Conversations with the most influential figures in media and technology.
May 29-31, 2007
Carlsbad, California
Speaker
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.
Posts With George Lucas
May the Fourth Be With You, Yo.
It’s not just a status update.
Please Don’t Tell George Lucas What You Think About Jar Jar Binks
It was fine before the Internet. But now with the Internet, it’s gotten very vicious and very personal. You just say, ‘Why do I need to do this?’
– George Lucas, still wincing from the reaction to the new “Star Wars” movies, in Bloomberg Businessweek’s story on a $4 billion Lucasfilm/Disney deal
Voices
Attack of the Meme Tweaker (Comic)
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site.
The Math Behind Disney’s “Star Wars” Deal
Maybe a Mickey-Yoda mashup: Bob Iger needs to sell $4.5 billion in tickets to make the math work, says Bernstein Research.
But What Does That Make “The Phantom Menace?”
The reason I’ve invested so much time and money (creating Industrial Light & Magic, a premier special-effects house) is because art is technology.
– George Lucas, in conversation with Marco R. della Cava of USA Today
Meet Kevin Clark, Master Not of the Force, but of Data
He’s not a Jedi, but given the computing challenges he wrestles with every day, he might as well be. Kevin Clark talks about running the IT infrastructure for that nerve center of geekdom, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Industrial Light and Magic.
Voices
If George Lucas Directed "The Social Network"
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
News Byte
"Star Wars": A New Dimension
The quality of 3-D technology and the number of available venues have finally reached the point where George Lucas is satisfied he can wring a few more zillion dollars out of the “Star Wars” saga. Lucasfilm announced that all six films in the series will be converted–tastefully, of course–to 3-D over an unspecified period of years, starting with the release of “Episode I: The Phantom Menace” in 2012 (the same year James Cameron will raise the “Titanic” gross with a 3-D remake)."Toy Story 3″ Is One of Summer's Few Big Movie Hits–And Another Win for Apple's Jobs
It looks like the iPad isn’t Steve Jobs’s only hit these days. As it turns out, the hottest movie this summer–and one of the season’s few big successes–looks like it might be “Toy Story 3.” The third in the innovative flagship film franchise, it was made by the Pixar Animation Studios unit of Disney. While he did not actually craft this film, as he does his “magical” devices, guess who is Disney’s largest individual shareholder, with a seven percent stake?
Welcome to Lucky D7: Still Gambling on the Digital Future
Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference. We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.” Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.
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