Won’t be long ’til summertime is through.
—The Beach Boys, “All Summer Long”
American Graffiti began life as a movie nobody wanted. But a half-century later, the quintessential end-of-summer love song to fleeting youth George Lucas made at 28 from the fragments of his own 18th summer has become a poignant touchstone for several generations of moviegoers. To honor the 50th anniversary of its August 1973 release, a new restoration of the print was screened for two days this past summer, roaring back into our lives like the 1932 Ford 5-Window Coupe owned by John Milner (Paul Le Mat), with a yellow California license plate that reads: THX 1138.
To really understand American Graffiti, you need to know something about Modesto, California, in 1962, a sunbaked place of walnut groves and flat dusty roads leading nowhere. The kind of place Jim Stark’s family might have moved to when he got into trouble in Rebel Without a Cause. The kind of place Marlon Brando’s posse of motorcycle outlaws overran in The Wild One.
Modesto is a place where America’s love affair with cars took hold and blossomed along the main drag through town—its land flat as an airstrip, its horizon a million miles away. It was made for speed, ideal for the restless, hormone-fueled boys just old enough to get behind the wheel and take off like a rocket into the vast American emptiness.
Even if you were going nowhere, you were going nowhere fast, like the skinny, teenage Lucas, who spent most of his time just driving around in circles in his small, two-cylinder Autobianchi Bianchina convertible, with a top speed of 60 miles per hour. His car had transformed him into a cool hot-rodder, able to take part in that uniquely American ritual of cruising the local drive-in; showing off your shiny, customized wheels; forging a macho reputation for speed; even occasionally hooking up with willing girls from the wrong side of the tracks for back-seat love sessions, the radio blasting out a stream of adolescent heartache and joy: “I Only Have Eyes for You,” “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?,” “The Great Pretender.”
But young Lucas’s Fiat was primarily for racing. He rolled his car in one accident, destroying the roof, which he replaced with a roll bar. He’d raced through scrub pasture and acres of walnut groves. He even knew kids who had been killed in car crashes not far from his home. Then, on June 12, 1962, a few days before graduating from Thomas Downey High School, Lucas was speeding home on Sylvan Road from the local library. He tried to make a left-hand turn and was blindsided by a Chevy Impala driven by another teenager. The Fiat slammed into a walnut tree, practically uprooting it. Lucas was flung from the car when his racing seat belt, bolted to the floor, inexplicably snapped, saving his life.
In shock and close to death, the 17-year-old was rushed by ambulance to the local hospital, where he languished for three months with two broken bones and crushed lungs. His high-school diploma was ultimately delivered to him in the hospital. The accident had come within a whisper of turning George Lucas into a teen angel.
“I should have been killed,” Lucas recalls, speaking from his 4,700-acre Skywalker Ranch, a sprawling film-office complex outside San Francisco. “To me, every day after the accident was an extra day. I didn’t know when it was going to be taken away from me. I figured it could happen at any time. I felt I had to take over the world, and I had only 10 years to do it.”
He resolved then that he was going to go somewhere after recovering from his accident, but where? Lucas attended Modesto Junior College, studying anthropology, but a chance meeting with the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler, also a racing fan, transformed Lucas’s interest in photographing cars to an interest in the movies.
“Suddenly, my life was film, every waking hour,” Lucas says. Those interests led him to the University of Southern California’s film school, in Los Angeles, where he was drawn to making experimental films, long on style and short on story. He had no less than three films in the 1967 National Student Film Festival, winning two awards, most notably for best dramatic film for his futuristic short, “Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB.” When it was shown at a screening at Royce Hall for U.C.L.A. film students, it brought down the house.
The short’s reception led to a Warner Bros. Fellowship, and it put Lucas on the map among a bumper crop of U.S.C. film students. He was the kid to watch. Lucas, then 24, met Francis Ford Coppola on the Warner lot. Coppola encouraged Lucas to turn his prizewinning short film into a feature, which would be the first release from Coppola’s newly formed American Zoetrope, an independent film studio backed by Warner Bros.
