Born on May 14, 1944, in Modesto, Calif., George Walton Lucas, Jr., became interested in filmmaking while in high school. THX-1138: 4EB, a short film he made while a film student at the University of Southern California, won first prize at the 1967–68 National Student Film Festival. In 1967 Lucas attracted the attention of U.S. director Francis Ford Coppola, who helped him turn his prizewinning student film into a feature-length movie called THX 1138 (1971), a grim fantasy about a robotized, dehumanized society in the distant future. In 1971 Lucas formed his own film company, which produced the surprisingly successful American Graffiti (1973), a sympathetic recollection of teenage American life in the early 1960s. The movie, which Lucas cowrote, directed, and edited, won five Academy award nominations, including best director and best screenplay. Lucas spent the next four years writing and then filming Star Wars (1977), an intergalactic swashbuckler with colorful characters, realistic extraterrestrial settings, and an array of breathtaking special effects. One of the highest-earning motion pictures in history, the film won Lucas two more Oscar nominations, for best director and best screenplay. The film also spawned a host of other science-fiction films using the same pioneering, computer-generated special-effects technologies developed for Star Wars. Lucas cowrote and served as executive producer for the next three episodes in the Star Wars saga: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), The Return of the Jedi (1983), and Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999).

In 1981 Lucas cowrote and produced the first of three Indiana Jones movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the story of an archaeologist's thrilling and perilous search for an ancient sacred object. He also cowrote and produced the sequels: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). In 1992 Lucas received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for consistent high-quality filmmaking.