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"Dreams are extremely important. You can't do it unless you imagine it."

"George has never stopped asking 'Any ideas?' and the world has been a better place for it."

George Walton Lucas Jr. (born May 14, 1944 in Modesto, California) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known as the man behind Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

Lucas was a car buff in high school, and wanted to be a professional racer, until he sufferered a near-fatal crash days before graduation; EMTs actually declared him dead at the scene. After recovering, he attended community college, where his initial interest was in anthropology before attending screenings of films from the likes of Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, and (especially) Kurosawa made him switch his focus to cinema (although anthropology would, by his own admission, continue to inform many of his films).

Lucas then transferred to the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where his early student films attracted much praise and support from his peers and were considered far in advance in terms of editing and cinematography than others of his class. Experimental film-maker Thom Andersen, a classmate of Lucas's, still considers them to be significant avant-garde films. For instance, his first work was in 1965 with Look at Life, which was supposed to be a one-minute film consisting of testing various camera angles; Lucas took the opportunity to create an intense and evocative montage of current events that went way beyond his class assignment. Incidentally, the class was really impressed by this, with the teacher saying of Lucas, "We have a live one here!"

This was followed by a number of other shorts, including The Emperor, Freiheit, and Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, the latter of which he would go on to remake as a feature. A program by Hollywood studios offering internships to students led to Lucas working on the sets of Francis Ford Coppola's Finian's Rainbow. The two men hit it off, with Coppola becoming his Big Brother Mentor and the pair remaining close friends and colleagues for most of the '70s and '80s until their careers branched off in different directions.note 

With Coppola, Lucas founded American Zoetrope to get away from the oppressive Hollywood studio system, and Coppola produced his feature directorial debut, THX 1138. That film's commercial failure sunk Zoetrope's initial plans for independence, though it remains a talismanic project for Lucas, the source of references, with "THX" and "1138" appearing in various forms, providing the name for the THX soundsystem. Lucas' main point in making that film was to show that (then) present-day America was close to the dystopias of science fiction, and he proved his point by using extensive location shooting at what were, at the time, highly futuristic-looking urban developments in San Francisco and Northern California. The failure led Lucas to go in what he saw as a more commercial direction, i.e. making films about the problems of young people, and proving he could direct a serious drama. Produced by Coppola and Gary Kurtz for Lucas's new production company, Lucasfilm, American Graffiti was a major success sold on the Nostalgia Filter (Its tagline was "Where were you in '62?") of the America just before the death of JFK, the escalation of the country's involvement in the Vietnam War, and the emergence of the counterculture. It led Lucas to go one step further.

Believing that his fellow New Hollywood directors had ignored the market for young children and teenagers, who hadn't grown up with the pirate, westerns, and serial films that his generation had, Lucas set out to revive the old serials' spirit but with a more updated and modern polish. His initial idea was to adapt Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, while also thinking of a concept based on Republic serials with an Adventurer Archaeologist. They became Star Wars and Indiana Jones respectively. For Star Wars, Lucas wanted to revive the old B-Movie serial but he wanted to update it, and give it the scale of an Epic Movie, with sound and visual effects far in advance of anything currently available. To create his vision for Star Wars, George formed his own FX studio Industrial Light & Magic and they revolutionized special effects and post-production techniquesnote . For sound, Lucas wanted to go away from the common electronic synth sounds of conventional science-fiction and incorporate natural sounds with advanced technology to make it more tangible. Ben Burtt was of a similar inclination, breaking new grounds in using unconventional sources for sounds that felt truly alien.

Star Wars, released in 1977, was the biggest film in American history, toppling the record for highest grosses, making more money than several studios had over the last 10 years, and adjusted for inflation, it still trails Gone with the Wind as the second-highest grossing film of all time. It also changed the film landscape thoroughly in ways that are too big to go here. Lucas had plans to make multiple serial films but initially conceived it as a standalone. The success demanded sequels and follow-ups, and Lucas believed initially that it could be done by other directors but he became so ubiquitously associated with the brand, and likewise believed he had to protect it from becoming the parody of the serials that many initially expected it was, that he gradually assumed more executive control than he expected. The disastrous Star Wars Holiday Special also confirmed these views, as did a rational belief that Star Wars might plateau its interest and become a fad. The Troubled Production of the first film also exhausted him from directing, and Lucas has repeatedly stated that he prefers the conceptual pre-production and post-production processes to the actual on-set process of directing.

