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Saving Star Wars: The Special Edition Restoration Process and
its Changing Physicality
Many are aware that Star
Wars was restored for its 1997 theatrical re-release, as video
featurettes and television specials from the time often touted that
the original negative was in poor condition and couldn't be shown as
was. Somehow, as if by magic, the film ended up playing in theatres
in January 1997 looking like it had when it was first shown twenty
years earlier, arguably looking better than it had when it was first
shown twenty years earlier. Featurette's talk about "washing the
film" and "digitally re-compositing" the bluescreen elements, but
these blur the line between restoration and enhancement, for the
digital processing and elements added are outside of the
restoration process itself. Fans and even many experts don't
seem to have been able to trace exactly what was enacted to preserve
the film; there are a couple articles and factoids floating around
the internet and in books, but there's never been an exhaustive
synthesis of all of this data, for it lurks in piecemeal form (the
best sources are ILM: Into the Digital Realm, and the
February 1997 issue of American Cinematographer). I am
hoping that this article will amend this, and also inform people on
the history of Star Wars as a physical medium, as the way
in which we view and engage with it.
The restoration of Star
Wars was a complicated and costly endeavor. Firstly, it should
be noted, is the great irony that the restoration of Star
Wars was used only as a means to revise the film, in effect,
not only not restoring it, but making great changes that
had no part in the original. The prevalent motivation for changes as
somehow constituting a rectification of things that were always
"meant to be", that the digital alterations are bringing the film
closer to the way "it was intended to be" and hence constituting a
metaphoric restoration of sorts, further obscures this fact. While
some changes were enacted to re-introduce portions originally (and
intentionally) left out of the film--like the Jabba scene,
which was never intended to feature an alien Jabba anyway--the bulk
of them were enacted for pure revisionism, as Lucas and the effects
wizards admitted at the time (though not so much today). It was
"an experiment in learning new technology," as Lucas said
at the time, [1] research for ILM that Fox
was paying for, and most new shots and altered shots were the
product of ILMers Tom Kennedy and Denis Muren, and art director
TyRuben Ellingson, rather than Lucas. [2]
I will not dwell on this point
other than highlighting the fact that advertised "restorations"
are not always the same as preservations, and while preservation of
the film as it was is ideally and normally the goal of a
restoration, such is not the case for Star Wars, whose
final product is not a "restored version" but an enhanced version
that uses restored elements. Lawrence of Arabia, for
example, is often touted as having been restored in 1991, but in
fact many scenes were not part of any version seen until then--the
difference here is that these scenes were meant to be included
in the original release of Lawrence of Arabia, hence it is
restoring footage originally forced out in addition to repairing the
physical negative to its original state; Star Wars'
released "restoration," on the other hand, does not contain any
items originally cut out or originally intended for inclusion--only
two new bits are from the original shoot: the Jabba scene which has
a central digital special effect never part of the original scene
(and, as far
as I can tell, was never intended to be, despite what Lucas
says), and a short moment between Luke and Biggs (even here there is
a new special effect--a digital foreground character wipes by to
hide a cut to the scene where Luke's non-Darth-Vader father is
discussed). Both of these were excised by Lucas deliberately, as he
had final cut in 1977. There is some debate about whether David Lean
is engaging in revisionism himself, but, even if he is, the scenes
included constitute an acceptable director's cut that would have
been possible when the film was made, rather than Lucas' case, where
he admits he is being fanciful. I will say no more on this other
than motion picture marketing has long used the term restoration as
a conflation for revision, and in the case of Star Wars
there has been more revision than any other
example.
Although this article will explain
about how the Special Edition(s) were created, this is not to be the
focus of the article--instead we will look mainly at the physical,
and non-physical, process by which the original negative of the film
was created and repaired. This is normally the point of a
restoration, and though I just a moment ago spoke of this not being
the case for Star Wars, the other great irony is that it,
at one point, was--before Lucas and ILM could enact the enhancement
and alteration of the original content, the film was restored to its
original state, the original negative meticulously and painstakingly
repaired. This restoration was then used as the basis for digital
additions, in effect making the restoration lost.
Background
The path to the restoration and the
Special Edition begins in 1993. [3] With a
renaissance of Star Wars merchandising and general
interest, Fox and Lucasfilm representatives met to discuss how to
celebrate the 20th anniversary in four years time. [4] An elaborate convention had been had in 1987 to
celebrate the film's first decade, and this was suggested as a
viable option for 1997 as well. Lucas, however, had just adopted his
third child and first son, who was still an infant; as he had yet to
show him the Star Wars movies on video, Lucas felt that a theatrical
re-release would give him, and everyone else, the experience that
the film was meant to be viewed under, on a massive scale outside
the home and with hundreds of other people. [5]
Fox evidently was enthusiastic about the idea, and when Lucas
realised how much work this would entail, he felt that he could deal
with a sore point that had always bothered him about the film: the
Mos Eisley sequence. His main concern was that the spaceport was not
capable of being portrayed of as a bustling hub of activity the way
he wanted, and he had a deleted scene of Jabba the Hutt as
well. [6] The last point was especially
interesting--since Lucas brought the character back in a very
prominent role in Return of the Jedi, his scene in the
original film was relevant again. This might have occurred to him as
far back as that third film--sketches exist showing how an early
version of Jabba could have been matted into the existing footage,
probably with the 1981 re-release in mind (that release also had a
brand new title crawl to further link the films). [7]
"The initial scope of it involved
two dozen shots," ILMer Tom Kennedy says. [8]
Denis Muren at ILM also drew up a list of shots that had always
bothered him, mainly in spaceship motion, which Lucas was open to
using, and Tom Kennedy and others then contributed ideas for new
additions [9] --since Fox was paying for it all,
it was looked at as free R&D for ILM to use for the prequels
Lucas was also planning. [10]
Rick McCallum was serving as
producer for the re-release, which was now becoming more and
more elaborate. It soon became apparent how elaborate it would be.
Existing Interpositive prints (IPs) and Internegatives (INs) were
not ideal to make new prints from for the re-release, since they
were aging and partly damaged from use. It would make sense to go to
the highest quality source as a base anyway--the original negative
(O-neg).
A word about this may be necessary
for the non-technical. The original negative is the master celluloid
from which all other copies are made from. It is made out of the
original pieces of film which went through the camera itself on the
set. This makes it very precious--any damage done to the negative
means that the damage will be permanent and undoable, so it is
handled as little as possible, and under carefully controlled lab
conditions. From this raw footage, a copy is made for the editor to
work with, so that the original camera negatives are not handled.
