BFI shows rare IB Technicolor print of original Star Wars

[Benjamin Ruder]

I'm 48 and wondering if I've ever seen a technicolor print projected, even though film on film was very much a part of my movie watching experience growing up.

You could travel to Chicago and be guaranteed of it at.... Technicolor Weekend 2025

[Mark Ogden]

Interesting line-up. Mary Poppins in Technicolor, wow, that must reach an acid-trip level experience.

There is still a holy-grail Technicolor screening that will probably never happen again, and that is Porgy & Bess, the musical from 1959. This was a 70mm shoot where 35mm IB prints were made. But both the producer and the film's writer/composer were so unhappy with the picture that some time after the original release, they made an effort to have all copies destroyed. But three 35mm IB prints are still around, one in Finland, one in the Library of Congress, and another in the hands of a private collector in Southern California. This last print was shown in NYC at the Ziegfeld many years ago, and it wasn't in good shape.The thing is, the 70mm negative still exists and is said to be in printable condition, but nobody wants to make the effort.

[Jim Cassedy]

Over the weekend, I was invited to a private screening of an IB-Tech print of "The
French Connection"- projected with carbon arcs and a meticulously restored late
1950's vacuum tube sound system. Unfortunately, I got the invitation too late for
me to attend. Last year I did see an original IB-Tech print of "Bonnie & Clyde"
there, and I've loaned them one of my films once.

> I have an appointment I need to get to, and am running up against the clock,but
if someone here has time, maybe you can find and post this story which appeared
in The Hollywood Reporter over the weekend. The headline was:
'Star Wars' "Looks Terrible" In Screening Of Long Lost Original 1977 Version"

[Ryan Gallagher]

Here is a link to that article, it does not appear to be pay-walled:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/mo...ew-1236291808/

I have fondness for the near original on VHS myself, from childhood, but I'd probably experience much of what the article commenters did too. The headline is a bit misleading, it's not that the screening or print looked terrible, it's that the film was so vastly different from the new ones everyone suddenly realized what the starting point was for this classic that has been constantly "improved" over the years.

[Leo Enticknap]

Also, back then, films were cheap to buy, imagine picking up an excellent condition IB print of Shane for $300.

There are likely a lot fewer prints like that in existence now than there were "back in the day," both because acetate decomposition will have taken their toll on them, and, I'm sorry if this comes across as morbid, the collections of private collectors are often at grave risk when that individual passes, if he or she has not made careful plans in advance. When I worked in archiving I would frequently be approached by relatives of someone recently departed, offering us the "boxes and boxes of old movie films" that they had no idea what to do with, because the person who died was the only film enthusiast in the family. Often I was in the position of having to reply that 200 16mm prints of railroad maintenance training films from the 1950s through '70s (for example) did not fall within our collecting remit. In that situation I would either have to spend hours trying to find another institution that might be interested in them, or live with the fact that those films would end up in a dumpster. I spent those hours whenever it was possible, but sometimes it wasn't.

These stories occasionally have a happy ending, though: a few years back, the collection of someone who was likely the world's leading expert on 9.5mm was acquired by an archive on the other side of the Atlantic after he passed. I suspect that he had the foresight to set this all up while he was still with us: all kudos to him if so.

As for the "looks terrible" response to the Star Wars show, I'm not surprised. When digital restoration first emerged around the turn of the millennium, it was widely speculated by archivists that the aesthetic look of original release prints in projection would eventually be perceived as defects by mainstream audiences. Even analog restoration techniques caused that, to a more limited extent. Seeing that misregistered Jungle Book reel when I was an archiving student was very much a wake up call. Another one was working at the Egyptian, just after the booth had been retrofitted to enable nitrate projection, and we played a weekend of nitrate prints. Most of them were pretty bad. We showed what was claimed to be Selznick's personal print of the 1935 The Man Who Knew Too Much, which he apparently had shipped over from the UK in order to decide whether or not to hire Hitchcock. It looked like about a 10th generation dupe to me: thin, blurry, no detail at all in the midtones, underexposed VD track so noisy as hell, etc. etc. Then there was an original release print of Laura, which was so badly scratched as to be barely watchable (a pity, because photographically, it was crisp and beautiful). There was a blizzard going on for around 30 seconds either side of each changeover. After that came Black Narcissus, which I suspect was a mix 'n match print, because some of the reels were not bad, but others were misregistered almost into North of Watford territory. Only Casablanca was a real treat: sadly, I was told a few years later that two of the reels have now decomposed as to become not safely projectable anymore.