For most of The '80s, Lucas worked as a producer and writer of his own and other projects. He has collaborated with Steven Spielberg, another close friend, on the Indiana Jones projects, as well as Francis Ford Coppola. He worked on a number of other films both mainstream (Labyrinth, Willow) and avant-garde (such as the Koyanniqatsi documenaries, Paul Schrader's Biopic on Mishima which was the first mainstream Hollywood film entirely in Japanese, and Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha) but most of these were commercial failures. With the exception of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, none of Lucas' later ideas ever found commercial favour, and many of his solo producer work has often been Cult Classic or niche items, with the exception of Howard the Duck being the biggest failure and still considered an embarrassing failure. Alongside that his company, Lucasfilm made many important innovations such as investment in CGI animation, chiefly Pixar studios, which Lucas sold to Steve Jobs. While not involved in the creative process, his name resonates in the video game scene thanks to a branch of his empire, LucasFilm Games — later renamed LucasArts — which experienced a golden age in the 1990s and was responsible for creating many iconic Adventure Games and Space Simulation Games, which are often ranked among the best games ever.

After Return of the Jedi in 1983, Lucas announced the end of the Star Wars franchise, at least in movie form (the concurrent Expanded Universe works kept chugging along for a few years after), but he later discussed plans for either sequels or prequels.note  Eventually in The '90s, he set out on making the prequel trilogy. The successful revival of the Expanded Universe in various media such as books, comics and video games starting in the early '90s and the commercial successes of the Special Edition re-releases of the films for the 20th anniversary of the franchise in 1997 also convinced him that the interest hadn't died down in Star Wars. Unlike the made-as-it-went-along threadbare approach of the original film (by then rechristened A New Hope) that was influenced by casting contingencies and uncertainty on whether any sequels would ever be made, the prequels were conceived from the start as a three-part work, with all scripts written at first. Lucas again tried to interest other film-makers, including Spielberg and Ron Howard, but they all insisted that he should direct it. After a twenty-year gap (1977-1999), Lucas returned to the director's chair on the prequels, which were again technical marvels, innovating on CGI with one of the first entirely CGI motion-captured character Jar-Jar Binks in a mainstream film. For the second and third film, Lucas shot the films in digital, being the first major director to embrace digital film-making, a process that became a norm later in the decades. After finishing Revenge of the Sith, Lucas again retired and went to producing, before announcing his landmark sale of Lucasfilm to Disney in October 2012, in a whopping $4 billion deal.

Lucas was married to film editor Marcia Lucas (formerly Griffin) between 1969 and 1983note  and he has several adopted children, most of whom have cameos in his films. Marcia worked as an editor for A New Hopenote  and Return of the Jedi, participating in the production of all the three original trilogy movies. In a notable example of Creator Couple, her main contribution to the original trilogy was to serve as The Heart, balancing out Lucas' highly technical, visual-minded vision with an emphasis on character development, plot and emotional response — Mark Hamill in particular has confirmed this. Lucas' divorce from Marcia, occurring at the same time as Spielberg's divorce from Amy Irving, is cited as a leading cause for the Darker and Edgier nature of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, as well as the fate of the Prequel Trilogy. In June 2013, he married his girlfriend of seven years, investment executive Mellody Hobson.

