Why did he hate his original creations so much that he let the theatrical film negatives rot and degrade while...

Why did he hate his original creations so much that he let the theatrical film negatives rot and degrade while preserving the special editions and only sold the rights to the special editions to Disney?

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Got new toys and lost his touch. There's like half a dozen directors from his generation and some younger that suffered the same fate.

The original creations had some good effects, some outdated.

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but why not give us the option like a lot of directors do?
For example Blade Runner has like 3 different versions of the film to choose from

Well for one, they weren't his original creations, that's probably what pissed him off. He only wrote and directed the first one, but there was also a huge amount of studio interference and production difficulties and in fact it was far from the movie he wanted to make.

He was sidelined into producing the other two, because apparently nobody was comfortable with him writing and directing the other films.

I think he's held a grudge over all that, and that's the reason why he insisted on being the only person behind the prequels.

Lucas is obsessed with control and perfection
>but why not give us the option like a lot of directors do?
He sees the old versions as inferiors and not the """""intended""""" vision, which is therefore not worth preserving

>but why not give us the option like a lot of directors do?
>For example Blade Runner has like 3 different versions of the film to choose from

plenty of directors don't believe in doing that. for example Villeneuve thinks there should only be one version of his films, the theatrical version, and refuses to release an extended edition or directors cut or deleted scenes of films he makes

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Some people are not satisfied with what they make even with other people compliment them on it

...

>he let the theatrical film negatives rot and degrade while preserving the special editions
Look I fucking hate the special editions but that's not what happened. Basically most American films from the 70s were made on absolutely shitty film stock (I believe it's Kodak Eastman stock specifically). It's not just Star Wars, other classics like Taxi Driver had the exact same issue. Basically the film degrades really fucking fast unless it's kept in a freezer, specifically the green and blue color channels leak out leaving the film almost black-and-white except it's more red-and-pink.

When they did the special editions in the late 90s it was thought that if they didn't chemically restore the footage then the whole film would've been lost. Thing is that this was before digital distribution, when you still needed a negative in order to strike film prints from. The Godfather's negative, for example, is in an even more shocking state than Star Wars. However no one's going to strike a new print from the negative ever again, it's all going to be painstakingly remastered digital scans from now on. That wasn't the case in the late 90s. theatres still needed 35mm film prints.

So Star Wars' original negative was actually saved in the process. The problem is that the new special edition footage was literally cut into the original negative, as that was pretty much the only way you could make a new cut to strike new prints from. As a result the original negatives are now the 1997 version of the films. Hilariously all the changes he made after that only exist as digital files so every time they go back they have to retroactively add all the extra, extra shit back into the 1997 version.

4k77, 80 and 83 have effectively preserved the originals

Is 4K80 out yet? I stopped checking a few years ago

yeah

true but they used a blasted out 35mm reel that was played in some theater a hundred times, hardly the ideal scenario

why are you posting this

why did they have to fuck up the original negatives to make the Special Editions when I'm sure there were plenty of 35mm copies that existed at that time they could have used

Woo-hoo. I guess I should've waited, I already got D+80 half a year ago because I couldn't stand the wait anymore and felt like watching Empire.

He knew some fanboy would do all the work for free anyway.

My big gripe with the Special Addition sis the shit CGI X-Wings in teh death star attack. The original models looked fine and didn't contrast so hard with everything else that was happening.

youtu.be/JFGp4A9GlkM?t=16

yeah it’s not perfect but they had many different sources to compare to, better than nothing. I remember people saying disney would release the unedited versions lmfao

>I remember people saying disney would release the unedited versions lmfao
I always assumed they would too but then I learned Lucas ONLY sold the rights to the special editions to them not theatrical

Does that mean theoretically he could independently show the originals in theatres or release them on home video without disney’s involvement? Or does it just mean disney “owns” them but isn’t allowed to use them?

Not entirely sure, I would imagine Fox has some original negatives in storage somewhere but just can release them, how could they not?

Because you need the negative to able to strike high quality copies.

>but then I learned Lucas ONLY sold the rights to the special editions to them not theatrical
There is zero actual proof for this.

No. The problem is that it wasn't just filmed on this shitty stock, the theatrical prints were also printed onto the same shitty stock. So 35mm release prints had the exact same problem the negative had, in fact arguably worse as those copies had been out on the road.

It's worth noting that this problem only exists for Star Wars and Empire. Jedi is actually fine and was filmed and printed on decent film stock. Star Wars also had a brief run of Technicolor prints which didn't degrade. However it was made at the end of Technicolor being a thing, so the colors are a bit wonky cause Technicolor really didn't give much of a shit anymore. Hence why projects based on it, like 4K77, have this nasty green tint in a lot of scenes. Empire was the one that was filmed on shit stock and then only printed on shit stock, hence why 4K80's taken so goddamn long. It's really, really hard to find any decent quality 35mm sources that aren't degraded as fuck.

