system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Just how was the original Star Wars "saved in editing?"

I've seen this statement made a few times, but never seen it elaborated. Can anyone do so here?
gpt
The original Star Wars was plagued with problems during production and pretty much everyone involved thought it wasn't going to do well. George Lucas was so confident it would do poorly he even famously offered a portion of all of Star Wars' proceeds to Stephen Spielberg if his film beat Poltergeist at the box office. To this day he still writes checks to Spielberg.

The reason for all the doom and gloom was that the first cut of the movie really did suck. The editors and the rest of the post production crew did a very good job of cutting and arranging the footage to add a level of excitement, fun, and generally good film making that wasn't there in the first cut.