George Lucas is a writer-director-producer who in one capacity or another has been involved in the making of six of the most commercially successful movies in Hollywood history. Lucas grew up in Modesto, California, with a penchant for car racing. This passion was considerably cooled after his miraculous survival of a serious car accident. After two years of junior college, George Lucas began to study film at USC, where he made a science fiction short titled THX-1138 that won first prize at the 1965 National Student Film Festival. A scholarship followed that allowed him the opportunity of watching FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA direct Finian's Rainbow (1968). Coppola took Lucas under his wing, and doors soon began to open.
He cowrote the screenplay, based on his own story, and directed the film on a tiny $700,000 budget. It turned out to be the year's biggest hit film.Despite the success of American Graffiti, George Lucas had trouble finding financing for his next film, a science fiction movie with a $9 million budget. It was to be a film without stars in a genre that had been box-office poison since the early 1960s. TWENTIETH CENTURY–FOX finally gave George Lucas the money, and Star Wars became the biggest grossing film of all time (later supplanted by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial).
The success of Star Wars (1977) has had an enormous impact on the American movie industry. For example, the May 25 release of the gargantuan hit extended the summer movie season forevermore (it now begins on "George Lucas Day," two weeks before its earlier traditional beginning). George Lucas's Star Wars also drove home the point that young people, in particular, would pay to see a film over and over again and that special effects would bring massive numbers of people into movie theaters.
Star Wars elevated George Lucas to the very height of directorial power. Yet George Lucas has not directed a movie since. He has chosen, instead, to either write and/or produce his films. He provided the original stories and acted as executive producer for the two other Star Wars epics, The Empire Strikes Back (1979) and Return of the Jedi (1983). Along with STEVEN SPIELBERG, George Lucas conceived and produced the Spielberg-directed Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). The Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones films became six of the top-grossing films of all time.
The overwhelming commercial success of Star Wars allowed George Lucas to make The Empire Strikes Back (1979) with his own money. The huge bankroll earned on the second Star Wars film made it possible for George Lucas to establish his own company, George Lucas film, and its special-effects subsidiary, Industrial Light and Magic, both of which are located on 3,000 acres in Northern California, on George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch, named for the hero of the Star Wars films, Luke Skywalker.
George Lucas's touch hasn't always been golden. He was the executive producer of More American Graffiti (1979), a minor misstep compared to his involvement in the cataclysmic flop Howard the Duck (1986). But George Lucas didn't write either of those failures. After five years without a writing credit, George Lucas returned to the creative wars, penning the script and producing the fantasy epic Willow (1988), directed by RON HOWARD, which was disappointing. His script for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, however, was particularly well received by the critics. As for the muchdiscussed remaining installments of the Star Wars opus, George Lucas would only say that he was thinking about them.
George Lucas returned to Star Wars in a big way in 1997 when he rereleased the movie in a reedited and updated version with new and improved special effects. Updated versions of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi followed the same year, the rerelease of the original trilogy becoming a prelude to George Lucas's new Star Wars films. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace hit theaters in 1999; this told the story of the first of nine proposed chapters in George Lucas's space opera. Phantom Menace was a huge box-office hit that featured cutting- edge special effects and enjoyed more hype and attention than any other movie released that year.
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