Is a classic film ever going to be left alone again?

We predict what George Lucas will monkey around with when he gives Star Wars the 3D treatment...and what he'll leave alone.

One of the five versions of Jabba in the Star Wars movies

I've been interested to read, on occasion, that George Lucas seems set to monkey around with the Star Wars trilogy yet again on the back of 3D-mania, I would like to point out to The Great Man one missed opportunity that every clean-up, re-release and re-mastering of Return Of The Jedi (1983) has failed to fix.

And yes, it's there for the entire scene
It's not just in this one shot either, but the whole scene...

How many more versions of Return Of The Jedi will there be before Lucas orders ILM to get rid of that really-obvious attempt to hide...I dunno what the hell it is, a make-up glitch? A wire? That thing on the side of Ian McDiarmid’s right temple as he tries to seduce Luke Skywalker to the dark side in his throne room on Death Star II? Could a minor repair not be included in the inevitable list of changes and updates/'upgrades' to the 1977-1983 movies when they go 3D...?

For Star Wars 3D, I'm betting that not only will Han Solo not shoot first, but he'll let poor old Greedo off with a stiff warning; whatever important social demographic has come to the fore since the last re-hash, I guess they'll get matted into Mos Eisley; and there'll be (ooh) four rings round the Death Star when it goes ka-boom.

Han not shooting first
Hey, you can't smoke in here.

God save them if they ever 'CGI' Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back 3D (although 'polygon-Yoda' did get a lot better by Revenge Of The Sith).

As for Return Of The Jedi 3D, Leia will either get a less sexist outfit for the Jabba-slave sequence or an even more sexist one; Jabba will have to lumber outside to smoke his Hookah...but I know, somehow I know, that that sizzling thing on the emperor's cowl will still be there in the big showdown scene between Luke and his father. Hell, maybe Lucas likes it. Maybe he'll tell Richard Edlund to make it bigger.

It didn’t get fixed in the 1997 edition or the 2004 re-spin of the first trilogy, anyway. Banthas may now prowl the arid plains of Tatooine, Greedo may have got cramp in his trigger-finger, and huge imperial CGI civilisations may sprawl before us that were only spoken of in the original versions…but every time I see that sizzling paint-out at the thrilling conclusion of Jedi, my enjoyment of the film is interrupted by the notion of some poor sod sitting up til 4am at a darkened ILM in 1983, painting the celluloid one frame at a time, and swearing revenge on Ian McDiarmid’s make-up artist/sound-man/whoever.

"The past is another galaxy – not only do they do things differently there, they often do them better"

I admit, one can be too perfectionist, and if you’re a director dealing with the work of yourself as a younger person, it’s not necessarily wise. The past is another galaxy – not only do they do things differently there, they often do them better. It can be embarrassing to watch a more ‘mature’ director ironing the charm and idiosyncracy out of work that he did under pressure.

I’m not talking here about the ring-around-the-death-star-explosion in Star Wars mark II (1977/97/04), which is now the poster-shot for the anti-revisionist lobby, but rather that species of tweak where the director attempts to retro-fit the psychological landscape of old projects with the (often very altered) point of view that they have developed since their younger days. Sometimes this can threaten to wreck work that a director is unable, for whatever reason, to entirely re-shoot.

One example is the omission of many of the more harrowing scenes of domestic break-up between Richard Dreyfuss and Teri Garr in the the 1980 ‘Special Edition’ of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. These scenes contain some of Spielberg’s rawest grappling with the spectre of his parents’ divorce that informs so many of his narratives, yet most of it is absent from the 1980 re-cut.

Roy Neary stretching his marriage with some home modelling experiments

Since CE3K was a huge hit, these upsetting but also very hard-hitting scenes were surely not removed for financial or market-based reasons. Did Spielberg consider the Roy Neary divorce back-story a necessary catharsis in 1977 for something that he had come to terms with by 1980? And was that part of CE3K’s narrative just – for him - the remnant debris of that struggle?

