George Walton Lucas Jr.[1] (born May 14, 1944) is an American filmmaker and philanthropist. He created the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and founded Lucasfilm, LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic and THX. He served as chairman of Lucasfilm before selling it to The Walt Disney Company in 2012.[2] Nominated for four Academy Awards, he is one of history's most financially successful filmmakers: he directed or conceived ten of the 100 highest-grossing movies at the North American box office, adjusted for ticket-price inflation.[3] He is considered to be one of the most significant figures of the 20th-century New Hollywood movement, and a pioneer of the modern blockbuster. Despite this, he has remained an independent filmmaker away from Hollywood for most of his career.[4]
George Lucas
Lucas at the 2009 Venice Film Festival
Born
George Walton Lucas Jr.
May 14, 1944 (age 80)
Modesto, California, U.S.
Alma mater
Modesto Junior College
University of Southern California (BFA)
Occupations
Film directorproducerscreenwriterentrepreneur
Years active
1965–present
Works
Full list
Spouses
Marcia Griffin
(m. 1969; div. 1983)
Mellody Hobson (m. 2013)
Children
4, including Amanda and Katie
After graduating from the University of Southern California in 1967, Lucas moved to San Francisco and co-founded American Zoetrope with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. He wrote and directed THX 1138 (1971), based on his student short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which was a critical success but a financial failure. His next work as a writer-director was American Graffiti (1973), inspired by his youth in early 1960s Modesto, California, and produced through the newly founded Lucasfilm. The film was critically and commercially successful and received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture. Lucas's next film, the epic space opera Star Wars (1977), later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, had a troubled production but was a surprise hit, becoming the highest-grossing film at the time, winning six Academy Awards and sparking a cultural phenomenon. Lucas produced and co-wrote the sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). With director Steven Spielberg, he created, produced, and co-wrote Indiana Jones films Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Temple of Doom (1984), The Last Crusade (1989) and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), and served as an executive producer, with a cursory involvement in pre and post-production, on The Dial of Destiny (2023).[5] Lucas is also known for his collaboration with composer John Williams, who was recommended to him by Spielberg, and with whom he has worked for all the films in both of these franchises. He also produced and wrote a variety of films and television series through Lucasfilm between the 1970s and the 2010s.
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In 1997, Lucas re-released the original Star Wars trilogy as part of a Special Edition featuring several modifications; home media versions with further changes were released in 2004 and 2011. He returned to directing with a Star Wars prequel trilogy comprising The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005). He last collaborated on the CGI-animated movie and television series of the same name, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008–2014, 2020), the war film Red Tails (2012) and the CGI film Strange Magic (2015).
In addition to his career as a filmmaker, Lucas has founded and supported multiple philanthropic organizations and campaigns dedicated to education and the arts, including the George Lucas Educational Foundation, which has been noted as a key supporter in the creation of the federal E-Rate program to provide broadband funding to schools and libraries, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a forthcoming art museum in Los Angeles developed with his wife, Mellody Hobson.
Early life
Lucas was born and raised in Modesto, California,[6] the son of Dorothy Ellinore Lucas (née Bomberger) and George Walton Lucas Sr., and is of German, Swiss-German, English, Scottish, and distant Dutch and French descent.[7] His family attended Disneyland during its opening week in July 1955, and Lucas would remain enthusiastic about the park.[8] He was interested in comics and science fiction, including television programs such as the Flash Gordon serials.[9] Long before Lucas began making films, he yearned to be a racecar driver, and he spent most of his high school years racing on the underground circuit at fairgrounds and hanging out at garages. On June 12, 1962, a few days before his high school graduation, Lucas was driving his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina when another driver broadsided him,[a] flipping his car several times before it crashed into a tree; Lucas's seatbelt had snapped, ejecting him and thereby saving his life.[10] However, his lungs were bruised from severe hemorrhaging and he required emergency medical treatment.[10] This incident caused him to lose interest in racing as a career, but also inspired him to pursue his other interests.[11][12]
Lucas's father owned a stationery store, and had wanted George to work for him when he turned 18. Lucas had been planning to go to art school, but his father said he wouldn't pay for it. Lucas declared upon leaving home that he would be a millionaire by the age of 30.[13][b] He attended Modesto Junior College, where he studied anthropology, sociology, and literature, amongst other subjects.[11] He also began shooting with an 8 mm camera, including filming car races.[11] At this time, Lucas became interested in Canyon Cinema: screenings of underground, avant-garde 16 mm filmmakers like Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner.[15] Lucas and childhood friend John Plummer also saw classic European films of the time, including Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, François Truffaut's Jules et Jim and Federico Fellini's 8½.[15] "That's when George really started exploring," Plummer said.[15] Through his interest in autocross racing, Lucas met renowned cinematographer Haskell Wexler, another race enthusiast.[11][15] Wexler, later to work with Lucas on several occasions, was impressed by Lucas's talent.[11] "George had a very good eye, and he thought visually," he recalled.[15]
At Plummer's recommendation,[16] Lucas then transferred to the University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinematic Arts. USC was one of the earliest universities to have a school devoted to motion picture film. During the years at USC, Lucas shared a dorm room with Randal Kleiser. Along with classmates such as Walter Murch, Hal Barwood, John Milius and Matthew Robbins (screenwriter), they became a clique of film students known as The Dirty Dozen. He also became good friends with fellow acclaimed student filmmaker and future Indiana Jones collaborator, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.[c] Lucas was deeply influenced by the Filmic Expression course taught at the school by filmmaker Lester Novros which concentrated on the non-narrative elements of Film Form like color, light, movement, space, and time. Another inspiration was the Serbian montagist (and dean of the USC Film Department) Slavko Vorkapić, a film theoretician who made stunning montage sequences for Hollywood studio features at MGM, RKO, and Paramount. Vorkapich taught the autonomous nature of the cinematic art form, emphasizing the kinetic energy inherent in motion pictures.
