George Lucas
Chairman, Lucasfilm
You must turn in your geek and movie credentials if you don’t know about George Lucas, one of the most successful and influential moviemakers of all time, and the leading advocate of digital cinema. His early combination of cutting-edge technology and filmmaking, along with mythic storytelling, has been groundbreaking. Lucas’s first hit was the low-budget 1973 classic “American Graffiti.” Then, in 1977, he offered the world “Star Wars,” and nerds have never recovered. A morality tale of good versus evil told across a fantastic landscape of exotic planets and bizarre creatures, the huge hit garnered a clutch of Oscars, spawned a genre and many sequels, some better than others. He later created the classic adventure “Indiana Jones,” and co-wrote and executive-produced the successful “Raiders of the Lost Ark” series, which got him another bunch of Oscars. A new “Raiders” sequel is coming next summer. (He also made “Howard the Duck,” but we’re going to ignore that.) All of his entertainment work inspired Mr. Lucas to create his own visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, which is the industry leader, delivering such movie creations as the scary dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park”; the fantasy worlds of the “Harry Potter” films; and the marauding pirates in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies.
