George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and entrepreneur. He founded Lucasfilm and led the company as chairman and chief executive before selling it toThe Walt Disney Company on October 30, 2012.[3] He is best known as the creator of the space operafranchise Star Wars and the archaeologist adventurer character Indiana Jones. Lucas is one of the American film industry’s most financially successful filmmakers and has been nominated for four Academy Awards.
Early life and education
George Lucas was born in Modesto, California, the son of Dorothy Ellinore Lucas (née Bomberger; 1913–1989) and George Walton Lucas, Sr. (1913–1991), who owned a stationery store.[4][5]
Lucas grew up in the Central Valley town of Modesto, and his early passion for cars and motor racing would eventually serve as inspiration for his USC student film 1:42.08, as well as his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon, American Graffiti. Long before Lucas became obsessed with film making, he wanted to be a race-car 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, while driving his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina, another driver broadsided him, flipping over his car, nearly killing him, causing him to lose interest in racing as a career.[6][7] He attended Modesto Junior College, where he studied, amongst other subjects, anthropology, sociology and literature.[6] He also began filming with an 8 mm camera, including filming car races.[6]
At this time, Lucas and his friend John Plummer became interested in Canyon Cinema: screenings of underground, avant-garde 16 mm filmmakers like Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner.[8] Lucas and 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.[8] “That’s when George really started exploring,” Plummer said.[8] Through his interest in autocross racing, Lucas met renowned cinematographer Haskell Wexler, another race enthusiast.[6][8] Wexler, later to work with Lucas on several occasions, was impressed by Lucas’ talent.[6] “George had a very good eye, and he thought visually,” he recalled.[8]
Lucas then transferred to the University of Southern California 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, George Lucas shared a dorm room with Randal Kleiser. Along with classmates such as Walter Murch, Hal Barwood and John Milius, 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. 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 Vorkapich, 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 unique dynamic quality of movement and kinetic energy inherent in motion pictures.
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, the French-Canadian 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 asLook 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 cinema.[8]
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 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.
In 1967, Lucas re-enrolled as a USC graduate student in film production. 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, and was later adapted into his first full-length feature film, THX 1138. 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 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, George Lucas was one of the camera operators on the classic Rolling Stones concert film Gimme Shelter.
Film career
George Lucas is a filmmaker, with a film career dominated by writing and production. Aside from the nine short films he made in the 1960s, he also directed six major features. His work from 1971 and 1977 as a writer-director, which established him as a major figure in Hollywood, consists of just three films: THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars. There was a 22-year hiatus between the original Star Wars film and his only other feature-film directing credits, the three Star Wars prequels.
Lucas acted as a writer and executive producer on another successful Hollywood film franchise, the Indiana Jones series. In addition, he established his own effects company, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), to make the original Star Wars film. The company is now one of the most successful in the industry.
Lucas co-founded the studio American Zoetrope with Coppola—whom he met during his internship at Warner Bros.—hoping to create a liberating environment for filmmakers to direct outside the perceived oppressive control of the Hollywood studio system.[9] His first full length feature film produced by the studio, THX 1138, was not a success. Lucas then created his own company, Lucasfilm, Ltd., and directed American Graffiti (1973). His new-found wealth and reputation enabled him to develop a story set in space. Even so, he encountered difficulties getting Star Wars made. 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.[10]
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 ofAmerican 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 $150,000 agreed.[6] 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, T-shirts, toys, etc.) and contractual arrangements for sequels.[6] The studio was unconcerned to relinquish these rights, as its last major attempt in the field, with the 1967 film, Doctor Dolittle, had proved a discouraging failure.[11]Lucas exploited merchandising rights wisely, and Lucasfilm has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from licensed games, toys, and collectibles created for the franchise.[6]
Director Jim Henson (left) and Lucas (right) and working on Labyrinth in 1986
Over the two decades after the first Star Wars film, Lucas worked extensively as a writer and/or producer, including the many Star Wars spinoffs made for film, TV, and other media. He acted as executive producer for the next two Star Wars films, commissioning Irvin Kershner to direct The Empire Strikes Back, and Richard Marquandto direct Return of the Jedi, while receiving a story credit on the former and sharing a screenwriting credit withLawrence Kasdan on the latter.[12] Lucas also acted as executive producer and story writer on all four of theIndiana Jones films, which he convinced his colleague and good friend, Steven Spielberg, to direct. Other notable projects as a producer or executive producer in this period include Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980), Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), Jim Henson‘s Labyrinth (1986), Godfrey Reggio‘s Powaqqatsi (1986) and theanimated film The Land Before Time (1988). There were also some less successful projects, however, includingMore American Graffiti (1979), the ill-fated Howard the Duck (1986), which was the biggest flop of his career;Willow (1988, which Lucas also wrote); and Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). Between 1992 and 1996, Lucas served as executive producer for the television spinoff The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. In 1997, for the 20th anniversary of Star Wars, Lucas went back to his trilogy to enhance and add certain scenes using newly available digital technology. These new versions were released in theaters as the Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition. For DVD releases in 2004, the series received further revisions to make them congruent with the prequel trilogy. Besides the additions to the Star Wars franchise, in 2004 a George Lucas Director’s Cut of THX 1138 was released, with the film re-cut and containing a number of CGI revisions.
The animation studio Pixar was founded as the Graphix Group, one third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm.[13] Pixar’s early computer graphics research resulted in groundbreaking effects in films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan[14] and Young Sherlock Holmes,[14] and the group was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs shortly after he left Apple after a power struggle at Apple Computer. Jobs paid US$5 million to Lucas and put US$5 million as capital into the company. The sale reflected Lucas’ desire to stop the cash flow losses from his 7-year research projects associated with new entertainment technology tools, as well as his company’s new focus on creating entertainment products rather than tools. A contributing factor was cash-flow difficulties following Lucas’ 1983 divorce concurrent with the sudden dropoff in revenues from Star Wars licenses following the release of Return of the Jedi.
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Lucas at the Venice Film Festival in 2009.
The sound equipped system, THX Ltd, was founded by Lucas and Tomlinson Holman.[15] 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.
In 1994, Lucas began work on the screenplay for the prequel Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, which would be the first film he had directed in over two decades. The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, beginning a new trilogy of Star Wars films. Lucas also directed Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith which were released in 2002 and 2005, respectively. Numerous critics considered these films inferior to the previously released Star Wars films,[16][17][18] though the prequels were nevertheless huge box office successes in each of their respective releases.[19][20][21]
George Lucas also collaborated with Steven Spielberg in the production of the 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Lucas later worked as the story-writer and executive producer for the 2012 film Red Tails, a war film based on the exploits of the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African America pilots in the United States Army Air Force during the Second World War. He also took over direction of reshoots while director Anthony Hemingwayworked on other projects. Lucas is working on his first musical, an untitled CGI project being produced at Skywalker Ranch. Kevin Munroe directed the movie while David Berenbaum wrote the screenplay for Red Tails.[22]
Following the conclusion of the Star Wars prequel trilogy in 2005, George Lucas continued to work on other Star Wars-related projects. Lucas worked as the executive producer for Star Wars: The Clone Wars, an animated television series on Cartoon Network, which was preceded by a feature film of the same name. As of 2014, he is currently working as a creative consultant on the Star Wars sequel trilogy, with the first movie Star Wars Episode VII being scheduled for release on December 18, 2015. J.J Abrams is serving as the director of the new trilogy while Kathleen Kennedy is serving as executive producer.[23][24] The new sequel trilogy is also being jointly produced by Lucasfilm and The Walt Disney Company, which had acquired Lucasfilm in 2012.[25]
