8/8/26
The Silicon Valley Industrial Complex and its network of professional shills have worked very hard to convince us that the poster child / native son of fusing the business of art with the technology of art and impacting people around the world is Steve Jobs. I have no agenda against Steve Jobs, but after reading “George Lucas: A Life” by Brian Jay Jones, I am convinced this halo should ideally sit with Lucas. I don’t believe another American has been as successful in impacting pop culture, technology, and the business of both.
Born in Modesto in ‘44, Lucas went on to USC and started American Zoetrope in 1969, a movie production company, with Francis Ford Coppola, another young filmmaker a few years his senior. Surprisingly, they chose to base their company in San Francisco, far from the reaches of the traditional Hollywood machine. They produced and released foreign films and movies aimed at the post-Vietnam burgeoning youth culture, including Lucas’ first film, THX 1138, released in 1971. Unfortunately, it met with middling performance, and over time Zoetrope itself ran light on cash, forcing both Lucas and Coppola to look to traditional studios for their next films. For Lucas, that meant going to Universal to produce his next original film, American Graffiti. For Coppola, that meant accepting Paramount’s offer to direct the movie rights they had licensed from Mario Puzo for his book, The Godfather.
Graffiti turned Lucas’ fortunes around, becoming a surprise hit at the box office. Earning him several million dollars personally, as well as a deep loathing of the Hollywood establishment, Lucas insisted on returning to independent filmmaking for the rest of his career, starting with his next original, Star Wars.
For Star Wars, Lucas still needed another studio to help finance it (at a total cost of about $15m), and chose to work with Fox. However, he sunk most of his proceeds from Graffiti to build his own special effects and production company in tandem and control more of the movie. Additionally, he always had the vision to monetize Star Wars beyond just the screen, so he negotiated the rights to all merchandising for the film.
Star Wars opened in 1977 to the largest box office collection at the time, beating the previous record holder, Spielberg’s Jaws. The movie grossed over $400m, and over $100m in merchandise sales. This would help Lucas bankroll the rest of the original trilogy - since he paid for the remaining movies entirely out of pocket, he only used Fox for minimal distribution work and kept far more of the economics of the remaining movies, to say nothing of the creative control. In the 90s, as he prepared for the Prequel Trilogy, his negotiating leverage was so high that when he chose Fox again for the distribution rights, he forced them to return ownership of the original Star Wars film rights, giving Lucas control of the full franchise. For the prequel films, Lucas spent $100m+ per movie, entirely out of pocket, making them some of the most expensive independent films made to this day.
Beyond the commercial success of the first film, Lucas pioneered the idea of a film original score composed by John Williams - while other movies had had great music, Star Wars was one of the first movies whose score itself become one of the best selling records of that year. Later, in Empire Strikes Back, Lucas insisted on moving the credits to the end of the movie, instead of the traditional credit roll at the beginning, to allow the audience to jump right into the action. Despite being sued by the DGA for violating their rules (Lucas paid a hefty fine and resigned from the guild), his alteration to the traditional process is now the standard.
Part of Lucas’ original vision for Star Wars was a dogfight with space ships. Unable to make this convincingly using practical effects, Lucas hired a few people to begin exploring CG effects, creating Lucasfilm in the process. As he required more custom tools for production and post-production, he organized this subdivision of Lucasfilm (which became the parent company for all his work) into Industrial Light and Magic, a company focused on applied visual effects technology.
Surprisingly, while they began doing the work for Lucas’ own films (the Star Wars series and Indiana Jones, written and produced by Lucas but directed by Steven Spielberg), Lucas was happy to have ILM provide effects for movies outside of the Lucasfilm orbit - ILM did the visual effects for movies like Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Iron Man, and even James Cameron’s Avatar. ILM has won the Academy Award for Visual Effects 16 times, with 12 of those coming between 1980 and 1994. The only comparable to this I can think of is Pixar, which has 23 Academy Awards and was, coincidentally, also spun out of Lucasfilm’s Computer division. Lucas was forced to totally divest Pixar from Lucasfilm during a divorce, selling it to Steve Jobs for $10m in 1986. Thankfully he retained all of ILM.
Lucas is singular, even amongst some of putative peers. Box office titans like Spielberg and Cameron have also birthed major IP, but nothing really compares to Star Wars in terms of longevity. Creative geniuses like Jim Henson or Orson Welles have certainly contributed to the process and tools of filmmaking, but they did not create a whole set of tools and services like Lucas did with ILM & Pixar. Even other notable media entrepreneurs like Walt Disney and Steve Jobs did not bet so aggressively on themselves the way Lucas did. After the hit of Star Wars in ‘77, Lucas basically exclusively used his own money to finance and control every one of his creative projects, nor did he ever take outside financing for Lucasfilm itself (until he sold it entirely to Disney). His also arguably impacted far more people than any of these individuals (maybe with the exception of Disney). Roughly 1.5B people on Earth currently use some iPhone, which is Apple’s most used product. How many people on the planet have seen Star Wars (or Indiana Jones, or any move made by Pixar or ILM)?