasm and bickering (which is usually flirting) but it also leads to some off hand compliments ("you're braver than i thought."). I mean, sure, Luke was attracted to her and all, but there was never a moment where it seemed that they would end up together.

 

The love triangle was played up very, very much in a lot of the popular press in the late 70's - the 'who would Leia end up with?' question was there in a lot of the magazines I saw back then and Lucasfilm didn't seem to do a whole lot to discourage this kind of speculation.  Watching these movies as they came out I can say all of my contemporaries were wondering what happened with that storyline when TESB came out and we saw it in the theatres.  I saw TESB in Milwaukee on the inital release (opening weekend), it was the only city in Wisconsin that had a 70mm setup and it played in other cities a bit later.  When I came back to school the following Monday there were three questions asked about the movie:

 

Do they really have a scene where Darth Vader tells Luke he is his dad, and do they clear it up before the movie ends?

 

Who does the Princess end up with?

 

Is Yoda any good...a puppet in Star Wars?  Ewww..

 

A lot of people go on about the whole brother sister thing with kind of an ICK overtone but I've always thought that the Star Wars universe is crawling with all sorts of sentient species. Look at all the different races presented in the first movie.  In a galaxy like that where humans are just one of a thousand species competing for resources you may not have an incest taboo that is as strongly defined as it is our society.   You don't even need competition for resources to relax that taboo - look at the intermarriage between the ruling families of Europe in the 1800's and early 1900's.  A lot of these people were more closely related than we may find acceptable today.

 

Than again, it's just a movie.

Bingowings said:

It's a classic case of the lady and the laddie protesting too much (and the counter opposite of the rubbish romance in the PT)

"You annoy the hell out of me"

"No you annoy the hell out of me more"

"Screw you, you, you delicious she devil"

"You start first and I'll join in later"

I don't know how many people here watch movies that were made before 1977 but a LOT of the Han/Leia interplay in TESB is taken from Gone With The Wind.  Watch it if you think I'm talking out of my hat.  Heck, the poster for TESB pretty much duplicates Gable/Leigh in the GWTW poster.

Lucas didn't make all this stuff up, he took from all sorts of things:

Flash Gordon (couldn't buy the rights to re-make it)

Hidden Fortress

Dune

Wizard of Oz

Metropolis

and a lot else: himself even.  Anyone watch the end of THX1138 and compare it to the chase at the end of Star Wars?  Then there's recent events, nods to Vietnam in the CT and GWB in the PT.  Don't make this more than it is. George Lucas WAS the OG of sampling.  

*** sarcasm mode ON *** You wanna know why SW was a hit in '77?  Han Solo = Elvis, Chewie = Bigfoot.  The man knows his pop culture stuff and was really good at making movie mashups of it all.  that's all.  George Lucas is the Phil Retrospector of SF movie mashups, that's it.  *** sarcasm mode OFF***  Oh, and adywan deserves an Oscar for his work on E4.

Long time reader first time poster signing off.