George Lucas - Biography

Arguably the most important film innovator working today, George Lucas has continually "pushed the envelope" of filmmaking technology since his early days as a student at USC. Considered a wunderkind by his contemporaries, he had a much harder time communicating his vision to studio executives, whose meddling managed to compromise each of his first three feature directing efforts in some way. The monumental success of "Star Wars" (1977) ushered in the era of the 'blockbuster', which, despite the recent popularity of low-budget, independent films, is still the prevailing mentality powering the Hollywood engine. Though he set the tone and established the expectations influencing studios to devote the bulk of their energy and resources to films designed to blast off into hyperspace and earn spectacular profits, it is doubtful that a film as revolutionary as "Star Wars" was in its day could get made in the current climate.

The son of a Modesto, California retail businessman, Lucas grew up tinkering with cars and dreaming of glory at the race track until a near-fatal auto crash derailed his driving ambitions, forcing him behind the scenes as a mechanic. He had already begun experimenting with both still photography and 8-mm movies when an assignment to help build a racing car introduced him to its owner, distinguished cinematographer Haskell Wexler, with whose encouragement he began to pursue filmmaking seriously. At USC he studied animation, moved to cinematography and excelled at editing, making eight student films ranging from one minute to 25 minutes. As the winner of a Warner Bros. scholarship, he came in contact with Francis Ford Coppola, and the two quickly became allies and close friends, Lucas serving as "general assistant, assistant art director, production aide, general do everything" for Coppola's "The Rain People" (1969). When Coppola opened his American Zoetrope production company (with its ultra modern editing equipment) in a San Francisco warehouse, Lucas was its vice-president.

An expanded version of Lucas' award-winning short "Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138: 4EB" (1968) was Zoetrope's first film, but Warner Bros., on whom Coppola depended for financial backing, despised "THX-1138" (1971), withdrew their support of Zoetrope and demanded the return of their money already invested, signaling the end of the production company for the time being. Warners did, however, release the picture, cutting five minutes and providing half-hearted promotion, to mixed reviews. Almost universally praised as a "dazzling technical achievement" with "stunning visuals and sound" (Walter Murch provided the sound track), "THX-1138" scored no points with critics for its Orwellian theme of the individual asserting himself against an authoritarian society policed by robots. Though the overall effect was cold and sterile, the zombie characters incapable of stirring sympathy, it was an extremely professional first film, one which its director re-released in 1977 with the missing five minutes restored. THX lives on today as the name of the Lucas company which designs sound for theaters and home entertainment systems.

Wanting to break the industry's conception of him as a "science-fiction guy" with "stainless steel in my veins", Lucas decided to make a crowd-pleasing comedy, proving with "American Graffiti" (1973) that a warm-funny film with an emphasis on personalities was well within his capabilities. His vision was once again at odds with the studios, but Universal finally agreed to make the script (inspired by a conversation with producer Gary Kurtz and written by Lucas with Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck), providing it could be done very cheaply. With Coppola and Kurtz co-producing, Lucas filmed "Graffiti" for $780,000 in 28 days on location in two small towns near San Francisco, his good friend Wexler taking over the camerawork when the director worked himself into a state of exhaustion. Shooting almost entirely at night, with very low light, they achieved a "curious golden radiance" that would distinguish the picture, but when Universal executives first saw the film at a crowded preview, they hated it, despite the enthusiastic response of the test audience.

The studio brass at Universal felt threatened by Lucas' prodigious talent, and "Graffiti" was so different from the cookie-cutter movies they were comfortable with that it scared them. Coppola pulled out his checkbook at the preview and offered to buy the film, but the executives refused, preferring instead to torment Lucas with a plan to bypass a theatrical release and show it on TV. Considering the nostalgia boom it spawned, it is difficult to understand their fears today, but its reliance on rock "oldies" for its structure seemed hopelessly "B-movie" to them. They did not realize that Lucas was anticipating the zeitgeist, that by setting his film in 1962, he was evoking "the end of a political era, a sociological era, a rock era . . . a warm, secure, uninvolved life." Universal finally relented and released "Graffiti" at the end of the summer (after humiliating Lucas with a four and a half minute cut), and it was an immediate word-of-mouth hit with its target audience, eventually grossing more than $100 million.

It was the last time Lucas would relinquish final cut but not his last war with a studio. Critical respectability and box office success had not made him bankable when pushing his own projects, and he had a difficult time interesting anybody in his proposed live-action comic book with high-tech effects. Three studio chiefs had told him to get lost. Only Alan Ladd Jr at 20th Century Fox believed in his vision, green-lighting "Star Wars" in 1974 for about $10 million. But Ladd would have a running battle with the Fox board, which insisted it was not commercial right until its blockbuster opening (May 27, 1977) marked a dramatic shift in the culture. With "Star Wars", Lucas drew on his love of racing, creating a two-hour-long image of raw speed that foreshadowed the media-induced state of speed that has become a condition of modern life. Proving himself a master of the long view, he also flabbergasted Fox executives by forgoing his option to receive an additional $500,000 for directing the movie and taking the merchandising and sequel rights instead.

Lucas had wanted to purchase the rights to the "Flash Gordon" comics but found the price prohibitive. Instead, he set about creating his own world, inventing a future that smacked of the past while figuring out a way to strike the archetypal jugular of his audience. In order to come up with his own nonsectarian "Star Wars" mythology, he studied the work of Joseph Campbell, among other sources, took structural elements from many different myths and combined them into an epic story which filled the moral void left by the demise of the traditional Western. He borrowed heavily from film-school canon, drawing inspiration from Kurosawa's "Hidden Fortress" for the lightsabres of the Jedi Knights, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" for C3PO's look and Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" for the ceremony at the end. Alec Guinness in a way reprised his role from "Lawrence of Arabia", Harrison Ford played Butch Cassidy and Lucas incorporated the references with a childlike naivete into a postmodernist commentary on the history of popular film.