Lucas has always been a controversial figure, despite being personally quite modest and disarming, even a little shy, and renowned for being a good sportnote  as well as being very generousnote . The success of Star Wars and its revolutionary technique were met with praise but also dismay since it was seen as a shift away from the analog qualities of cinema (chiefly focusing on actors performances, good dialogue, real locations) to the technological, and this criticism has been constant since the beginning. In The '80s and The '90s, Lucas was held as symbolic for the turn in Hollywood away from the adult audience to a more family and child-centric approach, which along with the extensive merchandizing of Star Wars, and the drying up of funds for films with more serious matter, has led him to being accused (with Steven Spielberg occasionallynote ) for "ruining the movies". Lucas' embrace of digital cinema and CGI was also driven by similar mix of resentment and technological skepticism. But for most of that time, Lucas could count on being popular with the audiences, rather than the critics. This changed in the Turn of the Millennium, where Lucas experienced a considerable vocal backlash against the prequels, which in turn led to a backlash on himself. Not just from his regular critics who usually disliked the prequels for the same reasons they hated the originals (e.g. the fact that it existed), but from his own fandom, who had formerly been loyal to him, with many now deprecating and questioning his skills as a director and writer. The fact that this period coincided with the rise of the internet and widespread use of online forums and social media spread this to a wider audience than it would have beforenote . However, with the equally divisive reception of Disney's Star Wars films, especially the Sequel Trilogy, fans have been reassessing both the Prequel Trilogy and Lucas himself in a more favorable light.

Lucas himself admits that he is "the King of Wooden Dialogue". On the other hand, collaborators and actors do not dispute his incredible eye for casting, conceptualization, visual style, and his dramatic instinct (e.g. making Vader Luke's father, one of cinema's all-time great plot twists, which was entirely written by him). As a director, Lucas is known for constantly iterating (for instance, he brought back the cast and crew for reshoots for Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, removing entire subplots that had been entirely filmed and finished as seen in deleted scenes) on set, as well as emphasizing wide and detailed backgrounds within which his characters interact, communicating a sense of place and setting. He's also considered a great director of immersive large-scale action scenes with impressive choreography of multiple moving parts as objects move through the screen. As a producer, a careful glance at Lucas' body of work shows that the number of uncommercial, avant-garde, and niche films that he has produced equal the number of mainstream works he has made, and that he is considerably more risk-taking than many give him credit for.

Lucas had an ambitious worldwide approach to his inspirations. Star Wars was a fantasy series with decidedly Buddhist and Taoist inspirations, influenced by Akira Kurosawa's and was able to assist in his Career Resurrection in The '80s. Reportedly he originally planned to cast Toshiro Mifune in A New Hope with Alec Guinness as Plan B. He also used it for character archetypes that were atypical for the time, such as Princess Leia who takes over her own rescue attempt and Lando Calrissian as a charismatic businessman and complex, dramatic character played by a black actor with no commentary made. His production of Willow was a fantasy epic with a dwarf actor (Warwick Davis) as the Hero (preceding Peter Dinklage's celebrated turn as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones by thirty years). As a producer he funded Red Tails which dealt with the Tuskegee Airmen and highlighting an African-American story and setting, while also producing Mishima, an American film entirely in Japanese. Conversely, his appeal towards the Genre Throwback has sometimes produced ethnic and racial stereotypes that may not have stood the test of time.

Lucas is still indisputably a pioneer in film technology and special effects, both in his own films and through Industrial Light & Magic. Together they mastered the non-linear editing system, allowing previews of the process without physically cutting the film strips. He was a strong advocate for digital filmmaking, using the Star Wars prequels to push the R&D at companies like Sony and Panasonic to produce higher quality digital film cameras. Young Indiana Jones used extensive digital effects to expand crowd shots. He turned Robert Rodriguez onto the technology and believed it would lead to an increase of independent productions because of the lower cost by avoiding film reel development. He predicted this in the early 1990s, well before the release of District 9. Martin Scorsese remarked that whenever he wonders what the future of cinema would be like, he would simply visit Lucas at Skywalker Ranch and pick his brain, noting he has never been wrong.

In 2016 he was the subject of a biography by Brian Jay Jones, whose previous work was about Lucas' sometime collaborator Jim Henson. This is Jones' third biography, and his first on a still living person. There are other books including J. W. Rinzler's series on the making of Star Wars, a book of interviews edited by Guy Flatley, The Cinema of George Lucas by Marcur Hearn, Masters of Cinema: George Lucas by Karina Longworth, and Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas by Dale Pollock which was originally released in tandem with Return of the Jedi.