After graduating with a bachelor of fine arts in film in 1967, he tried joining the United States Air Force as an officer, but he was immediately turned down because of his numerous speeding tickets. He was later drafted by the United States Army for military service in Vietnam, but he was exempted from service after medical tests showed he had diabetes, the disease that killed his paternal grandfather.
Film career
1965–1969: Early career
Lucas saw many inspiring films in class, particularly the visual films coming out of the National Film Board of Canada like Arthur Lipsett's 21-87, cameraman Jean-Claude Labrecque's cinéma vérité 60 Cycles, the work of Norman McLaren and the documentaries of Claude Jutra. Lucas fell madly in love with pure cinema and quickly became prolific at making 16 mm nonstory noncharacter visual tone poems and cinéma vérité with such titles as Look at Life, Herbie, 1:42.08, The Emperor, Anyone Lived in a Pretty (how) Town, Filmmaker and 6-18-67. He was passionate and interested in camerawork and editing, defining himself as a filmmaker as opposed to being a director, and he loved making abstract visual films that created emotions purely through non-narrative structures.[15]
In 1967, Lucas re-enrolled as a USC graduate student in film production.[18] He began working under movie and logo designer Saul Bass and film editor Verna Fields for the United States Information Agency, where he met his future wife Marcia Griffin.[19] Working as a teaching instructor for a class of U.S. Navy students who were being taught documentary cinematography, Lucas directed the short film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which won first prize at the 1967–68 National Student film festival. Lucas was awarded a student scholarship by Warner Bros. to observe and work on the making of a film of his choosing. The film he chose after finding the animation department closed down was Finian's Rainbow (1968) which was being directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who was revered among film school students of the time as a cinema graduate who had "made it" in Hollywood. In 1969, Lucas was one of the camera operators on the classic Rolling Stones concert film Gimme Shelter.
Film Career
1969–1977: THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars
In 1969, Lucas moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area and co-founded the studio American Zoetrope with Coppola, hoping to create a liberating environment for filmmakers to direct outside the perceived oppressive control of the Hollywood studio system.[20] Coppola thought Lucas's Electronic Labyrinth could be adapted into his first full-length feature film,[21] which was produced by American Zoetrope as THX 1138, but was not a success. Lucas then created his own company, Lucasfilm, Ltd., and directed the successful American Graffiti (1973).
Lucas then set his sights on adapting Flash Gordon, an adventure serial from his childhood that he fondly remembered. When he was unable to obtain the rights, he set out to write an original space adventure that would eventually become Star Wars.[22] Despite his success with his previous film, all but one studio turned Star Wars down. It was only because Alan Ladd Jr. at 20th Century Fox liked American Graffiti that he forced through a production and distribution deal for the film, which ended up restoring Fox to financial stability after a number of flops.[23] Star Wars was significantly influenced by samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, Spaghetti Westerns, as well as classic sword and sorcery fantasy stories.
