“American Graffiti” 50th anniversary (retro article)

[Michael Coate]

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WHERE WERE YOU IN ’73?: REMEMBERING “AMERICAN GRAFFITI” ON ITS 50TH ANNIVERSARY

By Michael Coate


“American Graffiti is one of those films where a filmmaker brings his youth to the screen with such a sense of sweetness and genuine nostalgia, that his or her personal recollections somehow become universal for the audience.” — Gary Leva, director of Fog City Mavericks: The Filmmakers of San Francisco

The Digital Bits and History, Legacy & Showmanship are pleased to present this longform retrospective commemorating the golden anniversary of the release of American Graffiti, George Lucas’s popular film that nostalgically asked, “Where were you in ’62?”

American Graffiti starred Richard Dreyfuss (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Ronny Howard (The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days), Paul Le Mat (Aloha, Bobby and Rose, Melvin and Howard), Charles Martin Smith (Never Cry Wolf, The Untouchables), Candy Clark (The Man Who Fell to Earth, Blue Thunder), Mackenzie Phillips (One Day at a Time), Cindy Williams (The Conversation, Laverne & Shirley) and Wolman Jack (popular radio DJ), plus a small, early-career performance by Harrison Ford (Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark). The film was nominated for five Academy Awards (Picture, Director, Supporting Actress----Candy Clark, Screenplay, and Film Editing). In 1995 the Library of Congress selected American Graffiti for preservation in the National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” Its most recent home media release, on 4K UHD, was in November of this year (but received less than high marks for A/V quality in most reviews).

For the occasion of American Graffiti’s anniversary this year, The Bits features a multi-page article consisting of a 17-chapter oral history-style interview segment with a diverse group of pop culture authorities, film historians and filmmakers who reflect on the movie, plus box-office data and statistics, passages from a sampling of original reviews, and a reference listing of its North American first-run theatrical presentations.

Note this article is a revision and updating of our 40th anniversary coverage from ten years ago.

GRAFFITI NUMBER$

1 = Number of cinemas playing the film during its opening week
1 = Number of sequels
2 = Rank among Universal’s all-time top-earning movies at close of first run
3 = Rank among top-earning films released in 1973 (lifetime/retroactive)
5 = Academy Award nominations
10 = Rank among top-earning films released in 1973 (calendar year)
11 = Peak all-time box-office chart position
16 = Box-office rank among movies released during the 1970s
28 = Number of days of principal photography
51 = Rank on current list of all-time box-office champs (adjusted for inflation)
63 = Number of weeks longest-running engagement played

$35,000 = Opening week box-office gross (one theater)
$777,000 = Production cost
$5.7 million = Production cost (adjusted for inflation)
$10.3 million = Domestic box-office rental (earnings through 12/31/1973)
$41.2 million = Domestic box-office rental (earnings through 12/31/1974)
$45.0 million = Domestic box-office rental (earnings through 12/31/1975)
$47.3 million = Domestic box-office rental (earnings through 12/31/1976)
$47.3 million = Domestic box-office rental (earnings through 12/31/1977)
$55.9 million = Domestic box-office rental (earnings through 12/31/1978)
$115.3 million = Domestic box-office gross (cumulative/lifetime)
$140.0 million = Worldwide box-office gross (cumulative/lifetime)
$762.3 million = Domestic box-office gross (adjusted for inflation)
$935.2 million = Worldwide box-office gross (adjusted for inflation)


PASSAGES FROM A SAMPLING OF FILM REVIEWS

“[American] Graffiti is one of those rare good movies that creates its own complete world. Lucas did something like that, on a fantastic level, in THX 1138. Here, however, he has populated it with a recognizably human group of people who are not only familiar but are also fun to be with on this long, symbolic early autumn night.” — Ted Mahar, The Oregonian (Portland)

“Lucas is scarcely the first person to realize how the automobile has influenced the American way of life and especially the dating habits of young people, but as far as I know, he’s the first director to put this common perception to expressive poetic use. The cruising sequences in American Graffiti are effective photogenically and emotionally: They’re a beautifully stylized reenactment of the real thing, suggesting a generation of ritual motion, joined in a Great American Mating Dance.” — Gary Arnold, The Washington Post

“The stars are nice clean-cut kids whose names probably will not be remembered.” — Fred Herman, The Modesto Bee

“[American Graffiti] is without a doubt the most tedious film I have ever seen. Whole new vistas of boredom wide-screen open to the imagination after this breakthrough. The excessive footage on the cars is wearisome in the extreme. Grand Prix it isn’t.” — Anitra Earle, San Francisco Chronicle

“Four stars. Highest rating! Warm, funny and poignant. It is a richly entertaining film guaranteed to please nearly everyone. By all means, go and enjoy it!” — Kathleen Carroll, New York Daily News

“It may well turn out that American Graffiti will be the most ardently overpraised celluloid product of the year, a movie a quiet but steadily weakening charm that summons a nostalgic mood for the sometime-innocence of the early 1960s in a small California town. The mood itself is a hangover from the 50s when the teenage conscience had yet to be inflamed by Vietnam, when the most crucial matters at hand were the Sock Hop and hot-rodding down Main Street on a Saturday night. Of such stuff, with thick layers of sentimentality, is American Graffiti made. And if you, in your senescence, have visions of little old Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, you’re right on target. The movie is a pastiche looking for a legend.” — Kevin Kelly, The Boston Globe

“Midway through American Graffiti, the viewer realizes what a graceful, intelligent and important film he is watching. The picture is the freshest, most provocative piece of moviemaking to come along this year. It leaves you with a satisfying sense of unity all too rare in films these days.” — Philip Wuntch, The Dallas Morning News

“Haskell Wexler, responsible for the cinematography, has done a superb job in catching a summer night, without getting fancy or cute. Walter Murch has done a brilliant sound track and Lucas puts the entire thing together with class and deftness.” — Joe Pollack, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“All these little stories are expertly woven into what somebody wrote was a ‘bumper to bumper ballet.’ I wish I’d thought of that. Director Paul [sic] Lucas has captured a time of life when everything seems so serious. American Graffiti has it all. It’s a sensitive film about a difficult time. And it shouldn’t get lost in the wave of nostalgia movies, because it doesn’t belong on their category. They’re crass. This isn’t. ” — Gregory James, The Atlanta Constitution

“The ideas, but not the techniques, set American Graffiti well above the nostalgia-juvenilia currently glutting the American marketplace. This is not a fad movie at all, though it is rough around the edges and misleadingly simple. It will make you laugh…and later, it will make you sad.” — John Huddy, The Miami Herald

“American Graffiti is a splendid movie largely because it does not deal only with the 1960s; it treats of growing up in general. It is universal to an extent that few movies are, and it does better than most movies what it tries to do. What it tries to do is to set forth young people in the context of their times, without mawkishness, without sentimentality and largely without phoniness.” — Emerson Batdorff, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

“The movie was made on location in two northern California towns, and there is no question that this movie is about the teen-age lives of white California kids. The lack of black faces and the emphasis on custom cars make that quite plain. And it also is a man’s movie, more precisely, a boy’s movie. The girls are there only because the boys want them there, and they are defined singularly by their desire for a steady boy friend. But this is no fault; this is the late’50s, early ‘60s. Rock ‘n’ roll music fills the sound track. There are more than 40 songs, each—with the exception of At the Hop—performed, as they say on the current TV commercials, by their original artists. Chances are, at least a couple of your favorites are included. But we have the problem of overkill. Forty plus songs is mucha music. That many songs turns the sound track into one of those golden-oldie TV blurbs. Overkill—that’s the disease that hobbles American Graffiti and prevents it from being the great motion picture some writers have called it.” — Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune

“[American Graffiti is] not only a great movie but a brilliant work of historical fiction; no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie’s success in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant.” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

“American Graffiti could turn out to be the best movie of 1973. It is surely the most accurate and poetic evocation of American life since The Last Picture Show—which it resembles in content if not in style—and it is the most completely realized new film I have seen so far this year…. American Graffiti is about 1962 and yet, with very few alterations, it could be about 1973. It has a quality of universality, underneath all of the nostalgia-evoking devices, that should make it a classic.” — John Hartl, The Seattle Times

“One of the top movies of 1973…funnier and more touching than Summer of ’42!” — Clyde Gilmour, Toronto Star

“American Graffiti could just as well have been Canadian Graffiti and it could have taken place any time from the early 1950’s to the mid 1960’s. Even better than The Last Picture Show o[r] Summer of ’42 it demonstrates that kids today don’t have a corner on being screwed up.” — Mel Rothenburger, The Kamloops News

