RocketJump
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2019–2021
18:25 · 3.2M views · Dec 7, 2017
A video essay on how the editors of Star Wars: A New Hope recut and rearranged the footage to rescue the film. It walks through specific changes that improved pacing and drama.
Cited as a compact account of how editing shaped the original Star Wars, though one commenter notes a rebuttal video disputes parts of it.
4 comments from Hacker News
How Star Wars Was Saved In The Edit: this video A good video. I believe the content is largely pulled from a book on the topic, but this is definitely a case where video helps, and if you haven't read or even heard of the book (like me), it's new stuff, not just a rehashing of the same old Star Wars stuff, and interesting from a film school point of view, not just a Star Wars point of view. I'll also just echo the grandparent post and say that you can see this pattern in a lot of artists: Heinlein, probably JK Rowling (her later books definitely were getting flabby and she's had no comparable success since the original series), all kinds. Hollywood has an interesting pattern where a director makes a huge hit, and they kind of have a defined structure for letting them make a "passion project" before putting them back under some editorial control. The passion projects usually do fairly poorly. I'm not sure what happens if one of them becomes a big hit. That would be interesting to see.
I would have agreed with you until I saw _How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit_ ( this video ). Maybe George Lucas had _always_ been a teenager with no restraints? EDIT: Of course in the process of looking up the URL for HSWwSitE, I discovered _How "How Star Wars was saved in the edit" was saved in the edit (sort of, but not really)_ ( [LINK] ) which is a really rather thorough (if laborious) rebuttal of the overall picture the original video sought to paint, and and quite justifiably takes the original video's creators to task for extremely selective reporting (and in several cases fairly woeful research). But boy does it go on at some length (nearly 2h!). If only someone would save _How "How Star Wars was saved in the edit" was saved in the edit (sort of, but not really)_ in the edit.
These accounts about Marcia are deserved but downplay the contributions of Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew. The three of them absolutely saved Star Wars in the editing room. The lack of Lawrence Kasdan is the reason that every piece of dialogue in the prequels is incredibly awkward (but apparently extremely meme-able). An accounting of changes made in the edit of Star Wars: this video
>(like the Death Star waiting to orbit Yavin before firing at its moon.) Trivia: this part was added during the editing of the movie for the sake of pacing and drama, see the last part of this video