My admirations #1

GEORGE LUCAS

George Lucas has to be mentioned as one of the professional people I admire. He not only pushed his vision forward right after graduating from USC with his award winning short film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, he managed to put Fox back onto the financial map with Star Wars. In an unheard of move for it’s time, he waived his director fee for Star Wars in order to get all the licensing rights for toys, games and t-shirts…it turned out to be a shrewd business decision and merchandising suddenly became all the rage Hollywood. You could say he fought against the big studio chiefs at their own game and won because he quickly became a heavyweight in the industry.

Having earned millions his creative mind did not stop there. Many more important films, like the Indiana Jones films (for which he created for Steven Spielberg to direct and the completion of the Star Wars series left a big impression on me as a kid.

He then began to create companies to assist him and others in order to make films.
THX (named after his first film) is a sound system he put on the market and is the leading system in cinemas worldwide. SKYWALKER SOUND is his post-production facility which deals with sound creation, finesse and engineering in films. Not to forget, ILM (Industrial Light and Magic), which has created CGI special effects for some of the most important films of the last twenty years (Terminator 2, Jurassic Park) and still to this day continues to push the boundaries of the cinematic experience.

He has created his own studio, Lucas Arts, which is located on the Lucas Ranch. The irony is he created his studio to independence from the big Hollywood studios only to become a major player in his own right. It’s hard to think of George Lucas as an independent figurehead after so much mainstream success but the fact is he has always stayed true to his own creative needs and that’s why I admire him so much. Everything else- the Lucas Ranch, ILM- was born out of his desire to aid the filmmaking process and has put him in a limitless position to achieve whatever he wants.