Star Wars (1977) original Blu ray. Crappier than ever.

Okay, one last time... and nice try on attempting to omit later details disclosed in that linked article;

In said linked article, the reference librarian working at the Library of Congress itself admits in a correspondence that they do not (as of 2011 when that article was written) have ANY new prints of either Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back, revised or otherwise. And even the author of the article takes them at their word and admits they likely don't have the 1997 version in their library because they declined it... and their position hasn't changed in the interim, seemingly.

Enough said.

 

I pointed out what was false. They DO have a physical copy of A New Hope, but it's the 1997 Special Edition. Lucas sent them SEs despite the fact it's not what they asked for. Now there's a stupid situation where they have those movies listed, but they have wrongs copies in the register.

The point being, Lucas went out of his way to actually destroy (yes, actually destroy) the prints with the original versions. It's not like he destroyed them all, but he did so with the best copies and the rest deteriorated by now. ANH was deteriorated badly even back in the 1990s. What Lucasfilms preserved are not full prints and they weren't professionally transfered back in the day and wouldn't make that great of a source these days. Disney has a 4K transfer of ANH, but it's the Special Edition because that's what Lucas actually preserved in high quality.

 

@Vidiot was there. You'll forgive us if we board that bus instead.

Ed

 

Give us the source of your information, and be specific. Dates, names, places.

I'll give you mine: I worked for Ken Moriyama in C Building at the original ILM campus on Kerner Blvd. in San Rafael (aka "The Kerner Optical Company"), in a makeshift room setup with a 2K Pogle Pandora Platinum, using a Quantel iQ as the image source. The 35mm negative was scanned at Post Group in Hollywood on a Spirit 2K scanner. Lucasfilm's vaults were all within a few blocks of ILM at that time, and they showed me some replacement OCN sections from the original 1977 version we were using because they were sharper than the 1997 dupes. After we did the color, Lowry Digital did the dust-busting, grain management, and frame repair at their facility on Ontario Street near the Burbank Airport.

My immediate supervisor at ILM was Jen Coranado, Fred Meyer was the head of HD, and my assistant was Mike Parkinson. This was from the beginning of January 2004 through the first week of April. I worked about 60 hours a week on weekdays doing the bulk of the color, and my old friend Rich Garibaldi was the colorist on weekends, involved with fixes and renders.

Now your turn.

That is true: Lucas would not give the Library of Congress a print of the original 1977 Star Wars. One reason why is the restoration isn't done yet, and I think he didn't want to hand over a substandard version that was beat-up and faded. Once a 4K restoration is done, then they could record-out a new negative and strike a new print (preferably on Vision Premiere stock, a low-fade emulsion which will theoretically last longer), then hand that print over to the LoC.

 

Lucas didn't give the original to LoC because he didn't want to. He doesn't want it to exist. It wasn't about the restoration not being done because he specifically wanted it not to be made. The Special Editions are his "ultimate" versions and he considers that final. A restoration from some 35 mm film is obviously possible since even fans can do it at homes, but that will always be substandard at this point. It's too late. The films simply degraded too much by now. Lucas knew this would happen and wanted it to happen. That's why he ordered not to restore the original versions for a digital storage when the films were still in a fairly good condition (ANH was already exhibiting serious problems, but it was salvageable back then).

 

Proof of anything you've said?

Ed

 

I didn't know you worked on the restoration of The Phantom Of The Paradise. I own the UK Arrow Video BD which I think uses the master you helped create, just the disc authoring and video compression must be different, and it looks superb for a movie of that period. I didn't noticed any inconsistencies on the picture that as I said looks great, actually I didn't know it the kind of put-together restoration work.

 

I was surprised that Fox sent the A/B rolls over, because usually it's just the built-in original film opticals. So that was a case where we had to dig in and precisely match some of the wipes and split-screens, which was tricky. I know a lot of us who really sweat blood over getting the little details just right.

I just remembered a case for Star Wars where my ILM assistant had to match one of the wipe transitions that went from one planet to an interior shot, so we did actually have A/B roll negatives for that as well. And that could only be from camera negative. So this kind of thing does happen. Star Wars is actually a funny movie in that I don't think Lucas ever repeated the same wipe twice in the same film. And very, very few filmmakers used wipe transitions at all in the 1970s.