With Coppola’s encouragement, Lucas expanded THX 1138 into a feature, though it was still “the kind of movie I was interested in at that point, sort of an underground visual tone poem that didn’t rely very much on plot and character.”
It bombed at the box office.
Warner’s took the occasion to pull the plug on American Zoetrope. Coppola and Lucas blamed each other. Lucas thought Coppola could have fought more to prevent the studio from recutting THX 1138, and Coppola thought Lucas’s film had derailed his dream of an independent studio.
Down to his last $2,000 and relying on his then wife, the film editor Marcia Lucas, to support them, Lucas decamped to Europe on a Eurorail Pass, where he and Marcia would follow the racing circuit. The hell with Hollywood.
Before Lucas left town, however, Coppola dared him to try to write a different kind of movie. Not one of those science-fiction things, not one of those visual tone poems—just a straight comedy, something warm and human. “So I thought, ‘If you want warm and human, I’ll give you warm and human,’” Lucas says. “And the first thing that popped into my head was American Graffiti.”
“50,000 Watts of Soul Power”
Lucas remembers his anthropology classes, at Modesto, where he’d studied mating rituals. After all, ancient graffiti scrawled on walls in Rome often displayed love declarations, which abound in American Graffiti. “Isn’t it funny that the mating rituals in the United States are all in cars? Nobody’s ever put that on film. I mean, there’s Hot Rods to Hell and Rebel Without a Cause, but nobody’s ever actually taken the phenomenon as connected to cars and made a movie about it.”
He would write a little film about four teenage friends on the last night of summer, two of them about to leave Modesto for colleges in the East. Steve (Ron Howard), a Kiwanis-club president in the making, can’t bear to leave his cheerleader girlfriend, Laurie (Cindy Williams). Curt (Richard Dreyfuss), a thoughtful romantic, is torn between seeing the world and staying in familiar Modesto, where he’s smitten by the fleeting sight of a beautiful blonde woman (Suzanne Somers) in a white 1956 Ford Thunderbird. Terry (Charles Martin Smith), a cheerful, uncool kid in Buddy Holly spectacles, rides a Vespa when everyone else is cruising in cars. (He finally gets the girl when Steve lends him his deluxe ’55 Chevy). John (Le Mat) is holding on to his reputation as the fastest dragster in Modesto while working a nowhere job as a car mechanic.
Lucas knew that when you cruised up and down 10th Street in Modesto, you cruised to the radio. That meant mostly three things: the all-American disc jockey, the drive-in, and rock ’n’ roll.
For a teenager, the disc jockey was a make-believe friend whose disembodied voice over the airwaves joked with you, played your favorite music, knew your deepest desires. The disc jockey Lucas grew up with was Wolfman Jack on XERB, via a signal that would fade in and out, which gave the experience a mystical quality. Some of the Wolfman’s teenage listeners thought he was broadcasting from Mexico or from an airplane so he could stay out of reach of the F.C.C. Others insisted that the broadcast originated from Norman Bates’s Psycho house. It was in fact coming from a small studio on Sunset Boulevard. “This is Wolfman Jack, skinny-dipping in the oil of joy on 50,000 watts of soul power.”
Born in New York as Robert Weston Smith, Wolfman Jack was the first mainstream disc jockey to introduce soul music to millions of white teenagers. He also came from car culture; Wolfman’s first was a lipstick-red, ’54 Ford convertible with a continental spare on the back, and he talked the talk in a voice roughened by years of cigarettes and Jack Daniel’s.
Coppola dared him to try to write a different kind of movie. Not one of those science-fiction things, something warm and human. “So I thought, If you want warm and human, I’ll give you warm and human,” Lucas recalls.
“Teenagers had a very personal relationship with the disc jockey,” Lucas explains, his own voice crackling through the phone. “It’s interesting because it pre-dates the Internet and things like Facebook, where you have very intimate relationships with people you’ve never even met. I was fascinated by the fact that for a lot of teenagers, their closest friend, their closest confidant, the one person they really care about in the world, was the disc jockey.”