The editor then makes his edit using this copy (the workprint). When
he or she is done, the workprint is passed on to the lab. The
editor's copy is made out of different shots put together (with
tape, literally), and now this must be replicated precisely using
the high-quality originals. This is accomplished by use of
edge-coding--each frame of film has a code printed on it that the
laboratory can reference. A person called a negative cutter then
takes the original negatives--the original camera negatives--and
carefully cuts portions out that correspond to the cuts on the
workprint; by using the edge-coding, he or she can make sure that
this replica is made of exactly the same shots and frames as the
editor has indicated. These portions of the camera negatives are
then glued together into an edit of the film that matches the
editor's. Any mistake here can be disastrous, as the process of
glueing the pieces of film together destroys the next frame, which
makes it irretrievably lost since these are the originals. When
done, we have what is called the original negative, which is the
original camera pieces conformed to an edit of the
film.
The process of bringing this to
theatres is even more complicated though. In order to avoid handling
the original negative, a copy is made. This is called an
Interpositive (IP), and is the second-highest-quality source of the
film. Copying this will give us another negative image,
however, so it cannot be used to make theatrical prints (the colors
will be reversed). So it is copied, resulting in an Internegative
(IN), which theatrical prints can then be made from (copies of a
copy of a copy of the original negative). Star Wars was a
popular film, and over the years so many theatrical prints were made
that the IPs/INs got worn out, and new ones had to be made. The last
one made was in 1985, intended to be a master copy for home video
releases. [11] Because each copy degrades the
image, when the anniversary re-release came up the original negative
naturally was sought as the highest quality source to make a new
version from.
Lucas had screened some prints in
1994 but none of them were presentable. "By the summer of '94
George said, 'I'm worried about the negative because every print we
get is bad,'" Rick McCallum remembers. "That's when we got really
scared about the presentation of this film." [12]
What they found when they opened up
the cans of film in late 1994 [13] was
horrifying--the original negatives had been severely deteriorated.
Because film is photo-chemical it is prone to aging and the colors
will fade like a newspaper; usually the yellow layer goes first,
resulting in blue-tinted images and purple skin tones. This is what
happened with Star Wars, where much of the film's existing
prints had also faded to red. This aging process is expected,
but the film was less than twenty years old and had looked fine
less than a decade earlier when the last IP was made--the film
should not have been as deteriorated as it was. In some places the
image was so degraded that it was unusable, plus there was the
normal wear from handling damage and shrinking/swelling that occurs
in the celluloid aging process.
Lab technicians began wondering how
it was that the film could have deteriorated so much. Fox stored its
negatives far away from Earthquake-prone L.A., hundreds of feet
underground in Kansas, at optimal temperatures of 50-53 degrees.
[14] As it turns out, the disease was not unique
to Star Wars--films from the same era had the same
affliction. The reason was because of the chemical composition of
the film stock in use at the time. Prior to 1983, all negative film
stocks were what archivists now call "quick fade"; Kodak was among
the worst, and their negatives had to be corrected every five years
to compensate for fading (often the cyan went first), and their
release prints even poorer, beginning to fade to red after only five
or six years. Due to pressure from filmmakers and experts (among
them, Martin Scorsese), companies started developing more stable
stocks in the early 80s, and by 1982 Kodak had developed its
"low-fade" negative and print stocks. As a result, color negative
films from 1952-1982 are in states of serious disrepair. Star
Wars faced additional challenges in that one of its
negative stocks, Color Reversal Intermediate (CRI) 5249, was so
prone to fading that Kodak stopped making it in 1987--but 62 shots
in Star Wars were on the stock, none of them usable. [15] Being an intermediate stock, used for making
dupes directly from the negative, this was probably what many
optical composites were printed on, including the many wipes,
dissolves and transitions; this was not commonly used for feature
films (usually television), and may have been a cost-saving measure.
"If George had wanted to do something even more creative to an
optical shot, like flop it or add an overriding zoom, and there
wasn't a lot of time, they used CRI as an intermediate reversal
stock to alter those few effects shots after the fact," Tom Kennedy
reported. [16]
Ted Gagliano remembers, "When I had
first seen the print at DeLuxe, I was shocked. I was a Marin
[County] high school student when I first saw Star Wars and
it had been so spectacular--it was the reason I ultimately went into
the movie business. But after seeing the dirt and the problem of
fading it didn't have the same feeling. It looked like an old movie.
At the ILM screening I had prepared everybody for what they were
going to see, and afterward Lucas said to me: 'Well, the speech was
worse than the viewing.' I think he was disappointed but slightly
relieved. He could tell it was fixable. The challenge was to
integrate the new [special edition] footage into a good negative."
[17]
Leon Briggs, a former veteran of
Disney Lab who was brought in to restore Star Wars, says
that 10-15% of the original color had faded, [18] but judging by some of the examples shown it was
at least double that in some cases. In addition, the negative was
discovered to have been in a state of disrepair for other
reasons--the popularity of the film meant that the negative was
handled and printed many times over the previous two decades, and it
was marked with dirt and scratches, more than is normal, with some
theatrical prints struck directly from it; with the last wide
theatrical showing in 1981 the negative had been okay back then, but
by the mid-90s the damage that was acceptable in subsequent home
video versions would not hold up when projected on a theatrical
screen. "They made far too many release prints off the original
neg," Kennedy says. "After 20th Century Fox reprinted Star
Wars from the negative, we saw all the various levels of
quality we could get out of the original cut, and we discovered some
interesting and frightening things." [19]
The Restoration Begins
The restoration of Star
Wars began in 1995 and took the combined efforts of three
companies, [20] under the payroll of Twentieth
Century Fox: Pacific Titles, who handled optical printing,
Lucasfilm, who organized the restoration and brought in ILM, and YCM
Labs, who were responsible for color timing (arguably the most
important of the three, since the faded colors were the biggest
concern), as well as the supervision of film restoration consultant
Leon Briggs and Fox's head of post-production Ted Gagliano. To
start, Briggs had the negative cleaned, removing dirt and grime that
had accumulated in its many years of use, by running it through a
104-degree sulfur bath solution and then hand-wiping it [21]. Star Wars' negative
contained four separate types of film stocks [22] (Kodak 5243, an intermediate, probably for
composites, 5247, a fine grain 100 EI tungsten stock that the
live action must have been shot on, and 5253, an intermediate
used as a separation stock that all visual effects elements
were shot on [see note], plus the CRI stock
[23]), however, and two of them could not be subjected to the
solution and needed to be addressed on their own [24]. Each stock had to be washed separately anyway,
unlike conventional restoration where the negative would have been
washed in one piece and then wiped by hand [25],
and so the negative was carefully disassembled.