While all of these prints gave us an insight into what original audiences might have seen, only Casablanca even came close to showing us what the filmmakers likely wanted them to see. With Star Wars, the situation is further complicated by the fact that the filmmaker is still around, and actively trying to remove evidence of the original presentations from public accessibility.

[Steve Guttag]

Like so many things in life, I tend to look at things in the context that they existed. When I saw the 1977 IB print I was around, it looked like what I saw in 1977. I don't judge it based on what aesthetics may be present today or any point in time. I enjoy things in their time and context. In 1976, Logan's Run is what Sci-Fi was. In 1977, the world changed. What Sci-Fi looked like, how films were made and an enthusiasm for going to a cinema changed. It cannot be overstated how monumental a moment Star Wars was. For that reason alone, the original version(s) (there were different mixes...mono, Dolby Stereo, 70mm) should be preserved and studied for what they meant in their point in history.

Now, personally, I MUCH prefer practical effects, with all of their flaws, over CGI with all of their sanitation. Yeah, you can see the "garbage mattes" on Star Wars. So? It was of its time and there is no shame or need for apology for that. It still changed the world.

I dare say that anyone that watches an original 1977 version of the movie and comes away thinking "It's not as good as you remember" is someone that :

1. Doesn't "get it."
2. Wants to elevate their perceived importance by critiquing a classic (everyone's a critic).
3. Wants to find flaws (they're in every movie) and in doing so is blinded to how many successes exist in the movie...from effects, to music and to just the fun nature of the movie.

I think everyone should have the opportunity to see/experience the original form of Star Wars, if they want to. If possible, from a 1977 print (obviosley, those opportunities are now rare with few prints in existence but fortunately some are IB prints). If you like the Special Editions better, that's fine too. Those just aren't the versions that changed the world and captured the imaginations of a generation of filmmakers.

BTW...my position on original theatrical releases of all titles is that those should be the reference. All subsequent re-imaginings of the titles are fine for co-existing but they don't replace what people saw and experienced on the original release.

[Bobby Henderson]

Disney is currently leaving a lot of money on the table by not doing some sort of re-release of the un-altered Star Wars movies from 1977, 1980 and 1983. But the profit potential for such a "de-specialized" re-release is going to be there for only so long. People in the Gen-X and Baby Boom generations would have the most emotional attachment to those versions and they're not going to live forever. People in those generations were around to see those films when they first played in theaters. They also lived through watching the original cuts of those movies on VHS and Laserdisc.

Plenty of Millennials and Gen-Z viewers have liked Star Wars but they've grown up in times where the special edition versions of the Star Wars Trilogy were the norm. The original versions of those movies won't mean as much to them.

It will be almost a criminal act for Disney to allow the 50th anniversary of the Star Wars release to pass without any attempts to re-release the original version.

I've grown to where I just can't stand the inserted "special edition" segments. I skip past the formerly deleted scene with Han Solo and Jabba the Hut in the first movie because that scene is pretty terrible. There are other inserted/altered scenes I find intolerable.

If they do a re-release I won't mind it if garbage mattes on optical visual shots are still plainly visible. They were visible way back then.

[Leo Enticknap]

What flips the archiving ethics of this one on its head is that it is the complete opposite of the traditional narrative as to how a movie is changed after its original release. The typical story is "philistine producer or studio cuts and changes auteur's masterpiece against his wishes in an act of cultural vandalism" - think Greed, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Big Sleep, The Wicker Man, etc. etc. etc. In these cases and many others, the first version to emerge from post production is the one that the filmmaker wants to survive. With Star Wars, however, the exact opposite is true: hence Lucas asserting that "I’m sorry you saw a half-completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be," in the "looks terrible" article linked above. An archivist or movie historian would likely argue that the "half completed" version had a big cultural impact when the public saw it, and should therefore be preserved and accessible in that form. But the filmmaker basically wants to be able to rewrite history.

[Steve Guttag]

I've found that is a very rare when I'm able ot see deleted scenes where I didn't agree with the cuts. Part of the movie making process, and I'd say probably the most vital one, is in the editing room. As to George's vision...it is well documented that his stories change throughout the years if one looks at his interviews.

I don't doubt that someone like George would have wanted/imagined more for Star Wars when it was released but was fortunate to get what he got, given the ambition and the state of Sci-Fi at the time of Star Wars' release.

