Everyone’s Gone to the Movies – Original Star Wars Edition

Editor’s Note: We’re going to have two or three summer movie blog posts coming up in the next week. For this one we’re looking at a rare screening of the original non-special-edition Star Wars.

Click to play the original 1977 theatrical Star Wars trailer.

Original 1977 print of Star Wars screened in Britain
Back in the summer of 1977 I was 17 years old and was blown away by a new movie called Star Wars. I was so blown away by it I went to see it in the theater every weekend all summer long for a total of 13 times. I know that sounds excessive, but this was before streaming, before common availability of cable movie channels, before even the VCR. If you wanted to see a movie, you had to see it in person in the theater. So I don’t really think I was that over the top…

One of the things I noticed over the summer was how the 35mm print gradually deteriorated. New scratches would appear and bits of the film would disappear as the film broke repeatedly. At my local theater, the most notable change was that the sequence with the mouse robot kept getting shorter and shorter as the film kept breaking at the same spot.

Now, with digital prints, projecting a movie on the 100th screening looks exactly like the projection from opening night.

Except…

Star Wars director and producer George Lucas has never been able to leave his movies alone. In between the 1977 release of Star Wars and the 1980 release of The Empire Strikes Back, the original Star Wars acquired a new heading: Before the crawl, it was now Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope.

Then, in 1997, for the movie’s 20th anniversary, Lucas released new “Special Editions” of the original three movies with new digital effects and some controversial editorial changes – most notably changing things so “Han didn’t shoot first” in his confrontation with Greedo.

Han shoots first at Greedo in the 1977 version of Star Wars.

Ever since that time, Star Wars purists (your author included) have been begging to be able to see trilogy in all of its original analog effects glory. But Lucas not only stands thoroughly behind the Special Editions (he says they were how he always intended the movies to look), he also claims the original editions no longer exist.

That’s mostly true, though not entirely. I have a DVD set of the Special Edition original trilogy that includes the (mostly) original versions as bonus disks. But… these are very old school with non-anamorphic prints that have the black bars permanently baked in. This means that if you try to view it on your modern HDTV, you will have a very small image in the middle of your screen surrounded by the black bars, rendering it essentially unwatchable. The only way I’ve been able acceptably view these is by taking rips of them and viewing them on my iPad.

There is also a “de-specialized” version of the movie floating around online that have been assembled from a number of sources, reportedly including “2011 special edition Blu-rays, the 2006 bonus DVD, a 2004 HDTV telecast, a scan of an old 35-millimeter print, and a handful of other sources.”

But in June this summer some 900 fans got to see Star Wars just the way I did when I first saw it in the summer of 1977.  The British Film Institute  pulled their original dye transfer Technicolor 35 mm print for two plays at their Film on Film Festival.

As reported by NPR:

“We’re not saying come and see this on a film print as part of nostalgia,” said James Bell, a senior curator of fiction at the British Film Institute National Archive and the programming director of the festival. “We’re saying there’s a real qualitative, aesthetic difference to seeing a film projected on a film print. I think that’s exciting to anyone, whether you’re a Star Wars fan or not.”

In an interesting side note, Kathleen Kennedy, Lucasfilm’s president, attended the screening and held a conversation with BFI’s host. One can only hope that someday Lucasfilm will see fit to release a high-quality home video version of the original trilogy.