"That made everybody suck in their
breath," recalls Tom Kennedy, effects producer on the release.
"Thankfully, Robert Hart, the neg cutter on the second and third
films, came in to put the negative back together."
[26] When this process was over, much of
the dirt that had plagued previous releases (which, when projected,
is often mistaken for grain) was gone and a clear image was had.
It would have been far too cost
prohibitive to scan and digitally restore the entire film at that
time, so only the shots that were going to be enhanced with digital
effects ended up in the computer. "After selectively cleansing the
negative they'd remove and send us those piece sections of the
original negative for which we were doing the special edition work,"
reports Tom Kennedy. [27] This was to the
viewer's benefit--though perhaps better than optical compositing,
scanning technology back then was only as advanced as 2K resolution,
not much more than standard HD (which also means all the SE
enhancements are at this res), so it was better that only portions
ended up in this downgrade. "After doing various tests, we found out
right away that nothing beats scanning original negative. Star
Wars was an A-B neg cut, which meant that they could actually
lift and slug original negative and send it back to ILM whenever we
were enhancing a live-action shot. I think this is the first time
someone has tried to bring a Seventies effects film back to the big
screen." [28] For parts of the negative that
were damaged, ILM preferred to use a scan from an IP instead, says
Kennedy in ILM: Into the Digital Realm. [29]
While ILM worked on digital
upgrades, the degrading CRI shots needed to be addressed. Because
some were made from different composites on an optical printer, even
in the best of conditions there would be heavy dupe grain and extra
dirt that was printed on the image itself and couldn't be removed.
One can see this in the scene where Luke activates the lightsaber in
Ben's hovel--the moment the special effect enters the shot, the
level of dirt and grain jumps noticeably (this was also shot on
normal 35mm cameras, rather than the higher quality Vistavision,
because the saber effects were originally to be in-camera). What was
worse was that this didn't just plague special effects shots but
shots with wipes or dissolves, and the generation loss was there
whether they were printed on CRI or regular Kodak Eastman stock. The
solution, then, was to go back to the original pieces and make new
composites. For instance, in a scene with a wipe transition, the
original two shots blended with the wipe were still in storage
somewhere, with the O-neg piece being a second-generation duplicate
of them combined together.
Ironically,
just as ILM was retiring optical printers and moving into the
digital realm, the technology was resurrected again. Pacific Titles
had eleven state of the art, modern optical printers with new
lenses, which, when combined with Kodak's finest film stock, gave "a
boost in resolution and color saturation," according to company
vice-president Phillip Feiner. [30] They
re-composited all wipes and transitions (the "bread and butter"
opticals, as Feiner calls them). These new negatives were then cut
into the O-neg, replacing the originals (which, I must presume, were
put in storage). One caveat of this is that each time the negative
has a new portion of film cut into it, a frame on either side of it
is lost in the process of cementing the new film piece into the
reel; if one compares closely the SE to the previous releases, one
finds that any new shot is missing a few frames at the head and
tail, though the difference is imperceptible when in
motion.
The
visual effects shots were faced with the same problems as the
conventional opticals: a deteriorated film stock (in CRI instances;
in others, milder color fading), and dupe grain and dirt. The shots
also contained matte lines, which were beginning to become a thing
of the past as films began to utilize digital compositing. Footage
from documentaries on the SE reveals that ILM had gone back to the
original special effects elements, which had been meticulously
saved, and then scanned and digitally recomposited them (in
some instances, their placement is slightly different than the
original, even though the principle was to match them as closely as
possible--for instance, the seeker ball in the scene of Luke's
Millennium Falcon training is positioned not quite the same as the
original composite, though the difference is basically imperceptible
while in motion). In American Cinematographer, it is never
stated that this re-compositing process was enacted for every
visual effect, but it seems that at the very least most of them
were. [31] When these were finished, they
were printed back onto film and cut into the O-neg, again replacing
the originals. The O-neg was slowly being subsumed by new
material.
But meanwhile, the rest of the film
needed to be tackled. Most of the negative could be addressed by
simply color-timing the image to get rid of the blue and pink shift
that had occurred, but some parts were in more serious need of
repair. What the policy was here is unclear--were the portions that
were ripped and damaged, or normal live-action printed on CRI (i.e.
if it had been flipped optically), replaced with new negatives
culled from IPs? There have been unofficial sources that have
suggested as much, and this was certainly the case with the ILM
scans, but it's not always clear if the O-neg itself gained new
physical pieces made from second-generation prints.
ILM: Into the Digital
Realm states that the IP was used to restore the
negative, but later it is said that this was done on
occassion by ILM for their work (i.e. re-compositing effects, adding
CG). ILM: Into the Digital Realm does, however, imply
that there was new negative pieces made from the original separation
masters. Separation masters are black and white prints (on
color film, that is) of each color spectrum of the
negative--yellow, cyan and magenta. Each of these color fields are
preserved on special metallic silver compositions, which never fade,
and which, when re-combined, give a perfect re-construction of the
original negative. Ted Gagliano states: "You know the original
negative will fade, so you can turn to the separation masters; it's
the record of what it'll look like and it'll last forever. So the
negative you make off your YCMs should be just as good as the
original negative." [32] The negative was being
cannibalized by other pieces.
Much of the "corrected" version of
the O-neg was accomplished by the work of YCM Labs, who combated the
color fading by re-timing the image to bring back its lustre. "Darth
Vader isn't black anymore," says Pete Comandini, engineer at the
company, "he starts out coming up to a navy blue and then getting
brighter and brighter as the film continues to deteriorate." [33] To guide them in how the film should look, they
used dye-transfer Technicolor prints. Technicolor was still making
dye-transfer prints in the late 70s in the United Kingdom, though
they would soon phase them out. Rather than using chemicals to make
release prints, like Kodak or DeLuxe, which had bad contrast, poor
color reproduction and heavy grain, but are inexpensive and easy to
make, these prints were made of three strips of dyed film, which
gave the prints a vibrant image with a very fine grain structure.
