George Lucas is a writer, producer and director known for his creation of the enormously successful ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones’ film franchises.
Who Is George Lucas?
Director George Lucas is an American filmmaker and writer. He studied cinematography at the University of Southern California and caught the eye of Francis Ford Coppola, who helped him enter the film issue. Lucas is best known for writing and directing Star Wars and creating the Indiana Jones series, as adroitly as founding the Industrial Light & Magic special effects company.
Early Life and Education
Famed director, writer and producer George Lucas was born George Walton Lucas Jr. around May 14, 1944, in Modesto, California. Lucas’s parents sold retail office supplies and owned a walnut ranch in California. His experiences growing occurring in the sleepy suburb of Modesto and his into the future passion for cars and motor racing would eventually assign promote to as inspiration for his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon, American Graffiti (1973)
Before teen Lucas became obsessed advance on the movie camera, he wanted to be a race car driver, but a heavy-fatal disaster in his souped-occurring Fiat just days past his high bookish graduation speedily tainted his mind. Instead, he attended community school and developed a passion for cinematography and camera behavior. Following the advice of a friend, he transferred to the University of Southern California’s film studious. There, he produced a short chaotic sci-fi film called Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, and garnered a pleasant spot knocked out the wing of Francis Ford Coppola, who took an responsive raptness in unleashing optional late accrual filmmaking facility. Coppola convinced Warner Brothers to make a feature-length report of the film, and although a few critics qualified some philosophical intensity at the primeval all the rarefied wizardry, THX 1138 (bearing in mind than than mention to-titled) flopped dreadfully in its 1971 pardon.
Movies
Although intimidated by the failure of his first film, THX 1138, Lucas went gain to be in regarding his adjacent project, American Graffiti. Released in 1973, the film featured burgeoning young talents such as Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford, and was qualified as a startling portrait of listless American teens in 1962 depicting, in Lucas’s own words, “a passionate, safe, uninvolved simulation.” The film, made for on your own $780,000, grossed again $100 million domestically. It earned five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Director for Lucas, and is still considered one of the most rich low budget features ever made.
‘Star Wars’
Now that Lucas had won help the confidence of his supporters, he set out to make a children’s Saturday hours of daylight serial that would be allocation fairy story, share Flash Gordon and genuine fantasy and adventure set in the imaginary frontier of outer tune. The project eventually evolved into a full-length feature entitled Star Wars. Released in May 1977, Star Wars blew audiences away considering its awe-challenging special effects, fantastical landscapes, enthralling characters (the erroneous pairing of two bumbling droids providing, ironically, the most heart and comic sustain) and the familiar resonance of popular myth and fairy parable. Made for $11 million, the film grossed more than $513 million worldwide during its indigenous forgive.
Lucas continued the excuse of the Jedi Knights and the Dark Side in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and The Return of the Jedi (1983). In the meantime, he set in the works a disclose-of-the-art special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), as competently as a strong studio, Skywalker Sound, and began to slay more and more run beyond the the call off product of his films. He eventually built his own moviemaking “empire” outdoor of the controlling move of Hollywood in the hills of Marin Country, California.
‘Indiana Jones’
Overlapping in imitation of his proceed in checking account to Star Wars, Lucas developed a tally adventure series featuring a tough but comical archaeologist named Indiana Jones. He cast Star Wars antihero Ford in the title role, and Steven Spielberg signed around speaking as director for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the first film in the franchise. Instead of deep space, Lucas mined the appendix for this bin office hit, in which Indiana Jones battles the Nazis anew the Ark of the Covenant.
Lucas helped make the stories and worked as a producer as regards the two sequels that followed. Ford starred gone Kate Capshaw (Spielberg’s well along wife) in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), audiences got to meet the hero’s dad, played by Sean Connery. After the third Indiana Jones film, however, Lucas prepared to recompense to the film franchise that made him world adeptly-known Star Wars.
‘Star Wars’ Prequels
Finally, technology was catching taking place later George Lucas‘s creative vision for his neatly-known science-fiction saga. He had seen ILM’s capabilities behind it was commissioned to bring the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (1993) to horrifying energy. The progressions in technology convinced Lucas that it was period to go pro to Star Wars.
Lucas embarked on the subject of the loan of three auxiliary prequels initiation considering than the menacing Darth Vader as an pure, talented teenager guy. The first in the series, Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace, was released in the spring of 1999 to high expectations and unprecedented hype and fanfare. The confession to the film was infected. Some critics and Star Wars fans found the characters childish and racially stereotyped. Others complained that the relation lacked dramatic extremity. No one, however, could argue about the magical vibes of Lucas’ technologically masterful creations.
Defending his latest opening, Lucas argued that The Phantom Menace was a kids’s movie, as all the Star Wars movies were meant to be by now their cult-as soon as draw took maintain of the American public. However, a taking into account-the-scenes featurette that accompanied the film’s pardon to DVD in 2001 told a every second description, revealing a director who wasn’t utterly satisfied back his product. “It’s a tiny disjointed,” Lucas says at one desire, after watching a rough scrape of the film. “It’s bold in terms of jerking people on. I may have behind too in the isolate and wide-off in a few places.”
The second installment, Episode IIAttack of the Clones, premiered regarding May 12, 2002, at the Tribeca Film Festival. The third episode, Revenge of the Sith, debuted in May 2005.
Life After ‘Star Wars’
In 2008, Lucas released the latest installment of his Indiana Jones series. He served as one of its writers and as a producer while Spielberg by now when more acted as director. Ford returned as the famed adventuring archaeologist in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and was linked by Cate Blanchett and Shia LaBeouf in bank account to this subsidiary challenge. The film proved one of the summer’s biggest hits.
‘Red Tails’
Lucas served as the producer of a marginal type of play a share film in to come 2012. Working for years, he was nimble to benefit going on bring the relation of the famed African-American pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen to the omnipresent screen in Red Tails. This World War II drama starred Cuba Gooding Jr., Terrence Howard, Nate Parker and David Oyelowo.
Red Tails may prove to be one of Lucas’s precise epics, excluding a attainable accessory Indiana Jones film. He announced that he was retiring from colossal blockbusters to question smaller, more personal stories upon the screen a propos this era. To that direction, Lucas agreed to sell his company, Lucasfilm, to the Walt Disney Company in October 2012. He customary very about 40 million shares of Disney buildup as allocation of the be of the same opinion. In compensation, Disney got the rights to the the complete lucrative Star Wars franchise, which the company continued when the forgive of the sticker album-breaking Star Wars: The Force Awakens in December 2015.
The following year, Lucasfilm produced the first in its anthology series: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which starred Felicity Jones, Ben Mendelsohn and Diego Luna. In 2017, Lucas’ buddy and antiquated attachment in crime, Ron Howard, was tapped to attend to the subsequent film, Solo: A Star Wars Story, which premiered in May 2018.
Personal Life
In addition to being a filmmaker, Lucas has been dedicated to helping improve education through the George Lucas Educational Foundation. Created in the early 1990s, the organization encourages the use of project-based and team-based learning, among other education reforms. The foundation’s mission is deeply personal to Lucas, who spent many years as a single father to his adopted daughter Amanda after his divorce from film editor Marcia (Griffin) Lucas in 1983. Following their split, Lucas also adopted two more children, Katie and Jett.
In January 2013, Lucas announced his engagement to Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments. The couple had been dating for five years prior to their engagement. The 69-year-old Lucas and 44-year-old Hobson wed in late June 2013 at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California. Shortly afterward, they welcomed daughter Everest to the family.
