George Lucas

George Walton Lucas Jr. is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and entrepreneur. He is best known for creating the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and founding Lucasfilm, LucasArts, and Industrial Light & Magic. He served as chairman of Lucasfilm before selling it to The Walt Disney Company in 2012.

About George Lucas in brief

Summary George LucasGeorge Walton Lucas Jr. is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and entrepreneur. He is best known for creating the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and founding Lucasfilm, LucasArts, and Industrial Light & Magic. He served as chairman of Lucasfilm before selling it to The Walt Disney Company in 2012. Lucas is one of history’s most financially successful filmmakers and has been nominated for four Academy Awards. His films are among the 100 highest-grossing movies at the North American box office, adjusted for ticket-price inflation. He last collaborated on the CGI-animated television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the war film Red Tails, and the CGI film Strange Magic. Lucas was born and raised in Modesto, California, and is of German, Swiss-German, English, Scottish, and distant Dutch and French descent. His family attended Disneyland during its opening week in July 1955, and Lucas would remain enthusiastic about the park. He was interested in comics and science fiction, including television programs such as the Flash Gordon serials. Long before Lucas began making films, he yearned to be a racecar driver, and he spent most of his high school years racing on the underground circuit at fairgrounds and hanging out at garages. Lucas had been planning to go to art school, and declared upon leaving home that he would be a millionaire by the age of 30. He attended Modesto Junior College, where he studied anthropology, sociology, and literature, amongst other subjects.

He met renowned cinematographer Haskell Wexler, another race enthusiast, on several occasions to work with him on several films. He also began shooting with an 8 mm camera, including filming car races. Lucas saw classic European films, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Federico Fellini’s 8½½½ Breathless, and thought visually, he had a very good eye. He then transferred to the University of Southern Arts of California to study at the School of Cinematic Arts. In 1967, Lucas co-founded American Zoetrope with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas’s next film, the epic space opera Star Wars, had a troubled production but was a surprise hit, becoming the highest- grossing film at the time, winning six Academy Awards and sparking a cultural phenomenon. He returned to directing with a Star Wars prequel trilogy comprising StarWars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Star Wars Episode II – Attack of the Clones and Star Wars  Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. In 1997, Lucas re-released the StarWars Trilogy as part of a special edition featuring several alterations; home media versions with further changes were released in 2004 and 2011. He later 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. He also produced and wrote a variety of films and television series through Lucasfilm between the 1970s and the 2010s.