Marcia Lucas, the Oscar-winning editor of Star Wars and wife of George Lucas, died at the end of May.
Marcia Lucas, the Oscar-winning editor who first took audiences to a galaxy far, far away with 1977’s “Star Wars,” has died at the age of 80, her family confirmed.
Marcia, part of the editorial team for both “Star Wars” and “Return of the Jedi,” was married to the franchise’s founder George Lucas from 1969 to 1983. She died after a battle with metastatic cancer.
“Marcia will be remembered as a brilliant storyteller, a trailblazer for women in film, a loving mother and grandmother, a generous host and a loyal friend whose humor and sparkle filled every room she entered,” the family said in a statement. “Her influence on film is indelible, but those who knew her best will remember the way she made life feel more vivid, more beautiful, more fun and more full of love.”
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She won an Academy Award for Best Film Editing for her work on the original “Star Wars” movie, an award that came four years after she was nominated for editing George’s previous film, “American Graffiti.” She additionally edited his debut feature, “THX 1138.”
Beyond these collaborations with her then-husband, Marcia worked as an editor with other acclaimed filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. She was credited as sole editor for Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” and served as supervising editor for “Taxi Driver” and “New York, New York.”
Marcia served as part of a three-person crew editing both “Star Wars” and “Return of the Jedi.” On the first film, she worked alongside Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew and was personally responsible for editing the Battle of Yavin — otherwise known as the iconic “trench run” sequence near the end of the film.
I wanted to do this obit because the attack on the Death Star is one off the greatest, best-edited action scenes in all of film history.
The swift inter-cutting between different shots does a great job of ratcheting up the tension. Indeed, the state of the film when Marcia Lucas started working on it included two Luke trench attack runs, the first where he used the targeting computer that was unsuccessful. She had a huge role in salvaging a film that George Lucas thought was a failure upon viewing the first rough cut, helping turn it into a masterpiece.
