In telling the story of George Lucas, the filmmaker and titan of 20th-century pop culture, we often leave out the part where, following the terrible car crash that upended his life of racing, the untested hero went to Modesto Junior College, a two-year program. There, he read Joseph Campbell’s seminal work of comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, for the first time, and fell in love with the social sciences. He decided to apply to San Francisco State and study anthropology or English or sociology. But he also considered the possibility of studying illustration down in Los Angeles—a direction his very practical-minded father surely would have opposed.
Here, as the young hero hesitated on the threshold of a major rite of passage, we might ask: Which course of study represented the true George Lucas? Was he merely confused or was he running from himself?