Filmography of George Lucas:

Director

  • Freiheit (1966, Student Film) — Showing a refugee trying to escape the Berlin Wall.
  • 1:42:06 (1966, Student Film) — Featuring a car race.
  • Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (1967, Short Film) — Later elaborated into a feature, and first got him notice.
  • Filmmaker (1968, Short Documentary) - Showing the making of Coppola's The Rain People, Coppola has said that this is an example of a making-of film better than the actual film.
  • THX 1138 (1971, Feature Debut) - Iconic science-fiction albeit commercially unsuccessful.
  • Bald: The Making of THX 1138 (1971, Short) — Largely showing shots of the various actors and actresses having their head shaved for his film.
  • American Graffiti (1973)
  • Star Wars: The creator, writer and chief visionary (until the sale to Disney) of the overall franchise. He directed four of the films (the most by any)

Writer and Producer

Other Work

  • Gimme Shelter (1970): Rockumentary about The Rolling Stones in which he worked as a cameraman.
  • The Godfather (1971): Worked as a second-unit director, shooting the footage used in the gangland murder montage, done in the style of a newspaper montage, that happens between Solozzo's death and Sonny's murder.
  • Apocalypse Now (1979): Provided financial support with no request for screen credit. Was originally supposed to be directed by him, planned alongside THX-1138 but eventually taken over by Coppola. Harrison Ford appears in a small cameo at the start as Colonel Lucas, as a tribute to his friend.
  • Game of Thrones (2011-19): Helped to direct a scene of the Season 8 premiere "Winterfell".


George Lucas and his works provide examples of:

