Francis Ford Coppola served as a mentor for George Lucas in the heyday of New Hollywood, producing Lucas' 1973 breakthrough feature “American Graffiti.” Lucas' next project would be “Star Wars,” which launched a franchise so massive the writer-director would never helm a non-“Star Wars” movie again.
During the years at USC, George Lucas shared a dorm room with Randal Kleiser. 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.
George Lucas soon planned a new space fantasy, Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), requiring him to create a visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, and hire Ben Burtt as a sound designer (later evolving into Skywalker Sound), to help bring his vision to the screen.
While the Star Wars franchise has many sources of inspiration, one of George Lucas' main influences on the films was the Vietnam War. The Empire in Star Wars was inspired by the Nazis during World War II, but Lucas also took inspiration from the United States' actions during the Nixon administration.
They immediately became friends; a master, and an apprentice. Soon after the fateful meeting, Lucas and Coppola co-founded their first production company “American Zoetrope”, where Lucas made his university project into his first full-fledge film in 1971; THX-1138.
George Lucas Tells Bill Moyers About the Mentors in His Career
Who was George Lucas's mentor?
Joseph Campbell later became a close acquaintance of Lucas' after the release of his first Star Wars films. and the filmmaker regarded the mythologist as his "Yoda," his mentor figure.
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have been good friends for decades, often supporting each other's careers. But when Spielberg was influenced by Lucas to make a change to one of his own movies, Spielberg deeply regretted the end result. Spielberg noticed Lucas' filmmaking capabilities from a young age.
What were the reasons at the time? When George Lucas sold his company, Lucasfilm, to Disney, he was 68 years old. He had been thinking about retirement for some time, and he wanted to pass on his company to a company he thought would continue the Star Wars legacy.
The Star Wars creator now is the world's richest celebrity billionaire with a whopping $5.5 billion net worth, topping Forbes's annual ranking of the wealthiest A-listers.
Under Iger, Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 for $4 billion, a deal under which Lucas received 37.1 million Disney shares. Lucas, who had founded the company in 1971, has an estimated net worth of $7.9 billion, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Acknowledging that he had trouble writing dialogue, Lucas brought in help from writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (although the director rewrote most of their changes). For Lucas, Star Wars was finally coming into focus.
In 1967, Warner Brothers awarded him a scholarship to observe the filming of Finian's Rainbow, directed by UCLA grad Francis Ford Coppola. The following year, Lucas worked as Coppola's assistant on The Rain People and made a short film entitled Film Maker about the directing of the movie.
However, after beginning work on the prequel trilogy, Lucas insisted that Star Wars was meant to be a six-part series and that there would be no sequel trilogy. Lucas decided to leave the franchise in the hands of other filmmakers, announcing in January 2012 that he would make no more Star Wars films.
The space battles in A New Hope were based on filmed World War I and World War II dogfights. Continuing the use of Nazi inspiration for the Empire, J. J.
One of the biggest questions fans have had is why 1977's Star Wars was called Episode IV, despite being the first film in what would become a blockbuster franchise. The logical explanation for why Star Wars starts with Episode IV is that the prequel trilogy was (naturally) set before the original; hence, the numbering.
How rich was George Lucas before selling Star Wars?
In fall 2012, news of Star Wars and Lucasfilm assets selling to Disney for $4.05 billion (half in cash and 40 million shares of stock) rocked the entertainment world and beyond. Immediately before the news broke, Lucas' net worth was estimated at around $3.3 billion.
Oh, I think he deeply regrets it on one level, in that Disney ruined the Star Wars franchise coming out of the gate and continues to ruin it. Lucas always considered the original six Star Wars films as “my kids,” and he felt very protective of them. But, when The Force Awakens premiered, 3 years afte…
With the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney, Lucas is currently Disney's second-largest single shareholder, after the estate of Steve Jobs. Lucas worked as a creative consultant on the Star Wars sequel trilogy's first film, The Force Awakens.
This minutiae may lose the casual reader, but Jones is more successful at explaining Lucas's many contradictions: an aspiring avant-garde filmmaker who made blockbusters, a pessimist who loved fairy tale endings, an introvert in the most collaborative of arts, a man with a professed uninterest in money who became a ...
How old was Steven Spielberg when he met George Lucas?
The year was 1977, and a young George Lucas and an even younger Steven Spielberg were talking on a beach in Maui. Lucas was 33 years old; Spielberg was 31. Lucas had already written and directed 10 short films and respectably successful two full length features, THX 1138 in 1971 and American Graffiti in 1973.