More importantly, because they are not chemical but dye-based, they
never fade. George Lucas loaned YCM Labs his very own personal
Technicolor print, which still looked the same as it had when he put
it in storage some twenty years earlier. "George had a private
[Technicolor] print in the basement of his home," Gagliano notes.
"For the color timing he told us to go for that look: 'That's the
Star Wars I made,' he told us." [34]
(from
Star Wars, The Magic and Mystery--the shots may be slightly
more green-shifted, rather than blue-shifted, due to
capture)
Since much of the restoration was
color-timing accomplished by YCM Labs, this begs the
conclusion--since the negs themselves can't be physically altered,
the restoration's final product must have been a new IP with correct
coloring. Whenever films are color-timed, it is the Interpositives
from which theatrical prints work from--original negatives do not
contain any color-timing information, so whenever a release goes
back to the original negatives, all the color-timing is lost and the
film must be re-timed from scratch all over again. It is doubtful
that an entirely new negative was struck from the corrected IP for
Star Wars, which might explain why Lucas enacted a second
color-timing effort in 2004 when he returned to the original
negatives.
Had the film remained like this, we
would have a restored version of Star Wars, perfectly
matching the original release but with pristine quality, even to the
point where it was better than what could have been possible back
then (as with the higher quality optical transitions). However, this
was only part of the process of making what was eventually called
"The Special Edition." ILM was working on many dozens of new shots,
and an even larger amount of enhanced shots, using digital effects
to re-do, expand, re-edit and otherwise alter many scenes in
the film. When these were completed, they apparently
were printed onto film and re-cut into the negative, replacing
the original negs, which were undoubtedly put back into
storage. As a result, the negative for Star Wars is
filled with CGI-laden modern alterations. When Lucas says that the
original version physically does not exist, this is what he really
means--the negative is conformed to the Special Edition. Of course,
it would be very easy to simply put the original pieces back and
conform it to the original version, or use the separation masters
and IPs, or simply scan the old pieces for a digital
restoration, but I digress.
The Special Edition of Star
Wars was frequently reported in the media as costing as much as
$20 million to enhance and restore, though some sources claimed as
low as $10 million. [35] In any case, the
film's restoration and enhancement cost more than the original
production itself--all of it being paid for by Twentieth Century
Fox. At the time, spending upwards of $20 million on a decades-old
film that, back then, was only to be a limited release, was a very
big gamble. Many speculated that they did so in order to win
Lucas' favor and get a chance at distributing the Star
Wars prequels that went to camera a few months later. As
the Special Edition drew greater and greater interest, it
was decided to do a full-scale release, rather than a limited one.
On January 31st, 1997, the Special Edition of Star Wars
opened in theatres. The film became the biggest January opener in
history, and earned $138 million, making the twenty-year-old film
one of the top money makers of that year. It was released on VHS and
Laserdisk in August--unfortunately, in the telecine the film
received a pink tint, making the color referencing and restoration
that YCM Labs did lost (you can tell this pink tint is from the
telecine and not the negatives because it's on the CG shots as
well). It was released again in 2000--this time removing the titling
of "Special Edition." Because this was supposed to supplant the
original, all prints in circulation of the original were recalled
(studios control all rented prints--none are sold privately, though
a black market exists), and possibly destroyed (studio print masters
are, of course, kept). Today, Fox/Lucasfilm--Lucasfilm gained the
rights in 1998 or 1999--only loans out prints of the Special Edition
(no theatrical prints were ever made of the 2004
SE).
Further Changes
and into the Digital Realm
The changing state of Star
Wars didn't end there, of course. In 2004, a second round of
alterations was released for the DVD debut of the trilogy. The
process of creating this was markedly different from the Special
Edition of 1997, however. Perhaps reflecting the computer advances
that had been made since, this version was created entirely in the
digital realm.
The film needed to be digitized to
release it on DVD in the first place, and when Lucas decided to make
further changes to the film, the highest quality source was sought
for scanning--the negatives. This would create a new master digital
negative that would serve as a base for Lucas' definitive version of
the film. There are a number of caveats that resulted from this,
however.
One was that the negative was
scanned only in HD resolution of 1080p, in 10-bit
RGB. [36] This was a state worse than the
primitive 2K scans ILM had done for the SE. By contrast, when
Blade Runner was restored and enhanced in 2007, the
live-action was scanned at 4K, the normal standard, and the visual
effect shots at 8K. Godfather's 2008 restoration was
scanned at 4K for the entire film, while Wizard of Oz's
2009 release was done at 8K. Why Lucas chose to source his master
from a paltry 1080 HD scan is hard to fathom, especially when 4K was
long in place as the standard, with 6K and 8K looming on the horizon
as a viable replacement since data storage was becoming cheaper. One
reason may be because Lucas was shooting the two
prequels--Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the
Sith--on the Sony CineAlta, which itself was 1080 (being the
first generation of HD feature-film cameras). This is another
undoable element of the prequels--filmed on 1080p HD, they have, at
the most, less than half the resolution of the 35mm original
trilogy, with some arguing that 35mm resolves 5000 lines, meaning
they have just under 1/5 the resolution (Phantom
Menace was shot in 35mm, but then scanned in 2K--which is still
an improvement over the following two films). With the new 2004 SE
existing partly to link the six films, this was indeed the case as
the original trilogy was lowered in resolution to that of the first
three episodes. Ironically, as Lucas moved into more "high tech"
digital arenas, the quality of the image slowly declined, going
from a 35mm original, to a partly-2K 1997 SE and then a fully-1080p
2004 SE. According to Videography, the negs were scanned on
a Cintel C-Reality telecine, at 1920x1080 resolution, in 4:4:4 RGB,
recorded to Sony SR tape. [37]
The second caveat that resulted
from scanning the O-neg is one that was irrespective of the output
resolution, and this was that they were once again working from a
copy of the film without color-correction, since the meticulous work
YCM Labs did existed only on the SE's Interpositive (again, the
O-neg can't have its physical image corrected, it has to be produced
on a copy). Perhaps because of the fact that Lucas had lost all of
his color-work, he embarked on a new principle--instead of
faithfully reproducing the look of the original release and
photography, as had been the case on the previous re-release, it
could be digitally manipulated to have a slicker look that matched
the high-saturation, high-contrast look of the three
prequels.