 

The real funny thing thing about Lucas is that the actually ripped-off Kurosawa in all sorts of matters (amongst others) and yet he's considered original.

Are George Lucas' words proof enough for you?

 

I can't see this in context. It's just here on its own. This may not mean what it appears to mean. Either way, @Vidiot was there.

Ed

P.S.: I didn't make the "same wipe effect" comment you attributed to me either.

 

It means exactly what it says and there's far more interviews with Lucas where he said the same things. It's a fact and I really don't care where Vidiot was because this isn't about him. It's about Gorge Lucas. His company employed an army, but it doesn't mean everybody was close to George Lucas.

Even Spielberg said he couldn't convince Lucas to stop erasing all sources of the original Star Wars trilogy he could find, BTW.

 

Lucas has talked about this many times and brought up all of the homages in the film, some of which are fairly subtle. As Wikipedia states:

In 1977, American director George Lucas released Star Wars, a wildly successful science fiction film influenced by Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, among other works. Lucas, like many other New Hollywood directors, revered Kurosawa and considered him a role model, and was shocked to discover that the Japanese filmmaker was unable to secure financing for any new work. The two met in San Francisco in July 1978 to discuss the project Kurosawa considered most financially viable: Kagemusha, the epic story of a thief hired as the double of a medieval Japanese lord of a great clan. Lucas, enthralled by the screenplay and Kurosawa's illustrations, leveraged his influence over 20th Century Fox to coerce the studio that had fired Kurosawa just ten years earlier to produce Kagemusha, then recruited fellow fan Francis Ford Coppola as co-producer.

So Lucas not only acknowledged Hidden Fortress and other influences, he's also cited books like Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces and how Lucas incorporated a lot of classic legends and story structure from many old stories -- even the trope of the son growing up without a father and then confronting the father to kill him. All this stuff is right out of Shakespeare and lots of other great fiction.

Here's a 2-minute interview with Lucas talking about how important Kurosawa's work was in his life:



Kurosawa was grateful for Lucas' respect and the fact that the filmmaker helped him get several films made and distributed in the latter part of his life.

 

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your...opinion, man!

 

I'll stick with my old VHS.

 

Yes, Lucas had been open about it and he was treating Kurosawa with respect. I mean that it's funny how the mainstream describes Lucas as an original author when he was actually extremely derivative.

BTW, I'm watching 4K77. Amazing quality for a fan project. To be honest, Disney could sell this on BD and most people would be satisfied. The version with film grain intact is my favorite. It's exactly how I remember the movies, but in high resolution. I wish they did 4K80, too...

 

Bah, pan/scan. You're missing 40% of the picture.

 

THIS. Let the consumer decide.

 

It's not just the edits made by Lucas. The official digital remasters on DVDs and BDs are surprisingly bad from a technical point of view. Crushed blacks, crappy color grading, quite low bitrate etc.

Isn't Lucas, like, the most wealthy filmmaker on the planet? Why was he so cheap? It's beyond me, TBH.

 

I can't speak for the actual transfer scan process on the remastered DVD's and Blu ray's, but Lucas deliberately had the OT scanned at 1920 x 1080 resolution for those releases... that's less than full 2K quality... and he did it to match the equivalent resolution on the prequels (the second and third of which was shot on HD cameras that could only capture at that resolution back then, the first was shot almost entirely on anamorphic 35mm film but downres'd in post). The OT negatives were capable of up to 4K resolution if not an exceptional transfer at full 2K resolution, but Lucas deliberately downgraded the picture quality to match the inferior quality of the prequels.

Think about that for a second.

 

News groups? Oh, I get it: 1977 film, 1977 Internet.

 

Couple of things here: first, even on modern blockbusters, they still do all the VFX at 2K because there's just no time to render them all at 4K. I was talking to somebody on the inside about The Last Jedi, and I was told, "if we had done all the effects at 4K, we'd still be rendering in May." Since the movie had to get out in December, that wasn't going to happen. Workflow requirements often override everything else.

