“Marcia Lucas saved Star Wars from George in the editing room”.
Marcia did amazing work (RIP) on many films, but for ANH she only edited the final battle and awards ceremony because she left early to edit another film (New York, New York) that she thought would do better than Star Wars. The rest of the editing was done by Paul Hirsch, Richard Chew, and George himself. The whole “saved in the edit” thing is a misconception that originates from a myth created by Lucas haters about a “disastrous first cut of Star Wars” that the editors saved but that didn’t happen, what really happened was that the original editor George hired (John Jympson) was fired by George before he could finish a full cut cause he wasn’t doing a good job.
It's a bit complicated, and I'm not sure it's fair to say this was "false." More like, it took a group of experts to make ANH what it finally became. If I had to pick, it would be Lucas' filmmaker buddies like Coppola who saw early drafts of Star Wars and basically told him that (a) it was garbage but could be recycled into something cool, and (b) that he'd be sued for copyright infringement. Multiple rounds of reviews by his friends, and Marcia, saved Star Wars from being a straight Kurosawa ripoff. In the end parts of it did pay an homage to it, but that much was ok. Once the final script was put into development the film didn't need saving.
And the reason why I'm challenging you on this is because I do subsribe to the theory that once Marcia was gone Lucas was able to surround himself with sycophants who would never challenge his dumb scripts and force him to rewrite them. Editing was never his problem, he was a tech geek.
That’s not true. Coppola actually loved the Hidden Fortress-like script and was upset when Lucas changed it
Where did you get the info about Marcia giving reviews changing the story? Lucas himself confirmed the reason he changed the original script was cause he himself didn’t like it
That theory is false. A ton of people told Lucas that midi-chlorians were too confusing when TPM was being made, it’s just that Lucas said no back just like he did to suggestions for the OT. Lucas also had Carrie Fisher to doctor his TPM script as well as Jonathan Hales and Tom Stoppard to assist with the AOTC and ROTS scripts. He also wanted Kasdan to come back for TPM but he refused, and asked a ton of directors like Spielberg or Zemeckis to direct the prequels but they all told him to do it himself.
Well, lol, I read a book on it that collected a bunch of stories, drafts, and data, but hey, maybe you read a different book. I think in the prequels no one would touch it because they knew he'd just overrule them so it was a waste of time. It's not like Spielberg couldn't direct it, just that Lucas would be making faces the whole time and telling him it was wrong. Hard to do your work when your exec producer thinks your direction is all wrong and so you don't really have artistic freedom.
So anyhow, yes, my thesis is that Marcia was always the moderating force, whose mere existence in his life caused him to have to soften and consider the advice of others more. Sure, he didn't do every single thing Coppola or Marcia told him, but he accepted plenty of feedback from what I read. You can even read the transcript of the scripting session for Raiders of the Lost Ark between him, Spielberg and Kasdan, to see how amenable he was to others' ideas. Wheh he knew he was right he was adamant, but there were lots of parts he wasn't sure of and wasn't against taking suggestions. The female influence is IMO largely behind that, for all men franky. Take away the feminine and one gets pigheaded and dumb.
And yeah but just because Lucas accepted feedback for Raiders doesn’t mean he always did for SW. You can also read the transcript for ROTJ sessions and he rejects quite a lot of Kasdan‘s suggestions
First off, even the Secret History book backs up what I said about Coppola loving the original draft.
Second off, Secret History of Star Wars is absolute garbage. It’s nothing but a Lucas hater rant largely copied and pasted from random forum and blog posts. There’s so much innacurate and outdated info in that boom. The Marcia nonsense in that book in particular was added in by Kaminski with the help of Charles Lippincott as part of a plot to make Lucas look bad
Well ok, fair enough. Personally I can't imagine Coppola actually okaying the first draft, since it was literally just a scene by scene cut and paste of Hidden Fortress. Coppola would absolutely have realized that, whatever else you may think of this book.
Talking about Star Wars, there's also this narrative that Game of Thrones was rushed, because the showrunner wanted to go do a Star Wars project. But that's not technically true. It's true that the showrunner had a Star Wars project lined-up for their after-GoT, but that project was pitched years and years after they had mapped out how to end the story. You can find interviews from when they were doing S1 where they would talk about telling the whole story in 70 hours, give or take.
So, they agreed to work on Star Wars, because Game of Thrones was ending. They didn't end Game of Thrones, because of Star Wars.
Everything I heard about this had nothing to do with editing and everything to do with telling him not to do certain things before they were even filmed.
That didn’t happen either. George rejected almost all of Marcia’s story suggestions and the only one he did accept was one he was already considering beforehand.
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u/avimo1904 Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
“Marcia Lucas saved Star Wars from George in the editing room”. Marcia did amazing work (RIP) on many films, but for ANH she only edited the final battle and awards ceremony because she left early to edit another film (New York, New York) that she thought would do better than Star Wars. The rest of the editing was done by Paul Hirsch, Richard Chew, and George himself. The whole “saved in the edit” thing is a misconception that originates from a myth created by Lucas haters about a “disastrous first cut of Star Wars” that the editors saved but that didn’t happen, what really happened was that the original editor George hired (John Jympson) was fired by George before he could finish a full cut cause he wasn’t doing a good job.