50 Fun Facts About George Lucas

George Lucas was born in 1944 in which California city, later the setting of American Graffiti?

Modesto. Its weekend ritual of cruising up and down the main streets, which he joined as a teenager, became the whole subject of American Graffiti a decade later.

What career did the teenage Lucas dream of before a near-fatal crash in June 1962 changed his mind?

Racing driver. Days before his high-school graduation his souped-up little car was hit and rolled into a tree; he has said nobody should have survived it, and that it made him start applying himself.

George Lucas transferred to the film school of which institution, where his classmates included John Milius and Walter Murch?

USC. In 2006 he repaid the film school with a gift of about $175 million, then the largest single donation the university had received.

Why was George Lucas turned down when he tried to join the US Air Force as an officer after film school?

Too many speeding tickets. The army then drafted him for Vietnam instead, but the medical tests turned up diabetes and he was excused from service altogether.

Which documentary of the Rolling Stones' ill-fated 1969 Altamont concert had George Lucas among its camera operators?

Gimme Shelter. Its cameras caught the moment that made the concert infamous: a Hells Angel stabbing a young fan to death in front of the stage.

With which filmmaker did Lucas co-found the studio American Zoetrope in 1969?

Francis Ford Coppola. They met when Lucas won a studio scholarship to watch him direct Finian's Rainbow, and they moved 400 miles north to make films beyond Hollywood's control.

Which actor starred in Lucas's 1971 debut THX 1138, a dystopia of mandatory drugs and banned reproduction?

Robert Duvall. He shaved his head for the part, like nearly all the cast, only for the studio to take the film away from its director, recut it and let it sink.

Which Star Wars actor plays American Graffiti's drag racer?

Harrison Ford. He was earning his living as a carpenter when he took the small part of Bob Falfa, and the director who cast him made him Han Solo four years later.

American Graffiti was made for a budget of roughly how much?

$800,000, or $777,000 to be exact. Universal thought the film fit only for television, yet it took well over $100 million and became one of the most profitable pictures ever made.

Star Wars borrowed part of its story from The Hidden Fortress, a 1958 adventure by which Japanese director?

Akira Kurosawa. Lucas later repaid the debt, fulfilling a long-held ambition by signing on as an executive producer of the director's 1980 epic Kagemusha.

Which real disc jockey appears as himself in American Graffiti?

Wolfman Jack. Listeners had never known the face behind the growl, and the film plays on the mystery: the hero tracks him down at the station, where he pretends to be just a hired hand.

Lucas wrote Star Wars only after failing to obtain the rights to which serial from his childhood?

Flash Gordon. Unable to buy it, he set out to work out what had made the old serial so thrilling and to write a space adventure of his own, one that nobody else would hold the rights to.

At which studio did Alan Ladd Jr. back Star Wars after others had turned it down?

20th Century Fox. By Lucas's account, Ladd said the script made no sense to him but, having liked American Graffiti, he chose to bet on the film-maker instead.

Rather than a bigger fee for directing Star Wars, what did Lucas ask the studio for?

Merchandising and sequel rights. Almost no film then made real money from toys, so the studio gave way cheaply; the rights went on to earn his company hundreds of millions of dollars.

Which film displaced Star Wars as the highest-grossing film of all time?

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It held the title for over a decade, but Star Wars had the last laugh in North America, taking the top spot back when it returned to cinemas in 1997.

Lucas's chest pains during the editing of Star Wars turned out to be what?

Hypertension and exhaustion. He had been rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack, and the scare helped persuade him to hand the directing of the sequels to other people.

Lucas's first wife Marcia won an Academy Award for which craft on Star Wars?

Film editing. She shared the Oscar with two fellow editors, which means the film's creator, who has never won a competitive Academy Award himself, saw his wife win one for it.

George Lucas built Star Wars on the 'hero's journey' traced through world myths by which scholar?

Joseph Campbell. Lucas felt children no longer had a mythology to give them a sense of values, so he built one from the story patterns Campbell had found repeated across the world's cultures.

George Lucas handed the directing of which Star Wars film to Irvin Kershner?

The Empire Strikes Back. Lucas weighed up around a hundred directors before picking Kershner, telling him he knew everything a Hollywood director should know without being Hollywood.

Which effects house did George Lucas set up in a Van Nuys warehouse in 1975 to make Star Wars?

Industrial Light & Magic. No studio was equipped to produce the shots he imagined, so he had John Dykstra, a young specialist in computer-controlled cameras, build an effects team from scratch.

The hero of Raiders of the Lost Ark was first called Indiana Smith; where did Lucas get 'Indiana'?

His Alaskan Malamute. The big, shaggy dog is also credited as the model for Chewbacca, and the third film turns the story into a joke when the hero's father reveals 'we named the dog Indiana'.

Where was George Lucas hiding from the Star Wars opening in May 1977 when the Indiana Jones idea was revived?

Hawaii. On the beach a director friend said he longed to make a James Bond film, and Lucas told him he had something better: a whip-cracking archaeologist he had been saving for years.

Who recommended composer John Williams to Lucas for Star Wars?

Steven Spielberg. Williams had just scored Jaws for him, and by the composer's own account Spielberg rang to say he had persuaded a young director the composer had never heard of to meet him.

By John Williams's account, George Lucas first meant to score Star Wars with existing classical recordings, like which film?

2001: A Space Odyssey. Lucas denies he ever meant to keep existing music, but the composer recalls arguing for an original score, with new themes that could develop along with the drama.

Which pop star played the lead in Captain EO, the 3-D space film Lucas produced for Disney's theme parks?

Michael Jackson. He sang and danced through the 17-minute film, which Disney's parks screened for more than a decade and brought back in 2010 as a tribute after his death.