  • Action Girl: A common trope in his movies. Whatever his shortcomings as a writer, his works are never short of strong, powerful female characters.
  • Actually Pretty Funny: He nearly died from laughter when Carrie Fisher roasted him.
  • Adam Westing: His appearance in Robot Chicken where he parodies his complicated relationship with the Expanded Universe, violently kicking writer Zeb Wells out of his office for making the mistake of associating him with it. Given Lucas in real life is known as a notoriously calm and polite man, seeing him scream in rage is very comedic.
  • invokedArtist Disillusionment: He seemed to let the fandom's negative reception of the Star Wars prequels get to him over time, which probably showed the most in the "Why would I make any more [Star Wars movies], when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?" quote after selling Lucasfilm to Disney.
  • Auteur License: Wrote, issued, and certified his license after the huge success of Star Wars. He actually said "screw you" to the Directors' Guild in 1981 and left the union after they demanded he put credits at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. In his last movies he didn't even need it, as he owned his own studio. In addition, George dislikes production companies messing with other people's movies, violating their "moral rights", and has spoken before Congress to advocate legal recognition of directors as creators entitled to copyright (it didn't take unfortunately). He argues that only a work's creator should be allowed to make changes to their work as they see fit.
  • Author Appeal: High-speed chase sequences. There's always at least one per movie. His car enthusiasm is also evident, all of his films have Technology Porn to varying degrees.
  • Author Usurpation: Star Wars was so successful that most people don't know or care about any of the other movies George Lucas made, except for the Indiana Jones movies. And even then, everyone always associates him with Star Wars first, Indiana second.
  • Became Their Own Antithesis: Experienced so much artistic neutering with his pre-Star Wars movies so much that it literally traumatized him, which led to a near-pathological fear of being told how to make his own movies, which led to his habit of updating Star Wars every few years.
    • This has ended up making him somewhat of a pariah in the general Hollywood system. When Empire came out he dropped out of the Directors' Guild when they started demanding more traditional opening credits for them. Ever since, he strove to make himself completely independent from Hollywood so that he could make his movies his way. With the financial clout Star Wars gave him, he noted about the time Revenge of the Sith came out that he has become his own meddling Hollywood system. As such, his Prequel films suffered for the fact that no one could really tell Lucas where he was going wrong.
    • Star Wars originally began as a modest homage to science-fiction serials which no major Hollywood studio would have given the attention and detail to what would be regarded as a B-Movie in the 50s and 60s, and yet the success of Star Wars led to the rise of the blockbuster and the success of the merchandise (whose rights Lucas entirely possessed), which in turn was cited by Lucas' friends and colleagues (Scorsese and John Milius), and lately Lucas himself, as closing the doors on the New Hollywood.
  • Creator Breakdown: His divorce from Marcia is often considered one. It led him to cancel his initial plans for Star Wars films, and it led to the mean-spirited nature of Temple of Doom.
  • Determinator: With the original Star Wars, he was insistent on getting the damn thing made through an infamously Troubled Production.
  • Dull Surprise: Due to his appeal towards dialogue that is heavily technical, filled with mysterious jargon or otherwise load bearing the plot, when he is directing a movie he expects it to be delivered it as it is. Actors have shared the numerous problems they had making it work, which is most prevalent in the Star Wars prequels due to the focus on monk-like Jedi or reserved politicians.
  • Fanservice: Puts it in his movies quite regularly.
  • George Lucas Altered Version: Trope Namer. He altered Star Wars and THX 1138 significantly after their initial releases (though the latter was done in response to the Executive Meddling that occurred during production rather than for personal taste). This has led "George Lucas" to enter the slang lexicon as a term for modification of a work after release.
  • Genre Throwback: Formerly "George Lucas Throwback", his works include several well-known examples:
  • Loose Canon: When he was still in charge of Star Wars, this seemed to be his attitude towards the expanded universe (renamed Legends). He technically allowed them to be canon, but he did not take them into account when telling new stories.
  • Merchandise-Driven: Part of what caused the Broken Base is just how much George has licensed for his various properties, especially Star Wars. Here's a brief overview.
  • No Origin Stories Allowed: George has stipulated that Yoda's species, homeworld, and origin cannot be revealed in Star Wars, and this still applies after the Continuity Reboot. Fan Fic doesn't abide by this, though; there's plenty of Fanon on it.
  • Old Shame:
  • One Degree of Separation: Lucas is the linchpin of the New Hollywood era, being one or two degrees away from Coppola (starting as his apprentice and co-producing many movies together), Spielberg (collaborating on Indiana Jones), Scorsese (via Marcia Lucas who edited Taxi Driver), De Palma (who suggested a modification for the title crawl of Star Wars), Milius (collaborator on the first drafts for Apocalypse Now), Schrader (producing Mishima). When Martin Scorsese was nominated for Best Director on The Departed, Lucas presented along with Coppola and Spielberg (which was itself a tell on who was going to win), and it turned into an impromptu roast on Lucas still not winning any Oscars among their generation.
  • The Other Darrin: A trope he seems to despise using unless absolutely necessary. Lucas has said that before he started searching for a company to sell his own to, he had contacted Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford, essentially saying that if they didn't have an interest in coming back for the next trilogy, he could write their characters out. This was also why the original series ended in a trilogy when it was intended to go for longer than that. Mark Hamill's car accident before Empire and Harrison Ford constantly going back-and-forth in terms of wanting to continue the series, led Lucas to believe he couldn't maintain the cast for long, and so he had to provide closure for the characters audiences cared for from A New Hope.