I had nothing to do with the original trilogy, but the remasters done in 2003-2004 were all scanned at 2K (2048x1556). 15 years ago, 2K was perfectly acceptable. And there were no pro digital cameras that could capture 4K until the Red Camera emerged in 2006. Not many studios were doing 4K restorations at the time.

My opinion: Lucas' basic philosophy to me was, "I mainly care about the new movie I'm making right now (Revenge of the Sith), and these old home video releases can only get a fraction of my time at the moment." Because Star Wars is 100% owned by Fox, my observation was he was philosophically opposed to spending his own money on restoring the films. As long as Fox was willing to foot the bill, then he was willing to give them some time provided he could add the changes he'd wanted to make for 20 years. Jedi and Empire are films he owns outright, though Fox has locked up the home video rights through 2020. Lucas and Fox had a rocky relationship throughout the 1970s and 1980s. A 2012 article outlines some of the issues:

Fox Still Owns Rights to STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE; Box Set Releases Could Be Tricky

 

It's not really about the resolution. It's about everything put together. It just adds up to a surprisingly cheap package. For a company of such caliber, I mean.

I was really disappointed with those DVDs and hoped the BDs will make it worthwhile (fully aware the edits would stay). Sadly, the BDs felt like an even worse job.

 

Hm... Well --- But but but, a film is made by more than one person. For example Lucas only directed "IV" and I-III. He didn't direct, or write the screenplay, for "Empire".

 

Much is made about the Blu-ray release of A New Hope. I'm curious to know what some of you think about the Blu-ray release of Empire. I'll always prefer the theatrical versions of all three original trilogy films, but of the three post-1997 original trilogy films, Empire suffers the least. It actually turned out okay. Again, I prefer the original, theatrical version. I prefer the less is more approach to the wampa scene. I prefer "You're luck you don't taste very good" to "You were lucky to get out of there." I prefer the original Emperor/Vader dialogue. The revised dialogue is too revealing and opens up questions about when and how Vader knew that he had a son. I prefer "Bring my shuttle" to "Alert my star destroyer to prepare for my arrival." But the changes to Empire aren't nearly as egregious as the changes made to A New Hope and Jedi. And I'm thankful for that, as it is my favorite original trilogy film and favorite Star Wars film overall.

 

Actually, he did. Lucas had a hands-on involvement with all of the Star Wars films he produced under his banner. Read J.W. Rinzler's extensive book The Making of The Empire Strikes Back, and you'll get a good idea of how Lucas, Leigh Brackett, and Lawrence Kasdan wrote the movie. Lucas is credited for writing the story, after all, and the other two are credited with the screenplay -- but the reality is that there were six other uncredited writers who participated in rewrites and punch-ups. And Lucas was there every step of the way to accept or reject any changes to the script.

Lucas is such a control freak, he completely controlled pre-production (storyboards, set design, script, locations, casting, etc.), then completely controlled post-production (editing, sound mix, VFX, color, etc.), having far more control than the director per se. It's true that he would give his directors a long leash during production, but that proved disastrous with Empire when Kirshner pushed the movie $10 million over budget and almost bankrupted Lucas personally. There's an interesting story as to how producer Gary Kurtz was able to negotiate a bank loan from a Boston bank that basically saved the film, after Fox had kind of rebuffed Lucas and asked for all the rights to all of Star Wars in return for bailing him out. Lucas was very angry about that, since they were basically blackmailing him when his back was up against the wall, and ultimately he won that argument and kept the rights for himself.

One of the editors at ILM had a neat hand-lettered sign on his editing screen that said "Han Shot First." I saw this about a week after I arrived, and I asked him, "hey, has George noticed this?" He laughed and said that yes, he had noticed it, but the editor left it up and George didn't ask him to take it down. So Lucas is keenly aware that not everybody -- even the people who work for him -- are happy about the changes he's made to the films.

I also think Empire is a terrific film, and I think it's not only my favorite of all the Star Wars films, it's very likely in my top 10 favorites of all time. It's a great film on many levels, partly because it's an epic tragedy, partly because it's so dark, and partly because it has a lot of surprises and twists. I wish I had gotten to work on the Blu-ray remastering, but unfortunately that one was already finished 2 weeks before I was hired.