And then there’s the drive-in. Mel’s Drive-In operates as a kind of mother ship where teenagers would dock to refuel, hook up, break up, and make up. Somers recalls that when she was in high school, in California, “it was all about the drive-in. It was where you went to spend the least amount of money and the most amount of time.”
“It was pretty innocent and tame by today’s standards, but you ended up in the back seat making out with somebody you hardly knew,” Somers says. “And for girls, it was about going to the ladies’ room because that was the march past the cars. It was about what you were wearing and how high you could get your ponytail. You wanted to be noticed and, at the same time, act like you didn’t notice them.”
For Lucas and his friends, it wasn’t the Beatles or the British Invasion but the Beach Boys that set the mood—songs such as “I Get Around,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and “Don’t Worry Baby,” songs that were all about cruising.
Once he had the concept for his movie, Lucas contacted a friend from film school, Willard “Bill” Huyck, and his wife, Gloria Katz, both screenwriters, and the three of them pounded out a 15-page treatment for American Graffiti, “Saga of the Low Riders.” But no major studios wanted to do it.
“I had a lot of trouble with the studios,” Lucas remembers. “They said it was just a montage set to records, that it wasn’t a movie.”
Meanwhile, the popularity of the feature-length version of THX 1138 at Cannes led to directing offers for Lucas, mostly for movies that he termed record albums, like Hair and Tommy. Though he was in debt and down to his last $500, he turned them all down. There was only one movie Lucas wanted to direct, and that was American Graffiti.
After another re-write of the script based on Huyck and Katz’s treatment, Universal Pictures became interested, but they were concerned because most of the roles were for teenagers, with no big names associated. That’s when Lucas had the inspired idea to go back to Coppola, who by now had finished shooting The Godfather; the word on the street was that it was going to be a major, major hit.
Despite their earlier falling-out, Coppola said, “I believed in American Graffiti from the moment I read it and thought it was very funny and very warm, and I said, ‘Of course.’” With Coppola now attached as a producer, Universal signed on.
Now it was time to cast the movie.
“Can You Drive?”
They saw hundreds of kids. Lucas knew what he wanted because it was his story, after all, and three of the four main characters were versions of himself: Curt, Terry, and Milner. The fourth member of the group, Steve—the class president, voted “Most Likely to Succeed”—was based on Lucas’s best friend in high school.
Lucas was aided by Fred Roos, one of the movie’s producers and an inspired casting agent. Roos had an eye for pairing the right actor with the right part. He’d helped Coppola in casting The Godfather. Roos and his partner, Mike Fenton, put out an old-fashioned casting call for teenage talent, requiring five or six auditions plus callbacks and tests.
“It was a gauntlet just to get the job,” Ron Howard remembers. This was his first adult role after years as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show and Mayberry R.F.D., and he was afraid he wasn’t going to make the transition. Roos had been a casting director for the entire run of Griffith’s show, so he’d watched little Ronnie grow up. But Ron was not being sought out for the movies—at 18, his acting career was already in a precarious place—so Roos made sure he was considered for the part.
Charles Martin Smith, also 18, had been backpacking through Europe after graduating from college as a theater major and appearing in a few films. “When I got back,” he recalls from his home, in Vancouver, British Columbia, “my agent said, ‘Well, it’s too bad that you’ve been gone for six weeks because they were casting this movie, and there were a lot of roles for kids your age. You missed it. It’s all cast!’” But when Smith learned that the movie was being directed by Lucas, he wouldn’t give up. “There was a lot of enthusiasm about George from U.S.C., and he had Coppola behind him, and Haskell Wexler, so there was already a great pedigree about the movie.”
Smith ended up doing a screen test at Haskell Wexler’s Dove Films, on Seward Drive in Hollywood. Once cast, Smith was asked to audition with five different “Debbies,” the slightly dippy, slightly too willing girl who gives Terry the happiest night of his teenage life. But none of them seemed right to Lucas, who had based the character on the teenage girls with bouffant hair from Modesto High that he’d once romanced in the back seat of his car.
Smith recalls, “We’re all standing around after the last audition, and I remember George turning and saying, ‘Where’s Candy Clark?’ She, too, almost didn’t make the cut.” After they played some scenes together, Smith understood why they ended up casting her. “She was just naturally great—a little off the wall and funny as hell. Candy was thrilled to get the part. She still has that same unedited, unaffected effervescence that Debbie had.”
