Happy birthday to the maker himself, George Lucas!
Born in Modesto, California, Lucas graduated from the University of Southern California in 1967. He co-founded American Zoetrope with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola soon afterward. Lucas wrote and directed THX 1138 in 1971, based on his earlier student short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which was a critical success but a financial failure.
His next work as a writer-director was the film American Graffiti in 1973, inspired by his youth in the early 1960s in California and produced through the newly founded Lucasfilm. The film was critically and commercially successful, and received five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture.
Soon after, he wrote and directed a certain space opera for Twentieth Century Fox, and the rest is history. He would go on to create Indiana Jones and give us the Prequel Trilogy, as well as create Industrial Light and Magic and Skywalker Sound as divisions of his production company Lucasfilm. He sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 and is now working on his museum in Los Angeles.
In this interview, Lucas discusses the impact of Star Wars.
Happy birthday Uncle George!