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Remake

Your Own

Dissatisfied with the director’s cut? Direct it yourself! By Richard Kadrey

Hollywood Movie

Really, it’s all George Lucas’ fault. By 1999, when The Phantom Menace was released, two generations had grown up regarding Star Wars with a kind of religious awe. A lot of these hardcore fans were disappointed with The Phantom Menace, and by the time Revenge of the Sith was released as the last film of the new trilogy, they felt betrayed. This wasn’t the first time fans had felt ripped off by a movie series, but this time, they had the tools to do something about it.

With video editing programs illegally copied or purchased from a software store, they dropped Lucas’ shabby effort onto their hard drives and went to work.

The technical part of editing wasn’t difficult. Once the film was on their disks, they could even use something as basic as iMovie to slice and dice the film into individual scenes, leave some on the cutting room floor, rearrange others, and then put them back together.

BANISHING MR. BINKS

The first fan-edited movie to make a splash was known as The Phantom Edit, a shorter, punchier version of the original film. It exploded across the geek movie world via bootlegs and later Bit Torrent — a savagely efficient global distribution system.

In The Phantom Edit, long stretches of Lucas’ talky political scenes were eliminated. The most radical change, however, was that the almost universally loathed Jar Jar Binks suffered a digital

Illustration by Tim Lillis

74 Make: Volume 12