“I identified with that character,” Candy Clark explains. “That was kind of me back in Texas. That’s exactly what I did. Cruise, and look for action. We went from the Lone Star Drive-In to Carlton’s Drive-In, back and forth.”
Candy was born Candace Clark in 1947 to a struggling family and grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. She started modeling at the Dallas Apparel Mart, then fled to New York to start a career with the Zoli modeling agency. Clark was one of Zoli’s original 13 clients, all of whom were photographed by Richard Avedon in a nude foldout. (“I was traumatized,” she says. “I hated to be nude.”) After appearing as an extra in a few films, Clark met Jack Nicholson at a party, who mentioned her to Roos, who cast her in John Huston’s Fat City and championed her audition for Debbie.
Le Mat’s John is a surprisingly sweet tough guy, aware on some level that he’s facing a bleak future as a car mechanic, while all the smart kids are going to the junior college. He’s going nowhere fast—too fast—and he knows it.
“I was fascinated by the fact that for a lot of teenagers, their closest friend, their closest confidant, the one person they really care about in the world, was the disc jockey.”
“I was very lucky,” Le Mat recalls, “because Fred Roos had remembered me from a previous audition, as most good screen casting directors do. He kept a file over the years, and he recommended me to George Lucas as someone who could play a tough guy.”
At 30, Harrison Ford was the oldest member of the cast. At the time, he was working successfully as a carpenter supporting his wife and two kids and had been under contract at Columbia Pictures for $150 a week, then at Universal for $250. When Lucas called and offered him $100 a week, Ford said, “Forget it.”
“I was making more money as a carpenter,” he explains. “I think I was a bit huffy about it and hung up on them. They called me back in about four or five hours and said they’d gone through the entire budget and found more money and could up their offer. I said, ‘How much?,’ and they said, ‘$500 a week.’ So I said, ‘O.K., I’ll take it.’”
Although Ford was closer in age to Lucas than most of the cast, the Chicago-born actor knew little about the cruising culture of American Graffiti. “It was a West Coast phenomenon,” he explains. “Nobody I knew had enough funds, or enough ambition, to have their own car.” Ford played Bob Falfa, the gruff, out-of-town farm boy in a cowboy hat who challenges Milner to a drag race, driving a 1955 Chevy 150.
Roos had been trying to find the right role for Richard Dreyfuss for some time. He kept bringing him in for readings on television shows because he knew how talented the Brooklyn native was. Roos finally brought Dreyfuss to Lucas, who offered the actor his choice of Steve or Curt.
Dreyfuss ended up playing Curt, who’s at the center of all the social cliques in the film: friends with Steve and Laurie, affectionately tolerant of Terry, comfortable with the businessmen at the Chamber of Commerce who’ve awarded him a college scholarship; he’s even inducted into the Pharaohs, an outlaw gang headed by Joe (Bo Hopkins), who manages to be both hilarious and menacing while hustling Curt into his customized 1951 Mercury.
Mackenzie Phillips was just 12 at the time but no stranger to the entertainment industry as the daughter of John Phillips, of the Mamas & the Papas. “I was still kind of naïve,” she says. “I lived in the San Fernando Valley with my mother, who was a very strict, kind of Eastern Seaboard socialite lady who’d moved to California.” Mackenzie had never acted before. Roos had approached her at the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard, where she was the lead singer in a band on hootenanny night.
“Fred Roos came up to me and said, ‘How’d you like to be in a movie?’ And I said, ‘Wow, that would be really cool,’ because I was just a complete Valley Girl. My mother came up behind me and said, ‘But she’s only 12!’ because I looked older.” She got the part of Carol, the bratty, insecure 13-year-old who attaches herself to Milner. Her blend of bravado and vulnerability was the perfect foil for the tough but sweet dragster, who’s completely embarrassed about having a tween tagging along. “She was a delight to work with,” Le Mat recalled. “She was a comedian, and she made those scenes funnier than I had intended.”
