The secret weapon of 'Star Wars' was George Lucas's ex-wife Marcia

When cinephiles hear the surname Lucas, the first person who invariably springs to mind is George, the man who created the “Star Wars” franchise, and in the process changed mainstream American cinema forever. But while his movie successes are undeniably impressive, there’s one achievement that was always just beyond him. Despite receiving Best Director and Best Writing nominations for both “American Graffiti” and “Star Wars,” Lucas has never won an Oscar, but another member of his family has.

George’s first wife Marcia picked up the award for Best Editing back in 1978 for her work on “Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope,” alongside Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew.

“I love editing and I’m real gifted at it,” she said in an interview back in 1983. “I have an innate ability to take good material and make it better, or take bad material and make it fair. I’m compulsive about it.”

Born in Modesto, California, on October 4, 1945, Marcia was mostly raised in North Hollywood. After studying chemistry at Los Angeles City College she worked at the Sandler Film Library as a film librarian, where her appreciation for editing first emerged. By 1967, she was at Sandler Films alongside Verna Fields, who would later win an Academy Award herself for "Jaws." This is also where she met her future husband and collaborator George, who at the time was a film school graduate from USC.

After working as Lucas's assistant editor on his debut "THX-1138," a dystopian sci-fi where mankind lives in underground authoritarian cities, Marcia edited his follow-up, "American Graffiti," with Fields in 1973.  It was Marcia’s work on Lucas’ deeply personal coming of age comedy that really established her as one of the best editors in Hollywood. After Fields left to edit Peter Bogdanovich’s "What’s Up, Doc?", George struggled with the film’s complicated structure, and its running time exploded to the gargantuan size of 3 and a half hours.

Marcia helped George move away from rigorously following the film’s main characters Curt, Steve, John, and Toad’s stories in synchronized order. She sliced down various scenes, threw some away entirely, and even combined them when necessary. The result struck a chord with critics and audiences alike, and "American Graffiti" became one of the most profitable films ever made, while earning Marcia her first Academy Award nomination for editing.

Unsurprisingly, Martin Scorsese quickly jumped at the chance to work with Marcia. Between 1974 and 1977 she edited three of his films. The dramatic comedy "Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore," which resulted in Ellen Burstyn winning the Best Actress Oscar, followed by the all round masterpiece that is "Taxi Driver," and then the subversive yet hugely ambitious musical/drama “New York, New York.”

George had initially decided that he should hire someone else to edit "Star Wars" so that his wife could escape his rather large shadow, which had started to obscure her own career. But then George asked her to replace John Jympson in the position, and she turned the film into a much more emotional and exciting adventure.

Marcia’s assistance on the sci-fi epic wasn’t just confined to the editing bay.  As he worked on the script for the film, she was the one who suggested that Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan Kenobi should die at the hands of Darth Vader. Throughout the writing process, Marcia was George’s sounding board, questioning him when certain sections didn’t make sense or sounded too corny, while also giving him the necessary encouragement.

Her crowning moment being when she reassembled the final action sequence in the Death Star trench. Thanks to her ingenious assembly, it managed to build in tension and then deliver a satisfying and rousing conclusion that undoubtedly contributed massively to the film’s popularity.

After the release of "Star Wars"and "New York, New York" in 1977, though, Marcia nearly stopped working as an editor. She did uncredited edits on "More American Graffiti" and "The Empire Strikes Back," and officially edited "Return Of The Jedi" alongside Sean Barton and Duwayne Dunham, while also constantly making suggestions for Lucas’ other projects.

Most notably, after watching an early screening of “Raiders Of The Lost Ark,” Marcia turned to her husband and director Steven Spielberg and told them “there was no emotional resolution” to the ending because Jones's love interest Marion Ravenwood just disappeared. Spielberg instantly agreed, and shot an additional scene in San Francisco that showed Ravenwood waiting for Jones outside a building mocked up to look like it was in Washington, D.C.

But as George’s focus fixated on the ever expanding “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” series, as well as building Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm, and Skywalker Ranch, their marriage started to struggle. By the middle of 1982, Marcia had asked George for a divorce, which was finally announced in June, 1983.

Since then Marcia has basically lived in anonymity and has given no interviews. Her only credit has been as an executive producer on "No Easy Way," a drama about a pianist becoming friends with a panhandler that was forgotten about as soon as it was released in 1996.

Worse than that, though, even her contributions to "Star Wars" have been overlooked.

Those who were involved know how important Marcia was to the process, though. In fact, back in 2013, Mark Hamill told Freak Central that “you can see a huge difference in the films” Lucas has done since he was divorced.

“She was really the warmth and the heart of those films, a good person he could talk to, bounce ideas off of, who would tell him when he was wrong,” said Hamill.

Considering the reaction to the "Star Wars" prequels and George’s distance from the franchise now, it’s not a stretch to say that Marcia was actually the glue that kept the galaxy far, far away together. Or, at the very least, helped repair it when it needed to be fixed.

Gregory Wakeman is a Los Angeles-based freelance culture writer. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Yahoo Movies UK, Metro US, and Four Four Two, among other publications.