George Lucas Made American Graffiti to Prove He Was Human

The post George Lucas Made American Graffiti to Prove He Was Human appeared first on Consequence.

Some movies are remarkable achievements on their own, and some movies need some extra context to appreciate. George Lucas’s breakout 1973 feature American Graffiti is one of those — the charming slice-of-life comedy, featuring a young cast including Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, Cindy Williams, Kathleen Quinlan, and Harrison Ford, turns fifty years old today, a powerful piece of nostalgia that gets even more powerful as time passes.

When the creator of Star Wars first began making movies in the 1960s, there was very little indication that he would eventually create some of pop culture’s most beloved characters — because his movies didn’t really have characters in them at all. As a film student at the University of Southern California, Lucas made shorts that might be best described as tone poems, with a heavy emphasis on visual style and mood: 1966’s Herbie, co-directed by Paul Golding, is literally three minutes of light reflected against a Volkswagen Beetle while jazz music plays.

Between this phase of Lucas’s career and American Graffiti came his first feature, THX-1138, a dystopian sci-fi drama shot in the brand new concrete tunnels of San Francisco’s BART system. The characters of THX were drug-controlled drones aiming to break free of their society’s rigorous controls; while there’s a love story and yearning for freedom embedded in the text, it’s an overall cold production.

Shockingly, it was not a hit at the box office, and as a follow-up, then, Graffiti feels like it comes from a completely different filmmaker. It certainly involved another filmmaker — Lucas’s friend and collaborator Francis Ford Coppola, who encouraged him to take a different approach for his second feature.

According to the Lucasfilm website:

In the wake of THX’s bold vision of a futuristic society [Editor’s Note: commercial failure], it was Coppola who challenged Lucas to make something “warm and funny,” a story that entertained audiences as much as it inspired them to think.

As Peter Biskind writes in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a lively book on this period in film history, what Coppola actually said to Lucas was, “Don’t be so weird, try to do something that’s human. Don’t do these abstract things. All you do is science fiction. Everyone thinks you’re a cold fish, but you can be a warm and funny guy, make a warm and funny movie.”

Marcia Lucas, Lucas’s wife at the time, also told Biskind that “After THX went down the toilet, I never said ‘I told you so,’ but I reminded George that I warned him it hadn’t involved the audience emotionally… He always said, ‘Emotionally involving the audience is easy. Anybody can do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have some guy wring its neck.'”

Fortunately, Lucas was speaking figuratively, not literally. However much spite was involved in doing so, Lucas did take on Coppola’s challenge, mining his own life story for American Graffiti that also plays into one great universal truth found throughout history: No matter the time or the place, as long as society keeps producing teenagers, teenagers will find ways to hang out and get into trouble.

For adolescent George Lucas in 1962, that meant cruising around his hometown of Modesto, California, a sleepy little city in Northern California. There are so many fun stories packed into American Graffiti, from awkward nerd Terry (Charles Martin Smith) who finds himself spending time with blond bombshell Debbie (Candy Clark) to long-time couple Steve (Ron Howard) and Laurie (Cindy Williams) battling over their relationship to drag-racer John (Paul Le Mat) finding himself unexpectedly saddled with a 12-year-old passenger (Mackenzie Phillips) — all while the radio plays an unending stream of pop and rock hits. (The soundtrack for American Graffiti, 41 Original Hits from the Soundtrack of American Graffiti, went triple platinum upon its release.)

For perspective’s sake, if a filmmaker today were to attempt their own modern-day version of American Graffiti, it would be set in 2013, and Macklemore and the Harlem Shake would probably be on the soundtrack. Actually, that’s not too far off what Greta Gerwig did with her solo directing debut Lady Bird, a 2002-set heartfelt love letter to growing up in Sacramento, California (a 90-minute drive from Modesto, depending on traffic), with a soundtrack featuring Ani DiFranco, Dave Matthews Band, Justin Timberlake, and Alanis Morissette.

Lucas, though, kept the action of his film confined to one summer night. The script, co-written with Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, tracks a large ensemble of young people as they roam the streets in search of love, sex, booze, or some unspecified sort of trouble. It’s all anchored around future college student Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) coming to terms with saying goodbye to his old town — much like Lucas had to when he moved to Los Angeles to pursue film.

Lucas said to Biskind that “I became really aware of the fact that the kids were really lost, the sort of heritage we built up since the war [World War II] had been wiped out by the ’60s, and it wasn’t groovy to act that way anymore, now you just sort of sat there and got stoned. I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about — from about 1945 to 1962.”

The timing is key, as 1962 was just before the Vietnam War became a tornado that would suck up an entire generation of young men; released in 1973, part of the film’s power for audiences at the time was definitely the poignancy of the nostalgia they felt for a simpler time. (Another universal truth: No matter what era you might be living in, certain periods of the past will always feel like “a simpler time.”)

When period pieces age, the importance of their context tends to degrade; movies that look old can just look old in the same flat way. There’s texture to be found in knowing that a movie made before you were born was also looking back at a different time, and the best versions of these films make it clear that nostalgia is in play. That’s something underlined by American Graffiti’s most brilliant touch: the final post-script, which lays out the fates of its four most prominent characters. No one makes it out of this life alive — some of us leave sooner than others.

Without that post-script, would American Graffiti have become Lucas’s first major critical and commercial success, receiving five Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay? Commerical yes, but critical, probably not. Yet it’s essential to the film, especially after the preceding 110 minutes; watching it today, the characters still feel so alive, even after 50 years. Lucas might have had mixed feelings, about emotionally engaging his audience. But he proved he was capable of the challenge, and created something immortal along the way — even before Star Wars.

American Graffiti is currently streaming on Hulu.

George Lucas Made American Graffiti to Prove He Was Human
Liz Shannon Miller

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