The 2004 SE (it has never been
marketed as a Special Edition, though there really is no other label
to describe it) had its color correction guided and supervised by
George Lucas himself. [38] Screening the film at
Skywalker Ranch, Lucas went through the film with members from ILM,
who would be color-timing the digitized film themselves at
Lucas' approval. [39]
This is one of the most
controversial aspects of the release. While the revised film
obviously is meant to have a deliberate look, what was released is a
sloppy mess, in technical terms; blacks are crushed, colors bleed
and pop distractingly, video noise is visible because of the
oversaturation, skin tones are inconsistent and often very pink,
scenes have weird casts to them (i.e. the Millennium Falcon scenes
look very green), everything is much too dull and dim, contrast is
not nominal, and many of the lightsaber effects are the wrong color
(pink for Vader, green for Luke). The coloring is not even
consistent with the prequels in some instances, whereas the
originals were--for instance, the original blockade runner scene was
meant to be Kubrick-esque bright white, while on the 2004
release it is a dull blue, yet strangely in Revenge of the
Sith it is the bright white it is supposed to be. Lowry is
often mistakenly pointed at as the culprits of these highly
noticeable flaws, but in fact it is Lucas himself. The final DVD
product has been screened for Lucas multiple times since, such as at
Celebration III.
Videography magazine
describes the re-coloring of the original film as done by
postproduction engineer Rick Dean [40];
Empire and Jedi were done by ILM, but Star
Wars' troublesome negative needed a professional hand. He did
the work at Burbank's IVC, which, as it happened, was located
downstairs from John Lowry's offices. Dean used IVC's da Vinci color
corrector in 4:4:4 mode, with a CRT monitor that accepted 4:4:4.
[41] One of the bigger issues was smoothing out
the film densities, an issue Lowry would struggle with as well. "The
sands of Tatooine showed multiple colors in the same shot, really
just due to film handling and aging," Dean says. "On any
particular shot in the film, you can color correct one frame, and
two frames up, the sand's a different color. We counted on Lowry's
unique technology to even out those types of fluctuations and then
go back and do a final color tweak." [42] Videography writes: "The film was provided to
Dean on SR tape one reel at a time. Dean's corrected versions would
be sent back to ILM in Northern California, where Lucas himself
would view the footage on a DLP cinema projector, sometimes offering
comments for further color adjustments." [43]
From here, John Lowry and his company stepped in.
"We'd done a lot of work on the films prior to going to John," says
Lucasfilm's VP Jim Ward, "re-mastering them in high-def,
down-converting them into standard def, and re-color timing them. We
actually took a cleaning pass through Industrial Light and Magic, as
well, but then ultimately took them down to John to make them
pristine." [44]
"We sent one of our 6-terabyte servers up to
Skywalker Ranch in San Rafael, California, where they loaded it with full RGB [red,
green, and blue] data without having to go through the component
output that tape masters would
demand," John Lowry said. "We processed those images, cleaned
them up, and sent them back in little packages of discs. The net
result was that we never lost a bit in the process of moving all the
data back and forth." [45]
Photo-chemical restoration, as the 1997 release
mainly was, had become a thing of the past by 2004, and digital
technology offered a treasure trove of tools to offer repairs never
before available, such as digitally painting out scratches and dirt.
Lowry Digital Images, headed by founder John Lowry, had become one
of the leading companies specializing in digitally cleaning film,
using a unique computer program that was able to mathematically
paint out dirt. Its early efforts were controversial--the first
release was the 2001 DVD of Citizen Kane, and it looked as
clear as a mirror. Which was not the way it should have looked.
Grain is a part of the film image--it literally is the
image, just as pixels are what a digital image is composed of--and
is part of any film's aesthetic; the computer algorithm could not
distinguish between dirt and dupe grain, and the actual emulsion
grain, and as a result the final product looked like it was shot on
video.
Lowry refined its technology in the years since
then, having shown improvement in their handling of Lucasfilm DVD
releases of THX-1138 (another Lucas special edition) and
the Indiana Jones trilogy, both released in 2003, and when they were
hired to do the Star Wars trilogy in early 2004 [46] they were confident they could deliver.
Lucas might not have minded if they weren't--he was looking to go
beyond simply getting the film back to its prestine state. This is
evident in the hiring of Lowry in the first place--the negative had
been thoroughly cleaned in 1995 by professional film
restorationists. Though one can still see plenty of emulsion grain
on the 2004 release if you look closely, the image is indeed
much cleaner than it should be, and Lucas had them artificially
sharpen both the entire image and select portions (i.e. composites
where certain elements might have been photographed soft--such as a
long shot of C-3P0 and R2-D2 walking on Tatooine in Return of
the Jedi) [47]. Digital technology also
allowed Lowry to paint out by hand many instances of film damage
that it wasn't possible to address in the photo-chemical days of the
first Special Edition.
Lowry spent a hasty three months working on the
entire trilogy. The Star Wars.com website reported: "At the Lowry
Digital Images facility, over 600 Macintosh dual-processor G5
computers utilizing over 2400 gigabytes of RAM and 478 terabytes
(over 478 million megabytes) of hard drive space processed each of
the classic Star Wars films for over 30 break-neck days to
create the stunning new versions fans will see in the Star
Wars Trilogy DVD set." [48] Star
Wars, in particular, was problematic and required some
specially modified software to handle the dirt issue. "We had to do
some special work on these, actually build some different algorithms
to try to deal with the incredible dirt levels and scratches," John
Lowry stated. "It was somewhat overwhelming." [49]
Lowry reports that they discovered thousands of
grains of sand embedded in the image in the Tunisian scenes,
which initially gave their computer algorithms
trouble. Though as a camera assistant I have a hard time
believing that sand could have gotten lodged in the microscopic
spaces between the film layers considering the rigorously clean
conditions camera assistants subject film to while loading and
changing; probably, these are dust blowing in the photographed
atmosphere or perhaps even trapped in the body of the camera. In an
interview with Sound and Vision, Lowry says: "In the first
movie, you have C-3P0 and R2-D2 walking across the desert, and I
think half of that desert sand ended up in the camera. It was
unbelievable. One technique we use is where you look at the frame
before and the frame after to determine what is dirt on the frame in
between. When you have as much dirt as this, though, the before and
after frames have the same damn dirt--and more. It's really hard for
the program to separate what's dirt and what's image. It led to a
lot of extra work--run it again, check it again, multiple passes, a
lot of hand work at the end." [50] Most surface dirt would have been washed away in
the 104-degree sulphur bath the negative was wrung through in 1995,
but still, the frequent handling of the film left enough dirt,
dust and damage that couldn't be washed out that John
Lowry called it the worst example of dirt in a film that he had
seen.
