George Lucas

“While no one else in the movie industry had even the slightest desire to invest in such things, George resolved in July, 1979 to launch a computer division.”

“As a young filmmaker in the wake of American Graffiti's success, he was advised to demand a higher salary on his next movie, which would be Star Wars. That would be the expected move in Hollywood. Bump your quote. Bump your quote. Not for George, though. He sk…”

“When Jobs buys the, we'll get there, but when Jobs buys Pixar from George Lucas after George Lucas is going through a divorce, the idea was like, oh, they're going to sell high-end hardware, right?”

“Nobody wants to buy Pixar. They were shopped over 20 prospective buyers, and none of them bit.”

“Genuinely with people that get excessively good at what they do. We see that theme over and over again.”

“And so Spielberg gave Lucas 2.5% of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Lucas gave Spielberg 2.5% of Star Wars. And it says this two 5.5% would earn Spielberg more than forty million dollars over the next four decades.”

“It is very hard to understand at the time you're doing something, how it's actually going to turn out and how impactful it was.”

“It's like, you have to believe that your own opinion about what you're working on is greater than everybody else's opinion around you. None of this works if you can't trust your own judgment.”

“Lucas makes three times the amount of toys as he does on the films and the films, they make billions and billions of dollars.”

“The budget for the original Star Wars was eleven million dollars. At the box office alone, it brought in seven hundred and seventy-five million.”

“This led him to forming his own company in 1971. Lucas officially opened Lucasfilm. This independent production company would be run out of his little house, and its lone employees were him and Marcia.”

“So they publish like a novelization of Lucas's script. They publish in November, 1976. The that's before there was even a trailer. By February, 1977. So you're talking was that three months, four months later, they had already sold out of its initial print run…”

“You need to make money, not to buy a bunch of useless shit, but to actually buy your own freedom, and that's exactly what he uses his money for.”

“He was the sole shareholder. The only shareholder in Lucasfilm when he sells it to Disney for over four billion dollars.”

“People going to see a Spielberg movie has no, like him being successful does not, it's not, it's all positive sum. It's not zero sum. They can go see Jaws and then next year they'll go see Star Wars.”

“At this time in history, science fiction was in, in films, was a dead genre.”

“Just in 1978 alone, George Lucas sells forty million Star Wars figures.”

“I would rather work for myself, In Hollywood, you have a producer breathing down your neck. I am happier working with less money. The risk of failure is far less. We can complete a film in maybe a year getting the results we want.”

“American graffiti cost a million dollars and it earned at the box office, fifty five million, making it one of cinema's most profitable returns on investment ever.”

“The Empire Strikes Back opened in May of 1980 in a 126 theaters and broke attendance records in a 125 of them. No other studio opened a single movie against it. The movie was gonna have to make fifty-seven million just for Lucas to break even, and to build Sky…”

“George was cash strapped from a thirty-five million divorce settlement and was threatening to fire the division's entire team if no buyer emerged.”