Cindy Williams, who passed away in January of this year, played Laurie, the cheerleader whose model of choice is a 1958 Edsel. (Perhaps Lucas put her in Ford Motor’s great folly for her decision to cling to Steve and remain in Modesto.) When the part was first offered, she turned it down, telling Lucas she wanted to play Debbie. Coppola called her up and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse: “Cindy, you want to do this movie because it’s really going to be something!”
Somers, then just 19, was called to audition for “Blonde in T-bird.” That’s all she was told. At the time, she was a broke, single mother of a three-year-old. She had no money—not even the 50-cent toll she needed to get herself from Sausalito across the Golden Gate Bridge to the casting interview. When she got to the tollgate, the actress remembers, “I started fumbling around and said, ‘I forgot my wallet.’ The guy at the tollgate informed me that I had to leave something as collateral, so I fished through my purse and came up with a lipstick. He said, ‘That’ll do.’”
When she walked into the interview, there were 200 actresses there: all blonde. “All much better-looking than me,” she recalls. “I thought, I’m never going to get this. I said to the casting agent, ‘I can’t stay. I can’t afford the parking.’ And he said, ‘Well, George is kind of interested in your photo. Let me see if he’ll take you in now.’”
“So I go in there and he’s kind of slumped behind his desk, and he looks kind of bashful, and he asks me, ‘Can you drive?’”
Somers answered “Yeah.” And George stared at her and said, “Thank you very much.” Somers walked out thinking, “Thanks for nothing. What a big waste of my time. And now I lost a lipstick and spent a lot of money on parking.” But when she arrived home, her phone was ringing. It was her agent, who started screaming, “You got the part, you got the part!” When Somers asked for the script, her agent answered, “You don’t need a script. You just say, ‘I love you.’”
His cast now complete, Lucas’s production was on the verge of collapse. The studio didn’t want to pay for the 81 songs Lucas wanted and asked him to cut the selection down to five, but he managed to hold on to 41. “The music actually functions as a kind of Greek chorus because I wrote the screenplay with the music,” Lucas explained. “I’d find a song and then I’d write a scene to that song, which was playing when I wrote it.”
Finally, Lucas and Coppola were given the green light. On June 26, 1972, the cast and crew assembled in San Rafael, California, the small Marin County town that would stand in for Modesto, to begin Universal Pictures #05144. Coppola conducted a kind of hand-holding prayer for harmony and productivity, and then he mostly faded into the background to let Lucas make his movie.
The Night Shift
It was going to be a 28-day shoot filmed almost entirely at night, but all was not in harmony in San Rafael. One of the hippie crew members was busted for marijuana the night before filming began. Then, on the second night, a local bar owner complained that the production was blocking access to his establishment, and he got the city to rescind the movie’s permit. Lucas jumped into a car and drove the 20 miles to Petaluma, where he talked the town into letting them continue the production.
“When we were making Graffiti, it was very much an indie-style film,” Ron Howard recalls. “There were women on the crew, a rare thing. Back then in Hollywood, you never saw a female executive. You never saw a female in the camera department, or in editing, so it was breakthrough stuff.”
They shot from nine p.m. to six in the morning. It was cold and foggy, and the damp weather caused Clark’s blonde flip wig (made of yak’s hair) to swell. “Worse than that,” she remembers, “we didn’t have any place to sit. You had to go into the wardrobe trailer, with the clothes hanging over your head, just to sit down. It upsets your system, too, working all night. You’re trying to sleep during the day and the rest of the world is up, slamming the car door at the Holiday Inn, splashing in the pool. Nobody says, ‘Shh, actors are sleeping.’”
“We got to know each other pretty well in that trailer,” she adds. “You saw everyone in their underwear. We were constantly on top of each other. If the Winnebago was too crowded, you had to sit on the curb or fall asleep in one of the cars. When Ron Howard finally asked Coppola, on one of his infrequent visits to the set, if he could scare up a few chairs, he answered, ‘There’s nothing in the budget for chairs.’”
As the production wore on, the cast became more and more exhausted. Lucas had had the bright idea of shooting the movie in sequence, so they would be authentically bedraggled by the end of the night during which the movie takes place.