In other shots, scratches had resulted in a
wet-gate transfer done, where the film is printed in a special fluid
that fills in fine scratches, but sometimes can lead to extra dirt
accumulating and softening the image. At the same time, however,
Lowry sharpened the entire film slightly beyond what had been
originally photographed. "We cleaned it up, matched scene to scene,
sharpened it end-to-end, reduced the granularity and got rid of the
flicker and all the wear-and-tear things," Lowry says. [51]
They further cleaned up the opticals, which had
already been improved for the 1997 release. "Opticals are a little
soft, and much grainier, because there are two more generations on
film, and there's a little more contrast," says Lowry. "We try to
match those scenes perfectly so they don't telegraph that
something's going to happen, a light saber sequence, for example, by
showing a change in picture quality. We removed that extra grain,
reduced the contrast, and got the sharpness to match the prior and
following scenes." [52]
The final result is strikingly different from the
original photography: a totally new color palette, less grain, and a
subtly oversharpened image. It is sometimes thought that the Lowry
Digital Images restoration has resulted in a better picture than
even the original photography had, and while this is true it is not
quite as drastic as some may think in most respects.
Star Wars is thought to be natively grainy, but in fact it
was photographed very cleanly on a fine-grain stock, and most
of the "grain" seen throughout its life is either dupe grain or dirt
that is foreign to the original negatives; to be sure though, a lot
of the original grain was scrubbed off, either deliberately or
mistakenly. This photograph is very telling: while it also reveals
damage and scratching, plus some shimmering and flickering effects
that are the result of photochemical aging, this shot (which has
been color-corrected, it should be noted) still displays much
more of a grain "look" than the generally clean Lowry
result.
Lowry claims that these desert scenes had
thousands of dirt instances in each frame, but it is difficult to
distinguish which is grain and which is dirt. A high quality scan
would have probably aided making this distinction more accurate, if
indeed it needed to be made moreso. An article from Studio
Daily had this to say:
"The Lowry Digital way of
restoration isn't without its controversy, and both Lowry and
[company president] Inchalik acknowledge the rumblings. The
crystal-clear imagery turns classic Hollywood films into a brand-new
viewing experience. Where's the thin line, for instance, between
correcting for the grain introduced by multiple generations of film
prints and the excision of so much grain that the image resembles
video?
But Inchalik's response makes the Lowry
Digital Image position clear. "Is all grain sacred?" he asks. "I
appreciate grain, but sometimes it's a limitation. If I'm handed
something three generations old, it's silly to preserve that level
of grain. We should get back to the quality analogous to the show
print seen by the director and cinematographer." But, he notes, the
decision to restore the Lowry Digital way is made by clients. Lowry
Digital Image is betting that those images will open up a new market
for them in DIs. "The images people will see will, pleasantly, cause
waves," predicts Lowry." [53]
On the other hand, Director of Photography
Gilbert Taylor photographed Star Wars to be gauzy and
slightly soft-filtered--this was at the request of Lucas. In
certain shots in Tunisia, Lucas insisted on using filters, even
pantyhose over the lens, to get an intentionally soft image; Taylor
disagreed with this approach, feeling the desert already gave a soft
look, but did it anyways. [54] The sharpening to
Star Wars that Lucas in 2004 insisted on, especially in the
desert scenes, often betrays this deliberate look, especially ironic
since it was Lucas who initially insisted on it in 1976. John Lowry
said in an interview with Sound and Vision: "On each of
these movies, George would look at a scene and ask us to sharpen
something a little--almost scene by scene. We can do that
beautifully without putting edges on things. It's very different
working with the director who created the movie you're restoring. It
gives us a whole new sense of the creative objectives and exactly
what path to take--how much sharpness, how much grain to leave. All
decided by George." [55]
Another flaw that has been speculated to be the
result of the Lowry process is the disappearance of the star
fields--if one looks at the space star fields, most of them have
either been re-done or have had many of the stars erased. This could
be a result of the crushed blacks on the color-timing, or because
the Lowry software couldn't distinguished between stars and dirt and
erased them, resulting in ILM having to create new ones. This could
have also been enacted for purely aesthetic reasons, but this seems
very unnecessary.
Sound and Vision also questioned John
Lowry about the unusual low-resolution of the release, a decision
made by Lucasfilm and not his company, but he rather dodged the
issue by alleging that the opticals were at less than 4K due to
generational loss, but surmised that Lucas might re-do the entire
process for an HD release. As it turns out, he hasn't, as the film
has been shown many times on HD broadcasts using the HD master,
although a re-do for Blu-Ray seems possible but unlikely. The
exchange:
"Sound and Vision: So the Star
Wars films were processed at high-def, but not at the 4K level
--four times high-def resolution--that you've been using for some
other films?
John Lowry: At
high-def, yes.
SV:Why was that?
JL:The challenge
with these films is the amount of special effects in them. Our
concern was whether the effects were done to true 4K standards.
Whenever anyone lit up a lightsaber, it was done with an optical
effect, and all of the opticals at the time were done on film--there
were no digital effects. So every time you go to a lightsaber scene,
bang, you drop two generations of film. It gets grainier and, as
it's going through an optical printer, you have different
characteristics in terms of contrast. And those are things we have
to match up with the scenes immediately before and after. It took a
lot of effort to match precisely the granularity, the contrast, and
the sharpness. They flow very nicely now and, frankly, in the
original movies, there was a distinct change. We were able to
eliminate that change, and to me that's a very strong contribution
to the storytelling process--removing something that prevents an
audience from being drawn in.
SV:But the high-def digital material was
fine for the standard-resolution DVD release?
JL: Yes. My guess,
knowing George, is that maybe he'll be back when they do the
HD-DVD." [56]
One unusual feature of this is the mention of
lightsaber opticals losing generation quality--but these shouldn't
be optical composites. In creating the 2004 DI, Lucasfilm
re-rotoscoped all the lightsabers digitally from the looks of
things, which would mean they went back to the raw negatives and not
the final composites. Perhaps the negative in these scenes was
simply dirtier because it had been run through the optical printer
and picked up more wear. Videography says that they weren't
actually using the O-neg but rather the 1997 Special Edition
negative (the IN, I must presume?) because that was the only one
that had the new visual effects work--but the O-neg would have had
the new CG shots cut in, and why would they need to color correct it
so heavily if it was the YCM Labs-corrected IN? Every other sources,
including stills from their workings, and articles published by
Lucasfilm (starwars.com) indicate that it was the O-neg, and
not the the SE IN.