Roy Neary’s woes gave me a deeper bond with the film, and one that I missed in later editions. If nothing else, retaining them would have helped to explain why Neary boards the mothership – abandoning his unbelieving wife and children - on what may well be a one-way journey to the stars. In any case, it advances the plot more than the grafted on, Ron Cobb-designed mothership interior of the CE3K:SE.

"CE3K, like the Star Wars saga, is more akin to software than a movie, now at version 4.0"

To boot, Spielberg is now said to regret killing the mystery of what’s inside the mothership, evidenced by the absence of those tacked-on SFX in the more recent '30th Anniversary Edition’.

Spielberg has now been married to Kate Capshaw for 19 years – if they get divorced, are the Neary fight-scenes going back into Close Encounters for the 35th Anniversary Edition? CE3K, like the Star Wars saga, is more akin to software than a movie, now at version 4.0.

The mothership in CE3K (1978)

If I talk about Casablanca with a friend, it’s a fair bet that we have a common point of reference as to which movie we’re talking about, but as the Digital Bits review of the second (1998) CE3K revision states: you'd need a blueprint just to figure out what's "new" footage, what's original footage and what was seen only in the syndicated TV version. And there has been another version since.

The aforementioned US network TV edits are another source of endless confusion and movie-versioning, since these – usually extended – versions tend to offer additional or unseen footage in exchange for the excision of instances of profanity, nudity, blasphemy or anything else the network feels might cause their conservative mid-west audience to explode in front of their TVs.

These often-eccentric edits can occasionally worm their way tenaciously from the black-market into proper commercial releases, as happened with the 1989 network edit of David Lynch’s Dune (1984).

Though a huge fan of Dune, and glad to have access to the extra footage in the 1989 edit (the ‘little-maker’ scene is fascinating, if revolting), I can see why Lynch got his name crudely changed to the classic and disavowing ‘Alan Smithee’ on the opening credits: the entire early segment is nothing but a series of frequently-repeated storyboards illustrating a male voice-over that replaces Virginia Madsen’s narration and image; the scene with Gurney (Patrick Stewart) singing his ballad should have been trod firmly and irrecoverably into the cutting-room floor and the 189 minutes is predictably flabby and frequently baffling, even for fans.

"I recognise that my wish that films be ‘signed-off’ definitively at release may be against the spirit of the Web 2.0 age, where all is resurrected, reimagined, recut and YouTubed, to be watched while we eat our sacred-cow-burgers"

Nonetheless the 1989 network cut finally became available to buy legally, presumably in response to clear fan-demand (and much illegal downloading). If you know nothing about the original 1984 film and buy the 1989 cut by mistake, you will have a very false impression of the director’s intentions.

I recognise that my wish that films be ‘signed-off’ definitively at release may be against the spirit of the Web 2.0 age, where all is resurrected, reimagined, recut and YouTubed, to be watched while we eat our sacred-cow-burgers. And I am not against putting long-standing grievances right…

The practical Spinner prop in 'Blade Runner' (1982) - the wires added nothing good

The 2007 re-release of Blade Runner made sensible use of CGI (such as taking the suspending wires away from the practical on-set Spinners) and excised footage to create a truly definitive version of a longstanding sci-fi classic, whilst the alternate version of Alien³ in the superb Alien Quadrilogy boxed-set finally made some sense of what the hell was going on in Fiorina 161; additionally I have enjoyed the restraint of the medium-quality CGI/SFX substitutions in the Star Trek Remastered releases.

The problem is the raft of unnecessary re-edits and re-releases that ride in on the good reputation of projects like those, as films imitate software in yet a second way: that they must be constantly updated - practically a mandate for rights-holders desperate to turn consumer movie consumption from an 'ownership' into a 'rental' model.

I forget which classic artist was arrested in a gallery for 'touching up' one of his own paintings when it had been hanging there for months, and I do have some sympathy for those who want to alter or perfect their own cinematic posterity. But some directors might need to rewatch Jurassic Park regarding what modern tech can do for re-releases and amended versions of their old analogue classics:

"We were so busy thinking about whether or not we could, that no one bothered to consider whether or not we should."

This worthwhile pause for thought does not encompass the emperor's cowl in Return Of The Jedi. George Lucas has my permission to fix that.

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