>>279980406 (OP)Lucas is no hack. In his case SW is but the vehicle to his main contribution to cinematography, namely the creation of ILM. He doesn´t get enough credit for literally changing how movies are made.
ILM was born because the technology to make SW did not exist. This is the reason why even at the time on which authors were being supported by studios no suit believed in his vision. Essentially everybody thought it was just impossible to make what he wanted to make.
Luckily he believed in himself. He had to invest all his earnings from his previous film (American Graffiti) and look for weirdos on all kind of different fields and disciplines to establish ILM and use what it developed to make SW.
And the things they created changed the industry completely. They helped develop non linear editing, photoshop, animatronics and puppets, created Pixar to explore the potential of CGI and so on. ILM is like this impossible place were a lot of brilliant people started they careers.
Lucas realized this and in order to keep them all together he allowed his friends to use ILM too for their movies (his friends being people like Steven Spielberg mind you). The point was to keep these people employed and working together (managing people is the most fundamental skill a Director should have, even more than their cinematographic vision, and he had that in spades).
Seriously, in time any movie with aspirations would resort to ILM and kept pushing development. Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Dragonheart... the amount of masterpieces that exist because of what he did is ridiculous. Honestly only Miyazaki and Disney are close to comparable.