On the nights when they weren’t in any scenes, Le Mat, Howard, Smith, and Ford haunted the City Lights Bookstore, in San Francisco. Like sailors on shore leave, they prowled the strip clubs, anything that was open. “Charlie and I were the only ones under 21, so we would always get thrown out,” Howard says. “The older guys in the cast—Harrison Ford, Bo Hopkins, Paul Le Mat—occasionally let off steam by consuming huge quantities of beer, racing up to the roof of the Holiday Inn, and placing all the empties on the motel sign. One of the trio even relieved himself in the motel ice machine.”
“Paul and Harrison were like the Hell’s Angels of our group,” Clark recalls. “They were always causing trouble.”
When Lucas called and offered him $100 a week, Ford said, “Forget it.” “I was making more money as a carpenter,” he explained.
If the schedule was hard on the actors, it was worse for Lucas. After staying up all night shooting, he’d spend the day in the converted two-car garage behind Coppola’s house in Mill Valley, working with Marcia and Verna Fields editing the film. (Lucas couldn’t help but notice the Xeroxed checks from Paramount made out to Francis Ford Coppola for millions of dollars taped to the editing machines.)
Lucas fell asleep on set a couple of times. “It wasn’t very much fun for me,” Lucas confesses. “It was a nightmare, but making movies is a nightmare. The cast, they were all kids, just running around and causing trouble. It was like summer camp for them. For me, I was just trying to get a movie made.”
Somers arrived prepared to give Lucas a buffet of all the possible ways of saying her one line—“I love you”—ready for anything he wanted. “Right before we shot the scene,” she remembers, “he comes up and says, ‘Oh, by the way, just mouth it.’” When she protested that she’d rehearsed it all night, Lucas said, “Don’t worry, everyone’s going to remember the Blonde in the Thunderbird.” She didn’t believe him, but he was right. He had her pegged as the girl in the Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” whose daddy takes the T-bird away.
The climactic drag race between Milner and Falfa evokes the “Chickie Run” in Rebel Without a Cause. When it came time to film the crash, Lucas found himself reliving his own teenage accident on film. After a couple of failed attempts, on August 4, 1972, the last day of shooting, Falfa’s car tore down the road and almost took out one of the cameramen lying on the ground. Cast and crew looked on in horror as the car came within inches of killing him.
Cindy Williams did not have to act hysterical as her character emerges from the car; she was genuinely shaken. Wexler was there, shooting the whole thing with a handheld camera in five minutes of perfect light as they raced the sun coming up over the horizon.
The only character to play himself in the movie is Wolfman Jack. It must have been a dream for the young director to sit with the legendary disc jockey, listening to old recordings of the Wolfman Jack show, picking out dedication calls and ad-libs to use on the soundtrack in the movie.
Curt searches for the elusive Wolfman so he can send out a love call over the radio to the Blonde in the Thunderbird. He’s like Dorothy looking for the Wizard of Oz, and the all-powerful wizard turns out to be just an ordinary (white) man in a studio, spinning records and eating a Popsicle—trapped in this town, just like Curt.
Lines Around the Block
The film broke twice during American Graffiti’s first screening, at the 1,000-seat North Point Theater in San Francisco on a Sunday morning, January 28, 1973, but it didn’t matter. The audience loved it. They were dancing in the aisles—all except for Ned Tanen, the Universal executive who had been amazed by Lucas’s student work and had financed the movie.
Tanen stood up at the end of the film and loudly announced, “This is in no shape to show to an audience. It’s un-releasable.” He wanted cuts made. He wasn’t comfortable with the unorthodox use of music. He just didn’t get it. When Coppola asked Tanen what he thought, the executive barked, “I went to bat for you boys, and you let me down.”
Lucas felt kicked in the teeth. It was like THX 1138 all over again, with the studio swooping in to snatch his movie away from him and ruin it.
Coppola went ballistic. He shouted at Tanen, “This kid has killed himself to make this movie for you, and he brought it in on time. The least you can do is thank him for that. I’ll write you a check right now for this movie,” Coppola added, pulling out his checkbook. “It cost $700,000. I’ll write you a check for a million dollars, and you’ll walk away with a profit right now.”
