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"A scrawny little devil," as his father remembers, George was a target for neighborhood bullies, who would throw his shoes into the sprinkler and tease him until his younger sister Wendy chased them away. A terrible student (the loyal Wendy would sometimes get up at 5 a.m. to correct misspellings in his English papers), he found comfort in fantasy. Whenever he or Wendy got a dollar, they would march down to the drugstore and buy ten comic books, which they would then read in a shed behind their stucco house on Ramona Avenue. Several carloads of comics were passed on to his sister Ann's children a few years ago, but they have since been returned to George, a legacy perhaps for his own daughter. When he was ten or so, TV replaced the comics, and he would spend Saturday mornings watching cartoons, his black cat Dinky draped round his neck.
In his teens Lucas did what most other boys did in Modesto: cruised the streets. Nearly killed when he crashed his Fiat into a walnut tree, he missed his high school graduation and took four months to recuperate. When he was able to function again, he attended Modesto Junior College for two years, then went to the film school of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. At U.S.C., Lucas finally came into his own. "He played with the concepts, he was free, he said we can do anything," says Classmate John Milius, director of Conan the Barbarian. "In those days we really felt we were going to change everything, that we were going to make the greatest art. And we did to a degree."
After graduation in 1966, Lucas worked as an assistant to Francis Coppola, who was directing Finian's Rainbow. Coppola, who remains a friend, later helped him find backing for his feature, THX 1138 (1971), a chilling look at a futuristic world in which people live underground and numbers have replaced names. American Graffiti came next. Its success persuaded 20th Century-Fox to invest money in Lucas' strange script about chirping robots, Jedi knights and a form of hocus-pocus called the Force.
What Lucas has done in the Star Wars films is rather like what his father did over dinner in Modesto. While providing entertainment, he has tried to instill in the young the old-fashioned virtues. "A lot of the stuff in there is very personal," he says. "There's more of me in Star Wars than I care to admit. I was trying to say in a very simple way, knowing that the film was made for a young audience, that there is a God and there is both a good side and a bad side. You have a choice between them, but the world works better if you're on the good side. It's just that simple." Luke is his alter ego, and it is no coincidence that he chose Mark Hamill, an actor who is about his own height, to play the last of the Jedi knights, or that he named the character Luke in the first place. Does Lucas really believe in the Force? "George says he doesn't, because he thinks people will consider him a freak if he does," says his wife. "But deep down, part of his unconscious believes in it, I think."