The Star Wars cut George Lucas didn't want you to see – and the battle to bring it back

Telegraph

14-04-2025

December 1978 might not quite qualify as a long time ago, either in a galaxy far, far away or this one. But for Star Wars fans, it certainly feels like it. Hard as it is to believe, that was the last point at which it was possible to watch the original version of George Lucas's science-fiction fantasy blockbuster in a British cinema.
From 1981, when it first resurfaced after its initial release, Star Wars had been gently revamped, with neatened-up special effects and an updated opening sequence, in which the film was subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope. (Before the sequels started to appear, it was just titled Star Wars.)
Then, ever since 1997, by studio decree, the only permitted cut has been the Special Edition, with its slew of additional scenes, dramatic adjustments, modified backdrops and computerised visual effects. Or at least one of the Special Editions: Lucas himself created a further three variations, each one featuring altered sound effects and new digitally inserted odds and ends.
Yet to widespread astonishment this week, Star Wars on the big screen, as it was meant to be seen all that time ago, is finally about to strike back. Because the British Film Institute's Film on Film Festival in June will open with a screening of one of the few remaining Technicolor prints that was produced for Star Wars' initial British run.
This, explains the BFI National Archive's Senior Curator of Fiction and Programme Director of the festival James Bell, with a grin, is 'a bit of a coup'. Yes, because it is the first time a cinema audience anywhere on earth will have seen the original version of Star Wars – legally, anyway – for decades. But also because the print itself is an especially good one.
It was struck at the Technicolor lab in London, and manufactured with a certain process known as dye-transfer imbibition which results in extraordinarily vivid colours that don't fade or alter with time.
'The vast majority of release prints of Star Wars in circulation will have faded, even when properly looked after,' Bell explains. 'But on this one, because of where it was made, that hasn't happened.' Settling down for a preparatory private viewing a few weeks ago and seeing the Empire's laser blasts in bright red rather than faded magentas was, he says, 'really exciting.'
For the last four decades, the print has sat at a temperature of -5 degrees in the BFI's Master Film Store near Gaydon in Warwickshire. But following negotiations with both Disney and Lucasfilm, it has been allowed out for public exhibition, just twice, back to back, on the festival's opening night.
The BFI has diplomatically declined to discuss the ins and outs of this process, or even how long it took, except to assure the Telegraph – in the wake of no little social media conspiracy-theorising – that it was all above board.
'Permission from Lucasfilm and Disney was required in order for us to screen the original cut at the BFI Film on Film Festival,' a spokeswoman says. 'We have a long-standing partnership with Lucasfilm and Disney and this permission was sought and obtained.'
But the reappearance of this version of the film – in the BFI's hallowed Screen One, of all places – represents an entirely unexpected shift in both Disney and Lucas's previously ingrained attitudes towards it. Which to the chagrin of purists has essentially been: tough luck, it's gone for good.
Since the Special Editions' mid-1990s release, when Lucas was gearing up to work on his divisive prequel trilogy, the film-maker has repeatedly insisted that these tinkered-with takes are the real Star Wars.
'The other one will be some sort of interesting artefact that people will look at and say, 'There was an earlier draft of this,'' he said in 1997. 'What ends up being important in my mind is what the DVD version is going to look like, because that's what everybody is going to remember.'
By 2004, his stance had seemingly hardened. 'To me, it doesn't really exist anymore,' he told the Associated Press about his original take, while shooting down speculation that it might ever be shown publicly again. (Its last appearance on a home entertainment format came two years later, when grubby versions of the original films were included as DVD extras on the 2006 Special Edition boxed set.)
And at his masterclass seminar at last year's Cannes Film Festival, it seemed clear that things weren't going to shift. 'I think a film belongs to its creator,' he told the audience. 'When Michelangelo made the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he looked at it and said: 'I'm going to redo this part.''
This all struck a very different note to the one sounded in a 1988 Congress hearing on cultural heritage protection law by none other than a young George Lucas – who told politicians that 'people who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians'.
'In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be 'replaced' by new altered negatives,' he went on. 'This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.'
