George Lucas Trivia
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50 free George Lucas trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
George Lucas created Star Wars and Indiana Jones, founded Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic and THX, and helped birth Pixar along the way, yet he has never won a competitive Oscar. This quiz covers the man behind the franchises: the teenage racing crash that changed his plans, film school with the "Dirty Dozen", THX 1138 and American Graffiti, the merchandising deal that made him a billionaire, the friends and collaborators from Coppola to Spielberg to John Williams, the flops like Howard the Duck, the prequels, the sale to Disney and the museum he is building in Los Angeles. Easy questions ask where he was born and which company he sold in 2012; harder ones cover the budget of American Graffiti, the dog that named Indiana Jones and why the Air Force turned him down. It suits Star Wars fans who want to look behind the camera, film-history students, and quiz nights that need a movies round with some depth. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Lucas, his films and his companies, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01George Lucas was born in 1944 in which California city, later the setting of American Graffiti?
Modesto
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.
Q 02What career did the teenage Lucas dream of before a near-fatal crash in June 1962 changed his mind?
Racing driver
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.
Q 03George Lucas transferred to the film school of which institution, where his classmates included John Milius and Walter Murch?
USC
USC. In 2006 he repaid the film school with a gift of about $175 million, then the largest single donation the university had received.
Q 04Why was George Lucas turned down when he tried to join the US Air Force as an officer after film school?
Too many speeding tickets
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.
Q 05Which documentary of the Rolling Stones' ill-fated 1969 Altamont concert had George Lucas among its camera operators?
Gimme Shelter
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.
Q 06With which filmmaker did Lucas co-found the studio American Zoetrope in 1969?
Francis Ford Coppola
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.
Q 07Which actor starred in Lucas's 1971 debut THX 1138, a dystopia of mandatory drugs and banned reproduction?
Robert Duvall
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.
Q 08Which Star Wars actor plays American Graffiti's drag racer?
Harrison Ford
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.
Q 09American Graffiti was made for a budget of roughly how much?
$800,000
$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.
Q 10Star Wars borrowed part of its story from The Hidden Fortress, a 1958 adventure by which Japanese director?
Akira Kurosawa
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.
Q 11Which real disc jockey appears as himself in American Graffiti?
Wolfman Jack
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.
Q 12Lucas wrote Star Wars only after failing to obtain the rights to which serial from his childhood?
Flash Gordon
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.
Q 13At which studio did Alan Ladd Jr. back Star Wars after others had turned it down?
20th Century Fox
Q 21The hero of Raiders of the Lost Ark was first called Indiana Smith; where did Lucas get 'Indiana'?
His Alaskan Malamute
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'.
Q 22Where was George Lucas hiding from the Star Wars opening in May 1977 when the Indiana Jones idea was revived?
Hawaii
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.
Q 23Who recommended composer John Williams to Lucas for Star Wars?
Steven Spielberg
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.
Q 14Rather than a bigger fee for directing Star Wars, what did Lucas ask the studio for?
Merchandising and sequel rights
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.
Q 15Which film displaced Star Wars as the highest-grossing film of all time?
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
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.
Q 16Lucas's chest pains during the editing of Star Wars turned out to be what?
Hypertension and exhaustion
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.
Q 17Lucas's first wife Marcia won an Academy Award for which craft on Star Wars?
Film editing
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.
Q 18George Lucas built Star Wars on the 'hero's journey' traced through world myths by which scholar?
Joseph Campbell
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.
Q 19George Lucas handed the directing of which Star Wars film to Irvin Kershner?
The Empire Strikes Back
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.
Q 20Which effects house did George Lucas set up in a Van Nuys warehouse in 1975 to make Star Wars?
Industrial Light & Magic
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.
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.
Q 24By John Williams's account, George Lucas first meant to score Star Wars with existing classical recordings, like which film?
2001: A Space Odyssey
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.
Q 25Which pop star played the lead in Captain EO, the 3-D space film Lucas produced for Disney's theme parks?
Michael Jackson
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.
Q 26In 1986 Lucas sold the computer graphics group that became Pixar for roughly how much?
$5 million
$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.
Q 27THX, the cinema sound standard from Lucas's company, was created to do justice to which film's soundtrack?
Return of the Jedi
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.
Q 28Which 1986 film is remembered as the biggest flop of George Lucas's career as a producer?
Howard the Duck
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.
Q 29Which fantasy film directed by Ron Howard did Lucas executive-produce in 1988?
Willow
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.
Q 30Lucas's secluded ranch workplace near Nicasio is in which California county?
Marin
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.