“A happy new movie…should brighten the lives of moviegoers…everything about American Graffiti is so good!” — George Anderson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“[American Graffiti] is surely the most accurate and poetic evocation of American life since The Last Picture Show. It reminds us what fun filmmaking even with a serious purpose can be,” — Charles Brock, Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville)

“American Graffiti is such a funny, accurate movie, so controlled and efficient in its narrative, that it stands to be overpraised to the point where seeing it will be an anticlimax.” — Vincent Canby, The New York Times

“Superb!” — Jay Cocks, Time

“For anyone who was growing up in the 1950s or as late as the assassination of President Kennedy which ended the era, American Graffiti is an enthralling movie, a deeply affecting experience. It will mean less to older and younger audiences, but it remains a masterful work of film art which distills adolescence, small town life, and 1950s America into one group of teen-aged friends’ final night together.” — Robert Taylor, Oakland Tribune

“A highly charged emotional experience. An absolute must for anyone who has nostalgia about growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A breathless, cat’s meow of a movie with enough energy and talent to get the next man to the moon and back. Magnificently acted, edited, directed, photographed and scored.” — Rex Reed, syndicated columnist

“Brilliant, bittersweet memoir.” — Paul D. Zimmerman, Newsweek

“Some of the warmest, most human comedy which has happened in a long time…masterfully executed…profoundly affecting…sensationally funny. One of the most important American films of the year.” — Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times

“With American Graffiti, his second feature film, 29-year-old George Lucas demonstrates that commerce can, on rare occasion, prove to be a comfortable bedfellow for art.” — Susan Stark, Detroit Free Press

“[American Graffiti] fails to be anything more than a warm, nice, draggy comedy, because there’s nothing to back up the style. The images aren’t as visually striking as they would be if only there were a mind behind them; the movie has no resonance except from the jukebox sound and the eerie, nocturnal jukebox look.” — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

“Without exception, all players fit perfectly into the concept and execution, and all the young principals and featured players have a bright and lengthy future. And so does Lucas.” — A.D. Murphy, Variety


THE FIRST-RUN THEATRICAL ENGAGEMENTS

What follows is a chronological reference listing of American Graffiti‘s theatrical first-run openings in the United States and Canada. The information is designed to provide a sense of the film’s rollout and illustrate how different film distribution/exhibition was in a prior era. Note the chronology is not a complete listing of the film’s entire first-run release; instead the emphasis has been placed on the film’s early bookings, the principal cities of each U.S. state and Canadian province, and a sampling of low-population towns in remote areas highlighting the amount of time it took for a popular movie to reach certain regions. The chronology also serves to correct the numerous books and Internet resources that have cited erroneous and/or misleading release-date details for the film.

The chronology also does not include any of the film’s expansion release waves where additional bookings were added to a market*), move-over bookings (except for one New York move-over early in the release), second run, re-issue, international, revival, etc.
(*As a point of reference, the first expansion wave in some of the largest markets—including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco—commenced December 21st, 1973.)

The first-run theatrical presentations of American Graffiti were in 35mm anamorphic (2.39:1 aspect ratio), a blow-up from 2-perf Techniscope. The audio was monaural.

(For the film’s 1978 re-issue, the audio was re-mixed into Dolby Stereo two minutes of excised footage was reinserted, and a content-related revision was made to the character bio segment at conclusion of film. For the 1998 remaster, the opening title card shot was revised.)

Note that many of the theaters, in the run-up to their booking, ran sneak preview screening(s). These sneaks have not been included in the chronology.

Opening Date YYYY-MM-DD … city — cinema (duration in weeks)

1973-08-01 … Los Angeles, CA — Avco Center Triplex (20)

1973-08-12 … New York, NY — Sutton (11)

1973-08-15 … Denver, CO — Colorado 4 (54)
1973-08-15 … Denver (Englewood), CO — Cinderella City (8)
1973-08-15 … Denver (Lakewood), CO — Westland (8)
1973-08-15 … Denver (Thornton), CO — North Valley (8)
1973-08-15 … Detroit (Bloomfield Hills), MI — Showcase Twin (18)
1973-08-15 … Detroit (Dearborn), MI — Westborn (7)
1973-08-15 … Detroit (Farmington Hills), MI — Old Orchard Twin (7)
1973-08-15 … Detroit (Madison Heights), MI — Abbey Triplex (43)
1973-08-15 … Detroit (Mt. Clemens), MI — Parkway Twin (13)
1973-08-15 … Detroit (Oak Park), MI — Towne Twin (19)
1973-08-15 … Detroit (Taylor), MI — Southland Twin (7)
1973-08-15 … Detroit (Warren), MI — Cinema City 4 (46)
1973-08-15 … Detroit (Westland), MI — Quo Vadis 4 (44)
1973-08-15 … Indianapolis, IN — Eastwood (5)
1973-08-15 … Indianapolis, IN — Lafayette Square (10)
1973-08-15 … Lansing (East Lansing), MI —M78 Drive-In (2)
1973-08-15 … Las Vegas, NV — Fox Boulevard (12)
1973-08-15 … Orange County (Costa Mesa), CA — South Coast Plaza Twin (18)
1973-08-15 … Orange County (Santa Ana), CA — Harbor Blvd. Drive-In (12)
1973-08-15 … San Diego, CA — Loma (18)
1973-08-15 … San Francisco, CA — Cinema 21 (18)
1973-08-15 … Tucson, AZ — Buena Vista Twin (13)
1973-08-15 … Tulsa, OK — Fontana 4 (13)

1973-08-16 … Lansing (Okemos), MI — Meridian 4 (40)
1973-08-16 … Omaha, NE — Six West 6 (45)
1973-08-16 … Omaha (Ralston), NE — Park 4 (29)

1973-08-17 … Atlanta, GA — Fine Art (18)
1973-08-17 … Dallas, TX — Medallion (19)
1973-08-17 … Houston, TX — Alabama (18)
1973-08-17 … Lincoln, NE — Plaza 4 (44)
1973-08-17 … Louisville, KY — Penthouse (10)

1973-08-22 … Buffalo (Amherst), NY — Boulevard Mall Twin (18)
1973-08-22 … Buffalo (Cheektowaga), NY — Holiday 6 (18)
1973-08-22 … Cincinnati, OH — Skywalk Twin (42)
1973-08-22 … Flint (Burton), MI — Miracle Twin Drive-In (2)
1973-08-22 … Honolulu, HI — Waikiki Twin (11)
1973-08-22 … Milwaukee, WI — Northridge Triplex (12)
1973-08-22 … Milwaukee (Greendale), WI — Southridge Triplex (6)
1973-08-22 … Milwaukee (West Allis), WI — Westlane (12)
1973-08-22 … Oklahoma City, OK — North Park 4 (42)
1973-08-22 … Sacramento, CA — Century 21 (17)
1973-08-22 … Salt Lake City (South Salt Lake), UT — Century 23 (18)
1973-08-22 … San Jose, CA — Century 22 Triplex (43)

1973-08-24 … Chicago, IL — Ford City Triplex (12)
1973-08-24 … Chicago, IL — Marina Triplex (screen #1: 9)
1973-08-24 … Chicago, IL — Marina Triplex (screen #3: 9)
1973-08-24 … Chicago (Evanston), IL — Evanston Twin (12)
1973-08-24 … Chicago (Lombard), IL — Yorktown Twin (12)
1973-08-24 … Chicago (Merrillville, IN), IL — Crossroads Twin (12)
1973-08-24 … Chicago (Niles), IL — Golf Mill Twin (12)
1973-08-24 … Flint (Grand Blanc), MI — Bella Vista Mall Twin (4)
1973-08-24 … Little Rock, AR — Cinema 150 (7)
1973-08-24 … Oakland, CA — Theatre 70 (17)
1973-08-24 … Oakland (Hayward), CA — Southland Twin (17)
1973-08-24 … Palo Alto, CA — Varsity (17)
1973-08-24 … Portland, OR — Broadway Triplex (52)
1973-08-24 … San Mateo, CA — Hillsdale Center Twin (13)
1973-08-24 … Seattle (Renton), WA — Renton Village Twin (32)

1973-08-29 … Austin, TX — Fox Twin (11)
1973-08-29 … Contra Costa County (Concord), CA — Sun Valley (12)
1973-08-29 … Des Moines, IA — Fleur 4 (16)
1973-08-29 … Des Moines (West Des Moines), IA — Sierra Triplex (17)
1973-08-29 … Kansas City (Overland Park, KS), MO — Glenwood Twin (11)
1973-08-29 … Kansas City (Raytown), MO — Brywood 6 (30)
1973-08-29 … Rochester (Greece), NY — Stoneridge Twin (17)
1973-08-29 … Rock Island (Milan), IL — Showcase Triplex (5)