Again, I'm okay with the SE versions existing or a director going back on a successful film and saying "this is how I really wanted it to be." However, the initial release, that remains the reference. You don't get to go back in time and re-write it.

I'd say a harder entity would be Stanley Kubrick...who was known to still be editing even after a movie's premier. Which version is the defacto reference? The premier cut or the general release cut? I would say the release cut though a premier cut should also be available as it was screened to "the public."

[Bobby Henderson]

I can think of numerous examples of movies where the previously deleted scenes in "special edition" releases weren't really a good thing. The scenes were left on the cutting room floor because they either didn't work or they messed with the film's pacing, or both. Sometimes scenes get deleted because they introduce problems with continuity or even the chronology of the story.

Home video versions of movies on DVD and Blu-ray have often given viewers a choice of which cut they want to watch. There are 5 different versions of Bladerunner in that great BD box set. The 30th anniversary Blu-ray of Close Encounters of the Third Kind has three cuts of the movie. I didn't really care for the "inside the mothership" scenes they added in 1980.

The original cut of Robocop got hit with an X-rating due to graphic violence in a few scenes. They had to trim and trim again repeatedly to get the film down to an R-rating. The funny thing is the pacing actually works better in the original theatrical cut. The restored scenes, as gory as they are, actually slow things down (as well as draw attention to themselves).

[Leo Enticknap]

The history of this phenomenon goes right back to when the formal academic study of film in universities started to become a thing in the late 1950s to early 1960s. One of the earliest and most influential "film theory" ideas to come out of this period was the so called "politique des auteurs," which emerged from the French New Wave. Cutting through the jargon and put as simply as I can manage it, this idea holds that a film in which the artistic vision of its director is its strongest characteristic is artistically superior to one for which that argument can't (credibly) be made. In other words, artistry is better than industry when it comes to movie making. Early "auteurist" writers were especially interested in Hollywood production line films from the height of the studio system, in which they believed that they could see aspect's of a director's personal vision show through even when they were working well down the chain of command and/or constrained to one or two genres: John Ford's westerns, Howard Hawks's noirs, etc. etc. But the ultimate goal of these film profs was to promote a non-Hollywood model of filmmaking in which the director was the equivalent of a painter, novelist, composer, etc., and everyone else who worked on the movie is basically just hired help.

Fast forward to the '70s and '80s, when a new generation of Hollywood directors have been to film school and been taught this stuff. These people weren't Jean-Luc Godard, who made his movies with government grants handed out by civil servants who didn't care if they made any money or not. If Godard's latest artistic masterpiece was only ever seen by a handful of absinthe-sipping hippies sitting on a wooden bench in a college lecture theater and on 16mm, that was OK. But in commercial cinema, you still had to put bums on seats, and so Scorsese, Lucas, Polanski, Spielberg, and all the other movie brats couldn't do totally what the heck they liked, even if their professors had taught them that this was what they should aspire to. The producers who wrote the checks still had the power of final cut, and used it to maximize the audience appeal and earning power of the film as released.

Fast forward another generation, when home viewing technologies (VHS, digital discs, and eventually streaming) created a lucrative new market for old films. How do you persuade consumers to pay for the same movie over and over again? Enter the "director's cut," "special edition" and all the other labels that are used in the repackaging and remarketing process. The most ironic aspect of this entire racket is that an idea (the moral supremacy of the author/artist) that was originally dreamed up by a bunch of commies as a protest against what they perceived to be the destructive capitalism of classical Hollywood was, three generations later, taken off the shelf and dusted down by those same Hollywood capitalists in order to squeeze new revenue out of old assets. Go figure...

[Bobby Henderson]

The most ironic aspect of this entire racket is that an idea (the moral supremacy of the author/artist) that was originally dreamed up by a bunch of commies as a protest against what they perceived to be the destructive capitalism of classical Hollywood was, three generations later, taken off the shelf and dusted down by those same Hollywood capitalists in order to squeeze new revenue out of old assets. Go figure...

And now Hollywood has basically wrecked that retail model of being able to sell a movie again and again. The combination of a very brief theatrical release window and quick migration to platforms like Disney+, HBO Max, etc. has turned movies into disposable items. New movies can still be purchased on DVD or Blu-ray, but they're often bare bones items. Major studios no longer put in big efforts with retail movie disc releases like they did before streaming became popular.

