Your comment got me to look at Lucas’s film career again, though, and aside from how little actual directing he has done, perhaps the most interesting thing that pops out at you is that American Graffiti is really the only stand-alone movie Lucas ever did for a major studio. THX 1138 was essentially a remade student film about a futuristic, um, police state.

But for the fact that it was Lucas’s first non-student project, I suspect no one would ever have heard of it again. As it is, it has become a (mostly unwatchable) cult film “now available in the two disk director’s cut DVD set!” After AG made a killing, Lucas took his cut and executive produced Star Wars, kept the licensing rights (which 20th Century Fox figured weren’t all that valuable, anyway — an eerie parallel to IBM and Bill Gates, I think) and was off to the races.

IIRC, Star Wars ranks second only behind Gone With The Wind in inflation adjusted earnings. Just think of how many Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler action figures MGM could have sold if they’d only understood marketing!

By “just about every Lucas film ever made,” I presume you simply mean every Star Wars movie. I don’t recall that American Grafitti had any technical brilliance to speak of.

She counts a hell of a lot more than *you* do.