George Lucas

Despite his great movie sucesses, including the Star Wars trilogy and the six Indiana Jones films, George Lucas remains an enigma and a recluse. In this text, John Baxter reveals the man behind the sucess. George Lucas is one of the most innovative bigtime players on the movie scene. His three Star Wars films and the trio featuring the action hero Indiana Jones (all six of which Lucas conceived, produced and co-wrote) are some of the most popular films ever made. To finance them, he masterminded a revolutionary redrawing of the financial agreements under which films were produced in Hollywood, snatching away control of funding, intellectual content and the distribution of profits from studios, and placing them in the hands of the film-makers themselves. Yet Lucas remains an enigma and a recluse. He has specially built the Skywalker Ranch a long way from Hollywood - a Victorian village community in a redwood forest where he and his friends can work in splendid isolation, free of studio pressure but with the highest technology. This is his story.