Since 1977, the Star Wars films have been at the forefront of special effects technology and what can be achieved with movie magic. According to a recent interview with Collider, special effects artist Dennis Muren revealed that some audiences who went to see The Empire Strikes Back on opening day wouldn’t have seen the completed film, with rushed special effects holding the place of complete sequences.
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When asked about deadline difficulties in his career, Muren explained, “Well you know we were worried about Empire because we had just moved up to Northern California and hired a lot of local people up here, and had to train them to be able to do the effects.”
He added, “I think there’s about maybe fifteen or twenty 70mm prints that went out that have about thirty temporary shots on them that are not finals. So we actually didn’t make it for the 70mm release, but then probably about a day later we got all those shots in, and all the rest of the prints were fine.”
As far as which specific shots fans wouldn’t have seen the finished version of, Muren points out, “It was a lot of them, I think some of it was in the Cloud City sequence maybe, and some of it might have been in a walker battle, the AT-ATs.”
The idea of going to see a movie in theaters without finished effects seems shocking in today’s world of visual effects, but with how advanced the effects in the Star Wars films were, it sounds like the errors weren’t noticeable.
“They saw shots, but they weren’t up to the quality that we wanted, not that anybody could tell the difference,” Muren confesses. “We were told that, ‘Oh don’t worry about these, when we do the neck of the real ones the next day, and you get your shots in, we’re going to pull all those prints back, and we’ll replace them with all your perfect shots and everything.’ I don’t know if they ever did that, so they may still be out there.”
The next installment in the franchise, The Last Jedi, will hit theaters on December 15, so long as all the visual effects are completed.
