George Lucas

• 1. Introduction

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  George Lucas was nearly killed before he ever made a film. On the 12th of June 1962, a few days before his high school graduation in Modesto, California, another driver broadsided his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina, flipping the car several times into a tree. His seatbelt snapped, ejecting him from the wreck, and that accident alone saved his life. His lungs were bruised from severe hemorrhaging, and his career as a racecar driver was over before it began.

  What rose from that near-fatal crash was something no one, including Lucas himself, could have predicted: a filmmaker who would shape the sound, look, and rhythm of cinema for decades. He founded companies that transformed how movies are made and heard. He negotiated a contract clause that Hollywood thought was worthless, and it made him one of the wealthiest people in the entertainment industry. He created worlds so enduring that they outlived his control of them.

  But Lucas spent most of his career working outside the studio system he distrusted, and the story of how he built that independence, lost pieces of it, and eventually walked away from the franchise he created is one of the stranger arcs in American film history.

• 2. A Californian Education

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  Modesto, California, in the early 1960s was a small agricultural city in the Central Valley, and Lucas grew up absorbed in comics, science fiction, and television serials like Flash Gordon. His father owned a stationery store and expected his son to work there after turning 18. When Lucas declared he wanted to go to art school, his father refused to pay. Lucas left home with a stated ambition: he would be a millionaire by the age of 30.

  At Modesto Junior College, he studied anthropology, sociology, and literature while filming car races with an 8 mm camera. His circle of interests widened when he discovered Canyon Cinema, a collective devoted to avant-garde and underground 16 mm filmmakers like Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage, and Bruce Conner. His childhood friend John Plummer introduced him to European cinema, including Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim, and Federico Fellini's 8 1/2. Through autocross racing, Lucas also met cinematographer Haskell Wexler. Wexler later recalled that Lucas "had a very good eye, and he thought visually."

  On Plummer's recommendation, Lucas transferred to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, one of the earliest universities to have a dedicated film program. There he shared a dorm room with Randal Kleiser and fell in with a clique of film students that included Walter Murch, Caleb Deschanel, Hal Barwood, John Milius, and Matthew Robbins, a group they called the Dirty Dozen. He also befriended Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. The professor who left the deepest mark was Lester Novros, whose Filmic Expression course focused on color, light, movement, space, and time: the non-narrative elements of film form. Another formative influence was Serbian montage theorist Slavko Vorkapich, who taught the autonomous nature of cinema and the kinetic energy inherent in motion pictures.

  Lucas graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in film in 1967. He tried to join the United States Air Force as an officer but was turned down because of his numerous speeding tickets. He was later drafted for service in Vietnam, but medical tests revealed he had diabetes, the disease that had killed his paternal grandfather, and he was exempted from service.

• 3. The ILM Gamble

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  Lucas founded Industrial Light and Magic in 1975 for a single purpose: to produce visual effects that had never been seen on film before. When he discovered that the in-house effects department at 20th Century Fox was no longer operational, he approached Douglas Trumbull, best known for his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running. Trumbull was already committed to Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and declined, but suggested his assistant John Dykstra.

  Dykstra assembled a small team of college students, artists, and engineers and set them up in a warehouse in Van Nuys, California. Lucas named the group Industrial Light and Magic after noticing the map showed the location was zoned as light industrial. Among the original leading members were Ken Ralston, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, Robert Blalack, Joe Johnston, Phil Tippett, Steve Gawley, Lorne Peterson, and Paul Huston.

  Pixar grew from the same infrastructure. In 1979, the Graphics Group was founded as one third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm. The group's early computer graphics research produced effects for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Young Sherlock Holmes, among others. In 1986, Steve Jobs, who had recently left Apple Computer, purchased the group for $5 million and put an additional $5 million in as capital. Lucas accepted the sale partly because he wanted to stop the cash flow losses from seven years of research projects in new entertainment technology, and to refocus Lucasfilm on making entertainment rather than tools.

  By June 1983, Lucas was personally worth $60 million. Yet within months, cash-flow difficulties following his divorce and a dropoff in Star Wars licensing revenues put him under real financial pressure.

• 4. The Merchandising Clause

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  After the success of American Graffiti and before Star Wars began filming, Lucas was encouraged by colleagues to renegotiate a higher directing fee than the $150,000 already agreed with 20th Century Fox. He declined. Instead, he negotiated for ownership of licensing and merchandising rights, including novelizations, clothing, and toys, along with contractual arrangements for sequels. Hollywood considered these rights peripheral. Lucasfilm has since earned hundreds of millions of dollars from licensed games, toys, and collectibles alone.

  Star Wars had come to exist partly by accident of rights. Lucas had originally wanted to adapt Flash Gordon, the adventure serial from his childhood. When he could not obtain those rights, he wrote an original space adventure in its place. The film was nearly rejected across the industry; all but one studio passed on it. It was Alan Ladd Jr. at 20th Century Fox who, because he admired American Graffiti, pushed the production and distribution deal through. Star Wars went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time at its release, displaced five years later by Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

  The production itself was punishing. During editing, Lucas suffered chest pains that were initially feared to be a heart attack, but turned out to be a fit of hypertension and exhaustion. The strain of post-production on Star Wars, and the subsequent sequels, contributed to the breakdown of his marriage to editor Marcia Lucas, a contributing factor to their divorce at the end of the original trilogy.

• 5. John Williams and the Score

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  Steven Spielberg recommended composer John Williams to Lucas for Star Wars, and the choice altered the film's identity as profoundly as any visual effect. Lucas had initially wanted to use existing tracks and film music in a manner similar to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had served as an inspiration for the film. Williams advised against this and proposed instead a system of recurring themes, or leitmotifs, in the style of classical composers Gustav Holst, William Walton, and Igor Stravinsky. Lucas had already used works by those composers as temp tracks for Williams to draw from.

