Writer-director George Strayton’s one-hour pilot The Skywalker has been named a finalist for Best TV Pilot at the 22nd Annual HollyShorts Film Festival, one of the industry’s biggest launching pads for new talent.
The Skywalker digs into the real story behind Star Wars, focusing on George Lucas and his wife and creative partner, Marcia. The limited series pilot follows how their relationship gave a struggling filmmaker the courage to make a movie every studio in town had already dismissed as a childish fantasy. That movie turned into the highest-grossing original film in Hollywood history and gave a divided world something to actually agree on..
“The Skywalker digs into the real story behind Star Wars, focusing on George Lucas and his wife and creative partner, Marcia.”
The script has already picked up hardware, winning Filmmatic’s Season 10 TV Pilot Awards and the Alpine International Film Festival, plus a finalist nod in the Filmmatic Sci-Fi/Fantasy Awards. Now it’s in the running at HollyShorts, where the Best TV Pilot winner gets announced at the HollyShorts Awards Gala on Aug. 23. This year’s festival is based out of the TCL Chinese Theatres and other venues around Ovation Hollywood.
Strayton splits his time between Los Angeles and Scotland, and while The Skywalker competes, he’s deep in post-production on his own short film, The Star Cycle, a science-fantasy project he wrote and directed in Scotland. His crew included producer Mark Lacey (Tornado), DP/VFX supervisor Dante Harbridge Robinson (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), and BAFTA-winning editor Conor Meechan (Chloe, Amazon/BBC). The feature screenplay from which the short is drawn is up for Best Screenplay at the 2026 Paris International Indie Film & Screenplay Festival.
Strayton’s TV credits go back a ways, including Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Mech-X4, Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonlance, and October Faction. In 2021, he was chosen for the inaugural WGA East Showrunner Academy, where he was mentored by Tina Fey, David Simon, and Jesse Armstrong.