In 1986 Lucas sold the computer graphics group that became Pixar for roughly how much?

$5 million, with the buyer putting in as much again to keep the young company running. Twenty years later Disney paid more than seven billion dollars for it.

THX, the cinema sound standard from Lucas's company, was created to do justice to which film's soundtrack?

Return of the Jedi. Lucas and his audio scientist had found that however carefully a film was mixed, nobody controlled how it sounded in the cinema, so they wrote a standard for the cinemas themselves.

Which 1986 film is remembered as the biggest flop of George Lucas's career as a producer?

Howard the Duck. Long before Marvel ruled the box office, this adaptation of one of its comics earned back only about half of its budget in American cinemas.

Which fantasy film directed by Ron Howard did Lucas executive-produce in 1988?

Willow. The story was Lucas's own, and for the spell that turns a sorceress from one animal into another his effects house broke new ground with digital morphing.

Lucas's secluded ranch workplace near Nicasio is in which California county?

Marin. By pure coincidence the ranch stands on Lucas Valley Road, which was named long before the film-maker arrived, after a local landowner who was no relation.

George Lucas fired Charles Weber, the president of his company, after Weber called what a cash drain?

Skywalker Ranch. Weber, a real-estate man hired to run the business, was also pressing for outside investments; Lucas replied that the ranch was the only thing that counted, and let him go.

In 1997 Lucas re-released the original trilogy with digital modifications under what name?

The Special Editions. Lucas said the new effects brought the films closer to what he had always intended, and he went on changing them again for DVD in 2004 and for Blu-ray in 2011.

What persuaded George Lucas to start making new Star Wars films in the 1990s?

Digital effects had matured. Watching his own effects house bring the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park to life convinced him that technology had finally caught up with the saga he wanted to film.

Lucas brought in Jonathan Hales, a writer from his Young Indiana Jones series, to help script which Star Wars film?

Attack of the Clones. The screenplay ran so late that, by the producer's account, the crew were building sets for a film whose script did not yet exist.

Whom did Lucas pick as supervising director of the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008–2014)?

Dave Filoni. Lucas hired him in 2005 from the crew of Avatar: The Last Airbender and taught him the trade over years of episodes; in 2026 the pupil was named president of the whole studio.

Red Tails (2012), which Lucas self-funded, tells the story of which group?

The Tuskegee Airmen. Lucas had nursed the project since the late 1980s, paid for it out of his own pocket, and ended up directing the reshoots himself.

Lucas sold his company to Disney in 2012 for a reported sum of roughly how much?

$4 billion, or $4.05 billion to be exact, half in cash and half in Disney shares. Lucas said he meant to give most of the proceeds away.

Who was appointed co-chair of Lucas's company in June 2012 and later succeeded him as its sole leader?

Kathleen Kennedy. The producer of Jurassic Park ran the studio for fourteen years, overseeing every Star Wars film made after its founder sold up, before stepping down in 2026.

After the 2012 sale, Lucas became Disney's second-largest individual shareholder, behind whose estate?

Steve Jobs. His shares were Disney's payment for Pixar, the very company he had bought from Lucas in 1986, so the seller of that deal ended up ranked just behind its buyer.

Which Star Wars film did Lucas criticise for having a 'retro feel'?

The Force Awakens. He complained that its makers 'wanted to do a retro movie', and said he had worked hard to give each of his own six films new planets and new spaceships.

Strange Magic (2015), which Lucas wrote, was his first attempt at what kind of film?

A musical. The animated fairy tale, loosely inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, tells its story through pop songs from several decades, a trick borrowed from the wall-to-wall jukebox soundtrack of American Graffiti.

After leaving Chicago in 2016, where was the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art built?

Exposition Park, Los Angeles. It opened in September 2026, more than a decade after San Francisco turned down his first plan and a parks group's lawsuit sank the second, on Chicago's lakefront.

Lucas's wife Mellody Hobson, a Chicago investment executive, was chairman of which animation studio when they married in 2013?

DreamWorks Animation. Hobson, who has run the investment firm Ariel since 2000, chaired the Shrek studio's board until it was sold to NBCUniversal in 2016.

George Lucas has described his religion as what?

Buddhist Methodist. Raised in a churchgoing Methodist family, he came to Eastern philosophy while studying it for his films, and once joked that where he lives 'we're all Buddhists'.

Which American painter does George Lucas collect, sharing a 2010 Smithsonian show of 57 works with a fellow director?

Norman Rockwell. The show, Telling Stories, set out to trace the links between his scenes of American life and the movies; both directors saw a kindred storyteller in him, and every work came from their own walls.

Which film festival gave George Lucas its top honorary award in 2024?

Cannes. Its honorary Palme d'Or closed a circle: in 1971 the studio would not send him to the festival with his first film, so he paid his own way and, with no ticket, sneaked into the screening.

To stretch its budget, George Lucas shot most of the studio scenes of Star Wars in which country?

England. Soundstages near London were then far cheaper than Hollywood's, and the arrangement stuck: the same studio complex later housed Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The charitable foundation that bears George Lucas's name, begun in 1991, is devoted to improving what?

Education. The foundation, known online as Edutopia, champions hands-on, project-based learning, an unlikely cause for a man who calls himself a terrible high-school student.

Leaving home, Lucas declared he would be what by the age of 30?

A millionaire. His father had refused to pay for art school, and the boast came true with time to spare: American Graffiti made him rich almost overnight, before he turned 30.

Which president presented George Lucas with the National Medal of Arts?

Barack Obama. The citation credited Lucas with films that had 'transported us to new worlds'; the medal, dated 2012, was presented at the White House the following July.