George Lucas

George Lucas was born in Modesto, California, in 1944, graduated from USC in 1967, and co-founded American Zoetrope with Francis Ford Coppola, which is the part of the story that gets forgotten. He came out of the same anti-studio New Hollywood generation as Coppola and Scorsese, and has spent most of his career refusing to work inside a studio.

His first two features are the evidence. THX 1138, expanded in 1971 from a student short, is a cold, formalist science fiction film that failed commercially. American Graffiti in 1973 is a loose, funny, jukebox-scored night in a small California town, drawn from his own adolescence in Modesto, and it earned five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture. Neither predicts what came next.

Star Wars worked in 1977 because it was assembled rather than invented: serial adventure, samurai film, war-movie dogfights, myth. Its real innovation was industrial. Lucas kept the merchandising and sequel rights, built Industrial Light and Magic to shoot effects nobody could buy, founded THX for sound reproduction and LucasArts for games, and in the process invented the modern franchise as a business. He then stepped away from directing for twenty-two years.

The prequels, from The Phantom Menace in 1999 through Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, are where opinion divides. He is least defensible there as a writer of dialogue and most interesting as a technologist, pushing digital capture and digital sets years before the industry was ready. He sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012. Three Hugo Awards, four Academy Award nominations and one enormous unresolved argument follow him around.