Perhaps what was meant was that they were working
from the SE-conformed O-neg, which is indeed the case. In further
discussion of negatives and composites, it is notable that Lowry's
talk about extra dirt on composites probably refers mainly to
Empire and Jedi. According to American
Cinematographer, ILM did their work on Star Wars 's
Jabba scene using the interpositive (since the O-neg was lost when a
16mm dupe was made for the 1983 documentary From Star Wars to
Jedi), and they learned to digitally reduce the extra grain so
successfully that they found it was easier to do all the CG
enhancements in the sequels from IPs (except when scenes were
digitally composited--in Empire, the entire walker sequence
was re-composited, as was at least portions of the asteroid chase
judging by footage from SE documentaries).
Videography reports that "Finished footage
was shipped to Lucas for review on the 250GB hard drives from
Lowry's network," [57] just as John Lowry
earlier noted ("disk packs"=hard drives). When the
Lucas-approved newly refurbished film and its two sequels were
released in September of 2004, they were met with enthusiastic sales
and praise for Lowry, but also criticism for being further altered
and for the harsh coloring and visual glitches.
Back to the
Future
So, then, is this the final state of Star
Wars? Judging by the trajectory of technology, it seems
inevitable that Star Wars will end up as virtual negative.
The question is: will there be further editions, and will Lucasfilm
ever go back to the source--to the negatives? The answer to the
first question is perhaps, if only to correct the errors of the 2004
edition--not just to picture, but to sound (swapped audio channels),
and visual effects (colorless explosions, dull lightsaber
cores)--and because it seems inevitable that Lucas will continue to
enact minor tweaks (for instance, Episode I has been given a digital
Yoda, still unreleased officially though seen on the Episode III
DVD). Possibly these may be made for the Blu-Ray release, or the
in-progress 3-D release, or possibly not. The second question is a
harder one to answer. Lucas seems perfectly fine with the current
version, seeing as he's re-released it on video twice, broadcast it
all over TV and in HD, and theatrically shown it at numerous
screenings. He also approved of the final product himself, of
course.
However, even clues in the current master
indicate Lucas used poor judgment in 2004 and may re-tweak the
image. The blockade runner's cool blue tone stands in stark contrast
to Revenge of the Sith, released a year later, which
reverts back to the original white tone, indicating a nullification
of the 2004 decision. And while Lowry acknowledges that the
2004 master was acceptable only as a standard-def project, Lucas has
indicated that that master is to be the "for all time" version. [58] He even stated, when asked why he didn't spend
money to refurbish the original, that millions of dollars had been
spent to make the Special Edition, and that his work restoring the
films was basically done. [59] It would not
be surprising if any further tweaks, or the Blu Ray release, used
the HD master of the 2004 release as a base. ILM's 2004 visual
effects work on the film--such as new shots at the end of Return
of the Jedi and a brand new version of Star Wars'
Jabba scene--were done using the HD scan, so if the 2004 master is
thrown out, so would all the revision work that went with it, which
means we may be stuck with it. That Lucas shot his last two prequels
in the same resolution indicates he is more than comfortable with a
1080p master of his films.
However, it is also incredibly hard to imagine
that Star Wars will never be restored to its original
version. Perhaps it will take Lucas' passing to see this enacted--or
perhaps not, given that he allowed the original versions to be
released on DVD in 2006, even if they were just Laserdisk ports. In
any case, I would be willing to bet a good amount of money that in
some years in the future efforts were made to somehow save the
original version of Star Wars--from Lucas himself, it may
seem, as his Special Edition would have to be somehow worked around
in gathering original elements. The negative could be re-conformed
to its original configuration, using the original, saved pieces, but
this is problematic due to handling issues (and losing more frames).
When Robert Harris restored Godfather last year, he had to
do it entirely digitally, saying that if any pin-registered
mechanism were to touch the negative it would crumble. [60] In Star Wars' case, using scans of
the separation masters is perfectly viable, and though IPs and
Technicolor prints are not ideal for masters they could be usable if
cleaned up digitally. Perhaps the easiest option would be to simply
follow the 1997 restoration pattern but in the digital
realm: scan the negative in 8K, then scan the stored pre-SE
shots or re-comp them, and fill in any damaged areas with IPs or
separation masters, reconstructing the original cut, then digitally
remove dirt and damage, and finally use a Technicolor print as a
color reference for the Digital Intermediate created. Such a product
would be theatrically viable, as pristine as when it had been
shot, and 100% faithful in image and color to the original
release.
The pricetag of doing a project like this would
likely be under a million dollars. Jim Ward claims that Lucasfilm
sold $100 million in DVDs in a single day when the refurbished
Star Wars films came out in 2004, [61] and
while this figure might not be replicated (though in my opinion it
probably would, if given a comparable marketing campaign) clearly
there would be worthwhile profit. One day, I predict this process
will happen, but that day does not seem to be anywhere in the near
future. It will remain to be seen if the
negative to Star Wars is in a salvageable state by the time
this happens or if it has become a brittle relic, faded to black and
white. It wouldn't be the first time the negative of a famous film
has been lost--Criterion's restoration of Seven Samurai,
for instance, does not work from a negative, nor did the gorgeous
35mm print of Rashomon that toured theatres this year. With
fine-grain masters, IPs, and Separation masters available, the
negative need not be the only source for a new
master.
Backlash has, of course, occurred because of all
this drama. The last dedicated release of the original version was a
Laserdisk and VHS in 1995 (using the 1985 IP, which was then
mastered in THX, according to Into the Digital Realm--the
in-progress restoration couldn't be used for this release because it
was still in-progress). By 2006, originaltrilogy.com had petitioned
over 70,000 signatures to get the original versions released, and
while the Laserdisk-port release of that year was at least admission
of defeat of Lucas' crusade to erase the originals from existence,
it also frustrated fans and experts alike, especially since the
release wasn't even anamorphic (as the Laserdisk wasn't). When a
letter-writing campaign reached Lucasfilm they responded by saying
that the Laserdisk was the best source for the originals [62] --which it would be without having to spend
money, that is. Robert Harris, the man who had hand-restored
Vertigo and Lawrence of Arabia, and later The
Godfather, went on record saying he knew there were
pristine 35mm elements available for use, and offered his
services to restore the film [63].
