Among the wave of film directors who brought fresh blood and maverick sensibilities to southern California in the early 1960s--including Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, Brian DePalma, and Martin Scorsese--none could have seemed less likely than George Lucas, the short, painfully shy car nerd from Modesto, California. And yet, in a mere four appearances behind the camera over 20 years, he managed to change Hollywood and fundamentally alter the culture. In this lively and informative biography, John Baxter weaves interviews with Modesto townies and Lucas cronies into a portrait of the man as an artistically gifted loner with a grocer"s feeling for budgets--an important director who was also unmanned by directing and a self-effacing man whose notes for Star Wars reveal an ambition to make an American epic on the scale of Kurosawa"s samurai stories. Baxter skillfully shades in Lucas"s emotionally straitened adolescence, his lack-of-anything-better-to-do enrollment in USC"s film school, and his relationship with Coppola, whose operatic maneuverings made the small, European-ish American Graffiti possible, even as his flamboyance estranged the two. Baxter also takes Lucas to task--Lucas lied about losing his virginity in the back seat of a car, he argues--but by the end the author has been won over, appreciating Lucas"s films less than he admires the basic goodness and integrity of the man who put up money for Kurosawa"s Ran and Coppola"s Tucker, for no other reason than because he felt that small-town boy"s sense of debt to his mentors. --Lyall Bush