OK besides this below and DEVO coming out of the Kent State massacre, what are other facts you have about the evolution of art / music /etc that wouldn't be obvious if you didn't know but, retroactively, explain and/or illuminate a LOT ?
Reminds me of how almost all the French dadaists and surrealists were WWI veterans of the trenches seriously exploring alternatives to conventional thought and language.
George Lucas REALLY wanted to impress Spielberg, Coppola, et al, but the first time he showed them Star Wars they laughed him out of their little boys’ club. He then gave it to his ex-wife to edit, and she is the only reason it became a hit.
She did not work on the prequels. Take it as you will.
Of course, at the time she wasn’t his *ex* wife. Also she didn’t want to do it initially because she had just finished editing “Taxi Driver” for Scorsese and also suffered a miscarriage. But yes, Marcia Lucas saved Star Wars, and then she got an Oscar for it.
Oh not even financially! He took complete credit for the Star Wars zeitgeist when his version made his contemporaries LAUGH.
I mean, I was shown the opening star destroyer scene as a textbook example of continuity in film class and not one person mentioned that that was HER doing, not George’s.
I mean, she was not the *sole* editor on Star Wars, in fact she left before the editing was finished because Scorcese wanted her back for "New York, New York" and, well, that was a *paid* gig.
She did the opening up until the droids land on Tattooine and she completely recut the Battle of Yavin (which took two months), but Richard Chew & Paul Hirsch finished it, and they shared the Oscar. (Hirsch was later the primary editor of The Empire Strikes Back, and Marcia did Return of the Jedi.)
That really highlights why I hate the Special Editions with the fire of a thousand suns. ALL of the great continuity and flow that his editors established, he just smeared over with his dull-witted add-ons. The whole motion of the films is ruined and I cannot watch them like that.
Could have been worse, at least he didn't add the scenes with Luke and his friends at Tosche Station back in. (They're in the novelization and the comics and... yeah, there's a reason they were cut. The comics flow very differently from the film as they were based on the shooting script.)
It’s not unlike Stan Lee. Both these universes are massively successful because of the contributions of many. Our culture likes to mythologize the single genius creator.
