Empire Strikes Back is visually beautiful

Interesting deleted scene with an acknowledgement that some of the wampas were being held at the Rebel base.

 

So glad they deleted it. Clumsy and awkward, bad dialogue.

 

Lucas must have written it.

 

That never happens in a Lucas film.

 

^ Also, the series is short on interaction between them outside of the action set-pieces. Polished and familiar in the final cut it'd probably fit fine with the rest of the arch dialogue and awkwardness. It isn't necessary and slows the pacing though.

 

There's another deleted scene between Han and Leia on Cloud City where they're having a quiet moment and start talking about their feelings. It smells just like Episode 2.

 

A note on the score: the cue where the snowspeeders are looking for Han and Luke has never been released as it appears in the film. It's an edit of three different pieces of music that have been around since the original soundtrack release. The reason I know this is that I always loved that bit but never could find it on any recording, so I edited the proper bits together myself about ten years ago.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand, evidenced by this shot (among many others)

 

And a wonderful interview with Irvin Kershner in Starlog, May 1980. Lots of insight.

http://thestarwarstrilogy.com/starwars/Magazines/starlog/34/Kershner/med/Kershner.pdf

 

Classic film. I still love it.

 

I wish that Kershner had stuck around for Return of the Jedi.

 

I have seen this film and Trading Places more than any other. I think I watched ESB every day one summer when I was a kid. I think this is as close to flawless as a film can get. Vader is truly mysterious and terrifying in this.
I heard somewhere that Irving Kershner offered to direct one or all of the prequels and George Lucas refused.

 

I always liked the way it really has no start or finish,it's sort of like someone just started filming these characters in their universe at some random point and then stopped 2 hours later,no main plot or problem to be resolved yet works perfectly.

 

Are you sure it's never been released? I know the exact piece of music you're talking about (great cue, by the way!) but I thought it was on at least one of the soundtrack sets that were released over the years. I have the 2-CD special edition from '97 plus the Anthology box set from '94 and I could've sworn that cue appeared somewhere... it's been a while since I've listened to them, though, so maybe I'm wrong!

 

It's funny how obvious the background matte painting is when you're looking at a still photo and you actually have time to examine it closely.... whenever I see this shot in the movie, it looks so good that you'd swear the Falcon, the landing platform, and the rest of Cloud City were real locations!

 

Totally agree

 

Its funny how people looking at the same thing can have opposing reactions. I've always thought that the cloud city scenes looked incredibly fake and cartoony, even when I first saw the film when it was released. The scenes have always looked like pure artwork to me.

 

There are scenes that all of us remember 'cause we got goosebumps, be it for the music, visuals, both. The appearance of the walkers gave me chills. I know I muttered out loud "Oh S__t"

 

To me, this has been the best Star Wars film. I even enjoyed the SE version. I never saw the first two in the theaters so when the SE's came out I was at the movies too many times.

 

There's a version on the 2009 Soundtrack called "Snowspeeder Rescue" which is close, but it includes a brief section between the rhythmic part and the melodic string part which isn't in the film. It also fades early. In the film, there's a transition at the end to a short piece of music which is played over the scene with Luke in the bacta tank.

This gets confusing because of different track names on different albums over the years, but the first part is from "Hyperspace" (edited to extend the intro section), the second from "The Rebels at Bay" (re-titled "Snowspeeders Take Flight" on later collections), and the third from a couple of different bits in "Arrival on Dagobah" (bacta tank music) although I've found this very difficult to piece together and have never done a satisfactory edit of that section.

Here's what the proper film edit of the two sections sounds like: https://soundcloud.com/user602849926/snwspdr-rscue-correct-film-edit

 

<Vader voice>I find your attention to detail...disturbing.

 

It was right after Katrina, I had a laptop and some audio editing software, and a lot of time on my hands. Kept me from going nutty.

 

They keyword being artwork - they look beautiful to me

 

I agree, and I think this may be at the heart of what makes this film so visually lush and beautiful. I can't find an exact number online -- in one interview Harrison Ellenshaw says 50 mattes while his website says 100 -- but there are a LOT of matte paintings in this movie, almost all of which only appear onscreen for a few seconds.

To the point of Cloud City looking like a painting, Ellenshaw has this to say:

"Those were kind of quick throw-aways, but I think they worked pretty well because, in this case, you've got a matte shot that obviously has to represent something other than reality. Everybody knows full well that there are no cities that are floating in the cloudsand nobody has yet built one for a filmso it has to be produced by some degree of cinema magic. But these are the kinds of matte shots that always worry me. When you are extending actual sets or putting in backgrounds of hills and mountains, something that the audience can relate to as being real, then if you've succeeded the audience won't notice it. But with a Cloud City, people will say: "This has to be a painting; it has to be a miniature; it has to be something, because a city floating in the air can't possibly exist in reality." So shots like those are perhaps the most anxiety-producing mattes of all. Ralph McQuarrie did a good number of those paintings and, of course, he had a great deal of design sense for Cloud City. Also, the sequence takes place at sunset, which gives the visuals a nice, eerie, other worldly glow."

from here: http://www.theasc.com/magazine/starwars/articles/empire/creat/pg2.htm

He also mentions in that interview how some of the live action elements they received were slightly out of focus. If you look carefully at the still of the Falcon on the landing platform that I posted above, sure enough, the live action part is slightly out of focus.

There really should be a large format book on all the matte paintings used in Star Wars, Empire and Jedi, but especially Empire. Hell, I'll photograph the plates for it. Can anyone connect me with Lucasfilm?

 

He couldn't stick around for Return of the Jedi even if he wanted to, Kershner was a member of the DGA (Director's Guild of America) who had fined him $250, 000 for not having credits at the start of The Empire Strikes Back... George Lucas paid the fine to protect his director, then promptly left the Guild thereafter, meaning no DGA member could direct the next Star Wars film without blowback from the aforementioned union... which left Lucas' original intention of Steven Spielberg to direct Jedi at a stop before it began.

Empire remains the best looking of all Star Wars films to date, because Kershner went for a classic 'old-Hollywood' look (plus he went a whole month over schedule and several million dollars over-budget to get it), but Richard Marquand - who directed Jedi - stated he didn't like that look and wanted closer to the minimalist cinematography of the 1977 film, and thus they went that route with Jedi...

 

I think it may have been a $25,000 fine, but I'd have to look it up. If Spielberg had directed, I wonder if the lethal cuteness quotient would have been higher?

And yet Jedi looks nothing like Star Wars. I saw part of it again recently and I actually realized how flat the lighting is in much of it, and the direction certainly matches that flatness. I get the feeling, from reading The Secret History of Star Wars, that Lucas was really directing through Richard Marquand, and without Kershner or Kurtz to push back, Lucas got his way, much to the film's detriment.

Of course, I like to remind myself at times like this that I've never directed a film and these movies have changed the industry, made billions, etc etc.