1973-08-31 … Baltimore, MD — Senator (8)
1973-08-31 … Baltimore (Randallstown), MD — Liberty Twin (6)
1973-08-31 … Baltimore (Woodlawn), MD — Security Square Twin (11)
1973-08-31 … Dayton (Trotwood), OH — Salem Mall Twin (16)
1973-08-31 … Monterey, CA — Regency (1+)
1973-08-31 … San Antonio, TX — Fox Central Park Twin (10)
1973-08-31 … Washington, DC — Embassy (16)

1973-09-19 … Eugene, OR — Valley River Twin (13)

1973-09-21 … Akron (Fairlawn), OH — Fairlawn (13)
1973-09-21 … Albuquerque, NM — Fox Winrock (8)
1973-09-21 … Boston, MA — Cheri Triplex (13)
1973-09-21 … Cleveland (Mayfield Heights), OH — Mayland Twin (8)
1973-09-21 … Cleveland (Parma), OH — Parmatown Triplex (14)
1973-09-21 … Kalamazoo, MI — West Main (1+)
1973-09-21 … Minneapolis, MN — Skyway Twin (35)
1973-09-21 … New Orleans, LA — Joy (14)
1973-09-21 … Phoenix (Scottsdale), AZ — Kachina (14)
1973-09-21 … St. Paul, MN — Norstar (1+)

1973-09-28 … Albany, NY — Hellman (12)
1973-09-28 … Athens, GA — Beechwood Twin (6)
1973-09-28 … Boise, ID — FairVu (6)
1973-09-28 … Cedar Rapids, IA — Stage 4 (39)
1973-09-28 … Columbus, OH — Morse Road (6)
1973-09-28 … El Paso, TX — Northgate (8)
1973-09-28 … Erie, PA — Plaza (13)
1973-09-28 … Grand Rapids, MI — Alpine Twin (40)
1973-09-28 … Lake Charles, LA — Charles (4)
1973-09-28 … Lubbock, TX — Fox Twin (8)
1973-09-28 … Marin County (Mill Valley), CA — Sequoia (13)
1973-09-28 … Memphis, TN — Plaza Twin (12)
1973-09-28 … Norfolk, VA — JANAF (8)
1973-09-28 … Norman, OK — Heisman 4 (1+)
1973-09-28 … Philadelphia, PA — SamEric (12)
1973-09-28 … Santa Cruz, CA — Park Plaza Twin (28)
1973-09-28 … Sioux City, IA — Morningside (7)
1973-09-28 … Stockton, CA — Sherwood Plaza (1+)
1973-09-28 … Syracuse (DeWitt), NY — Shoppingtown Twin (13)
1973-09-28 … Tacoma (Lakewood), WA — Villa Plaza Twin (23)
1973-09-28 … Toledo, OH — Showcase Triplex (12)

1973-10-05 … Toronto, ON — Uptown 5 (54)
1973-10-05 … Vancouver, BC — Varsity (34)

1973-10-12 … Edmonton, AB — Varscona (63)
1973-10-12 … Montreal, QC — York (34)

1973-10-17 … Pittsburgh, PA — Chatham (10)

1973-10-19 … Alexandria, LA — MacArthur Village Twin (9)
1973-10-19 … Baton Rouge, LA — University 4 (20)
1973-10-19 … Benton Harbor, MI — Fairplain Twin (5)
1973-10-19 … Binghamton (Endicott), NY — Cinema (9)
1973-10-19 … Columbia, MO — Campus Twin (14)
1973-10-19 … Duluth (Hermantown), MN — Cinema Twin (1+)
1973-10-19 … Fargo, ND — Lark (1+)
1973-10-19 … Greeley, CO — Cooper Twin (7)
1973-10-19 … Jackson, MI — Westwood Mall Twin (9)
1973-10-19 … Jackson, MS — Jackson Square (5)
1973-10-19 … Lafayette, LA — Plaza (8)
1973-10-19 … Madison, WI — Strand (17)
1973-10-19 … Nashville, TN — Green Hills (24)
1973-10-19 … Paducah, KY — Paducah Twin (5)
1973-10-19 … Providence (East Providence), RI — Four Seasons 4 (10+)
1973-10-19 … Providence (Warwick), RI — Warwick Mall Twin (10)
1973-10-19 … St. Louis (Maryland Heights), MO — Westport Twin (44)
1973-10-19 … Santa Barbara (Goleta), CA — Cinema (10)
1973-10-19 … South Bend, IN — Scottsdale (9)
1973-10-19 … Spokane, WA — Dishman (36)
1973-10-19 … Springfield, IL — Roxy (9)
1973-10-19 … Springfield, MA — Eastfield Mall (5)
1973-10-19 … Springfield (West Springfield), MA — Paris (28)
1973-10-19 … State College, PA — The Movies (9)
1973-10-19 … Topeka, KS — Dickinson (1+)
1973-10-19 … Waterloo, IA — Strand (5)
1973-10-19 … Worcester, MA — Lincoln Plaza (1+)
1973-10-19 … Youngstown, OH — Uptown (24)

1973-10-23 … New York, NY — Beekman m/o (8 [19])

1973-10-26 … Allentown, PA — Colonial (7)
1973-10-26 … Atlantic City, NJ — Charles (8)
1973-10-26 … Bay City, MI — Westown (1+)
1973-10-26 … Biloxi, MS — Edgewater Plaza Twin (8)
1973-10-26 … Burlington (South Burlington), VT — Showcase Twin (24)
1973-10-26 … Calgary, AB — Towne (31)
1973-10-26 … Charlotte, NC — Park Terrace (8)
1973-10-26 … Columbia, SC — Miracle (9)
1973-10-26 … Essex County (Lawrence), MA — Showcase Twin (9)
1973-10-26 … Fall River, MA — Center Twin (1+)
1973-10-26 … Fort Worth, TX — Ridglea (8)
1973-10-26 … Harrisburg, PA — Union Deposit Twin (9)
1973-10-26 … Lancaster, PA — Wonderland Twin (8)
1973-10-26 … Miami, FL — Miracle (8)
1973-10-26 … Miami (Fort Lauderdale), FL — Gateway (9)
1973-10-26 … Miami (North Miami Beach), FL — 163rd Street (9)
1973-10-26 … Miami (West Palm Beach), FL — Palm Beach Mall 4 (8)
1973-10-26 … Middlesex County (Chelmsford), MA — Route 3 Four-plex (9)
1973-10-26 … Ogden (South Ogden), UT — Wilshire (8)
1973-10-26 … Plymouth County (Brockton), MA — Westgate Mall 4 (9)
1973-10-26 … Plymouth County (Hanover), MA — Hanover Mall 4 (14)
1973-10-26 … Raleigh, NC — State (8)
1973-10-26 … St. Petersburg, FL — Crossroads (8)
1973-10-26 … Tampa, FL — Floriland Twin (9)
1973-10-26 … Tampa, FL — Twin Bays 4 (15)
1973-10-26 … Utica (New Hartford), NY — Kallet (8)
1973-10-26 … Victoria, BC — Haida (9)
1973-10-26 … Winnipeg, MB — Polo Park (35)

1973-10-31 … La Crosse, WI — Marc Twin (7)
1973-10-31 … Racine, WI — Marc Twin (8)
1973-10-31 … Scranton, PA — Viewmont Mall Triplex (7)

1973-11-01 … Ames, IA — Varsity (7)

1973-11-02 … Birmingham (Homewood), AL — Brookwood Twin (37)
1973-11-02 … Bloomington (Normal), IL — Cinema Twin (22)
1973-11-02 … Champaign, IL — Co-Ed Twin (8)
1973-11-02 … Fresno, CA — Country Squire (8)
1973-11-02 … Green Bay (Ashwaubenon), WI — Stadium Twin (7)
1973-11-02 … Jacksonville, FL — Edgewood (7)
1973-11-02 … New Bedford (North Dartmouth), MA — North Dartmouth Mall Triplex(1+)
1973-11-02 … Orlando, FL — Plaza Twin (8)
1973-11-02 … Ottawa, ON — Elgin Twin (32)
1973-11-02 … Reno, NV — Keystone (24)
1973-11-02 … Richmond, VA — Westhampton (15)
1973-11-02 … Shreveport, LA — Capri (7)
1973-11-02 … Wilkes-Barre, PA — Wyoming Valley Mall Twin (7)

1973-11-08 … Hattiesburg, MS — Broadacres Twin (6)

