George Lucas

George Walton Lucas Jr., born May 14, 1944, in Modesto, California, is an American filmmaker and philanthropist whose work helped define the New Hollywood movement and the modern blockbuster. He created the Star Wars franchise and its fictional universe, the Indiana Jones franchise, and founded Lucasfilm, LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic, and THX. Though his films became part of mass popular culture on a large scale, Lucas remained an independent filmmaker for most of his career.

Lucas grew up in a small agricultural city in California’s Central Valley, the son of Dorothy Ellinore Lucas and George Walton Lucas Sr. His early interests were comics, science fiction, Flash Gordon serials, Disneyland, and cars. For much of high school he wanted to be a racecar driver, racing on underground circuits and spending time in garages. A serious car crash in June 1962, just before graduation, ended that ambition and pushed him toward other interests. At Modesto Junior College, he studied subjects including anthropology, sociology, and literature, and began filming car races with an 8 mm camera.

His film education widened through Canyon Cinema, where he encountered underground and avant-garde 16 mm filmmakers such as Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage, and Bruce Conner. He also saw European films by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Federico Fellini. Through autocross racing he met cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who later worked with him and remembered that Lucas “had a very good eye” and “thought visually.” Lucas transferred to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where he joined a circle of film students that included Walter Murch, Caleb Deschanel, Hal Barwood, John Milius, Matthew Robbins, and Randal Kleiser, and became friends with Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.

After graduating from USC in 1967, Lucas moved to San Francisco and co-founded American Zoetrope with Francis Ford Coppola. He wrote and directed THX 1138 in 1971, based on his student short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB. The film was a critical success but a financial failure. His next film, American Graffiti (1973), drew on his youth in early 1960s Modesto and was both critically and commercially successful, earning five Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture.

Lucas’s 1977 space opera Star Wars, later retitled A New Hope, had a troubled production but became a surprise hit, the highest-grossing film at the time, and won six Academy Awards. He produced and co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). With Spielberg, he created, produced, and co-wrote the Indiana Jones films Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Temple of Doom, The Last Crusade, and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and served as an executive producer on The Dial of Destiny. He later returned to directing with the Star Wars prequel trilogy and worked on projects including Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Red Tails, and Strange Magic.

Lucas received two Emmy Awards and was nominated for four Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. He also worked for decades with composer John Williams on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. Through Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound, he was connected to many big-budget U.S. films before selling Lucasfilm to The Walt Disney Company in 2012. His philanthropy has focused on education and the arts, including the George Lucas Educational Foundation and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. His words still carry weight because they come from a maker who combined boyhood interests, formal study, technical invention, and a strong visual imagination into stories that reached audiences around the world.