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by pjc50 2434 days ago
The chief editor of the first films was Lucas's first wife, who had a considerable contribution to their success and won a BAFTA for the editing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcia_Lucas
2 comments

How Star Wars Was Saved In The Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFMyMxMYDNk

A good video. I believe the content is largely pulled from a book on the topic, but this is definitely a case where video helps, and if you haven't read or even heard of the book (like me), it's new stuff, not just a rehashing of the same old Star Wars stuff, and interesting from a film school point of view, not just a Star Wars point of view.

I'll also just echo the grandparent post and say that you can see this pattern in a lot of artists: Heinlein, probably JK Rowling (her later books definitely were getting flabby and she's had no comparable success since the original series), all kinds. Hollywood has an interesting pattern where a director makes a huge hit, and they kind of have a defined structure for letting them make a "passion project" before putting them back under some editorial control. The passion projects usually do fairly poorly. I'm not sure what happens if one of them becomes a big hit. That would be interesting to see.

She also contributed a lot to refining some of the characters. For the prequels, Lucas could really have used someone like that.