George Walton Lucas, Jr.

(born May 14, 1944) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer,

and entrepreneur. He founded Lucasfilm and led the company as chairman and chief executive before
selling it to The Walt Disney Company on October 30, 2012. He is best known as the creator of the
space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist adventurer character Indiana Jones. Lucas is one
of the American film industry's most financially successful filmmakers and has been nominated for
four Academy Awards for directing and writing American Graffiti (1973) and Star Wars (1977).
George Lucas was born in Modesto, California, the son of Dorothy Ellinore Lucas (ne Bomberger;
19131989) and George Walton Lucas, Sr. (19131991), who owned a stationery store.
George Lucas is a filmmaker, with a film career dominated by writing and production. Aside from the
nine short films he made in the 1960s, he also directed six major features. His work from 1971 and
1977 as a writer-director, which established him as a major figure in Hollywood, consists of just three
films: THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars. There was a 22-year hiatus between the
original Star Wars film and his only other feature-film directing credits, the three Star Wars prequels.
Star Wars quickly became the highest-grossing film of all-time, displaced five years later by
Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. After the success of American Graffiti and prior to the
beginning of filming on Star Wars, Lucas was encouraged to renegotiate for a higher fee for writing
and directing Star Wars than the $150,000 agreed. He declined to do so, instead negotiating for
advantage in some of the as-yet-unspecified parts of his contract with Fox, in particular ownership of
licensing and merchandising rights (for novelizations, T-shirts, toys, etc.) and contractual
arrangements for sequels.The studio was unconcerned to relinquish these rights, as its last major
attempt in the field, with the 1967 film, Doctor Dolittle, had proved a discouraging failure. Lucas
exploited merchandising rights wisely, and Lucasfilm has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from
licensed games, toys, and collectibles created for the franchise.