George Lucas served as chairman of Lucasfilm before selling it to The Walt Disney Company in 2012.
82 Facts About George Lucas
2.
George Lucas is one of history's most financially successful filmmakers and has been nominated for four Academy Awards.
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George Lucas's films are among the 100 highest-grossing movies at the North American box office, adjusted for ticket-price inflation.
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George Lucas is considered to be one of the most significant figures of the 20th-century New Hollywood movement, and a pioneer of the modern blockbuster.
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George Lucas wrote and directed THX 1138, based on his student short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which was a critical success but a financial failure.
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George Lucas's next film, the epic space opera Star Wars, had a troubled production but was a surprise hit, becoming the highest-grossing film at the time, winning six Academy Awards and sparking a cultural phenomenon.
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George Lucas produced and co-wrote the sequels The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
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George Lucas is known for his collaboration with composer John Williams, who was recommended to him by Spielberg, and with whom he has worked for all the films in both of these franchises.
9.
George Lucas produced and wrote a variety of films and television series through Lucasfilm between the 1970s and the 2010s.
10.
In 1997, George Lucas re-released the original Star Wars trilogy as part of a Special Edition featuring several modifications; home media versions with further changes were released in 2004 and 2011.
11.
George Lucas last collaborated on the CGI-animated television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the war film Red Tails, and the CGI film Strange Magic.
12.
George Lucas's family attended Disneyland during its opening week in July 1955, and Lucas would remain enthusiastic about the park.
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George Lucas was interested in comics and science fiction, including television programs such as the Flash Gordon serials.
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Long before George Lucas began making films, he yearned to be a racecar driver, and he spent most of his high school years racing on the underground circuit at fairgrounds and hanging out at garages.
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On June 12,1962, a few days before his high school graduation, George Lucas was driving his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina when another driver broadsided him, flipping his car several times before it crashed into a tree; George Lucas's seatbelt had snapped, ejecting him and thereby saving his life.
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George Lucas had been planning to go to art school, and declared upon leaving home that he would be a millionaire by the age of 30.
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George Lucas attended Modesto Junior College, where he studied anthropology, sociology, and literature, amongst other subjects.
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At Plummer's recommendation, George Lucas then transferred to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.
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George Lucas became good friends with fellow acclaimed student filmmaker and future Indiana Jones collaborator, Steven Spielberg.
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George Lucas was deeply influenced by the Filmic Expression course taught at the school by filmmaker Lester Novros which concentrated on the non-narrative elements of Film Form like color, light, movement, space, and time.
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George Lucas was later drafted by the Army for military service in Vietnam, but he was exempted from service after medical tests showed he had diabetes, the disease that killed his paternal grandfather.
22.
George Lucas was passionate and interested in camerawork and editing, defining himself as a filmmaker as opposed to being a director, and he loved making abstract visual films that created emotions purely through non-narrative structures.
23.
In 1967, George Lucas re-enrolled as a USC graduate student in film production.
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George Lucas began working under Verna Fields for the United States Information Agency, where he met his future wife Marcia Griffin.
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In 1969, George Lucas was one of the camera operators on the classic Rolling Stones concert film Gimme Shelter.
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In 1969, George Lucas co-founded the studio American Zoetrope with Coppola, hoping to create a liberating environment for filmmakers to direct outside the perceived oppressive control of the Hollywood studio system.
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George Lucas then set his sights on adapting Flash Gordon, an adventure serial from his childhood that he fondly remembered.
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The original Star Wars film went through a tumultuous production, and during editing, George Lucas suffered chest pains initially feared to be a heart attack, but actually a fit of hypertension and exhaustion.
29.
The effort that George Lucas exerted during post-production for the film, and its subsequent sequels, caused strains on his relationship with his wife Marcia George Lucas, and was a contributing factor to their divorce at the end of the trilogy.
30.
George Lucas acted as executive producer for the next two Star Wars films, commissioning Irvin Kershner to direct The Empire Strikes Back, and Richard Marquand to direct Return of the Jedi, while receiving a story credit on the former and sharing a screenwriting credit with Lawrence Kasdan on the latter.
31.
George Lucas gave away his writing story credit out of great respect for Leigh Brackett for The Empire Strikes Back after her death from cancer.
32.
George Lucas acted as story writer and executive producer on all four of the Indiana Jones films, which his colleague and good friend Steven Spielberg directed.
33.
Craig Barron, who worked at ILM as part of the matte painting department, told Star Wars Insider that George Lucas liked to spend time with the department's painters and often spoke of what movies he wanted to make.
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Projects where George Lucas was credited as executive producer and sometimes story writer in this period include Kurosawa's Kagemusha, John Korty's Twice Upon A Time, Ewoks: Caravan of Courage, Ewoks: Battle for Endor, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Jim Henson's Labyrinth, Ron Howard's Willow, Don Bluth's The Land Before Time, and the Indiana Jones television prequel spinoff The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
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At this point, George Lucas had no desire to return to Star Wars, and had unofficially canceled the sequel trilogy.
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George Lucas was formerly owned by Lucasfilm and contains equipment for stereo, digital, and theatrical sound for films, and music.
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When Star Wars became popular , in the wake of Dark Horse's comic book line and Timothy Zahn's trilogy of spin-off novels, George Lucas realized that there was still a large audience.
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George Lucas's children were older, and with the explosion of CGI technology he began to consider directing .
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George Lucas began penning more to the story, indicating that the series would be a tragic one, examining Anakin Skywalker's fall to the dark side.
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George Lucas began to change the status of the prequels relative to the originals; at first, they were supposed to be a "filling-in" of history tangential to the originals, but now he saw that they could form the beginning of one long story that started with Anakin's childhood and ended with his death.
41.
In 1994, George Lucas began work on the screenplay of the first prequel, tentatively titled Episode I: The Beginning.
42.
In 1997, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Star Wars, George Lucas restored the original trilogy, making numerous modifications using newly available digital technology to bring them closer to his original vision.
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Additionally, George Lucas released a director's cut of THX 1138 in 2004, with the film and containing a number of CGI additions.
44.
The first draft of Episode II was completed just weeks before principal photography, and George Lucas hired Jonathan Hales, a writer from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, to polish it.
45.
In 2004, George Lucas reflected that his transition from independent to corporate filmmaker mirrored the story of Star Wars character Darth Vader in some ways, but concluded he was glad to be able to make his films the way he wants them.
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George Lucas collaborated with Jeff Nathanson as a writer of the 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, directed by Steven Spielberg.
47.
From 2008 to 2014, George Lucas served as the creator and executive producer for a second Star Wars animated series on Cartoon Network, Star Wars: The Clone Wars which premiered with a feature film of the same name before airing its first episode.
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In 2012, George Lucas served as executive producer for Red Tails, a war film based on the exploits of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II.
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George Lucas took over direction of reshoots while director Anthony Hemingway worked on projects.
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In January 2012, George Lucas announced his retirement from producing large blockbuster films and instead re-focusing his career on smaller, independently budgeted features.
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George Lucas worked as a creative consultant on the Star Wars sequel trilogy's first film, The Force Awakens.
52.
George Lucas went on to say that he needed to support the company and its employees who were going to suffer financially.
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In 2015, George Lucas wrote the CGI film Strange Magic, his first musical.
54.
In October 2016, George Lucas announced his decision to not be involved in the story of the film but would remain an executive producer.
55.
The Last Jedi, the second film in the sequel trilogy, was released in 2017; George Lucas described the film as "beautifully made".
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George Lucas has had cursory involvement with Solo: A Star Wars Story, the Star Wars streaming series The Mandalorian, and the premiere of the eighth season of Game of Thrones.
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George Lucas met with JJ Abrams before the latter began writing the script to the sequel trilogy's final film, The Rise of Skywalker, which was released in 2019.
58.
George Lucas founded the Star Wars Corporation, Inc as a subsidiary to control various legal and financial aspects of Star Wars, including copyright, and sequel and merchandising rights.
59.
That year, George Lucas hired Los Angeles-based real-estate specialist Charles Weber to manage the company, telling him that he could keep the job as long as he made money.
60.
George Lucas wanted the focus of the company to be making independent films, but the company gradually became enlarged from five employees to almost 100, increasing in middle management and running up costs.
61.
On June 24,2016, George Lucas announced that he was abandoning his plans to locate the museum in Chicago, due to a lawsuit by a local preservation group, Friends of the Parks, and would instead build the museum in California.
62.
On January 17,2017, George Lucas announced that an 11-acre campus with green space and the museum's five-story 300,000 square foot building will be constructed over what was a parking lot in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California.
63.
George Lucas was heavily involved and invested in the scoring process for the original Star Wars soundtrack, which was composed by John Williams, on the recommendation of his friend and colleague Steven Spielberg.
64.
Whilst initially wanting to use tracks and film music in a similar manner to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which served as the inspiration for the film, Williams advised against this and instead proposed a system of recurring themes to enhance the story in the style of classical composers Gustav Holst, William Walton, and Igor Stravinsky; works that George Lucas had used as "temp tracks" for Williams to gain inspiration from.
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George Lucas was in attendance for a ceremony honoring Williams as the 44th recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award, the first composer to receive the honor, and gave a speech in praise of their relationship and his work.
66.
In interviews, and most famously at the 40th Anniversary Star Wars Celebration convention, George Lucas has repeatedly reaffirmed the importance of Williams to the Star Wars saga, affectionately referring to him as the "secret sauce" of his movies.
67.
George Lucas has pledged to give half of his fortune to charity as part of an effort called The Giving Pledge led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to persuade America's richest individuals to donate their financial wealth to charities.
68.
On June 24,2008, George Lucas testified before the United States House of Representatives subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet as the head of his Foundation to advocate for a free wireless broadband educational network.
69.
In 2005, George Lucas gave $1 million to help build the Martin Luther King Jr.
70.
Previous donations led to the already-existing George Lucas Instructional Building and Marcia Lucas Post-Production building.
71.
In 1969, George Lucas married film editor Marcia Lou Griffin, who went on to win an Academy Award for her editing work on the original Star Wars film.
72.
George Lucas began dating Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments and chair of DreamWorks Animation, in 2006.
73.
George Lucas has come to state that his religion is "Buddhist Methodist".
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George Lucas is a major collector of the American illustrator and painter Norman Rockwell.
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George Lucas has said that he is a fan of Seth MacFarlane's hit TV show Family Guy.
76.
George Lucas supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the run-up for the 2016 US presidential election.
77.
George Lucas was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Directing and Writing for American Graffiti and Star Wars.
78.
George Lucas received the academy's Irving G Thalberg Award in 1991.
79.
George Lucas appeared at the 79th Academy Awards ceremony in 2007 with Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola to present the Best Director award to their friend Martin Scorsese.
80.
George Lucas served as Grand Marshal for the Tournament of Roses Parade and made the ceremonial coin toss at the Rose Bowl, New Year's Day 2007.
81.
In July 2013, George Lucas was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama for his contributions to American cinema.
82.
In October 2014, George Lucas received Honorary Membership of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.