It's easy for me to remember movies released decades ago. They spent a significant amount of time in theaters, initially in first run and then in 2nd run/bargain showings. The movie would spend a few months migrating to overseas markets. Then a second ad campaign would launch for the home video version. Brick and mortar stores that sold or rented movies were common and those businesses would give movies lots of on-the-shelf marketing visibility. Prior to the home video rental boom in the 1980's it was common for hit movies to be re-released again and again.

A new movie released today can go from its theatrical debut to the streaming platforms in just a few weeks and then be completely forgotten less than a few months later.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

In keeping with forum policy to post articles for when the link inevitably breaks: (From the original The Hollywood Reporter article

‘Star Wars’ “Looks Terrible” in Screening of Long Lost Original 1977 Version


The years have not been kind to the oft-romanticized original print of the sci-fi classic, which lacks all of George Lucas' post-release tweaks and polishes and looks "like a completely different film."

June 16, 2025 9:54am




Carrie Fisher in 1977's 'Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope' Courtesy Everett Collection

A long-lost original print of 1977’s Star Wars was recovered from an archive and screened for a group of cinema aficionados and die-hard fans.

An audience was finally permitted to watch the first released version of the film — nearly perfectly preserved and unfaded — that creator George Lucas famously suppressed from being publicly shown on a big screen for 47 years. The British Film Institute event was introduced by Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy, who joked that the screening was “not illegal.”

“What you’re going to see is in fact the first print, and I’m not even sure there’s another one quite like it,” Kennedy said. “It’s that rare.”




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And the result?

An attending film critic from The Telegraph who attended the screening last week admitted the unaltered original “looks terrible” by modern standards.

While fans understandably tend to focus on Lucas’ most intrusive creative moves (adding the jarring CG version of Jabba the Hutt, having Greedo shoot first, stuffing distracting CG creatures and droids into Mos Eisley), the amount of subsequent polish and tweaks over the years is so extensive that many aspects of the original look just as noticeably fake as the egregious CG.

“I felt like I was watching a completely different film,” wrote Robbie Collin, who called the print a “joyously craggy, grubby, stolidly carpentered spectacle” that “looks more like fancy dress than grand sci-fi epic.” “Every scene had the visceral sense of watching actual people photographed doing actual things with sets and props that had been physically sawn and glued into place. The slapstick between C-3PO and R2-D2 looked clunkier, and therefore funnier; the Death Star panels were less like supercomputers than wooden boards with lights stuck on, and so better attuned to the frequency of make-believe. It felt less like watching a blockbuster in the modern sense than the greatest game of dressing up in the desert anyone ever played.”



A vlogger for Cinema Savvy, George Aldridge, who says he’s seen A New Hope at least 100 times said the screening was “incredibly special,” but likewise made him realize “there are so many great changes to the Star Wars films; it’s the ones we dislike that have always overshadowed them.” He, too, noted the print was so radically different that “it felt like watching the film for the first time.”

“From day one, George Lucas has been making changes to these films,” he said. “It hasn’t just been here’s one big scene change there. It’s been the little nuance. It’s been the sound effects, it’s been the smallest details — which you do not notice until now you don’t see it.”

Aldridge noted differences “like R2-D2 isn’t hiding behind rocks when the Tusken Raiders come for them … there are so many little things that I noticed the cantina … there’s been cleaning up of James Earl Jones’ voice [as Darth Vader]…”

So, ironically, a version of Star Wars that Lucas for so long didn’t want to shown seems to give viewers more respect for Lucas — due to gaining some appreciation for his extensive and controversial tinkering.

Both reviewers noted, however, that the theater burst into applause when Han Solo (Harrison Ford) shot first during the Greedo confrontation. Enthused Aldridge: “Han Solo was so much cooler.”

Lucas’ tweaks to the print began with the very first theatrical rerelease of Star Wars in 1981. Until now, the studio has only permitted the screening of various Special Editions. BFI negotiated with Disney and Lucasfilm for the rights for a back-to-back screening on the festival’s opening night. This particular BFI print was stored for four decades at a temperature of 23 degrees Fahrenheit to preserve its quality.



Lucas, over the years, has been rather firm about not screening the original and, when asked in 2004 by the Associated Press why he doesn’t simply release the original version along with the Special Editions, rather grumpily shot back, “The Special Edition, that’s the one I wanted out there. The other movie, it’s on VHS, if anybody wants it. I’m not going to spend the — we’re talking millions of dollars here — the money and the time to refurbish that, because to me, it doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw a half-completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be. I’m the one who has to take responsibility for it. I’m the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they’re going to throw rocks at me, they’re going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.”