The Star Treatment

He looks as if he might die. Gaunt and grim, young George Lucas paces the set of Star Wars, in Pinewood Studios near London. He and everyone else know the movie is hurtling toward chaos. His favorite toys — R2D2 and C-3P0 — keep breaking. The actors are fretting because he won't talk to them. (Carrie Fisher recalls that Lucas "lost his voice at one point. We didn't know that for days.") Industrial Light & Magic, his band of cybergeeks back in Los Angeles, hasn't finished its computer shots — because ILM is still building the computers. The 20th Century Fox board of directors is sending unhelpful memos (e.g., the Wookie should wear pants). The Fox boss, Alan Ladd Jr., has insisted that the last two weeks of principal shooting be done in one manic week. And the frail 32-year-old with a galaxy of ideas in his head seems near implosion. As Mark Hamill recalls, "He really looked like he was ready to burst into tears."

That was 1976, as portrayed in the new documentary Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy. On May 25, 1977, Star Wars opened, and it instantly altered the way Hollywood would do business, tell stories, reinvent reality. Yet at first the moguls didn't understand the revolution Lucas kick-started. "George was enormously farsighted," Gareth Wigan, the Fox executive on the Star Wars set, says in the documentary. "The studio wasn't, because they didn't know the world was changing. George did know the world was changing. I mean, he changed it."

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He keeps making history, and changing it. On Sept. 21, Lucasfilm Ltd. will release the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD — unquestionably the most eagerly anticipated debut in the dominant home-movie format. (Last weekend, more than two weeks before it could be shipped, the box set was No. 1 in Amazon.com DVD sales.) The films — Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi — will look sharper than ever. They will be adorned with many beguiling extras, such as an interactive video game, Battlefront, the making-of documentary and a peek at next year's completion of the saga, Revenge of the Sith — which, whatever you've heard, will be the series' final chapter.

Be warned: this is not your dweeby uncle's or your inner child's Star Wars. Not the trilogy that opened in 1977, 1980 and 1983, but the newer improved special editions of 1997, the ones with some new footage and updated computer effects. Says Jim Ward, president of LucasArts: "Those are the versions of the film [George] had always envisioned. It's really an artist's prerogative."

In the documentary Lucas speaks of perfecting "things that I had to give up on because I just didn't have the time or money or the power." The DVDs have even newer shots that tie elements of Lucas' first trilogy and his more recent one — you may be able to spot a cameo by a current star who was in diapers when Jedi was made — to make the grand story line flow more coherently.

This kind of coherence begets controversy among the caretakers of movie tradition. For them, New is never Improved, and Lucas' decision to release the updated films without the cherished originals is sacrilege. (Steven Spielberg, who updated his E.T. in 2002, issued a DVD with both versions.) "Sure, the effects work isn't up to today's standards, but it's the effects work that we saw," says Harry Knowles, geek in chief of the movie website AintItCoolNews. "It's about the preservation of the original art."