Worn out by the monumental ordeal of coordinating hundreds of cast and crew members, Lucas retired from directing after "Star Wars", retaining control of the script as executive producer and hiring directors like Irvin Kershner ("The Empire Strikes Back" 1980), Richard Marquand ("Return of the Jedi" 1983) and Steven Spielberg (the Indiana Jones trilogy). He poured his fortune into Skywalker Ranch, a secluded, three-thousand acre, Victorian-style work paradise surrounded by groves of eucalyptus and redwood in Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco, where he forges technological breakthroughs serving the editing and production process. Conceived as a complete filmmaking operation, Skywalker Ranch is headquarters of Lucasfilm, companies with an estimated worth in excess of $5 billion (FORBES puts Lucas' personal worth at $2 billion), employing twelve hundred people. One of those companies, Industrial Light & Magic, located 15 inefficient miles away in San Rafael, houses legions of young geeks diligently constructing "polys", the basic elements of computer graphics, in an endless endeavor to produce special effects never seen before.

Lucas' day-to-day activities include the management of the Star Wars story, which is probably the most carefully tended secular story on earth. Everyone in the content-creating galaxy of Star Wars has a copy of 'The Bible', a finite, expanding chronology of all the events that have ever occurred in the Star Wars universe (films, books, CD-ROMs, comic books, et al), maintained by continuity editors. Lucas has the last word on all creative decisions. For example, when Bantam wanted to do the back story of Yoda, guru of 'The Force', the guardian of the tale nixed the notion because he wanted the character to remain a mysterious figure. Taking advantage of the booming interest in his myth, Lucas re-released digitally-enhanced versions of the three "Star Wars" movies in 1997 to a staggering box office. "Star Wars" (the first film) earned $35.9 million its opening weekend on 2,100 screens as opposed to $1.6 million on 43 screens during its 1977 opening. He returned to the director's chair after 20 years to helm "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" (1999). The colossal buzz preceding the prequel's release proved anticlimactic when it finally hit theaters: although the movie generate huge box office grosses, fans came away somewhat disappointed that despite all of Lucas' breakthroughs in digital technology, he seemed to have lost a step when it came to storytelling and creating characters as iconic and compelling as those in the original trilogy. Despite some canny casting--including Liam Neeson, Ewan MacGregor and Natalie Portman--and many captivating visual elements--such as the climactic lightsaber battle and the demonic look of the villainous Darth Maul--Lucas took heat for the film's mostly lugubrious pace, the weak performance of young actor Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker and particularly for the annonying digitally-created alien Jar Jar Binks. The director was unbowed and, instead of handing off to a new director, proceeded to helm the next instalment as well , "Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones" (2002). Though much better received by critics and fans (both casual and diehard), the sequel also suffered from wooden dialogue, a mostly charmless performance by the new Anakin (Hayden Christensen) and a preponderence of computer-generated effects. Fans were pleased by the lessening of the Jar Jar character's role and the new all-digital version of Yoda created for a lightsaber battle. Lucas concluded the series with "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith" (2005), well-reviewed and widely accepted as the best of the prequels (and the darkest, earning "Star Wars'" first PG-13 rating) if still not nearly as effective as any of the originals. Through the film was filled with brilliant visual concepts, spectacular special effects, better acting and plotlines ripe with potential, Lucas the screenwriter still fell short of delivering a finalized story and dialogue as dramatic and compelling as those in his initial trilogy. Nevertheless, the hype and anticipation factors were high, and the film broke the single-day box office record with a $50 million haul.

Although press reports claimed Lucas originally conceived as a cycle of nine movies, Lucas decided that "Star Wars" saga would not exceed six, claiming that he would be roughly 80 years old when he might revisit the franchise and doubted that he will have the energy to further it. Instead, he announced plans to continue "Star Wars" on television, first by expanding animator Genndy Tartakovsky's spin-off series "Clone Wars," which began airing three-minute-long segments on the Cartoon Network in 2003, into full 30-minute episodes; and second with a planned 100-episode live-action series set between Episodes III and IV. In 2002 he--along with collaborators Spielberg and Ford-- announced plans to resurrect his second major on-screen enterprise, Indiana Jones, for a fourth and likely final outing. Meanwhile, in 2003 Lucas announced plans to consolidate his film production company, Lucasfilm, his special effects house, Lucas Digital, and video game company, LucasArts Entertainment, under the name Lucasfilm Ltd. As a result, most of the company's 2,000 employees relocated to the company's Digital Arts Center campus at San Francisco's Presidio in 2005.

"I've always had a basic dislike of authority figures, a fear and resentment of grown-ups," Lucas said in "Skywalking", Dale Pollock's 1983 biography, and it is childhood that has remained the source of his magic, burning bright despite his becoming an old-fashioned, paternalistic boss. In a way, "Star Wars" is a metaphor for his own life. He is Luke. Estranged from his father (Darth Vader), he came under the protective influence of Coppola (Obi-Wan), who helped him get his first film made, and as Luke has to contend with the qualities he may have inherited from his father, Lucas cannot deny he has become the successful, fiscally-conservative businessman his father always wanted him to be. He changed movies forever because he saw them through the eyes of a child, jettisoning character and complexity for non-stop action. The concept of an "action beat" every ten minutes to propel a story is one part of the Lucas legacy, coupled with his high tech quest to achieve unparalleled visual effects in filmmaking.