On June 12, a BFI Film on Film Festival audience in London sat down for a familiar favorite, but when the opening crawl announced it was taking them to a “galaxy far, far away,” something different happened. Instead of seeing the title “Episode IV: A New Hope,” the crowd was greeted with simply “Star Wars.”
The rare print was the original 1977 cut of the space opera, and BFI‘s chief executive stressed it was a “miracle” the print was even screenable. On hand for the rare event was Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who made clear to the audience just how rare the viewing experience was — though she felt the need to clarify it was “not an illegal screening.”
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“It’s incredible folklore. Even when I came into the company, there was endless conversation about where everything was, and what was in fact the first print? And it’s quite remarkable, 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. It’s that rare,” Kennedy said to the audience. “There’s so much tinkering that’s gone on over the years, and things that [writer/producer George Lucas] decided, ‘I’m gonna change this, I’m gonna try that.’ And then, everybody kind of lost track of what it was.”
“Star Wars” has been through quite a few incarnations in its various theatrical and home video releases. In addition to the title addendum, special effects were given CG updates, and one particular moment was infamously reedited. Originally, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) shoots the bounty hunter Greedo when he meets with him at the Mos Eisley cantina. In the re-edit, Greedo is shown to get a shot off before Han, making self-defense a clear motivation. The current Disney+ version even shows Greedo getting in the last word before Han offs him.
Lucas has often defended his repeated revisions to the original “Star Wars” trilogy, noting the autonomy of a film‘s creator.
“I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it, but I want it to be the way I want it to be,” he told the Associated Press in 2004. In 2024, he explained to a Cannes audience, “When Michelangelo made the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he looked at it and said: ‘I’m going to redo this part.’” Lucas added that “everybody got really mad” when the original version was released on Laserdisc.
“They said, ‘It looks terrible.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know it did.’ That is what it looked like,” he said.
The BFI Film on Film Festival, which is presenting exclusively film prints of numerous classics, continues through Sunday, June 15, when it will screen, among others, “Westward the Women,” “An American Tail,” “Amadeus,” and the “Twin Peaks” pilot.