Lucasfilm did not respond. The efforts of fans and professionals
like these will probably result in the aforementioned restoration at
some point, if only for the callousness of making money, but it
seems that day is not today.
The story of Star Wars' negative is both
the story of advancing technology and the story of Lucas' ego.
Showing how fragile negative film can be, how all sorts of
old-fashioned tricks and the most advanced of analog technology was
used to photo-chemically restore the elements, which were then
embellished by select digital pieces in the infant
technology, like some kind of emerging cyborg; by 2004, the
film had been entirely consumed by digital technology, existing only
as a digital negative. At the same time, a crusade of revisionism
took over, moving from a project to preserve Star Wars so
that future generations could see it, to an enhanced anniversary
celebration for the fans that Lucas could use as an excuse to play
with emerging digital technology, to finally a consummation of his
prequel storyline and a nail in the coffin for the original version
that so many had loved and that had given him his empire in the
first place, while the quality of the negative itself seemed
perpetually sliding downward in resolution.
Note: in the July 1977 issue of American
Cinematographer: "It was decided to use black and white
three-color separations for all primary images in the composites.
The emulsion of 5235 color separation stock has a wide contrast
latitude and grain definition which is superior to 5243 color
interpositive: it is the best choice for quality." So the raw
elements were shot on 5235; although apparently used as a separation
shot, Kodak lists it as an intermediate. This statement may also
suggest that 5243 was then what the composite of the 5235 elements
were printed on.
[1] Hearn, Marcus. The Cinema of George Lucas. 2005.
p.183
[2] Vaz, Mark Cotta and Duigan, Patricia Rose.
Industrial Light and Magic: Into the Digital Realm. 1997.
p.291
[3] Vaz, p.290
[4] Interview by Mr. Showbiz, 2000,
http://mrshowbiz.go.com/interviews/299_2.html
[5] Oprah, February 1997
[6] Vaz, pp.290-1
[7] see the note on:
http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/jabba.html
[8] Magid, Ron. "An Expanded Universe," American
Cinematographer, February 1997.
[9] Vaz, p.291
[10] Magid, Ron. "An Expanded Universe," American
Cinematographer, February 1997.
[11] Vaz, p.288
[12] Vaz, p.288
[13] Vaz, p.287
[14] Vaz, p.287
[15] Vaz, p.288
[16] Magid, Ron. "Saving the Star Wars Sequels,"
American Cinematographer, February
1997.
[17] Vaz, p.288
[18] Vaz, p.287
[19] Magid, Ron. "Saving the Star Wars Sequels,"
American Cinematographer, February
1997.
[20] Vaz, pp.287-8
[21] Vaz, p.288; Magid, Ron. "Saving the Star Wars
Sequels," American Cinematographer, February
1997.
[22] Vaz, p.288
[23] Magid, Ron. "Saving the Star Wars Sequels,"
American Cinematographer, February
1997.
[24] Vaz, p.288
[25] Magid, Ron. "Saving the Star Wars Sequels,"
American Cinematographer, February
1997.
[26] Magid, Ron. "Saving the Star Wars Sequels,"
American Cinematographer, February
1997.
[27] Vaz, p.288
[28] Magid, Ron. "Saving the Star Wars Sequels,"
American Cinematographer, February
1997.
[29] Vaz, p.289
[30] Vaz, p.289
[31] Magid, Ron. "Saving the Star Wars Sequels,"
American Cinematographer, February
1997.
[32] Vaz, p. 289-90
[33] Star Wars, The Magic and Mystery,
1997
[34] Vaz, p.290
[35] for instance, American Cinematographer, in its
February 1997 issue, reports that the trilogy's restoration costs
$10 million. Whether this is for all three films, for just the
salvaging of the negative, for just the enhancements, or for any
combination or variant of the above is not
clear.
[36]
http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/feature/20040916/index.html
[37] Hurwitz, Matt. "Restoring Star Wars,"
Videography, Vol. 29, No.9, 2004.
[38]
http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/feature/20040916/index.html
[39]
http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/feature/20040916/index.html
[40] Hurwitz, Matt. "Restoring Star Wars,"
Videography, Vol. 29, No.9, 2004.
[41] Hurwitz, Matt. "Restoring Star Wars,"
Videography, Vol. 29, No.9, 2004.
[42] Hurwitz, Matt. "Restoring Star Wars,"
Videography, Vol. 29, No.9, 2004.
[43] Hurwitz, Matt. "Restoring Star Wars,"
Videography, Vol. 29, No.9, 2004.
[44]
http://www.apple.com/ca/pro/film/lowry/starwars/index.html
[45]
http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/features/671/restorer-of-the-star-wars-trilogy-and-thx-1138-john-lowry.html
[46] Hurwitz, Matt. "Restoring Star Wars,"
Videography, Vol. 29, No.9, 2004.
[47]
http://www.apple.com/ca/pro/film/lowry/starwars/index2.html
[48]
http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/feature/20040916/index.html
[49]
http://www.apple.com/ca/pro/film/lowry/starwars/index2.html
[50]
http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/features/671/restorer-of-the-star-wars-trilogy-and-thx-1138-john-lowry.html
[51]
http://www.apple.com/ca/pro/film/lowry/starwars/index2.html
[52]
http://www.apple.com/ca/pro/film/lowry/starwars/index2.html
[53]
http://www.studiodaily.com/filmandvideo/tools/otherways/4755.html
[54] Williams, David E. "High Key Highlights: Gilbert
Taylor BSC," American Cinematographer, February
2006.
[55]
http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/features/671/restorer-of-the-star-wars-trilogy-and-thx-1138-john-lowry-page2.html
[56]
http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/features/671/restorer-of-the-star-wars-trilogy-and-thx-1138-john-lowry.html
[57] Hurwitz, Matt. "Restoring Star Wars,"
Videography, Vol. 29, No.9, 2004 .
[58] see his statements to the Associated Press in
September 2004:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6011380/
[59] see above.
[60] Argy, Stephanie, "Post Focus: Paramount Restores
The Godfather", American Cinematographer, May
2008
[61]
http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/news/2004/09/news20040922.html
[62]
http://www.originaltrilogy.com/Lucasfilm_PR_response.cfm
[63] see http://digitalbits.com/#mytwocents/ for
May 19,
2006.
11/03/09
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