Days before his 1962 high school graduation in Modesto, George Lucas was broadsided in his Autobianchi Bianchina, and a snapped seatbelt threw him clear of the car before it wrapped around a tree. This episode traces how surviving that crash pushed a would-be race car driver to tell his father he would be a millionaire by 30, then through USC film school, where he saw himself as a maker of abstract visual tone poems rather than a storyteller, and into a partnership with Francis Ford Coppola at American Zoetrope that produced the commercial failure THX 1138.

The conversation follows the pivot to American Graffiti, the failed attempt to license Flash Gordon that led him to write his own space opera, the studio rejections, the chest pains and hospitalization during production, and the contract decision to trade a higher fee for merchandising a ...