George Lucas

George Walton Lucas Jr. was born on May 14, 1944, in Modesto, California, a farming town in the state's Central Valley. His father, George Lucas Sr., ran a stationery store and owned a walnut ranch, and the family lived a comfortable middle-class life shaped by small-business discipline and Methodist values ^[1]. As a boy, Lucas read comic books, built model cars, and absorbed the adventure serials that played on television, including the Flash Gordon shorts that would later color his imagination ^[2].

Cars, not movies, dominated his teenage years. Lucas dreamed of becoming a professional race driver and spent much of high school cruising Modesto's streets and working on engines. That ambition ended abruptly in June 1962, days before his high school graduation, when another driver broadsided his Autobianchi Bianchina near the family ranch. The crash flung him from the car and left him hospitalized with serious injuries ^[1]. Lucas later described the accident as a turning point that pushed him to reconsider what he wanted from life ^[3].

After recovering, he enrolled at Modesto Junior College, where he studied anthropology, sociology, and literature. A friendship with the cinematographer Haskell Wexler, whom he met through racing circles, helped steer him toward film. In 1964 Lucas entered the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, one of the few dedicated film programs in the country at the time ^[2].

At USC, Lucas thrived. He gravitated toward experimental and documentary techniques rather than conventional storytelling, and his student short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB won first prize at the 1967-68 National Student Film Festival ^[2]. The school also placed him inside a generation of young directors, including John Milius and Walter Murch, who would reshape American cinema in the following decade.

A scholarship to observe Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Finian's Rainbow in 1967 began the most important professional relationship of his early career. In 1969 the two founded American Zoetrope in San Francisco, an independent studio intended as an alternative to the Hollywood system ^[3]. Zoetrope's first production was Lucas's feature-length expansion of his student film, THX 1138 (1971), a cold dystopian vision that impressed critics more than audiences and left Warner Bros. unhappy ^[1].

Coppola challenged Lucas to prove he could make something warm and commercial. The answer was American Graffiti (1973), a nostalgic portrait of one night of teenage cruising in early 1960s California, drawn directly from Lucas's Modesto adolescence. Made for under a million dollars, the film became one of the most profitable pictures of its era and earned five Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture ^[4]. At twenty-nine, Lucas suddenly had the standing, and the money, to attempt something far more ambitious.

Lucas spent the mid-1970s writing drafts of a space adventure influenced by Saturday matinee serials, Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, and Joseph Campbell's writing on myth. Nearly every studio passed before Twentieth Century-Fox agreed to finance the project. Star Wars opened on May 25, 1977, in a few dozen theaters and became a cultural phenomenon almost overnight, eventually surpassing Jaws as the highest-grossing film released to that point ^[4]. It won six Academy Awards in technical and musical categories and redefined what a blockbuster could be ^[2].

The shrewdest decision of Lucas's career happened before the cameras rolled. In negotiating his directing fee, he traded salary for the sequel and merchandising rights, terms Fox considered nearly worthless. Star Wars toys, books, and licensed products went on to generate billions of dollars and gave Lucas the independence to finance his own films ^[3]. He funded The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) largely with his own money, hiring other directors while supervising the story and production himself ^[1].

Beyond the films, Lucas built institutions. Industrial Light & Magic, founded in 1975 to create the effects for Star Wars, became the world's leading visual effects house, contributing landmark digital work to films such as Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park ^[5]. His sound division set the THX theater standard, and his computer graphics group, sold to Steve Jobs in 1986, became Pixar ^[3]. With his friend Steven Spielberg he also created Indiana Jones, producing and co-writing Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its sequels, another of the most successful franchises in film history ^[4]. Between 1999 and 2005 he returned to directing with the Star Wars prequel trilogy, which drew mixed reviews but enormous audiences and pioneered digital cinematography and all-digital characters ^[2]. Any honest account of George Lucas achievements has to weigh his influence on film technology as heavily as the films themselves.

Lucas married the film editor Marcia Griffin in 1969. Marcia Lucas cut American Graffiti and Star Wars, winning an Academy Award for Film Editing for the latter, and colleagues credited her with sharpening the emotional core of her husband's work ^[1]. The couple adopted a daughter, Amanda, in 1981 and divorced in 1983, a split Lucas has acknowledged as one of the most painful periods of his life ^[3]. As a single father he adopted two more children, Katie and Jett, and by his own account organized his schedule around raising them at Skywalker Ranch, his production headquarters in Marin County, California ^[1].

In 2006 Lucas began a relationship with Mellody Hobson, a Chicago investment executive who later became co-CEO of Ariel Investments and chair of Starbucks. They married in June 2013 at Skywalker Ranch, and their daughter, Everest, was born that August ^[6]. Known for avoiding the Hollywood social circuit, Lucas has spent most of his career in Northern California, deliberately apart from the studio system he often criticized.

He is also a serious art collector, with particular devotion to American narrative illustration, including one of the largest private collections of Norman Rockwell paintings. That collection forms part of the foundation of the museum he and Hobson are building in Los Angeles ^[7].

In October 2012 Lucas announced his retirement from blockbuster filmmaking and sold Lucasfilm to The Walt Disney Company for approximately 4.05 billion dollars in cash and stock, one of the largest acquisitions in Hollywood history ^[5]. He handed leadership of the company to his longtime producer Kathleen Kennedy and stepped away from creative control of Star Wars, though he has occasionally commented, sometimes critically, on the direction of the later films ^[6].

Philanthropy absorbed much of his attention afterward. Lucas signed the Giving Pledge in 2010, committing the majority of his wealth to charitable causes, and stated that most of the Disney proceeds would go to education-focused philanthropy ^[6]. The George Lucas Educational Foundation, which he founded in 1991, operates Edutopia, a resource promoting evidence-based teaching practice. He has also given substantially to USC's film school, funding buildings and endowments at his alma mater ^[2].

His largest late-career project is the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a roughly one-billion-dollar institution under construction in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, personally financed by Lucas and Hobson. Designed by the architect Ma Yansong, the museum will house painting, illustration, comic art, photography, and cinema artifacts organized around the idea of visual storytelling ^[7]. After earlier proposals in San Francisco and Chicago collapsed amid local opposition, Los Angeles approved the project in 2017 ^[7].

Few filmmakers have altered their industry as thoroughly as George Lucas. Star Wars reorganized Hollywood around the franchise: the sequel, the merchandising line, the summer release calendar, and the shared fictional universe all owe much of their modern form to choices Lucas made in the late 1970s ^[4]. The mythology he assembled, from the Force to Darth Vader, remains among the most widely recognized fictional material on earth, sustained by decades of films, television series, novels, and games ^[2].

His technical legacy runs just as deep. Industrial Light & Magic drove the digital effects revolution, THX raised presentation standards in theaters, and the Pixar hardware group he incubated helped launch computer animation as an art form ^[5]. Lucas also pushed early and hard for digital cameras, digital editing, and digital projection, changes that eventually swept the entire industry ^[3]. Critics have long debated his strengths as a writer and director, and the prequels in particular divided fans, but his influence on how films are made is not seriously disputed.

Recognition has followed. Lucas received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1992, the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 2005, the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013, and Kennedy Center Honors in 2015 ^[2]. For readers asking who was George Lucas before the empire of merchandise and museums, the answer is a car-obsessed kid from Modesto who survived a crash, found film school, and bet on his own independence. The plainest George Lucas facts, a two-billion-dollar-plus fortune committed to education and a museum built to honor popular storytelling, suggest how he wants that independence remembered ^[6].