A long-lost original print of 1977’s Star Wars was recovered from an archive and screened for a group of cinema aficionados and die-hard fans.
An audience was finally permitted to watch the first released version of the film — nearly perfectly preserved and unfaded — that creator George Lucas famously suppressed from being publicly shown on a big screen for 47 years. The British Film Institute event was introduced by Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy, who joked that the screening was “not illegal.”
“What you’re going to see is in fact the first print, and I’m not even sure there’s another one quite like it,” Kennedy said. “It’s that rare.”
And the result?
An attending film critic from The Telegraph who attended the screening last week admitted the unaltered original “looks terrible” by modern standards.
While fans understandably tend to focus on Lucas’ most intrusive creative moves (adding the jarring CG version of Jabba the Hutt, having Greedo shoot first, stuffing distracting CG creatures and droids into Mos Eisley), the amount of subsequent polish and tweaks over the years is so extensive that many aspects of the original look just as noticeably fake as the egregious CG.
“I felt like I was watching a completely different film,” wrote Robbie Collin, who called the print a “joyously craggy, grubby, stolidly carpentered spectacle” that “looks more like fancy dress than grand sci-fi epic.” “Every scene had the visceral sense of watching actual people photographed doing actual things with sets and props that had been physically sawn and glued into place. The slapstick between C-3PO and R2-D2 looked clunkier, and therefore funnier; the Death Star panels were less like supercomputers than wooden boards with lights stuck on, and so better attuned to the frequency of make-believe. It felt less like watching a blockbuster in the modern sense than the greatest game of dressing up in the desert anyone ever played.”
A vlogger for Cinema Savvy, George Aldridge, who says he’s seen A New Hope at least 100 times said the screening was “incredibly special,” but likewise made him realize “there are so many great changes to the Star Wars films; it’s the ones we dislike that have always overshadowed them.” He, too, noted the print was so radically different that “it felt like watching the film for the first time.”
“From day one, George Lucas has been making changes to these films,” he said. “It hasn’t just been here’s one big scene change there. It’s been the little nuance. It’s been the sound effects, it’s been the smallest details — which you do not notice until now you don’t see it.”
Aldridge noted differences “like R2-D2 isn’t hiding behind rocks when the Tusken Raiders come for them … there are so many little things that I noticed the cantina … there’s been cleaning up of James Earl Jones’ voice [as Darth Vader]…”
So, ironically, a version of Star Wars that Lucas for so long didn’t want to shown seems to give viewers more respect for Lucas — due to gaining some appreciation for his extensive and controversial tinkering.
Both reviewers noted, however, that the theater burst into applause when Han Solo (Harrison Ford) shot first during the Greedo confrontation. Enthused Aldridge: “Han Solo was so much cooler.”
Lucas’ tweaks to the print began with the very first theatrical rerelease of Star Wars in 1981. Until now, the studio has only permitted the screening of various Special Editions. BFI negotiated with Disney and Lucasfilm for the rights for a back-to-back screening on the festival’s opening night. This particular BFI print was stored for four decades at a temperature of 23 degrees Fahrenheit to preserve its quality.
Lucas, over the years, has been rather firm about not screening the original and, when asked in 2004 by the Associated Press why he doesn’t simply release the original version along with the Special Editions, rather grumpily shot back, “The Special Edition, that’s the one I wanted out there. The other movie, it’s on VHS, if anybody wants it. I’m not going to spend the — we’re talking millions of dollars here — the money and the time to refurbish that, because to me, it doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw a half-completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be. I’m the one who has to take responsibility for it. I’m the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they’re going to throw rocks at me, they’re going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.”