George Lucas, 'empire builder'
2005-05-16 12:11
Los Angeles - George Lucas is a rare being in Hollywood - a one-man, multibillion-dollar film industry who answers to nobody.
Now, with the release of the sixth and final chapter in the Star Wars saga that put him in that enviable position, the 61-year-old onetime wunderkind finds himself at a career crossroads.
It's a quandary Lucas approaches from a powerful vantage point, as head of an entertainment empire with some 1 600 employees and annual revenue of more than one billion dollars.
Lucas says he has stashed away enough cash to bankroll his moviemaking ambitions for 10 years, and with such resources at his command, everything would seem to point to more blockbusters in the Star Wars or Indiana Jones mould.
But the maestro himself has other ideas.
"I know they won't be mainstream movies," Lucas said in a recent interview with Time magazine.
"I'm going to go off in a direction that I was really interested in going off in when I was in film school... films that are a little more abstract in nature," he said.
Early life
Born in Modesto, California in 1944, Lucas's first passion was for cars, and he nursed ambitions of becoming a racing driver before a near-fatal accident, just days before he graduated from high school, changed his mind.
Instead, he went to a film school where he made a sci-fi short that was eventually released in 1971 as the full-length feature "THX-1138."
The film tanked at the box office and Lucas switched tack completely with his next effort, American Graffiti, a portrait of listless American youth in the early 1960s that was released in 1973.
Shot on a budget of just over $750 000 and featuring the young talents of Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford, the movie grossed $50m dollars, garnered five Oscar nominations and launched Lucas's career.
Emboldened by that success, Lucas decided to take another crack at science-fiction, working up a mythical tale of good and evil set in the far-flung reaches of the galaxy.
Star Wars an 'overnight phenomenon'
Released in 1977, Star Wars became an overnight phenomenon, changing forever the way films were made and marketed and putting Lucas on the path towards creating his own moviemaking world outside the controlling influence of Hollywood.
The five Star Wars movies released to date have grossed $3.4bn dollars at the global box office, and a further nine billion dollars in related merchandising.
In the three-decade span of the Star Wars series - including a 16-year hiatus between the first three films and the "prequel" trilogy - Lucas developed a reputation as something of a recluse, an enigmatic figure monitoring his empire from the isolation of his Skywalker Ranch headquarters just north of San Francisco.
While admitting to a lifelong sense of shyness, Lucas says the image has been wildly exaggerated.
"People think of me as a sort of pathological, Howard Hughes-type guy sitting in a hotel room, which is definitely not so," he said. "It ain't even close to that."