George Walton Lucas Jr. was born in
Modesto, California to George Walton Lucas, Sr. (1913–1991) and Dorothy Ellinore Bomberger Lucas. His father was mainly of British and
Swiss-German heritage and his mother was a member of a prominent Modesto family (one of her cousins is the mother of former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and director of UNICEF Ann Veneman) and was mainly of
German and Scots-
Irish heritage.
His parents sold retail office supplies and owned a walnut ranch in California. His experiences growing up in the sleepy suburb of Modesto and his early passion for cars and motor racing would eventually serve as inspiration for his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon,
American Graffiti. Before young Lucas became obsessed with the movie camera, he wanted to be a race car driver, but a near fatal accident in his souped-up
Autobianchi Bianchina just days before his high school graduation quickly changed his mind. Instead, he attended
community college and developed a passion for cinematography and camera tricks.
During this time an
experimental filmmaker named
Bruce Baillie tacked up a bedsheet in his backyard in 1960 to screen the work of
underground, avant-garde 16 mm filmmakers like
Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage and
Bruce Conner. For the next few years, Baillie's series, dubbed
Canyon Cinema, toured local coffeehouses, where art films shared the stage with folksingers and stand-up comedians.
These events became a magnet for the teenage Lucas and his boyhood friend John Plummer. The 19-year-olds began slipping away to San Francisco to hang out in jazz clubs and find news of Canyon Cinema screenings in flyers at the City Lights bookstore. Already a promising photographer, Lucas became infatuated with these abstract films.
"That's when George really started exploring," Plummer recalls. "We went to a theater on Union Street that showed art movies, we drove up to San Francisco State for a film festival, and there was an old beatnik coffeehouse in Cow Hollow with shorts that were really out there." It was a season of awakening for Lucas, who had been a D-plus slacker in high school.
At an autocross track, Lucas met his first mentor in the film industry - famed
cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a fellow aficionado of sleek racing machines. Wexler was impressed by the way the shy teenager handled a camera, cradling it low on his hips to get better angles. "George had a very good eye, and he thought visually," he recalls.
Lucas then transferred to the
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. USC was one of the earliest universities to have a school devoted to
motion picture film. During the years at USC, George Lucas shared a dorm room with
Randal Kleiser. Lucas was deeply influenced by the Filmic Expression course taught at the school by filmmaker
Lester Novros which concentrated on the non-narrative elements of Film Form like color, light, movement, space, and time. Another huge inspiration was the Serbian montagist (and dean of the USC Film Department)
Slavko Vorkapich who had been a colleague of
Sergei Eisenstein's before moving to Hollywood to make stunning
montage sequences for studio features at
MGM and
Paramount. Vorkapich taught the autonomous nature of the cinematic art form, emphasizing the unique dynamic quality of movement and kinetic energy inherent in moving film images.
Lucas saw many inspiring movies in class, particularly the visual films coming out of the
National Film Board of Canada like
Arthur Lipsett's 21-87, the French-Canadian
cameraman Jean-Claude Labrecque's cinema verite 60 Cycles, the work of
Norman McLaren, and the documentaries of
Claude Jutra. Lucas fell madly in love with
pure cinema and quickly became prolific at making 16 mm nonstory noncharacter visual tone poems and
cinema verite with such titles as
Look At Life,
Herbie,
1:42.08,
The Emperor,
Anyone Lived in a Pretty (how) Town,
filmmaker, and
6-18-67. He was passionate and interested in camerawork and editing, defining himself as a filmmaker as opposed to being a director, and he loved making abstract visual films that create emotions purely through cinema.
After graduating with a bachelor of
fine arts in film in 1967, he tried joining the
United States Air Force as an officer, but was turned down because of his numerous speeding tickets. He was later drafted by the Army, but tests showed he had
diabetes, the disease that killed his paternal grandfather. Lucas was prescribed medication for the disease, but his symptoms are sufficiently mild that he does not require insulin and would not be considered diabetic under the disease's current classification.
In 1967, Lucas re-enrolled as a USC graduate student in film production. Working as a teaching instructor for a class of
U.S. Navy students who were being taught documentary cinematography, Lucas directed the short film
Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which won first prize at the 1967-68 National Student
Film Festival, and was later adapted into his first full-length
feature film, THX 1138. Lucas was awarded a scholarship by
Warner Brothers to observe the making of
Finian's Rainbow (1968) which was being directed by
Francis Ford Coppola, who at the time was revered among film school students of the time as a cinema graduate who had "made it".
