person: are you ok?
me: yeah i just think marcia lucas, george lucas ex-wife, should be more praised in the star wars fandom cause she literally saved the franchise in the 70′s. marcia was the one who had all the good ideas (like killing obi-wan, the “a kiss for luck” sequence) and was the one who had to edit the entire movie cause the first cut of ANH was an incomprehensible mess. marcia is also responsable for the existence of the battle of yavin aka the sequence where the good guys win over the empire. george lucas where, most of the time, tripping on acid and would’ve end up ruined if not for marcia’s ideas and actions. without marcia lucas, star wars would’ve flopped so hard we’d probably never even been hearing about star wars til these days. she left the sw franchise after her divorce with GL, during the production of ESB (but she kept working od ROTJ). her work provided her with an Oscar of Best Film Editing for ANH. wondering why george lucas never made a good sw movie after she left? (x) (x) (x)I’ve seen this sort of thing thrown around a lot, and it’s correct that Marcia Lucas was an editor in the original films and was a good influence, but most of this post is just not true. At all.
She didn’t choose to kill Obi-Wan; that was George’s idea, way back when he was just drafting the story, after he realized he just didn’t have anything more for the character to do. And she didn’t edit the entire movie. George Lucas was the primary editor on each of his films, actually; he has always said that his true love is film editing and not directing, and he reserved final cut decisions for himself even when he hired other people to direct. Piecing together shots and making them into something exciting is what he really cares about. He personally intervened in the editing of most of the space combat scenes in the original Star Wars after first delegating the task to others because he felt they weren’t doing it right.
Marcia is not “responsible for the existence of the Battle of Yavin” (the first Death Star battle), and that claim is just ludicrous on its face. Film editors don’t handle the story elements because that’s not what the job is.
All the editors who did contribute to A New Hope, including Marcia but also Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew, did great work and deserved their Academy Award. But to use this kind of insane distortion to discredit George does them all a disservice just in order to feed the narrative where George Lucas is a talentless hack who never had any good ideas and ruined Star Wars.
I’ve even read conspiracies that say the reason George re-edited some scenes for the Special Edition is that he resented his ex-wife and wanted to expunge her work from the movie. But the only scene she edited that was ever cut from a final release was the scene with Luke and his childhood friends on Tatooine, which never made it into the theatrical release or any of the subsequent versions.
From what I can gather, George and Marcia and Alec Guinness (y’know, when he was alive) have all claimed credit for having the initial idea of killing off Obi-Wan.
Which just amuses me, really. (It’s like the character thought ‘k I’m gonna die now’ and left the writers to fight it out amongst themselves.)