The People vs George Lucas

Star Wars ended for me when I watched the special edition of Episode IV: A New Hope that came out in the 90s. The one that had those stitched-on scenes with sweeping views across the metropolis on Luke’s home planet where he met Han Solo. I was confused; I thought the DVD had skipped. Had they left Luke’s home planet already? What was this sprawling, teeming market city? In the original, where we just saw a couple of streets, the spacedock and the bar where they met Han Solo, I thought the planet was in the middle of nowhere and Mos Eisley was a wretched little outpost that had a bit of a spaceport to export the meagre produce of the planet’s desert farms. This impression fitted nicely with the background story that had been set up: Obi-Wan Kenobi had taken Luke to the furthest backwater he could find on the edge of the universe for his protection. It was also a subtle way to establish the characters and their motivations – Luke was a parochial boy who knew nothing of the universe, and Han Solo was desperate, hiding, stuck far from the ordinary trade routes and ultimately willing to take any courier work that came along.

Adding in a few pretty scenes which showed that Luke had easy access to a busy port city changed the entire movie for me. It toned down the contrast between a hushed rustic life and a harsh universal war, dimmed the characters and made the struggles of Luke and the Rebels much less vital. It made me wonder why Luke, the frustrated farm boy who yearned for adventure hadn’t just left his planet to see what was out there. Was he so slow to move? Was he that easy to manipulate? I lost a lot of respect for him, and went from being a fan to being just not all that interested.

As one of the many interviewees in The People vs George Lucas says “It’s not geeky nit picking when you go into the heart of the character and you do something that changes that character’s dynamic. That’s not nit picking, that’s destroying the story.” And that’s what it comes down to. The People vs George Lucas is a call out by fans for George Lucas to release the original trilogy in the original, undoctored form, because the new versions are broken.

If you’re not aware, Lucas has been releasing and re-releasing the original trilogy with new special effects, new scenes, and changes to key moments in the movies since he saw Jurassic Park and thought he’d like to have a go at doing digital technology. There’s even a plan to release another version in (ugh) 3D. “Han shot first” has become a catch-phrase summing up fan anger at the changes that mark characters irreversibly, while one of the interviewees in The People articulates it by saying “The special editions lied to us about the characters, and made (the Star Wars universe) a safer, dumber place”.

For me the secondary problem was a visual one. The new scenes of Mos Eisley looked nice, I’ll grant you that, but the aesthetic was different. The scenes made by the magic of exciting new visual technology had a smoother feel to the old gritty scenes, and they didn’t fit.

I won’t say Star Wars has become a Frankenstein of technologies stapled, gaffed and bandaged together by Lucas’ obsessive urge to use every technological advancement that comes out, and to add in every idea that made it to his notebooks. It’s more like Elvis. No one wanted to see Elvis become a bloated mumbling drughead clinging to the gaudy sequinned suits that fame could afford, but they did.

The People vs George Lucas is a fun documentary that gives us a peek at the joyous chaos of fanvids, remakes, animations, claymations, legomations, embroidermations, reenactments, roleplays, re-edits and costumes that fans have produced for the love of the original trilogy. It shows us the exuberance and obsession that has engulfed the lives of the fans and filmmakers they interviewed, and it uses this information to make a clever analysis of the arguments that are being used to hold off from releasing the original.

Where Lucas says that it’s his artistic vision, The People points out that a) there were other creators working on the original who had their own creative influence; some won awards for special effects that have since been stripped out; b) “This was done with utter distain for the original release of the films” – that is to say, it has been done badly; and c) while artists have been changing and tweaking their works for centuries, “eventually you have to say the work is finished, and now belongs to the ages”.

Where Lucas says that he has ownership over the trilogy The People points out that when it was included in the National Film Registry it became a piece of cultural heritage. “Once a film is in the National Film Registry it belongs to everyone, it belongs to the American people, because it’s so important, culturally, to the United States”. The original Star Wars trilogy is so big that its ownership is in question, the public has (or should have) the right to access their cultural material. This leads to an excellent argument that while it’s illegal to pirate and release downloads of the original trilogy, it is morally correct to preserve cultural heritage by doing so.

And I like that. This is the part that I find the most interesting in the Star Wars wars. There’s an idea of ownership here that doesn’t quite fit in with our current economic model. The righteous fan-rage that wells up every time a new version is released comes from a sense that the fans love Star Wars in its true form, so they’re the ones with the credentials to protect it. It probably wouldn’t exist if Lucas’s upgrades weren’t clumsy grafts that infected the rest of the body. That Lucas admits he doesn’t like his original films, doesn’t seem to understand what was good about them and keeps on tinkering with them lends credibility to the sense that he doesn’t have the right to make changes. There’s an idea here that love is a currency, and that those who have the most love of something ought to have a say in what happens to it.

The People vs George Lucas is a fan doco directed at George Lucas, so it ends a little apologetically. They end by admitting that it is the genius of Lucas that brought them the thing that they love best, and they adore him for it. But they’ve tolerated so much – they even tolerated The Phantom Menace – and now they’ve reached a point where all they want is for someone to release the original trilogy so they can watch again the films they fell in love with in the first place.

The People vs George Lucas
Released on DVD Wednesday 22 February 2012
Distributor: Hopscotch