What prompted the change of heart? In the absence of a more compelling explanation, it's often been suggested – albeit without evidence – that Lucas's 1983 divorce settlement with his former wife (and editor) Marcia must have granted her a share of all future profits from the original Star Wars trilogy. An embittered ex, the theory ran, could circumvent this by essentially withdrawing those films from circulation, and issuing new pieces of freshly copyrighted work in their stead.
Yet if anyone's reaction to the switch resembled that of a spurned lover, it was the fandom itself. This was largely because many of the adjustments seemed to create more problems than they solved.
The reinsertion of a deleted scene featuring Jabba the Hutt was rendered in CG that dated so badly it had to be entirely overhauled in 2004: it also denied viewers the excitement of wondering exactly who this formidable Jabba character was for two films, only to learn in the third he was a sumo-sized slug.
But one notorious change, in particular, came to stand as an emblem of everything viewers disliked about the Special Editions. It was giving the Ewoks creepy CGI eyelids. Not really: as anyone who's dipped a toe in the internet since 1997 will know, it was Lucas's decision to have the bounty hunter Greedo fire a shot at Harrison Ford's Han Solo across a cantina table, at point-blank range – and somehow miss – immediately before Solo shoots him dead.
What was the problem? There were arguably three. It made the rakish smuggler's own killshot merely retaliatory, edging Han out of the moral grey area that should be his natural habitat. It was supremely neurologically improbable, since Han's shot is loosed off all of two frames – 1/12 of a second – after Greedo's. And worst of all, it was simply less cool.
Lucas was well aware of the controversy, and often insisted he was merely cleaning up some muddled staging, and had never intended Han to be a killer. But his own Star Wars screenplay – in which Ford's character does indeed shoot his rival first – appears to disagree.
Anyway, having been grilled about it relentlessly over the years, Lucas seemed to become just as irritated by the whole thing as everyone else. That would certainly explain his last, bizarre tweak to the scene for Star Wars's 2019 Disney+ release, which has Greedo inexplicably whoop the unsubtitled alien word 'maclunkey' in his final moments.
Many other amendments were relatively gentle, and largely served to bring the first films into line with later entries in the series. There was the addition of Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin Skywalker in the prequel trilogy, in Force Ghost form at the end of Return of the Jedi, for instance – or the similar switch in The Empire Strikes Back, in which Ian McDiarmid's Emperor Palpatine was slotted into a holo-pad scene in place of the creepy chimera the 1981 audience had seen, which comprised the face of an unknown actress (either Marjorie Eaton or Elaine Baker) under heavy prosthetics with the eyes of a chimpanzee superimposed over her own.
But even so, the film still wasn't Star Wars as 1977 audiences had seen it, so in 2010, a small band of fans – a rebel alliance, if you like – took matters into their own hands. Led by a Czech English teacher called Petr Harmáček, a group of largely self-taught tech-savvy amateurs began painstakingly restoring the original cuts of all three films, using footage from various sources, cleaning up the colours and animated special effects frame by frame.
After thousands of man-hours, a restored version of the first film had been completed within a year; multiple revisions and fine-tunings of all three original trilogy entries have since followed. Harmáček, known online as Harmy, quit teaching four years after that and became a full-time VFX artist, working on blockbusters such as Wonder Woman and Blade Runner 2049.
His so-called 'Despecialised Editions' look ravishing – ahem, so I hear – but their legal status is obviously contentious. Though Disney and Lucasfilm have never taken any action against Harmáček, exhibitors have apparently not been so lucky. Unconfirmed stories circulate of independent cinemas who tried to legally obtain the rights to screen a 1977 Star Wars print, only for Disney to catch wind and demand they show the latest Blu-ray version instead, on pain of future sanctions.
While many hardcore traditionalists have likely already sought out and enjoyed the Harmy restorations at home, watching the genuine article from a genuine print is another order of authentic. And as such, the BFI knows that demand for tickets will be high.
'We probably could have sold out the whole festival with screenings of Star Wars,' sighs Bell, who points out that for those who don't manage to snag a ticket, other blockbusters are available, including Amadeus and Empire of the Sun on 70mm and 2001: A Space Odyssey on 70mm Imax.
There are, however, no further screenings planned – for now. 'After opening night, it's going straight back to the Master Film Store and those sub-zero conditions,' Bell says. Meanwhile, fans around the world will be wondering if Disney and Lucasfilm's previously permafrost-hard line might finally be starting to thaw.