• Lucas' favorite comic book character wasn't Superman or Batman but Scrooge McDuck, “the money-hoarding, globe-trotting uncle of Donald Duck.” (Foreshadow alert)
• He wasn't really a movie-loving kid like Steven Spielberg. “While Lucas recalled seeing a few memorable films either on TV or in the Modesto movie theaters—Forbidden Planet, Metropolis, The Bridge on the River Kwai—for the most part, movies were simply a pleasant diversion.”
• I'd long read that Lucas wanted to remake “Flash Gordon,” which he'd supposedly seen as a kid, and I couldn't understand why. He was born in 1944, serials were dead or dying when he came of age, and no “Flash Gordon” had been made for decades. Answer: “The TV shows that Lucas remembered the most fondly were those 30-minute blocks of local programming in the late afternoon and early evening that broadcasters, looking for content, simply filled with installments of old movie serials. ... 'I especially loved the Flash Gordon serials,' Lucas said.”
• At odds with this? At USC film school, he was a huge fan of foreign and avante-garde filmmaking and into “tone poems” rather than straight storytelling.
• At the same time, Lucas' classmate, future Oscar-winning editor and sound designer Walter Murch, remembers that the USC film school didn't think much of the future of film: “The very first thing our film teacher told us... was, 'Get out of this business now. There's no future in it. There are no jobs for any of you. Don't do this.'”
• Lucas made “American Graffiti” out of spite. His previous film, “THX-1131,” had failed utterly and everyone was telling him to make something that wasn't so cold and impersonal. “Don't be so weird,” Coppola told him. “Why don't you try to write something out of your own life that has warmth and humor?” Lucas responded, as if through clenched teeth: “I'll give them one, just to show that I can do it.”
• While he was struggling to write “Star Wars” (writing was always a chore for him), he saw his wife Marcia driving away with their dog, an enormous Alaskan malamute, sitting in the passenger seat. “Lucas thought the dog, nearly as big as a person, looked like Marcia's copilot,” Jones writes. Yes, that's what led to Chewbacca.
• That malamute inspired an even more famous movie character: His name was Indiana.
• Though he'd cast Harrison Ford in “Graffiti,” Lucas didn't want him for “Star Wars,” but casting director Fred Roos got him into casting sessions by hiring him as a carpenter and then suggesting, “Hey, why don't we get this guy to help them out?”
• Lucas would create casting sessions in groups so he could see which actors had chemistry together. In one, Christopher Walken was Han, Will Seltzer Luke, and Teri Nunn Leia. But Seltzer's Luke was a bit intellectual, while Nunn was still a minor. Plus this group was a bit serious. So he went with the other, more fun trio.  
• Lucas didn't want to use Anthony Daniels voice for C-3PO or Frank Oz's voice for Yoda. For the former he envisioned a Brooklynesque used-car salesman(!), and for the latter, who knows? But he realized what he had was better than what he envisioned and kept it in.
• One of LucasFilm's first hires was a computer scientist named Ed Catmull. Lucas wanted him developing tools to make digital movies but Catmull was intrigued with computer animation—so he and team did it on the sly. What they worked on eventually became a company: Pixar.
• Lucas never saw the value in Pixar and sold it in the mid-1980s for $5-10 million. It was eventually worth billions. And counting.
• I never delved into the “Han shot first” discussion, which I assumed was just a contentious matter within the first “Star Wars” movie. Not quite. In its 20th anniversary update, along with cluttering the screen with gimcrackery, Lucas manipulated what he'd originally filmed in the barroom showdown between Han Solo and Greedo so Greedo shoots first rather than (as in the '77 original) Han shooting first. Lucas wanted his famous characters nice now, while fans felt it ruined Han's arc—from a ruthless solipsist to a semi-true believer. The fans are right. Again.

I still think you can make a good movie about the relationship between Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. The larger-than-life Coppola takes the young, quiet man under his wing, and Lucas, with “THX,” all but sinks Coppola's production company, and then with “Star Wars,” revolutionizes the industry away from the very types of films that Coppola was made to make. It's Frankenstein.

The book by Brian Jay Jones is recommended.