1973-11-09 … Appleton, WI — Marc Twin (7)
1973-11-09 … Bangor (Old Town), ME — University Twin (6)
1973-11-09 … Billings, MT — Cine Triplex (15)
1973-11-09 … Bloomington, IN — Princess (5)
1973-11-09 … Charleston, WV — Village (5)
1973-11-09 … College Station, TX — University Square Twin (6)
1973-11-09 … Colorado Springs, CO — Cooper Triplex (6)
1973-11-09 … Corpus Christi, TX — National Twin (7)
1973-11-09 … DeKalb, IL — Carrols Twin (6)
1973-11-09 … Durham, NC — Carolina (9)
1973-11-09 … Elmira, NY — Elmira (6)
1973-11-09 … Evansville, IN — Town Center Twin (27)
1973-11-09 … Fond du Lac, WI — Forest Mall Twin (6)
1973-11-09 … Fort Wayne, IN — Holiday Twin (7)
1973-11-09 … Fort Wayne, IN — Southtown Mall Twin (7)
1973-11-09 … Gainesville, FL — Royal Park Twin (1+)
1973-11-09 … Hagerstown, MD — Long Meadow Twin (6)
1973-11-09 … Huntsville, AL — Alabama (7)
1973-11-09 … Knoxville, TN — Capri Terrace (18)
1973-11-09 … Lawrence, KS — Hillcrest Triplex (14)
1973-11-09 … Lexington, KY — Turfland Mall (14)
1973-11-09 … Macon, GA — Westgate Triplex (17)
1973-11-09 … Manchester (Bedford), NH — Bedford Mall Twin (7)
1973-11-09 … Manhattan, KS — West Loop Twin (7)
1973-11-09 … Melbourne (Merritt Island), FL — Merritt Square 6 (18)
1973-11-09 … Mobile, AL — Village Triplex (7)
1973-11-09 … Muncie, IN — Northwest Plaza Twin (6)
1973-11-09 … Nashua, NH — Nashua Mall Twin (6)
1973-11-09 … Odessa, TX — Winwood Mall Twin (6)
1973-11-09 … Pocatello, ID — Starlite Twin (7)
1973-11-09 … Portland (Westbrook), ME — Cinema City 4 (1+)
1973-11-09 … Pueblo, CO — Movie City (1+)
1973-11-09 … Rapid City, SD — Northgate Twin (6)
1973-11-09 … Rochester, MN — Oakview (1+)
1973-11-09 … St. Cloud, MN — Hays (6)
1973-11-09 … St. Joseph, MO — Hillcrest 4 (7)
1973-11-09 … Salina, KS — Mid-State Twin (15)
1973-11-09 … San Luis Obispo, CA — Obispo (11)
1973-11-09 … Sheboygan, WI — Marc Twin (7)
1973-11-09 … Springfield, MO — Tower (7)
1973-11-09 … Tallahassee, FL — Miracle Twin (7)
1973-11-09 … Terre Haute, IN — Honey Creek Square Twin (7)
1973-11-09 … Tuscaloosa, AL — Tide Twin (14)
1973-11-09 … Watertown, NY — Stateway Plaza Twin (6)
1973-11-09 … Wheeling, WV — Coronet (6)
1973-11-09 … Windsor, ON — Vanity (6)

1973-11-14 … Reading (Wyomissing), PA — Berkshire Mall (5)

1973-11-16 … Annapolis, MD — Eastport Twin (5)
1973-11-16 … Baytown, TX — Bay Plaza Twin (5)
1973-11-16 … Bradenton, FL — Bayshore Twin (5)
1973-11-16 … Carbondale, IL — Saluki (5)
1973-11-16 … Carbondale (Herrin), IL —Egyptian Drive-In (3)
1973-11-16 … Decatur, IL — Northgate Mall Twin (12)
1973-11-16 … Dubuque, IA — Kennedy Mall Twin (18)
1973-11-16 … Eau Claire, WI — State (5)
1973-11-16 … Fayetteville, NC — Miracle (1+)
1973-11-16 … Fort Myers, FL — Cinema 41 (3)
1973-11-16 … Galveston, TX — Galvez Plaza Triplex (4)
1973-11-16 … Ithaca, NY — Temple (12)
1973-11-16 … Kokomo, IN — Markland Mall Twin (5)
1973-11-16 … Lafayette, IN — Lafayette (5)
1973-11-16 … Lake Jackson, TX — Lake Twin (3)
1973-11-16 … Lawton, OK — Showcase Twin (5)
1973-11-16 … Monroe (West Monroe), LA — McMillan Mall Twin (10)
1973-11-16 … Peoria, IL — Madison (1+)
1973-11-16 … Quincy, IL — Town & Country Twin (1+)
1973-11-16 … Rockford, IL — Times (6)
1973-11-16 … Savannah, GA — Weis Cinema Twin (1+)
1973-11-16 … Springfield, OH — Upper Valley Twin (5)
1973-11-16 … Waukegan, IL — Belvidere Mall (5)
1973-11-16 … Wichita Falls, TX — State (5)
1973-11-16 … Wilmington, NC — Oleander Twin (5)

1973-11-21 … Ann Arbor, MI — Michigan (4)
1973-11-21 … Cedar Falls, IA — College Square Twin (5)
1973-11-21 … Charleston, SC — Ultravision (11)
1973-11-21 … Eureka, CA — State Triplex (13)
1973-11-21 … Florence (Muscle Shoals), AL — Cinema Twin (4)
1973-11-21 … Kenosha, WI — Roosevelt (5)
1973-11-21 … Longview, TX — Cinema Twin (4)
1973-11-21 … Modesto, CA — Briggsmore (18)
1973-11-21 … Santa Rosa, CA — Park Twin (13)
1973-11-21 … Winston-Salem, NC — Thruway (5)

1973-12-21 … Altoona, PA — Playhouse Twin (12)
1973-12-21 … Bakersfield, CA — Valley Plaza (7)
1973-12-21 … Battle Creek, MI — West Columbia Twin (11)
1973-12-21 … Canton, OH — Palace (17)
1973-12-21 … Casper, WY — Rialto (5)
1973-12-21 … Connellsville, PA — Laurel Mall (7)
1973-12-21 … Findlay, OH — Cinema World Triplex (15)
1973-12-21 … Fort Smith, AR — Phoenix Village Twin (1+)
1973-12-21 … Galesburg, IL — West Twin (8)
1973-12-21 … Glens Falls (Queensbury), NY — Route 9 Twin (4)
1973-12-21 … Greenville, MS — Plaza (3)
1973-12-21 … Groton, CT — Groton Shopping Plaza Twin (16)
1973-12-21 … Hamilton, OH — Court (6)
1973-12-21 … Hamilton, ON — Odeon Twin (22)
1973-12-21 … Harlingen, TX — Morgan Plaza Twin (4)
1973-12-21 … Hartford (East Hartford), CT — Showcase 4 (16)
1973-12-21 … Iowa City, IA — Astro (9)
1973-12-21 … Joplin, MO — Fox Joplin (4)
1973-12-21 … Kitchener (Waterloo), ON — Waterloo (18)
1973-12-21 … Lakeland, FL — Imperial Mall Twin (9)
1973-12-21 … Latrobe, PA — Laurel 30 (10)
1973-12-21 … London, ON — Odeon Twin (1+)
1973-12-21 … Mattoon, IL — Time (1+)
1973-12-21 … McAllen (Edinburg), TX — Century (6)
1973-12-21 … New Haven (Orange), CT — Showcase 4 (16)
1973-12-21 … Pensacola, FL — Plaza (8)
1973-12-21 … Pittsfield, MA — Capitol (8)
1973-12-21 … Plattsburgh, NY — Strand Twin (6)
1973-12-21 … Poughkeepsie, NY — Juliet (17)
1973-12-21 … Provo, UT — Fox (15)
1973-12-21 … Richmond, IN — Tivoli (5)
1973-12-21 … Roanoke, VA — Towers (5)
1973-12-21 … Salem, OR — Lancaster Mall (12)
1973-12-21 … Santa Fe, NM — Coronado Twin (7)
1973-12-21 … Steubenville, OH — Paramount (8)
1973-12-21 … Trenton (Princeton), NJ — Playhouse (7)
1973-12-21 … Vineland, NJ — Landis (6)
1973-12-21 … Visalia, CA — Fox (1+)
1973-12-21 … Wichita, KS — Fox (13)
1973-12-21 … Wilmington, DE — Edgemoor (8)
1973-12-21 … Wilmington (Newark), DE — Cinema Center (15)

1973-12-23 … Cape Girardeau, MO — Town Plaza Twin (15)

