George Lucas is born in Modesto, California. His imagination and drive will make him one of the most successful independent directors and producers in film history.
Lucas met Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola at the USC film school. Lucas and Coppola formed the indie studio American Zoetrope in 1969.
Lucas’s first film for that fledgling enterprise was sci-fi dystopia THX 1138. Its fearsome vision of a futurist society governed by dispassionate machines intent on eradicating freedom would reappear in Lucas’s world-beating franchise: Star Wars.
But THX 1138 didn’t make money. That was left to Lucas’s nostalgic ’60s comedy American Graffiti, which was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director.
His firm Lucasfilm spawned special-effects pioneers Industrial Light and Magic, audio innovators Skywalker Sound, the high-fidelity sound reproduction standard THX, game peddler LucasArts, and Pixar—the award-winning animation studio bought in 1986 by Apple guru Steve Jobs (see here). But it was his spiritual space opera Star Wars that took Lucas from cinema standout to cultural and business influential. Lucas waived his up-front director’s fee for Star Wars in favor of 40 percent of the box-office receipts and full ownership of the merchandising rights. Smart move: the epochal success of Star Wars netted Lucas hundreds of millions in revenue, setting the stage for the franchising and licensing deals we now take for granted.
Sequels and prequels followed. Forbes has estimated that Star Wars films, toys, games, comics, paraphernalia, and ephemera have earned around $20 billion. Lucas himself is worth about $3 billion. Lucas has championed a national educational wireless-broadband network, supported the Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington, and lavishly funded the film school that gave him his break.
Happy birthday, O Master Jedi.—ST