Name: How Star Wars was saved in the edit
Uploaded: 2018-12-05T06:34:23.000Z
Duration: 18 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In February of 1977, George Lucas invited some of his closest friends to watch a rough cut of his new film:

In attendance among a handful of people were 
Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma.

-not good. According to Spielberg, this is how De Palma reacted:

Sure, you can point at the superficial problems with the rough cut.

No, the real issues were fundamental: the story, the scenes, the characters, the pacing

But the film was not beyond saving, because they say a film is written three times:

If my blade should find its mark, you will cease to exist."

If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

The success of Star Wars was not inevitable.

In fact, the way things were going, it was almost guaranteed to fail.

It was only due to their laborious editorial process that Star Wars snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

So Lucas turned to his ingenious editing team: Richard Chew, Paul Hirsch,

arguably one of George's greatest collaborators: 
his wife at the time, Marcia Lucas.

Their job was to rebuild a bloated first act, 
cut tons of unnecessary material,

create clarity, tension, 
and drama in places that had none,

and restructure scenes and 
entire sequences to propel the story forward.

Basically, they just had to start from scratch.

In this video, we'll compare and contrast these changes from rough to final cut

Using references from the script, recovered deleted scenes, and behind the scenes interviews

in order to demonstrate just how powerful editing is

So, without further redo, let's go back and examine how Star Wars

The film always began with the famous opening crawl.

However, the text itself in earlier drafts was long.

And it bombarded the audience with information. 
Especially for a first-time viewer.

It talked about the Republic Galactica, the Jedi Knights, the Dark Lords of the Sith,

the Emperor, none of which will be immediately relevant to the story we're about to watch. 
It's just overloaded.

He was particularly brutal about the opening crawl. So, George enlisted him and Jay Cox to rewrite it.

And that's how we got the roll up we see today, which is straight to the point

There's a civil war between the Rebellion and the Empire, a Death Star,

Then we see an epic space battle.
 Star Destroyers chasing Princess Leia's ship and is quickly captured.

So far so good. Everything was pretty much the same, up until this happens:

"Help, I think I'm melting! This is all your fault!"

A little awkward place for a joke, and then there's a scene transition to...

Hopefully, it's clear already that there's some problems with this.

They just interrupted the pacing of this epic space battle to cut to some rando kid and his robot.

This is really how they're gonna introduce their main character?

Cutting the deleted scene is one thing.
 However, the opening of the film intercut with luke constantly

So, let's break down Luke's introduction.

In the first cut of the film, they intercut with Luke three times before he eventually crosses paths with the droids at the Jawa auction.

Which, as we all know, is the first time we meet Luke in the final film.

This scene was never intended to be Luke's introduction, but it works.

"Luke, tell uncle if he gets a translator be sure it speaks Bocce."

"Doesn't look like we have much of a choice, but I'll remind him."

Nothing is happening and they prevent the story from progressing.

And to illustrate that, here's a quick breakdown of the events laid out in the rough cut.

We already saw the first scene, so now we're back on the ship.

Then once again, they go from epic space fantasy,

Well, I'm serious the sandpeople been getting really crazy. 
They've even rated the outskirts of angkor thom

That's enough of that. We'll provide links below if you want to watch the whole thing okay?

Which they're not in the making of Star Wars editor Paul Hirsch says quote in the first five minutes

We were hitting everybody with more information than they could handle there were too many storylines to keep straight the robots the Princess Vader

Luke so we simplified it by taking Luke out, and you don't introduce Luke until he actually becomes a part of the story.

Don't you think it's Hersh continues by stating quote it also made the planet they land on work as an alien place

Before by showing Luke on the planet there was no mystery. 
You knew the planet was inhabited by people

But now you don't know what you're gonna find the first characters you see the jawas

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How Star Wars was saved in the edit

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