American Graffiti

• 1. Introduction

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  American Graffiti premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival on the 2nd of August, 1973. It had been refused by every major Hollywood studio. The one studio that finally agreed to distribute it had planned to release it on television, not in cinemas. When the film finally reached theaters, it had cost $777,000 to make. Within a few years, it had earned more than $200 million.

  How does a picture about teenagers spending a single summer night in a California town in 1962 survive repeated rejection and a chaotic production? And how does it then become one of the most profitable films ever made? The answer is personal. The film's director, George Lucas, was not making entertainment. He was making a document of something he had watched disappear.

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• 2. Modesto and Memory

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  During the production of THX 1138, Francis Ford Coppola challenged George Lucas to write a film with mass appeal. Lucas looked immediately to his own past. He had grown up in Modesto, California, cruising the streets as a teenager in the early 1960s, and that world was already gone. "Cruising was gone, and I felt compelled to document the whole experience," Lucas explained, describing what his generation used as a way of meeting girls.

  His fascination with the radio disc jockey Wolfman Jack reached back to his years at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. There, Lucas had once considered making a documentary about the Wolfman before dropping the idea. The character survived into the fiction instead, eventually becoming structural to the whole film.

  Curt Henderson, John Milner, and Terry "The Toad" Fields each represented a different era from Lucas's own past. Curt came from Lucas's USC years; John from his teenage street-racing days and the Kustom Kulture car scene around Modesto. Terry represented Lucas's unlucky freshman years in high school. The filmmaker also drew on Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni, a 1953 film about young men who could not bring themselves to leave their hometown.

  Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz helped write the treatment, and Lucas and his producer Gary Kurtz took it to studios across Hollywood. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Columbia Pictures all said no. United Artists gave Lucas $10,000 to develop a full screenplay, then rejected the finished draft. Their note described it as "a musical montage with no characters." In the same meeting, United Artists also passed on the untitled space opera Lucas had been developing alongside it.

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• 3. Unknowns and Future Stars

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  Fred Roos, who had served as casting director on The Godfather, oversaw the American Graffiti casting process. Because the roles called for young actors, notices went out to high-school drama groups and community theaters across the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the actors who auditioned was Mark Hamill, then entirely unknown.

  More than a hundred actors read for the role of Curt Henderson before Richard Dreyfuss was chosen. George Lucas was struck by Dreyfuss's careful analysis of the role and offered him his pick of either Curt or Terry "The Toad" Fields. Dreyfuss chose Curt. Bob Balaban turned down the Terry role out of fear of becoming typecast; he later said he regretted it. Charles Martin Smith, who had already completed two feature films in his first year as a professional actor, was eventually cast instead.

  Producer Coppola convinced Lucas to cast Wolfman Jack as himself. The Wolfman later recalled that he and Lucas had worked through thousands of recorded Wolfman Jack phone calls in preparation. The calls heard in the finished film, he noted, were actual recordings made with real people.

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• 4. Six Weeks in Petaluma

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  Filming began in San Rafael, California, on the 26th of June 1972. Lucas chose San Rafael because he believed Modesto had changed too much in ten years to stand in for its own past. The arrangement lasted only two days. A key crew member had been arrested for growing marijuana, and the production was already running behind schedule. The San Rafael City Council then withdrew permission to continue filming, citing disruption to local businesses.

  Lucas moved the production to Petaluma, a small town roughly 20 miles north, without losing a single day of shooting. He persuaded the San Rafael council to allow two more nights of filming for general cruising shots. In Petaluma, Lucas shot using Techniscope cameras, an inexpensive format that used only half of a standard 35 mm film frame. He believed it would give the finished film a documentary quality, and he encouraged the cast to improvise, using unplanned moments in the final cut.

  Paul Le Mat was hospitalized after an allergic reaction to walnuts during production. Le Mat, Harrison Ford, and Bo Hopkins were reported to have been drunk most nights and on weekends. One actor set fire to Lucas's motel room. Another night, Le Mat threw Richard Dreyfuss into a swimming pool; Dreyfuss gashed his forehead the day before his close-up scenes were scheduled. Ford was ejected from his room at the local Holiday Inn. Two camera operators were nearly killed while filming the climactic drag race on Frates Road outside Petaluma.

  Haskell Wexler stepped in to help when the Techniscope cameras created persistent lighting problems. He was credited on the finished film as the "visual consultant." Principal photography ended on the 4th of August 1972, with the final scenes shot at Buchanan Field Airport in Concord.

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• 5. The Absent King

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  Elvis Presley is not on the American Graffiti soundtrack. His absence came down to a contract dispute. RCA, the label that controlled Presley's recordings, refused to accept the flat licensing deal that Universal offered to all music publishers. Every other major publisher agreed to the terms; RCA did not, so Presley was left out entirely.