1973-12-25 … Ashland, KY — Mid-Town Twin (1+)
1973-12-25 … Bismarck, ND — Plaza Twin (7)
1973-12-25 … Bozeman, MT — Cinema Twin (5)
1973-12-25 … Bristol, TN — Paramount (6)
1973-12-25 … Burlington, NC — Paramount (7)
1973-12-25 … Cape Cod (Mashpee), MA — Seabury Twin (1+)
1973-12-25 … Chattanooga, TN — Eastgate (10+)
1973-12-25 … Clarksville, TN — Capitol (7)
1973-12-25 … Columbus, GA — Beverly (8)
1973-12-25 … Florence, SC — Crown (3)
1973-12-25 … Frederick, MD — Holiday (6)
1973-12-25 … Fredericksburg, VA — Virginians Twin (9)
1973-12-25 … Hampton, VA — Riverdale Twin (11)
1973-12-25 … Helena, MT — Circus Twin (5)
1973-12-25 … High Point, NC — Martin Twin (8)
1973-12-25 … Jefferson City, MO — Ramada 4 (7)
1973-12-25 … Lethbridge, AB — Paramount (5)
1973-12-25 … Manitowoc, WI — Mikadow (4)
1973-12-25 … Mansfield, OH — Madison (1+)
1973-12-25 … Montgomery, AL — Montgomery Mall (6)
1973-12-25 … Morgantown, WV — Metropolitan (3)
1973-12-25 … Muscatine, IA — Plaza Twin (4)
1973-12-25 … Myrtle Beach, SC — Camelot (4)
1973-12-25 … Oshkosh, WI — Time (4)
1973-12-25 … Panama City, FL — Capri (5)
1973-12-25 … Red Deer, AB — Uptown (5)
1973-12-25 … Rutland, VT — The Movies (7)
1973-12-25 … Sioux Falls, SD — Hollywood (11)
1973-12-25 … Spartanburg, SC — Hillcrest Twin (7)
1973-12-25 … York, PA — Capitol (6)

1973-12-26 … Kingston, ON — Odeon (1+)
1973-12-26 … North Bay, ON — Odeon (4)
1973-12-26 … Saskatoon, SK — Cinema Twin (12)
1973-12-26 … Sault Ste. Marie, ON — Odeon (5)
1973-12-26 … Sudbury, ON — Odeon Twin (1+)
1973-12-26 … Thunder Bay, ON — Court (1+)

1974-01-05 … Naples, FL — Kon Tiki (3)

1974-01-11 … Palm Springs, CA — Village (4)

1974-01-18 … Amherst (Hadley), MA — Mountain Farms 4 (15)
1974-01-18 … Asheville, NC — Merrimon Twin (6)
1974-01-18 … Bennington, VT — Bennington Plaza Twin (4)
1974-01-18 … Daytona Beach, FL — Big Tree (9)
1974-01-18 … Gastonia, NC — Webb (3)
1974-01-18 … Greensboro, NC — Terrace (6)
1974-01-18 … Indiana, PA — Indiana (6)
1974-01-18 … Johnstown, PA — Act Twin (1+)
1974-01-18 … Leominster, MA — Searstown 4 (8)
1974-01-18 … Portsmouth, NH — Cinema (5)
1974-01-18 … Waterville, ME — Cinema Center 4 (4)

1974-01-23 … Boulder, CO — Fox (1+)

1974-01-24 … Auburn (Opelika), AL — Midway Plaza (6)

1974-01-25 … Augusta, ME — Turnpike Mall Twin (3)
1974-01-25 … Charlottesville, VA — Paramount (4)
1974-01-25 … Mason City, IA — Park 70 (5)
1974-01-25 … Poplar Bluff, MO — Mansion Mall Twin (6)
1974-01-25 … Saint John, NB — Plaza (1+)
1974-01-25 … Waco, TX — Lake Air (4)

1974-01-30 … Hazleton, PA — Church Hill (2)
1974-01-30 … Murfreesboro, TN — Martin (3)
1974-01-30 … Shamokin, PA — Victoria (2)
1974-01-30 … Shamokin Dam, PA — Brookside (4)

1974-01-31 … Augusta, GA — National Hills (6)
1974-01-31 … Bowling Green, KY — State (5)

1974-02-01 … Amarillo, TX — Esquire (7)
1974-02-01 … Brunswick, ME — Brunswick Plaza Twin (3)
1974-02-01 … Concord, NH — Cinema 93 (5)
1974-02-01 … Danville, VA — Park (3)
1974-02-01 … Fort Collins, CO — Campus West (8)
1974-02-01 … Great Falls, MT — Twi-Lite Cinema Center Twin (7)
1974-02-01 … Logan, UT — Utah (5)
1974-02-01 … Regina, SK — Capitol (8)

1974-02-06 … Bowling Green, OH — Stadium Plaza Twin (5)

1974-02-07 … Johnson City, TN — Mall (5)

1974-02-08 … Clovis, NM — Hilltop Twin (8)
1974-02-08 … Denton, TX — Denton Center (2)
1974-02-08 … Grand Junction, CO — Cinema 25 (6)
1974-02-08 … Halifax, NS — Paramount Twin (1+)
1974-02-08 … Hammond, LA — Town & Country Plaza Twin (5)
1974-02-08 … Lewiston, ME — Paris (5)
1974-02-08 … Stevens Point, WI — Campus (5)
1974-02-08 … Twin Falls, ID — Twin (6)
1974-02-08 … Wausau, WI — Crossroads (8)
1974-02-08 … Winona, MN — Cinema (7)

1974-02-13 … Hanover, PA — North Hanover Plaza (4)
1974-02-13 … Harrisonburg, VA — Roth Triplex (8)

1974-02-14 … Olympia, WA — Olympic (6)

1974-02-15 … Anderson, SC — Osteen (4)
1974-02-15 … Chapel Hill, NC — Carolina (3)
1974-02-15 … Grand Island, NE — Capitol (4)
1974-02-15 … Greenville, SC — Astro Twin (11)
1974-02-15 … Owensboro, KY — Lincoln Mall Twin (9)
1974-02-15 … Parkersburg (Vienna), WV — Grand Central Twin (1+)

1974-02-20 … Anchorage, AK — Denali (15)
1974-02-20 … Chambersburg, PA — Capitol (3)
1974-02-20 … Pottstown, PA — Fox (5)
1974-02-20 … Staunton, VA — Dixie (5)
1974-02-20 … Waynesboro, VA — Wayne (2)

1974-02-22 … Abilene, TX — Westgate Twin (6)
1974-02-22 … Beaumont, TX — Gateway Twin (5)
1974-02-22 … Bellingham, WA — Viking Twin (9)
1974-02-22 … Blytheville, AR — Malco Twin (5)
1974-02-22 … Lake City, IA — Capri (2)
1974-02-22 … Las Cruces, NM — Video Twin (4)
1974-02-22 … Newark, OH — Cinema I (4)
1974-02-22 … Zanesville, OH — Cinema I (4)

1974-03-01 … Fayetteville, AR — Malco Twin (6)
1974-03-01 … Napa, CA — Uptown Twin (6)
1974-03-01 … Newport (Middletown), RI — Esquire Twin (5)
1974-03-01 … Port Arthur, TX — Park Plaza Twin (4)
1974-03-01 … St. George, UT — Dixie (3)
1974-03-01 … Sikeston, MO — Malco Twin (5)
1974-03-01 … Vallejo, CA — Cine 21 Triplex (5)

1974-03-06 … Storrs, CT — College (1)

1974-03-08 … Salinas, CA — El Rey (7)

1974-03-13 … Moncton, NB — Capitol (6)

1974-03-15 … El Dorado, AR — Jerry Lewis Twin (3)
1974-03-15 … Petaluma, CA — Showcase (4)
1974-03-15 … Redding, CA — Showcase (6)

1974-03-20 … Stroudsburg, PA — Sherman Twin (4)

1974-03-22 … Bremerton, WA — Roxy (5)
1974-03-22 … Chico, CA — El Rey (6)
1974-03-22 … Fort Pierce, FL — Village (4)
1974-03-22 … Gaffney, SC — Hub (2)
1974-03-22 … Hot Springs, AR — Paramount (3)
1974-03-22 … Ocala, FL — Springs (2)
1974-03-22 … Oxford, MS — Ritz (1+)
1974-03-22 … San Angelo, TX — Sherwood Twin (5)
1974-03-22 … Vero Beach, FL — Plaza (3)

1974-03-27 … Victoria, TX — Uptown (4)

1974-03-29 … Brownsville, TX — Amigoland Mall Twin (4)
1974-03-29 … Merced, CA — Regency (6)
1974-03-29 … Tyler, TX — Liberty (2)

1974-04-03 … Lebanon, PA — Academy (3)

1974-04-04 … Flagstaff, AZ — Orpheum (3)

1974-04-05 … Anniston, AL — Cheaha (3)
1974-04-05 … East Liverpool, OH — American (2)
1974-04-05 … Helena (West Helena), AR — Gene Boggs Twin (3)
1974-04-05 … Lima, OH — American Mall (4)

1974-04-10 … Kamloops, BC — North Hills (1+)
1974-04-10 … Missoula, MT — Fox (4)

1974-04-11 … Ukiah, CA — Ukiah (2)

1974-04-12 … Fort Walton Beach, FL — Palm (3)
1974-04-12 … Sandusky, OH — State (3)

1974-04-17 … Lewisburg, PA — Campus (2)

1974-04-19 … Beaufort, SC — Plaza (3)

1974-04-24 … Corvallis, OR — State (5)
1974-04-24 … Rock Hill, SC — Cinema (4)

1974-04-26 … Bend, OR — Tower (3)
1974-04-26 … Defiance, OH — Valentine (3)
1974-04-26 … Del Rio, TX — Cinema Plaza (2)
1974-04-26 … Kalispell, MT — Strand (4)
1974-04-26 … Oil City, PA — Drake (4)
1974-04-26 … Traverse City, MI — Michigan (4)

1974-05-02 … Easley, SC — Colony (2)

1974-05-03 … Washington, PA — Midtown (3)

1974-05-10 … St. John’s, NL — Avalon Mall (1+)

1974-05-23 … Taos, NM — Kit Carson Drive-In (2)

1974-05-24 … Port Huron, MI — Huron (4)

1974-05-31 … Gallup, NM — El Morro (1)

1974-06-14 … Alamogordo, NM — Sierra (1)

1974-06-26 … Butte, MT — Fox (3)
1974-06-26 … Fairbanks, AK — Goldstream Twin (3)

1974-07-03 … Selma, AL — Selmont Drive-In (2)

1974-07-10 … Durango, CO — Kiva (2)

1974-07-12 … Rocky Mount, NC — Cardinal (3)

1974-07-26 … Jackson, WY — Teton (1)

1974-07-30 … South Lake Tahoe, CA — Lakeside (2)

1974-08-02 … Decatur, AL — Gateway Twin (4)

1974-08-14 … Cheyenne, WY — Lincoln (1+)

1974-08-15 … Orangeburg, SC — Orangeburg Mall (2)

1974-08-28 … Hilton Head Island, SC — Island (1)
1974-08-28 … Yuma, AZ — Yuma (3)

1974-10-02 … Clemson, SC — Astro (2)

1974-11-08 … Opelousas, LA — Delta (1)

1974-11-13 … Barstow, CA — Barstow (1)
1974-11-13 … Mountain Home, AR — Baxter (1)
1974-11-13 … Victorville, CA — El Rancho (1)

1974-11-20 … Barstow, CA — Skyline Drive-In (1)
1974-11-20 … Victorville, CA — Joshua Drive-In (1)

1974-11-27 … Forsyth, MT — Roxy (1)

1974-12-31 … Hilo, HI — Palace (1)

1975-01-01 … Carlsbad, NM — Cavern (1)
1975-01-01 … McComb, MS — Camellia Twin (1)

1975-01-03 … Quebec City, QC — Frontenac Twin (1) [w/ French subtitles]

1975-03-21 … Whitehorse, YT — Yukon (1)


THE EPIC AMERICAN GRAFFITI INTERVIEW

CHAPTER 1: THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY

Ray Morton (author, Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Making of Steven Spielberg’s Classic Film): First and foremost [it should be remembered on its 50th anniversary] as a terrific movie—funny, touching, and wildly entertaining. As a film that captured a specific time and place about as well as any movie ever has. As the movie that put George Lucas on the map and brought him to the industry’s and the world’s attention. As the film that launched the careers of some of the most familiar faces of the 70s and 80s including Richard Dreyfus, Cindy Williams, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Candy Clark, Kathleen Quinlan, Mackenzie Phillips, and some bit part player named Harrison Ford. As the movie that made Wolfman Jack a national celebrity and relaunched the career of Ron Howard. And as the movie whose success made Star Wars possible.

Gary Leva (director, Fog City Mavericks: The Filmmakers of San Francisco): There were a lot of people making “youth films” in the early ‘70s. When I interviewed producer Saul Zaentz for my feature documentary about the San Francisco film community, Fog City Mavericks, he said everybody tried to make American Graffiti, but only George pulled it off.

Joseph McBride (co-screenwriter, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School; author, Steven Spielberg: A Biography): It’s a landmark film in helping change Hollywood (unfortunately not for the better), by playing a major role in turning the once-great American film industry into a marketplace for adolescents and teenagers. American Graffiti was one of the first films I saw in California (Westwood, near the UCLA campus) after moving from Wisconsin in mid-July 1973 to become a screenwriter. I had already found an agent, who had advised me not to write scripts about teenagers and not to write comedies, because he said they wouldn’t sell. So then Graffiti comes out and becomes one of the most profitable films ever made, with a gross of more than $100 million on a production cost of $777,000. I fired that agent. His idiotic advice is classic! The floodgates soon opened on a torrent of dumb youth comedies, which became a flood a few years later as the Reagan period turned Hollywood more conservative and mindless. None of them had the wit or sophisticated style of American Graffiti.

Richard Ravalli (editor, Lucas: His Hollywood Legacy [forthcoming]): From the perspective of teenagers watching cars cruise McHenry Avenue in 1974, some eight months after the release of American Graffiti, it seemed like the local cruise was no big deal. As one was quoted by a New York Times reporter who visited town, “it’s not that much of a big thing anymore,” while another opined that many think of cruising as “dumb and uncool.” Interestingly, the title of Jon Nordheimer’s April 14, 1974 article, “Teen-Age Drivers Still Cruise, but Without That Old Fervor” was changed when it was published in the Modesto Bee three days later, to “Cruising: It Holds the Bright Promise of Adventure.” Perhaps the Bee editors saw something that the teens didn’t. For if you wait a few more years and another film by Modesto’s own George Lucas, the zeitgeist changes. The first mentions of “Graffiti Night” begin to appear, a massive cruise held on McHenry on the weekend after high graduation, a nod to American Graffiti’s storyline. By the end of 1977, talk of using chains and barricades to close off side streets and control cruisers emerge. Such an editorial was published in the Bee on December 6, far away from the “official” Graffiti Night. While the historical relationships may often be forgotten today, both of Lucas’s films, American Graffiti and Star Wars, “put Modesto on the map” and changed the local landscape for years to come. By the 1980s, Graffiti Night was a major Northern California event, drawing cruisers and onlookers from far and wide as Modestans celebrated car culture and the Hollywood icon who made it all shine for them, the cars and the stars. American Graffiti and Lucas’s rising industry profile may not have invented the cruise—the phenomenon was far from just being a West Coast thing in the postwar era—but they certainly affected what Americans thought they were doing when they did cruise. However the 1973 film’s cultural impact is measured, clearly it includes ground zero and the local environs that Lucas sought to preserve and interpret for the future.

Peter Krämer (author, American Graffiti: George Lucas, the New Hollywood and the Baby Boom Generation): I think that it should be remembered as a true American classic, a film that captures two moments in the country’s history: a time of apparently ever-increasing affluence and optimism (the 1950s and early 1960s) and a time of perceived crisis and increasing pessimism (the late 1960s and early 1970s). Even though the film’s action takes place during a single night in the summer of 1962, in a sense the film traces the development of the baby boom generation, those born during the years of exceptionally high birth rates between the 1940s and the 1960s. Through the story of this generation Graffiti maps the history of the country, moving from a vision of excessive consumerism and apparently unlimited growth to a recognition, by the early 1970s, of the limits to growth (as per the title of an influential book from 1972, the year before American Graffiti was released). What is most amazing, perhaps, is that the film achieves this in a wholly unpretentious manner, by nostalgically and compassionately looking back, from the vantage point of 1973, on the very personal trials and tribulations of a bunch of small-town kids in 1962. Admittedly, the broader implications of the film’s story only become apparent when one examines its production history and its reception in the mid-1970s—which is one of the reasons why I felt I had to write a book about all this.

William Kallay (author, The Making of Tron): American Graffiti is a rare film that was able to successfully mix humor and a bittersweet ending. This was the early 1970s when dark themed and gritty cinema ruled. Lucas’ look back on his youth was a departure that was mostly positive, yet still felt raw. He deserves a lot of credit for taking a chance to tell a story that connected directly with those of his generation.

Beverly Gray (author, Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon…and Beyond): American Graffiti arrived in an era when youth audiences were becoming more and more important, and when youthful involvement in national issues (like civil rights and Vietnam) was really changing the nature of the country. Baby Boomers (and there were so many of us) felt a natural connection with the characters in this film. Their behavior on the night of their high school graduation was something with which we could strongly identify. I well remember the gasp that went through the audience when we saw that final-crawl telling us where the central characters would be in ten years’ time. What we learned there seemed to be right on target: Terry the Toad dying in Vietnam and Curt making a new life for himself in Canada, far from the small town where Steve is stuck in a safe but mundane existence that would be explored (but not too effectively) in a sequel.

John Cork (co-author, James Bond Encyclopedia): The way American Graffiti should be remembered is by re-watching it. American Graffiti is one of the most important and influential films ever made. If you had to pick one film that shows the potential of American analog cinema—with no serious visual effects, only minor special effects—real actors, a real story, no spectacle, and virtually nothing that seems to stretch credulity, this is film shows that art form at its highest and most accessible.

CHAPTER 2: GEORGE LUCAS

Gary Leva: As a director, George’s work in Graffiti is really impressive, particularly for a second feature. The camera angles, the natural way the action is staged, the gorgeous shots of the car parked by the lake…it’s all extremely cinematic, and certainly not the norm for what is arguably a teen comedy. What teen comedy ever looked this good, or even aspired to? It’s George’s eye, but we also have to give cinematographer Haskell Wexler credit for making the film look this good on a tiny budget under difficult circumstances.

John Cork: George Lucas has very few director credits, and among those, he made two of the greatest films in cinema history: American Graffiti and Star Wars. I love them both equally for very different reasons.

Ray Morton: Depending purely on your preference and taste (because the quality of both is excellent) it’s either his best film as a director or his second best, with Star Wars filling the other slot.

William Kallay: Lucas was still a very young man when he directed Graffiti. Talk about a second feature film being so well directed and so well made. The man had very little money to work with. Yet with his cast and crew, he managed to pull off a very hilarious and poignant masterpiece, in my opinion. Though Lucas has received grief over the years for his way of directing actors, he clearly showed that he could bring out incredible performances from a very deep and talented cast. To think of the many careers that started as a result of Graffiti is really impressive.

John Cork: George Lucas made films in the 70s through to the mid-80s that so reflect where he was in his life. American Graffiti is about the tough decisions involved in leaving a place you love because you know your future isn’t there. Star Wars is about a kid who leaves home and fulfilled his greatest dream, becomes a legend. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a love letter to the films that shaped Lucas, but also about the dangers of pursuing one’s passion. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are about living up to success, and balancing talent, insecurity, tough moral choices, and humanity. On that level, all of these films were intensely personal, but none more so than American Graffiti.

Ray Morton: His work in all areas is superb. The stories came out of his life and he did a great job of dramatizing them for the screen. Lucas also did a brilliant job of recreating the time, place, and feel of the era he was trying to capture on film; the documentary filming style he employed gave the piece incredible verisimilitude; the choreography of the cars during the cruising scenes is quite exciting, as is his spotting of the music; and, despite the hits Lucas can take as a director of actors, he elicits wonderful performances from the entire cast. American Graffiti is a really impressive piece of direction in all respects.

William Kallay: As much as I love the original Star Wars, I loved Lucas’ films such as American Graffiti and THX 1138 for their unapologetic view of the world of their eras. In Graffiti, Lucas obviously had fondness for the people of the small rural town. But he expressed, so well, some of the characters’ desire to break out into the big world. I wonder what other independent films Lucas might have given us outside of the Star Warsuniverse that were experimental and potentially groundbreaking.

John Cork: All of Lucas’s films of this era are staggeringly great, but if you want to see just how talented he is, American Graffiti is Lucas without ILM, without great pre-visualization artists, before he could call up anyone anywhere and get favors done just because he was George Lucas. This is Lucas when he had to make a period movie for less than a million dollars with a 28-day shooting schedule. The results show the kind of raw talent that he possesses, and it shows the raw talent he possessed that allowed him to create two iconic franchises after the success of American Graffiti.

Peter Krämer: I guess the two most striking insights I gained from all my research on the early career of George Lucas are these: he was not at all destined to become a blockbuster filmmaker, quite on the contrary his interests and ambitions for a long time lay elsewhere; and he was so much more uncompromising than most of his film school peers. In retrospect it appears as a bit of a miracle that this man came to change mainstream cinema forever…. The movies were not his first love in his childhood and youth, perhaps not even the second or third. When he did finally develop a strong interest in movies in his late teens, it was for avantgarde and experimental films, which is what he specialized in at film school. In fact, he imagined that he would later get a film industry job as an animator, cinematographer or editor, while making experimental movies on the side…. But then Francis Coppola convinced him to try his hand at a feature film version of one of his rather unconventional student shorts. It was to be the first production by the newly formed American Zoetrope, a company Coppola set up with funding from Warner Bros. Now, Lucas, who was American Zoetrope’s vice-president, turned his—and Zoetrope’s—debut feature into a formal and stylistic tour de force: a dystopian drama presented in such a way that the in essence quite simple story became largely incomprehensible, while radically simplified, almost abstract sequences alternated with hectic scenes characterized by severe information overload. Warner Bros.’ negative responses to THX 1138 scuppered all further production plans for American Zoetrope, drove Coppola to the brink of bankruptcy and almost ended Lucas’s Hollywood career….. He refused to become a director for hire working on projects he had not himself initiated and developed. Coppola was less choosy and agreed to make a movie based on a recent bestseller for Paramount—and it is a good thing, too, that Coppola was not as uncompromising as Lucas because the result was The Godfather (1972)…. Lucas, however, talked about giving up on feature films altogether, unless he could get funding for making a very personal movie. While a project building on his childhood fascination with Science Fiction serials was also in the running, Lucas’s second production turned out to be a semi-autobiographical film about a group of young people in a small Californian town, some of whom have to make important decisions about the future during one particular night at the end of the summer of 1962…. That summer had been of particular importance for Lucas, because in June 1962, shortly before his high school graduation, he had been in a near-lethal car accident. The accident changed his life—arguably for the better—by turning him away from his obsession with tuning and racing cars and towards getting more of an education. So in the early 1970s, when the direction of his life was once again up for debate, he returned to the summer of 1962 to reflect on the options young people like himself had had, and the decisions they had arrived at…. This nostalgic but not uncritical backwards glance was in tune with the changing outlook of the older baby boomers who, like Lucas, were entering adulthood at a time when there was a pervasive sense of crisis in American society to do with the Vietnam war, a declining economy, concerns about environmental destruction and global overpopulation, and also, especially during the so-called “oil crisis” of 1973/74, with doubts about the security of energy supplies needed to support the American way of life. Older baby-boomers as well as other Americans were inclined to look back at more optimistic times, longingly but also critically, and a wave of nostalgia washed over U.S. culture, making American Graffiti a huge hit and also leading to the massive success of the stage musical (and later film) Grease, of Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, two television sitcoms featuring lead actors from American Graffiti, and other entertainment forms recreating America in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Joseph McBride: In retrospect, it’s clear that much of the unusual quality of American Graffiti is due to the contributions of his co-writers, Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz. Katz in particular deserves credit for making the women characters in Graffiti—especially Cindy Williams’s Laurie, Candy Clark’s Debbie, and Mackenzie Phillips’s Carol — so well-drawn, real, and memorable. Those qualities—and indeed a good script of any kind—never appeared again in Lucas’s work, although Huyck & Katz did some uncredited writing on the first Star Wars and presumably are responsible for some of the rare funny dialogue sprinkled amidst that mostly crappy script. The most sexist crime in the history of American cinema, however, is how Lucas, over his co-writers’ objections, did not include the female characters of American Graffiti in the epilogue showing the male characters’ fate. That horrible omission makes the film take a dive into downer territory at the end. (Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond hilariously satirized that epilogue at the end of their 1974 film The Front Page, while not neglecting their film’s female characters.) As for Lucas’s direction of Graffiti, he does a remarkably lively and spontaneous job, unlike in any of his other films. Lucas has said he hates directing because he doesn’t like to talk to people, but the film benefits from its fast and snappy shooting schedule, and the quality of the acting in Graffiti presumably is due partly to the script as well as to the self-directing by the actors themselves and the freedom they were given by the taciturn director. A lot of credit for the visual energy and semi-documentary beauty of the film is also due to the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who is credited as “visual consultant.” He was in effect the DP but had to commute each day between Los Angeles and northern California while taking over from the credited cameramen, who reportedly were not up to the job…. Another great film craftsman, Walter Murch, deserves tremendous credit as well for his pioneering sound design of the film, which adds so much to the atmosphere and mood of the film. Murch later worked on the restored version of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (on which I was a consultant), and he said he was delighted to find that Welles in the famous opening tracking shot had actually invented something he thought he had invented for American Graffiti, the use of diegetic sound of music and other sounds from actual sources to serve as the soundtrack. Universal-International in 1958 replaced Welles’s track for the opening shot with Henry Mancini music, but Murch recreated Welles’s original plan for the soundtrack. Verna Fields and Marcia Lucas did a splendid job editing the film and helping give it the propulsive style that makes it so distinctive.