Don't get me wrong. I think the speical edition nonsense is the worst thing Lucas ever did and I fucking hate it. I'm just making the point that OP's got the wrong idea of what happened and back in 1997 it probably seemed like the sanest way of preserving the films while adding in new material. Turns out it fucking wasn't and that Lucas had some weird autism that causes him to refuse to restore the originals in any way despite absolutely everything, but that's why it's so hard to restore the original cuts. The actual negatives themselves are now the 1997 version.

Anyway you know 4k77/80/83 exist now right? It's not like it's 2006 anymore. There's decent 4K versions of the original cuts now. It's not a huge problem anymore if you know how to torrent.

>puts horrible cgi scale texture infront of the frame for 5 seconds
Why? Nobody could have thought that looked good. And what’s with the odd dialogue changes
>you were lucky to get out of there
Why?

JJ himself said releasing the theatrical cuts in HD is pretty much impossible but refused to elaborate in an interview back in the day

so what's the deal with the 16mm prints that Silver Screen Edition used?
Are they less degraded than the 35mm negatives?

>I would imagine Fox has some original negatives in storage somewhere
You do understand that every film has just one negative copy? There are no original trilogy negatives that don't have the -97 special edition changes made into them, and the Star Wars negatives are most certainly in some Lucasfilm or Disney storage facility.

I assume lucas didn’t like the implication that R2 only survived because of his metallic nature? Or that luke would make a joke about him nearly being eaten? No clue.

The truth is he never had any respect for star wars, it was always just a silly thing he made for 14 year olds to hopefully sell toys. He was always a hack, and to be honest, the best parts of the franchise were always the product of more talented people.

I can respect that, although also some films suffer a lot and deviate significantly from the director's vision due to the intervention of the studio.

Silver Screen used a dupe print from memory. Basically a Spanish (If I remember correctly - it might've been Italian) print that was copied from a 35mm print. Problem is that you loose a lot of quality when you copy a film print to another film print which isn't ideal. 4K77 meanwhile uses a technicolor print, which as said before did survive in good condition.

redo the compositing digitally is one thing, adding cgi all over the place and cringe audio changes is completely different

it's not out, only the beta, there're fixes to be done

>it's not out, only the beta
So it's out.

Lucas seized control of ESB and ghost directed RotJ. Everyone knows this.

if you don't mind watching it with some issues yet to be fixed and in 1080p with low bitrate, yes, it is out

>added a scene that repeated dialogue verbatim from a scene that happened 5 minutes ago
What was he thinking?

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>What was he thinking?
"hmm, now I can sell two different Jabba the Hut action figures, ANH version and ROTJ version"

that bottom screen is from the GOUT, which comes from an outdated low res transfer made for the Laser Disc in 1993, here's a 35mm screenshot

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>Ewoks instead of wookies
He is such a poor choice of taste. Just to think about how embarrassing the writing and acting is in the prequels, and to think of how it was all allowed, essentially, because the emperor had no cloths. No one wanted to tell some hack egomaniac he is a retard.

The acting/writing in the prequels is one of the most bizarre and embarrassing anomalies in all of film history. He achieved the impossible and fucked up the basics.

The 1997 Jabba was horrifically ugly, so I guess Lucas was confident that people would buy anything with the Star Wars logo on it

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>Lucas was confident that people would buy anything with the Star Wars logo on it
he was right

This guy got only lucky break, assist in editing the rumour at least and just went straight into jew mode. It's like Rian Johnson, some guy made some ok film, gets picked up by a big studio to make a AAA movie and just rides on that for the rest of his life. Lucas barely directed anything and just became a producer, clearly he was not an artist but a merchant.
>"Missionaries went to Hawaii/Pacific Islands looking to do good, and that they did. They all got rich and powerful."

Ewoks work better for the Vietnam allegory

Didn't Lucas ask a bunch of people to direct prequels episode and they all said "it's your baby, you should direct it"? I think he asked Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg and maybe some others

THX 1138 was his first film. Hardly a merchant's calling card.

Plus American Graffiti which is legit kino. Don't get me wrong I dislike the prequels and I fucking hate the special edition nonsense but I swear people have started to write George Lucas out of his own story over the years.

People project what a Star Wars film should look like unto Lucas' intentions. He envisioned them as a throwback to 40's serials with modern effects and better writing (as bad as the writing in Star Wars might be, if you compare them to Flash Gordon and others, they are Shakespeare), but he didn't want them to just emulate the style of contemporary films.

Can someone please post that picture of buff George and buff Jar Jar

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I got you pal

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Thank you :)

How did Episode 3 manage to come out as a mostly coherent film after the first two were incoherent acid trips?

Are Harmy's despecialized edition worth a shit?

>nooo you can’t just heckin convert my volcano sacrifice island christians le bad
>noooo you can’t just make money off of plastic sci fi crap that’s greedy

They're good but 4k77 rendered them outdated

At a guess, Lucas wanted to tell the story of #3 but needed to lead up to it - and had no idea how to tell #1-2.

>the first two were incoherent acid trips?
they weren't, specially ep1, which is the best of the three if you're not a pleb

D+77/80/83 do the same shit but better and 4K77/80/83 are the superior way to watch it