That scared the hell out of Tanen. Howard says, “I wasn’t there, but it’s a legend now—$700,000, which was cheap for a movie. But you know what it would be today? $10 million.” Tanen refused Coppola’s offer, but the studio also refused to release the movie until Lucas spent the next four months recutting the film.
At a second screening, at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills on May 15, 1973, the entire cast showed up, including Wolfman Jack. “It was just packed,” Clark recalled. “The lights went down, and all of a sudden you see Mel’s Drive-In, and you hear ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ and the whole audience jumped up out of their seats and went, ‘Yeah!’”
Steven Spielberg, who’d been so deeply impressed by THX 1138, was present at the screening, which he later described as the most powerful he’d ever witnessed. But Tanen still didn’t like it.
Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount let it be known that if Universal didn’t intend to release American Graffiti, they would be happy to take it off their hands. Universal considered showing it only in drive-ins or re-inventing it as a Movie of the Week. Finally, fresh out of bad ideas, they released it, “dumping it in theaters in August, which is what you do with movies you don’t care about,” says Howard.
Steven Spielberg was present at the screening, which he later described as the most powerful he’d ever witnessed.
Howard recalled driving to Westwood’s Avco Theater with Charlie Smith and seeing the lines around the block. Midnight screenings sold out by seven p.m. American Graffiti was nominated for five Academy Awards: best director, best supporting actress (Clark), best film editing, best original screenplay, and best picture.
Film critic Stephen Farber, reviewing the movie for The New York Times, wrote, “The nostalgia boom has finally produced a lasting work of art.” Only Lucas’s hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, panned it, describing the movie as the worst film ever made. Lucas was hurt by that, especially because that was the only newspaper besides The Modesto Bee that his family and their friends ever read.
American Graffiti, which was made for $700,000, plus $500,000 for prints and advertising, took in more than $100,000,000: at the time, the highest return ever on an investment in Hollywood. Its success begat Lucasfilm Ltd., Skywalker Sound, and Industrial Light & Magic, all of which helped to transform the movies. Coppola received points as one of the producers, but had he managed to buy American Graffiti back from Universal, he would have made millions more.
“I didn’t think it was going to make $60,” Dreyfuss recalls. “I just thought it was a little movie.” As for the American Graffiti class of 1973, that handful of young actors who came together in San Rafael, many have graduated to spectacular careers.
In 1977, Ford became a major action star, thanks to Lucas, who cast him as Han Solo in his juggernaut science-fiction movie, Star Wars, and later as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Smith remembers how Lucas used to talk about Star Wars while they were shooting American Graffiti. “He was telling us the story. I remember Rick Dreyfuss saying to him, ‘I wanna be the king of the [Ewoks].’ And I kept saying, ‘What about me? I’m short, too!’”
Many in the cast wanted to audition for Star Wars, but Lucas says he “didn’t want any Graffiti people on other planets.” Williams auditioned for Princess Leia, however, and Smith tried out for Luke Skywalker, but only Ford made it into the movie. That was five years between jobs for the lanky actor.
In 2012, Lucas sold Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company for more than $4 billion. “I don’t really care that much about money, which some people find amusing,” he says. It goes back to that car crash that should have killed him in 1962. When the final credits of American Graffiti rolled, a lot of people were shocked to learn that Terry is killed in Vietnam and Milner by a drunk driver. Clark never liked that ending. “The best driver killed on the road? Toad missing in action?” But Lucas had always woven the awareness of mortality into the flickering colors of his movies. It’s what makes his fictions ring true.
“Youth is a fantasy, and we must seize the moment,” Lucas, who turns 79 this year, insists. “It’s really time that’s important—time spent doing what you want to do, because you don’t have much of it, especially as you get down to my age. I have a little slogan on my desk, which simply says, ‘An inch of gold will not buy an inch of time.’”
Sam Kashner is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. Previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author or co-author of several books, including Sinatraland: A Novel, When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, and Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends