A snapped seatbelt in 1962 may be why Star Wars exists
Days before finishing high school, George Lucas flipped his souped-up car into a tree; the belt broke, he was thrown clear, and he survived. The crash killed his dream of racing. Fifteen years later, a space fantasy that nearly every studio had rejected became the highest-grossing film yet made.
Lucas was born in 1944 in Modesto, a farming town in California's Central Valley, and grew up on comics, science fiction and the Flash Gordon serials. His family went to Disneyland in its opening week in 1955. As a teenager he raced at fairgrounds until the accident of 12 June 1962 left him with badly bruised lungs. His father, who ran a stationery shop, refused to pay for art school, and Lucas announced as he left home that he would be a millionaire by 30.
At Modesto Junior College he studied anthropology and sociology and began filming car races on 8 mm. Racing introduced him to the cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who admired his visual eye. At the University of Southern California's film school he fell in with a clique nicknamed the Dirty Dozen and befriended Steven Spielberg. He preferred abstract, plotless tone poems, calling himself a film-maker rather than a director. After graduating in 1967 the Air Force rejected him for his many speeding tickets, and a diagnosis of diabetes exempted him from the Vietnam draft.
His student short Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB won the top prize at a national student festival. With Francis Ford Coppola he co-founded American Zoetrope in San Francisco in 1969, hoping to escape studio control, but their feature version, THX 1138 (1971), lost money. American Graffiti (1973), drawn from his Modesto youth, was a hit with five Oscar nominations. Denied the rights to Flash Gordon, he wrote his own space adventure. Only Alan Ladd Jr. at 20th Century Fox backed it, and Star Wars (1977), shaped by Kurosawa's samurai films and Spaghetti Westerns, restored Fox's finances and won six Academy Awards.
Lucas went on to create Indiana Jones with Spielberg and returned to directing with a prequel trilogy beginning in 1999. His effects house Industrial Light and Magic and Skywalker Sound touched nearly every big American production from the late 1980s until he sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012. Adjusted for ticket inflation, ten of North America's 100 biggest box-office films carry his name as director or story writer.
Source: George Lucas
