Marcia Lucas, the Oscar-winning editor and the individual long credited as one of the secrets behind the success of Star Wars, died on May 27 from cancer, her family announced Friday. She was 80.
“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,” a statement from Lucas’ family read. “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. Her work was known for its emotional intelligence, rhythm, and humanity — a rare ability to find the truth of a scene and bring heart, momentum, and clarity to the screen.”
And while Lucas’ name became synonymous with the film that earned her an Oscar — no doubt, in part, to her relationship with then-husband George Lucas — she was an instrumental filmmaker in the 1970s New Hollywood movement, contributing to works directed by Martin Scorsese and Haskell Wexler.
In memory of Lucas’ legendary — if too brief — career, here’s a look back at the greatest films she helped cut together.
Medium Cool (1969)
Although she studied chemistry in college, Marcia Lucas (née Griffin) started her Hollywood career cataloguing movie memorabilia at a Hollywood museum. She became a film librarian for company called Sandler Films, where she discovered an affinity for editing, eventually securing an apprenticeship with the Motion Picture Editors Guild. It was through her day job at Sandler Films where she met trailblazing film editor Verna Fields, who would become a mentor. Fields hired Marcia as an assistant on Haskell Wexler’s pioneering Medium Cool, starring Robert Forster. The visceral New Hollywood classic, with its blending of newsreel footage and staged, documentary-style fictional sequences, became a sensation, hailed by the likes of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel and selected for the National Film Registry in 2003.
THX 1138 (1971)
Marcia served as assistant editor on George’s first feature, an elaboration of his award-winning student film about a dystopian future starring Robert Duvall and produced by Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope. While the film failed commercially, it did help establish a cinematic sci-fi vernacular that was hugely influential. Still, Marcia was vocal in her dislike of the film, saying George generally dismissed her suggestions and the material “left her cold.” That would quickly change.
American Graffiti (1973)
The antithesis of THX 1138, American Graffiti was a culture-shaking love letter the 1950s that established both George and Marcia as forces to be reckoned with. Universal initially pushed back on George hiring Marcia to edit the film, insisting that Fields do the work. Fields did a rough cut before departing to work on What’s Up, Doc?, leaving Marcia and George to finish. In the end all three were nominated for Best Film Editing, one of five Academy Awards nods for the film, which was enshrined in the National Film Registry in 1995.
Taxi Driver (1976)
Martin Scorsese was so impressed by Marcia’s work on American Graffiti that he hired her to cut his first studio feature, 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More. That experience went well, so Scorsese brought her back for a second collaboration, serving as supervising editor on the towering Taxi Driver, starring Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster. While she didn’t get a nod, the seminal film did rack up four total Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. It was preserved in the National Film Registry in 1994. She would go on and serve as a supervising editor on one more Scorsese film, the 1977 musical New York, New York, starring De Niro and Liza Minnelli.
Star Wars (1977)
With Marcia busy with Taxi Driver, George hired editor John Jympson, a British union member (the film was shooting in the U.K. and required to use a certain percentage of local personnel), to cut the original Star Wars, aka A New Hope. Jympson’s rough cut was a disaster, and George brought Marcia aboard to cut the final “Battle of Yavin” sequence, with Luke Skywalker’s attack on the Death Star. Eventually she left to work on New York, New York, and two other editors, Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew, finished the film. Marcia, along with Hirsch and Chew, won the Oscar for Best Film Editing, one of the space opera’s six Academy Awards. Like Taxi Driver, American Graffiti, and Medium Cool, Star Wars was also selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
But by most accounts, Marcia’s role on Star Wars wasn’t limited to editing. She was a key sounding board for George, helping him make key cuts to his unwieldy original screenplay and insisting on elements that injected humanity and feeling into the story. She insisted to George that the film’s thrilling final sequence needed to resonate: “If the audience doesn’t cheer when Han Solo comes in at the last second in the Millennium Falcon to help Luke when he’s being chased by Darth Vader, the picture doesn’t work.” Biographer Dale Pollock called her George’s “secret weapon.”
Return of the Jedi (1983)
Marcia took a hiatus from work in the early 1980s to raise a family, but that didn’t mean she stopped providing input on her husband’s projects. At her urging, George reworked Raiders of the Lost Ark. Marcia explained that the film had no emotional closure because Marion was missing, leading George to scrap his initial version and add the ending featuring Marion an Indy. Their last credited collaboration came on Return of the Jedi, where she was one of a trio of editors, along with Duwayne Dunham and Sean Barton, focusing on punching up the film’s emotional elements. She and George divorced shortly thereafter. (Jedi would eventually become the fifth film that Marcia worked on to be selected for the National Film Registry.)
Marcia worked sporadically through the later 1980s and into the early 1990s, with her final credit being executive producer on the 1996 AIDS drama No Easy Way.