  The score introduced the Main Title Theme, the Force Theme, the Rebel Alliance Theme, and Princess Leia's Theme in the first film, with each subsequent installment adding to the catalog. The soundtrack was released to critical acclaim and won Williams his third Academy Award for Best Original Score. In 2005, the American Film Institute listed it as the greatest film score of all time.

  Williams went on to score every film in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises that Lucas was involved in. Across those collaborations, Williams received six of his fifty-two Academy Award nominations: for Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Lucas attended the ceremony at which Williams became the 44th recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award, the first composer to receive the honor, and gave a speech in his praise. At the 40th Anniversary Star Wars Celebration convention, Lucas called Williams the "secret sauce" of his movies.

• 6. The Prequel Return

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  By 1983, Lucas had unofficially canceled any sequel trilogy and had no desire to return to Star Wars. The divorce that year, combined with a sudden dropoff in Star Wars licensing revenues after Return of the Jedi's theatrical run, left him managing cash-flow difficulties despite his earlier wealth.

  What changed his mind, over the following decade, was a combination of factors: his children were older, the franchise had been revived by Dark Horse's comic book line and Timothy Zahn's trilogy of spin-off novels, and the explosion of CGI technology opened creative possibilities that made revisiting the material feel worthwhile. By 1993, Lucas announced in Variety and elsewhere that he would be making a prequel trilogy. He began to see the prequels not as tangential backstory but as the beginning of one long narrative, running from Anakin Skywalker's childhood to his death.

  In 1997, to mark the twentieth anniversary of Star Wars, Lucas restored the original trilogy and released the films as Special Editions with extensive digital modifications. Further changes followed for DVD releases in 2004, Blu-ray in 2011, and 4K in 2019. The first prequel, The Phantom Menace, was released in 1999. It was the first film Lucas had directed in over two decades. The second and third followed in 2002 and 2005 respectively. The first draft of Episode II was completed just weeks before principal photography began. Older fans and critics gave the prequels a mixed reception, though they were box office successes and found a large audience among younger viewers.

  In 2004, Lucas reflected that his own transition from independent to corporate filmmaker mirrored the story of Darth Vader in some ways, but concluded he was glad to make his films as he wanted.

• 7. Selling the Franchise

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  In January 2012, Lucas announced his retirement from producing large blockbuster films. In June of that year, producer Kathleen Kennedy was appointed co-chair of Lucasfilm Ltd., with the understanding she would eventually succeed Lucas as the company's sole leader. That October, Lucas sold Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company for a reported sum of $4.05 billion. With that transaction, Lucas became Disney's second-largest single shareholder, after the estate of Steve Jobs.

  A spokesperson for Lucasfilm stated at the time that Lucas intended to donate the majority of the proceeds to his philanthropic endeavors. Lucas himself said: "For 41 years, the majority of my time and money has been put into the company. As I start a new chapter in my life, it is gratifying that I have the opportunity to devote more time and resources to philanthropy."

  His feelings about the sale were complicated. His son Jett told The Guardian that his father was "very torn" about having sold the rights to the franchise, despite having hand-picked J. J. Abrams to direct The Force Awakens. In a December 2015 interview with Charlie Rose, Lucas likened selling Lucasfilm to Disney to a divorce and criticized The Force Awakens for having a "retro feel." He said: "I worked very hard to make them completely different, with different planets, with different spaceships, to make it new." In January 2015, Lucas had stated that Disney discarded the story ideas he had developed when he considered creating Episodes VII-IX himself.

  He remained more positive about later entries. It was reported that Lucas liked Rogue One more than The Force Awakens, and he described The Last Jedi as "beautifully made."

• 8. Philanthropy and the Museum

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  Lucas's personal net worth is estimated at $5.1 billion, placing him among the wealthiest people in the entertainment industry. He has pledged to give half his fortune to charity as part of The Giving Pledge, the effort led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to persuade America's richest individuals to donate their wealth.

  In 1991, Lucas founded the George Lucas Educational Foundation as a nonprofit to support innovation in schools, operating under the brand Edutopia. Through the foundation, he was a leading proponent of the E-Rate program, enacted as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which directs broadband funding to schools and libraries. On the 24th of June 2008, Lucas testified before a United States House of Representatives subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet to advocate for a free wireless broadband educational network.

  On the 19th of September 2006, the University of Southern California announced that Lucas had donated between $175 million and $180 million to expand its film school, the largest single donation to USC and the largest gift to any film school anywhere. In 2021, Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson donated to NYU through the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation to establish the Martin Scorsese Institute of Global Cinematic Arts.

  The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has had a long road to completion. Lucas first considered building it on Crissy Field near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, offering to pay an estimated $300 million in construction costs and endow it with $400 million at opening, later adding a further $400 million to its endowment. After failing to reach an agreement with the Presidio Trust, he turned to Chicago, where a lakefront site was selected by June 2014. On the 24th of June 2016, a lawsuit by the preservation group Friends of the Parks caused him to abandon that plan. On the 17th of January 2017, Lucas announced the museum would be built on an eleven-acre campus over a former parking lot in Exposition Park in Los Angeles, with a five-story, 300,000-square-foot building due for completion in 2026. In July 2025, Lucas made his first ever appearance at San Diego Comic-Con to preview the museum, showcasing drawings from the original Iron Man comic, Indiana Jones concept art, Frida Kahlo paintings, and Peanuts sketches among the opening exhibits.