George Lucas

The Accident That Invented a Filmmaker

George Lucas nearly died on June 12, 1962. He was driving his small Autobianchi Bianchina down a road in Modesto when another car slammed into him head-on. The impact threw him out of the vehicle just before it crashed into a tree. That accident ended his dream of becoming a racecar driver, but it opened the door to film school.

At the University of Southern California he met a group of young people who wanted to blow up Hollywood from the inside. Among them was Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas wasn't interested in telling love stories or classic dramas. He preferred abstract film and observational documentaries.

His first feature film grew out of a university short film. In 1971 he released THX 1138 with the backing of Coppola's production company. The film was a dark dystopia where sex was banned and citizens lived sedated.

Nobody understood that cold, sterile debut.

Warner Bros. hated the final cut, and the box office failure was total. But Lucas learned a lesson he would apply for the rest of his life: he needed to control the money so that no one could ever touch his films again. So he founded Lucasfilm in 1971 and decided to shoot something completely different from his first work.

The Student Who Hated the System

In 1973 he presented American Graffiti. It was a love letter to his teenage years in California and to nights of cars and rock and roll. Universal Pictures didn't believe in the project, but the film grossed $115 million on a budget of barely $700,000.

That success gave him the capital he needed to finance his next crazy project. Lucas wanted to shoot a space opera inspired by the Flash Gordon serials and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. The writing process was a nightmare of rejected drafts and unpronounceable names.

But the real masterstroke happened in the boardroom. Lucas gave up a raise in his director's salary in exchange for keeping the sequel rights and all the merchandising for Star Wars. At the time, the studios thought T-shirts and plastic toys were worthless.

And the gamble paid off.

When the film premiered in May 1977, lines wrapped around the block outside movie theaters. Lucas wasn't there to see it. He was in Hawaii with Steven Spielberg, trying to process the fact that he had become the richest man in independent film.

The Loneliness of the Independent Millionaire

The success of the galactic saga allowed him to create Industrial Light & Magic. This visual effects company changed the way images were made and made digital cinema possible. But Lucas stepped away from the director's chair for more than twenty years to focus on producing.

In 1981 he produced Raiders of the Lost Ark and helped create Indiana Jones. Meanwhile, he was building Skywalker Ranch in Marin County. It wasn't a conventional movie studio but a technological retreat where he could edit and mix sound away from the pressure of Los Angeles.

In 1999 he returned to directing with Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. He wanted to explore the limits of digital effects, but critics gave it a frosty reception. Despite the attacks from longtime fans, the three prequels raked in astronomical box office numbers and laid the technical groundwork for 21st-century cinema.

Then he stepped away from the spotlight.

In 2012 he sold Lucasfilm to Disney for $4,050 million. He dismantled his empire to devote himself to philanthropy and his family. Instead of making movies, he began collecting narrative art and designing a massive museum to house his pieces.

In May 2024, he received the Palme d'Or Honorary Award at the Cannes Film Festival for his body of work. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles is scheduled to open in 2025, with a construction budget of more than $1,000 million.