George Lucas Impact On The Film Industry

Tyler Luke

Mr. Stanford

Dual Enrolment English 3A

24 February 2023

George Lucas: Film Legend

George Lucas is an American filmmaker and entrepreneur who has significantly impacted the film industry. He was born on May 14, 1944, in Modesto, California. Lucas attended Thomas Downey High School, where he graduated in 1962. During his years, Lucas showed a passion for photography and film alongside a passion for race cars. He made his first film, "Look at Life," a one-minute animation.

“I hated school, I love to build things, I loved woodworking, and I loved working on cars and engines, I worked in a foreign car service. And all I wanna do is race cars, right before graduation, I was in a terrible automobile accident and was almost killed”.

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His films have been heavily awarded and highly loved for their innovative scenes, memorable characters, and one-of-a-kind storytelling. George Lucas created the stories for the first episode of Star Wars in 1977 with “Episode IV - A New Hope” and the first Indiana Jones in 1981 “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. Both series are still getting sequels to this day some forty-odd years later.

Reporter: “The force awakens is directed by JJ Abrams. George Lucas will not get a say in any of the new Disney-owned movies, asking him about handing over the reins of the franchise he created”.

Lucas: “The issue was ultimately they looked at the stories and they said we want to make something for the fans, so I said all I wanted to do is tell a story of what happened.”

Lucas: “You know it started here, and it went there, and it's all about generations and it's about you know the issues of fathers and sons and grandfathers, and it's actually a family soap opera.”

Lucas had created these stories and planned out how everything in the story would behave and bring forth that family aspect he was looking for, to create more of an open, personal, story that people could connect to. This was taken by Disney when they acquired the franchise and turned it into an unrelatable space fight

He founded Lucasfilm, which developed the first computer graphics system for film, and the audio company THX which is widely used today.

“...the fantasy, science fiction, these are literary works. These are things that you depend on people's imagination to conjure up dreamlike otherworldly existences. The problem of cinema is you have to make that real for a moment in time”. There’s a major problem with cinema, everyone must imagine the same idea for everything to work correctly. Where a book written by one person, allows all readers to interpret how they want.

“After I did Star Wars I said this was great but I was constantly banging up against the technological ceiling”.

This is where Lucas started to create new technology and improve the current technology to create better films and continuously push the boundaries of film. Lucas spent a lot of time creating new digital ways to produce and edit films, with GCI also being pushed by his movies.

“In 2013, George Lucas received the National Medal of Arts, our nation’s highest artistic achievement, with a citation that read: “For contributions to American cinema”