This report comes from the Official Star Wars Site!
Answered by: Rick McCallum

I noticed that Mr. Lucas is credited as "Executive Producer" of the Star Wars movies. What's the difference between an executive producer and a regular producer?

Unfortunately right now, there isn't a uniform standard of how producers are credited in the film industry.

For Star Wars, George Lucas is the Executive Producer because he finances the movie and is also the overall architect of the picture. He's the one we work for. Whereas I'm in the traditional producer role of coordinating the thousands of tiny details that need to come together to get a picture made.

That's the way it should be. On other movies, however, those titles may mean other things.

One reason why a lot of movies are bad is that they have 8-12 producers. Sometimes it will be as arbitrary as an agent of one of the actors, who then wants some level of control because he doesn't want to be known just as the agent anymore. The Producers' Guild is being run by Kathleen Kennedy now and she's doing a great job to try to stop that kind of crediting because it devalues the contributions of the actual producers.