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Star Wars quickly became the highest-grossing film of all time, displaced five years later by Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. After the success of American Graffiti and prior to the beginning of filming on Star Wars, Lucas was encouraged to renegotiate for a higher fee for writing and directing Star Wars than the US$150,000 agreed.[11] He declined to do so, instead negotiating for advantage in some of the as-yet-unspecified parts of his contract with Fox, in particular, ownership of licensing and merchandising rights (for novelizations, clothing, toys, etc.) and contractual arrangements for sequels.[11][24] Lucasfilm has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from licensed games, toys, and collectibles created for the franchise.[11]
The original Star Wars film went through a tumultuous production, and during editing, Lucas suffered chest pains initially feared to be a heart attack, but actually a fit of hypertension and exhaustion. The effort that Lucas exerted during post-production for the film, and its subsequent sequels, caused strains on his relationship with his wife Marcia Lucas, and was a contributing factor to their divorce at the end of the trilogy.[22] The success of the first Star Wars film also resulted in more attention focused on Lucas, both positive and negative, attracting wealth and fame, but also many people who wanted Lucas's financial backing or just to threaten him.[25]
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1977–1993: Hiatus from directing, Indiana Jones
Director Jim Henson (left) and Lucas working on Labyrinth in 1986
Following the release of the first Star Wars film, Lucas worked extensively as a writer and producer, including on the many Star Wars spinoffs made for film, television and other media. Lucas acted as executive producer for the next two Star Wars films, commissioning Irvin Kershner to direct The Empire Strikes Back and Richard Marquand to direct Return of the Jedi, while receiving a story credit on the former and sharing a screenwriting credit with Lawrence Kasdan on the latter.[26] Lucas also gave away his screenwriting credit out of great respect for Leigh Brackett for The Empire Strikes Back after her death from cancer.[27] He also acted as story writer and executive producer on the first four Indiana Jones films, which his colleague and good friend Steven Spielberg directed.
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Craig Barron, who worked at ILM as part of the matte painting department, told Star Wars Insider that Lucas liked to spend time with the department's painters and often spoke of what movies he wanted to make. According to Barron, Lucas had wanted to make a film about Alexander the Great, but this film was ultimately never produced.[28] Projects where Lucas was credited as executive producer and sometimes story writer in this period include Kurosawa's Kagemusha (1980), John Korty's Twice Upon a Time (1983), Ewoks: Caravan of Courage (1984), Ewoks: Battle for Endor (1985), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Jim Henson's Labyrinth (1986), Ron Howard's Willow (1988), Don Bluth's The Land Before Time (1988), and the Indiana Jones television prequel spinoff The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992–93). There were unsuccessful projects, however, including More American Graffiti (1979), Willard Huyck's Howard the Duck (1986), which was the biggest flop of Lucas's career, Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) and Radioland Murders (1994) directed by Mel Smith.
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The animation studio Pixar was founded in 1979 as the Graphics Group, one third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm.[29] Pixar's early computer graphics research resulted in a digital film The Adventures of André & Wally B. and groundbreaking effects in films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan[30] and Young Sherlock Holmes,[30] and the group was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs shortly after he left Apple Computer. Jobs paid Lucas $5 million and put $5 million as capital into the company. The sale reflected Lucas's desire to stop the cash flow losses from his seven-year research projects associated with new entertainment technology tools, as well as his company's new focus on creating entertainment rather than tools. As of June 1983, Lucas was worth $60 million,[31] but he met cash-flow difficulties following his divorce that year, concurrent with the sudden dropoff in revenues from Star Wars
Wars licenses following the theatrical run of Return of the Jedi. At this point, Lucas had no desire to return to Star Wars, and had unofficially canceled the sequel trilogy.[32]
Lucas, formerly a member of Writers Guild of America West, left and maintained financial core status in 1981.[33]
Also in 1983, Lucas and Tomlinson Holman founded the audio company THX.[34] The company was formerly owned by Lucasfilm and contains equipment for stereo, digital, and theatrical sound for films, and music. Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic, are the sound and visual effects subdivisions of Lucasfilm, while Lucasfilm Games, later renamed LucasArts, produces products for the gaming industry.
1993–2012: Return to directing, Star Wars and Indiana Jones
Lucas receiving the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President George W. Bush, February 2006
Having lost much of his fortune in a divorce settlement in 1987, Lucas was hesitant on making additional Star Wars features.[32] However, the prequels, which were still only a series of ideas partially pulled from his original drafts of "The Star Wars", continued to tantalize him with technical possibilities that would make it worthwhile to revisit his older material. When Star Wars became popular once again, in the wake of Dark Horse's comic book line and Timothy Zahn's trilogy of spin-off novels, Lucas realized that there was still a large audience. His children were older, and with the explosion of CGI technology he began to consider directing once again.[35]
By 1993, it was announced, in Variety among other sources, that Lucas would be making the prequels. He began penning more to the story, indicating that the series would be a tragic one, examining Anakin Skywalker's fall to the dark side. Lucas also began to change the status of the prequels relative to the originals; at first, they were supposed to be a "filling-in" of history tangential to the originals, but now he saw that they could form the beginning of one long story that started with Anakin's childhood and ended with his death. This was the final step towards turning the film series into a "Saga".[36] In 1994, Lucas began work on the screenplay of the first prequel, tentatively titled Episode I: The Beginning.