  George Lucas had written each scene with a particular song in mind, drawing from his own large collection of vintage records. He had wanted 75 songs in total. Clearing the rights cost approximately $90,000, which consumed the entire music budget. There was nothing left for a traditional score. Lucas turned that constraint into a method. "I used the absence of music, and sound effects, to create the drama," he later explained.

  Walter Murch, who handled audio mixing and sound design, suggested making Wolfman Jack's radio show the structural backbone of the entire film. The music throughout is diegetic: the characters themselves can hear it, playing from car radios and jukeboxes, so it becomes part of the action. Producer Gary Kurtz called the Wolfman "an ethereal presence in the lives of young people." That quality, Kurtz said, was what they wanted in the picture.

  When the end credits ran, the film listed each song's title, artist, and record label. But it omitted the names of composers, lyricists, and publishing companies. Several songwriters filed lawsuits against MCA over the omission. A settlement was reached; MCA paid damages to the songwriters and to the publishing companies. The soundtrack album was released by MCA Records under the title 41 Original Hits from the Soundtrack of American Graffiti. It presented the songs in the order they appeared in the film. The song "Gee" by the Crows was left off the main album and appeared instead on a subsequent second release.

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• 6. A Summer Before the Fall

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  The summer of 1962 that American Graffiti depicts sits two months before the Cuban Missile Crisis. It comes before the Vietnam War, before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and before the counterculture peaked. The film's characters have no idea what is coming. That is precisely the point.

  Roger Ebert gave the film four stars and called it "a brilliant work of historical fiction." He wrote that "no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie's success in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant." Jay Cocks of Time magazine praised its depth of feeling and its portrait of a generation's eagerness, sadness, and small defeats.

  Pauline Kael of The New Yorker was less persuaded. She called the film "a warm, nice, draggy comedy" with nothing to back up its style. She also noted with disdain that the epilogue tracked only the male characters, leaving the women entirely unmentioned. Kael later accused Lucas of chauvinism on that point.

  On Metacritic, American Graffiti received an average score of 97 out of 100 from fifteen critics. The American Film Institute ranked the film at number 77 on its 1998 list of the hundred greatest American films. That position was revised to number 62 in the 2007 anniversary edition.

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• 7. A Studio at War

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  At a test screening in January 1973, every person in the room praised American Graffiti. Universal Pictures executive Ned Tanen attended and heard the unanimous approval. Then the studio asked Lucas to re-edit his cut anyway.

  Francis Ford Coppola stepped in with a dramatic offer: he would buy the film from Universal for $775,000, the full cost of production. 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures both made similar offers. Universal refused all of them and announced plans to have editor William Hornbeck re-cut the film instead.

  In March 1973, The Godfather won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Universal relented. The studio agreed to remove only three scenes from Lucas's version. One was a car salesman's encounter with Toad. Another was an argument between Steve and his former teacher Mr. Kroot at the sock hop. The third was Bob Falfa's attempt to serenade Laurie with "Some Enchanted Evening." Word of mouth among studio employees gradually built the film's reputation toward a theatrical release.

  Studio presidents Sidney Sheinberg and Lew Wasserman heard the praise and approved an additional $500,000 for marketing. The film was released in the United States on the 11th of August 1973. It cost $1.27 million in total to produce and market; the worldwide box office gross exceeded $55 million. Universal reissued the film on the 26th of May, 1978, with Dolby sound added. That second release earned an additional $63 million, bringing the total revenue for both theatrical runs to $118 million.

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• 8. After the Night Ends

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  The financial success of American Graffiti turned George Lucas into an instant millionaire. His net worth reached $4 million, and he set aside $300,000 as an independent fund for the space opera he had been developing. That project reached theaters in 1977 as Star Wars.

  The profits from Graffiti also funded the development of Lucasfilm, Skywalker Sound, and Industrial Light and Magic. Producer Francis Ford Coppola later reflected that he could have financed the film himself and made $30 million on the deal. Lucas recalled that Coppola "never got over it and he still kicks himself."

  In 1995, the Library of Congress selected American Graffiti for preservation in the National Film Registry. It deemed the film culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. Two years later, the city of Modesto honored Lucas with a statue dedication at George Lucas Plaza. The city also established an annual classic car festival in tribute to its graffiti culture heritage.

  Internet reviewer MaryAnn Johanson noted that the film rekindled public interest in the 1950s and early 1960s. It influenced The Lords of Flatbush in 1974 and Cooley High in 1975, and it shaped the television series Happy Days. Director David Fincher credited American Graffiti as a visual influence on his 1999 film Fight Club.

  After shooting wrapped, all of the principal cars from the film were offered for sale through San Francisco newspaper ads. Only one attracted a buyer: the 1958 Impala driven by Ron Howard, which sold for a few hundred dollars. The yellow deuce coupe and the Pharaohs' red Mercury went unsold. The coupe was priced as low as $1,500, but no one came forward. John Milner's yellow deuce coupe bore the California plate THX 138, a slight echo of Lucas's earlier science-fiction film.

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