George Lucas

I am more of a visual person than a verbal person.

George Walton Lucas Jr. (born May 14, 1944, Modesto, California), is the man behind Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

In high school, George was a car buff, and wanted to be a professional racer, until a near-fatal crash days before graduation; EMTs actually declared him dead at the scene. After recovering, he attended a community college and turned his passion to filmmaking.

His first work was Freiheit, but his best known pre-Star Wars works are THX 1138 and American Graffiti. He co-founded American Zoetrope with Francis Ford Coppola, to get away from the oppressive Hollywood studio system, and with the success of Graffiti and Star Wars, founded Lucasfilm. THX 1138 in particular is a frequent source of references, with "THX" and "1138" appearing in various forms in American Graffiti, Star Wars and the Indiana Jones films, not to mention providing the name for the THX soundsystem.

After American Graffiti, George wanted to revive the old serials' spirit, and pitched two ideas: one based on the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials (Star Wars); and one based in the Republic serials with an Adventurer Archaeologist (the Indiana Jones series, produced by Lucas and directed by his friend Steven Spielberg).

To create his vision for Star Wars, George revolutionized special effects and post-production techniques. Before, the "spaceship flyby" effect was accomplished by pulling a model ship across a starfield backdrop with a string; very limiting and very cheap. George (with a LOT of help from John Dykstra) decided to leave the model static, put it against a bluescreen, and move the camera around it.

George is infamous for his iron-fisted grip on the Star Wars franchise. This may be from Warner Bros.'s Executive Meddling in THX-1138 to cut it down and reduce its marketing budget. Many fans blame the perceived faults of the series on Lucas's refusal to accept creative input from others; in other words, he's considered a great producer when he simply oversees his staff developing his general ideas such as Lawrence Kasdan who did script rewrites, but now a terrible director and writer when he tries to do that himself.

He's also infamous for writing cheesy dialogue - during the filming of A New Hope, Mark Hamill is alleged to have told him that "people don't talk like this!", Harrison Ford complained "you can type this shit, George, but you sure can't say it" and Empire co-writer Lawrence Kasdan recalled frequently saying "This is a terrible scene, I can't believe George wrote this" while reading Lucas' draft. Even Lucas called himself "the King of Wooden Dialogue".

He also seems to have a fondness for cute alien critters, a fondness which many older Star Wars fans don't share. This, has contributed to the sizeable Hatedom he seems to have gathered and the fracturing of the Star Wars fandom between older fans (who grew up with the first three movies) and younger ones (who grew up with the prequel trilogy and animated series).

Lucas is still indisputably a pioneer in film technology and special effects, both in his own films and through Industrial Light and Magic. He's a strong advocate for digital filmmaking, having shot the last two Star Wars prequels digitally (and turned Robert Rodriguez onto the technology), and firmly believes that digital filmmaking will lead to an increase of independent productions (at a much lower cost than studio films, due to film reel development) and be surprise successes. He predicted this in the early 90's, well before the release of District 9.

Lucas was married to film editor Marcia Lucas (formerly Griffin) between 1969 and 1983. Marcia worked as an editor for A New Hope and Return of the Jedi, participating in the production of all the three original trilogy movies. In a notable example of Creator Couple, her main contribution to the original trilogy was to serve as The Heart, balancing out Lucas' highly technical, visual-minded vision with an emphasis on character development, plot and emotional response - Mark Hamill in particular has confirmed this. Lucas' divorce from Marcia, occurring at the same time as Spielberg's divorce from Amy Irving, is cited as a leading cause for the Darker and Edgier nature of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, as well as the fate of the Prequel Trilogy. He later married investment executive Mellody Hobson, his girlfriend of seven years, in 2013.

In October of 2012, Lucas, in a landmark deal, sold Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company for $4 billion USD, personally appointing Kathleen Kennedy as his successor.

Trope Namer for George Lucas Throwback.

Tropes associated with George Lucas:

• Approval of God:
  • Heartily approved of Robot Chicken and Family Guy parodying Star Wars, even offering his help.
  • Loved The Last Jedi and had nothing but nice things to say about its director, Rian Johnson.
• Author Tract: If Lucas could find a way to sneak a left-wing message into his movies, it would be snuck in.
• Big Name Fan: Is a huge fan of Family Guy, helping them out during the Blue Harvest parodies.
• Creator Breakdown:
  • As mentioned above, his divorce from Marcia is often considered one.
  • The sheer hatedom to the Prequel Trilogy was his other big one. He never quite got his pep back after it and retired from making Star Wars movies following Revenge of the Sith.
• Dear Negative Reader: Officially retired from making Star Wars in this manner, outright telling the fans that they'd taken all the fun out of it and to find a new Scapegoat Creator.
• Disowned Adaptation:
  • His overall reaction to Star Wars Legends. While he liked some aspects, he outright hated others or just didn't pay too much attention to Legends.
  • Has said he wishes to hunt down every copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special and destroy it, even though he wasn't directly involved with it.
  • He's not hugely fond of The Force Awakens, thinking it too derivative of A New Hope.
• Executive Meddling: Experienced this with his pre-Star Wars movies so much that it literally traumatized him, which led to a near-pathological fear of being told how to make his own movies, which led to his habit of updating Star Wars every few years.
• Fan Service: Puts it in his movies quite regularly.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: His own father was a Real Life example, never supporting his filmmaking ambitions. His old man later came around.
• Flip-Flop of God:
  • Some of his ideas about what his "original vision" were, although a lot of this was exaggerated by the fandom. He does not say that every change was his original vision or that the prequels were intricately mapped out ahead of time, only that specific items were unable to be realized at the time.
  • Did he ever intend to make a Sequel Trilogy? He had ideas, some of which even made it into the Sequel Trilogy, about where the characters would have gone post-Return of the Jedi but can never quite seem to make up his mind about whether he would have made films out of them.
• Memetic Outfit: His flannel shirts and jeans.
• Only Mostly Dead: Happened in his teenage years.
• Otaku: A major eiga otaku, for many different classic film genres, including jidaigeki.
• Recut: There is precedence of filmmakers re-editing their movies after the original release long before Lucas became the poster-boy for it, including friends Francis Ford Coppola for Apocalypse Now and Steven Spielberg for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. South Park featured a joke that had Lucas remastering home movies.
• Retcon: Has been accused of this with the Special Edition and prequels to Star Wars. Though aside from the infamous "Han shot first" controversy in remastered versions of A New Hope, this is largely an urban legend.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules: George dislikes production companies messing with other people's movies, violating their "moral rights", and has spoken before Congress about this, arguing that only a work's creator should be allowed to make changes to their work as they see fit.
• Special Edition: Trope Namer and, with Steven Spielberg, the co-Trope Codifier.
• Stock Scream: Loves using the Wilhelm Scream in his movies.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: His insistence that Valerian was not an inspiration on Star Wars.
• Technician Versus Performer: Technician, in contrast with Steven Spielberg, who is a performer.
• Trolling Creator: One possible interpretation of his behavior. Then again, if you had a fanbase like that, you would too.