  • Parody Assistance: Lucas is a fan of Family Guy, describing it as one of the only TV shows he regularly watches. So naturally, when the show made a trilogy of episodes parodying the original ''Star Wars'' trilogy, Lucas not only gave his approval, but assisted with the production.
  • Production Posse: With Harrison Ford, albeit not intentionally. They got along well as friends but he didn't want Ford to be a part of all his movies, like Martin Scorsese had done with Robert DeNiro. But they brought in Ford to read for Han Solo just in the casting process and the crew fell in love with his take on the character. For Indiana Jones, scheduling issues with Tom Selleck led them back to Ford once more.
  • Re-Cut: There was precedence of filmmakers re-editing their movies after the original release long before Lucas became the poster-boy for it, including Steven Spielberg for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It's often a source of parody, if not outright flanderization, South Park featured a joke that had Lucas remastering home movies.
  • Retcon: The Special Editions of the original Star Wars movies and the prequels to said movies count. Of course the biggest and most successful retcon was the twist of Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back which was not planned in the first film and which Lucas himself introduced into the second film.
  • Self-Deprecation: His biggest critic of the dialogue of his movies is likely himself.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: His films are more on the idealistic end of the scale.
  • Special Edition: Trope Namer and, with Steven Spielberg, the co-Trope Codifier.
  • Stock Scream: He loves using the Wilhelm Scream in his movies, and it became so famous in Star Wars that everybody started using it.
  • Technician Versus Performer: The Technician to Steven Spielberg's Performer. He's actually expressed a lot of discomfort personally directing his movies, early in his career he preferred being an editor and only turned towards directing because they had more control over the footage. Most of the films he has made were partially testbeds for new filmmaking technologies.
    • In fact, Lucas only ever directed six feature films throughout his career: THX 1138, American Graffiti, Star Wars, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith.
    • On the other hand, many consider Lucas to be brilliant as an action film-maker, with the space battle in A New Hope and Revenge of the Sith cited as being the best of their kind.
  • Tribute to Fido: In the 1970s, his partner Marcia had a dog called Indiana, who helped inspire two characters of his: Star Wars' Chewbacca (being a big, furry dog that always sat up front with in his car) and the titular Indiana Jones (referenced in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where we find out Indy took the nickname from his childhood dog).
  • Troperiffic: Rather than try to avoid cliches, his works often embrace them wholeheartedly. As he himself once pointed out, "They became cliches because they work."
  • Troll: Wanted to build a production studio on his ranch in Marin County, California, but his wealthy neighbors protested the development, claiming that it would ruin their views. Rather than fighting them, Lucas backed down... and began work on a low-income housing project on the property instead. Served as both a hilarious "screw you" to his neighbors and as a sweet Pet the Dog moment, as affordable housing is a pressing issue in the Bay Area and Lucas pledged over $150 million of his own money to fund the project.
  • Trolling Creator: One possible interpretation of his remarks about Star Wars. Then again, if you had a fanbase like that, you would too.
  • Uncredited Role:
    • He had a brief uncredited cameo in Hook, alongside Carrie Fisher.
    • He was executive producer on Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat, mainly as a favor for Kasdan's help with the script for Return of the Jedi. Lucas went uncredited because he didn't want his work on an erotic thriller film to affect his family-friendly reputation from the first two Star Wars films.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Or in this case, what might not have been. Lucas abandoned his quest to become a race car driver due to a near-fatal accident. If he hadn't had the accident, he might have become a race car driver. On the other hand, he might have died. Eerily enough, he survived because a special protector for race cars that he'd installed failed and he was thrown from the car before its final impact, hitting a walnut tree hard enough to rip out half its roots.
    • John Milius first wrote the script for Apocalypse Now while he and Lucas were at USC together, intending for Lucas to direct it. Francis Ford Coppola later joked that this would have involved California Doubling with just two helicopters. Some reviews of Return of the Jedi also pointed out that the scenes on Endor were pretty much Lucas finally making his Vietnam movie.
    • He offered Disney several ideas for their Star Wars sequel trilogy upon turning over the rights, and was quite upset that none of them were used. The issue is muddled by contradictory statements from various sources (including Lucasfilm, Mark Hamill, Lucas himself, and Bob Iger, chairman of Disney at the time), about what exactly he came up with and what can be traced to him in the final products.
    • In a rare case of him completely missing the boat on an emerging new technology, he turned down the chance to get in on the ground floor at Pixar when some of the Lucasfilm employees got involved with computer animation. Lucas, however, needed money to cover his divorce costs, so he sold off the department to Steve Jobs, under whom it became Pixar and eventually immensely successful in its own right.
  • What You Are in the Dark: After Star Wars became an unexpected monster hit, he took his own cut of the profits and paid unofficial royalties to the main stars who otherwise didn't have it in their contracts. Mark Hamill said no one does that and it was never expected of him. This largely explains them as remaining True Companions over the years, with Hamill in particular being defensive with the backlash Lucas would get.

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