Everything Old is New Again

Science-fiction fans, fantasy buffs, geeks and nerds of all description will be pleased to note that, at long last, George Lucas's 1977 epic "Star Wars" is finally coming to DVD.

What's that you say? "Star Wars" is already out on DVD? Has been for quite some time?

Not really. Think again.

What has been released on DVD (in both a widescreen and what is ludicrously called a "fullscreen" edition) is the 1997 reissue of the original "Star Wars" trilogy -- for which Lucas did quite a bit of tampering with the original films, adding special effects and even entire scenes that didn't quite make the cut the first time around.

But now, almost 30 years after the film's original release, LucasFilm is announcing (according to E! Online) that the original 1977 version of "Star Wars," along with the original edits of "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi," will be released on DVD on September 12th.

This is good news for film buffs, and possibly might help to reverse a dangerous trend in Hollywood. For many of the so-called "movie brat" generation, who are seemingly unable to make good new movies, tampering with their old ones has become a way of seeming viable as filmmakers.

A list of the classic films of the 1970s that have been changed from their original release version by the filmmakers for their DVD issue is quite startling: "American Graffiti," "Apocalypse Now," "The Last Picture Show," "The Exorcist"... it would seem that, of that whole generation, just about the only one who has the sense to keep his hands off his old films is Martin Scorsese.

I wrote about this issue almost a decade ago. Back then I wrote:

"Some examples, pretty much at random: Orson Welles’ film of "Othello" was "restored" for a 1992 re-release, during which the dialogue was resynchronized and the film’s original music track taken off the film and re-recorded. The previous reissue of "Gone With the Wind" had its color toned down because the people at Turner responsible for its restoration felt that its original Technicolor was too garish for modern sensibilities -- and people have complained of the current rerelease that the colors bleed all over the place. The latest video release of Sergei Eisenstein’s "Alexander Nevsky" has had its original music track removed and re-recorded in digital stereo. Charles Chaplin’s films "Modern Times" and "Limelight" have had footage that the filmmaker cut reinserted for the laser disc release, and his masterpiece, "City Lights," has had its music track removed for gimmicky presentations with a live orchestra – and there’s even the possibility that Chaplin’s original track will removed completely from all future 35mm prints of the film.

Why is all this happening now? There are a lot of reasons. Partly it’s financial: a "restored" text can be used as an excuse for a theatrical reissue of the film, as with Alfred Hitchcock’s "Vertigo." Sometime it’s considered a matter of keeping up with the times. Why listen to Chaplin’s original analog music track to "City Lights" when you can listen to a nice new digital track? The fact that Chaplin had 46 years, and two major re-releases of his film to update the music track, and never saw fit to do so, doesn’t seem to matter. And sometimes it’s well-intentioned, as with the attempt by Universal Studios to reconstruct Orson Welles’ original version of his 1958 film noir "Touch of Evil." What all these examples have in common is that the original filmmaker is dead, and not able to protest what’s being done to his work."

And of course what's really depressing is when the tampering is done by the original filmmaker himself in a misguided attempt to improve on his former work.

This "editorial hubris," as I called it back in the 90s, has a long history -- the Museum of Modern Art had to literally lock D.W. Griffith out of the projection booth in the 1940s, because if a screening of one of his old silent films didn't go well with a 40s audience, he would storm up into the booth to recut the film. Charlie Chaplin had to put together an entirely new version of his classic 1918 comedy "Shoulder Arms" in the 40s from the outtakes, because the original materials were in such bad shape. As a result, people who watch the DVD of "The Chaplin Revue" today have no idea that what they're watching is not what audiences originally saw in 1918. So far as anyone knows, there is only one print in existence of the original 1918 version of "Shoulder Arms." It's in a Danish archive, and the Chaplin family has turned down requests to have it restored.

So the announcement by LucasFilm may portend the start of a new era, where filmmakers realize that audiences want to see the original versions of classic films, and not the second thoughts of over-the-hill directors decades after the fact. I'm hoping so, anyway.

Tom Moran