CHAPTER 3: THE CONCEPT

John Cork: I know very little about who contributed what to the screenplay, and certainly it follows the “star studded” formula that films like The Longest Day, The High and the Mighty, and the host of Arthur Hailey-inspired films (Zero Hour!, Hotel, Airport) where a great number of character-driven stories are intertwined over a short period of time. What Lucas/Katz/Huyck found was a wonderful balance between character-based comedy and poignancy. I’m going to give Gloria Katz the credit for making the female characters so wonderfully rich. The plethora of coming-of-age / teen sex comedies that follows tended to treat the women more and more as sex objects to be lusted after, ogled at, or mocked with far too little interior life. American Graffiti transcends that with three strong, richly drawn female leads.

Ray Morton: It’s terrific. A lot of multi-plot movies don’t work because, with so many elements to juggle, there isn’t enough time to develop the individual stories fully and so the overall films can feel thin or episodic and therefore ultimately unsatisfying. That doesn’t happen in Graffiti because each separate plotline is fully developed, fully sustained, and fully dramatized. Better yet, the separate stories flow into one another at key moments, with each one supporting and fleshing out the others. The characters are all three-dimensional and sympathetic. The dialogue is sharp and the script is filled with good humor and some genuinely touching moments. Finally, the ending has a marvelously wistful quality that Lucas captures perfectly with his direction.

Gary Leva: Francis Coppola deserves a lot of credit, not for the substance of the film, but for its very existence. After the commercial failure of THX 1138, it was Francis who told George to make something more accessible to a general audience next time. And coming off the success of The Godfather, the power of Francis lending his name to the film as producer is what got the film financed. It wasn’t as if Hollywood wanted to be in the George Lucas business. He was a young guy who had made one feature that bombed at the box office and, honestly, didn’t do much better with the critics.

Ray Morton: It’s a very innovative film structurally—it was one of the first films to tell multiple intertwined stories following multiple intertwined characters in the same movie without being an anthology. This sort of storytelling later became quite commonplace but when Graffiti first did it, it was remarkably unique.

William Kallay: I am not sure if American cinema audiences had seen that method of telling a story in a modern American film. They certainly enjoyed it because the film was such a big hit. Lucas took a huge chance in telling his story of growing up in a non-linear fashion and it paid in spades.

John Cork: It's a brilliant screenplay, rich in character details, a sense of time and place, and surprisingly high emotional stakes. Most importantly, the film clearly tells the stories of so many characters, brings viewer along on their journeys, but provides satisfying and less-than-predictable conclusions for each.

CHAPTER 4: THE CAST

Ray Morton: The film is perfectly cast—everyone fits their part perfectly. And everyone does a great job. Along with The Godfather, it served as the launchpad for an entire generation of terrific actors, most of whom became either stars or well-known character actors. Not surprising since both films were cast by the same person—the brilliant Fred Roos.

John Cork: If they had given Academy Awards for casting, Fred Roos would have an Oscar for American Graffiti. He quickly moved on to become an important producer (The Black Stallion, Rumble Fish, Lost in Translation, St. Vincent), but he has a fantastic eye for matching acting talent to screenplays that cannot be denied.

Beverly Gray: In the summer of 1972, just before Ron Howard became an undergraduate film student at USC, he spent several months playing a brand-new high school graduate not entirely different from himself. The film was American Graffiti, and it would prove to be a milestone both for American cinema and for Howard as an aspiring filmmaker.

Bruce Kimmel (screenwriter/composer/lyricist/co-star/co-director, The First Nudie Musical): We all wanted to be in American Graffiti. Every young actor in Los Angeles read for it, including me. I was thrilled when Cindy got cast and she made sure I was at the screening at Universal before it came out. The reaction was amazing there and everyone who was there knew it was going to be a huge hit. What was most interesting for me is that Cindy, a great, great comic actress, basically had the straight role. By that point, I knew she could do anything because we'd been in shows together at college and I knew her range. But she was so real and so simple in the film and, for me, she's the heart of American Graffiti. No one could have played it better than she did. It remains, for me, one of her finest performances.

Beverly Gray: Auditioning for a part in the film, Howard was asked to improvise scenes with other actors. This was his first hint that George Lucas didn’t do things the Hollywood way. Fortunately, Lucas wasn’t thrown by Howard’s lingering “Opie” image. Garry Marshall helped his cause by supplying the Love and the Happy Days pilot to Fred Roos, Lucas’s casting director. So the videotape of Ronny Howard playing Richie Cunningham led to him winning the role of Steve Bolander, nice guy and big man on campus.

John Cork: Every so often a film comes along that introduces a cast of relatively unknown actors, many of whom go on to have iconic careers. American Graffiti is my favorite example of this phenomenon. The two biggest stars to come from the film were Harrison Ford and Richard Dreyfuss, both who have had mammoth movie star careers. But Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips (and the barely-there Suzanne Somers) had amazing careers on American television (Phillips facing many heartbreaking public challenges with substance abuse and her relationship with her rock star father, John Phillips). Ron Howard, though, emerged with the staggering career both as a sitcom star and then as an important American film director.

Beverly Gray: The young cast of American Graffitisoon discovered that Lucas wanted them to continue improvising on the set. He shot take after take in what he called “documentary style,” hoping his actors would catch him by surprise, and then cobbled his film together in the editing room. The scene in which Howard and Cindy Williams, as Steve and his girlfriend Laurie, patch up their quarrel at the end of the film was improvised and shot in five minutes, to catch the light of dawn. Since the story is supposed to take place in one night, Lucas shot more or less in sequence, a choice that Howard belatedly learned to appreciate: “As the production wore on, we became more and more exhausted. By the end we all had circles under our eyes, and we looked like we’d been up all night. Well, we had been up all night for weeks! And it showed.”

John Cork: The performances are nearly flawless. Great casting is matching the temperament of the character to the right actor. Ron Howard was experienced on sets (having been Opie on The Andy Griffith Show) and oozes that “awe shucks” goodness. Cindy Williams, who remained religious her entire life, looked like the good girl that she played. Richard Dreyfuss, who is basically playing George Lucas, perfectly portrays the mix of confidence and self-doubt that accompanies opportunity and talent. Mackenzie Phillips was, in so many ways, the precocious twelve-year-old girl she played. Paul Le Mat was very much that James Dean-esque figure who could command respect and be both delicate and strong at the same time. Candy Clark captured that party girl who may not be all that bright, but she makes the absolute best of life. Bo Hopkins, who had been somewhat of a delinquent in his youth, is great as the swaggering bad boy gang leader. It’s an amazing cast with some fantastic supporting players (Deby Celiz as Richard Dreyfuss’s ex-girlfriend and, in the extended 1978 edition, John Brent as the unctuous used car salesman, are two that stand out for me).

Beverly Gray: Howard was fascinated by what he came to call Lucas’s “counterculture approach to filmmaking.” He found it exhilarating to see women and long-haired men on a film crew, and to be granted a high level of autonomy for his own performance. He also noticed how Lucas paid as much attention to the costumes on the extras, the cars on the road, and the music on the soundtrack as he did to the people in the closeups. Lucas, who had graduated from USC film school in 1966,found the young director-to-be a kindred spirit. He was glad to share his filmmaking techniques with Howard, who roamed the set with his video camera, documenting the work-in-progress. (To his lasting regret, his mother later somehow dumped this potentially historic footage. )

Joseph McBride: The casting by Fred Roos—who was acknowledged as the best in the business—helped jumpstart numerous important careers. The acting is uniformly wonderful throughout. To me the standout performance is the haunting work by Cindy Williams, and the best scene is the one at the sock hop in which she and her feuding boyfriend, Ron Howard, are suddenly told they have to lead a dance as an important graduating couple and are surprised by a spotlight shining on them. Their stunned reactions and the way they are initially confused about how to act but quickly improvise a “happy” relationship for the sake of appearances is quite moving. It is one of the steps that leads to their reconciliation and the ways (including nearly committing suicide) that Laurie persuades Steve to stay in town with her and not go to college. That presumably does not turn out very well, since the epilogue says Steve becomes an insurance agent, and Laurie is invisible in the epilogue…. I became so enamored of Cindy Williams in this film, as well as in her earlier George Cukor film, Travels with My Aunt, and her subsequent role in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic The Conversation, that I wrote a lead role for her in a screenplay. She wanted to do it and told me I was one of the few writers in Hollywood who could write good roles for women, but I could not sell the script, a large-scale Western. (It was, however, ripped off twice, once for a film that is regarded as a classic and another time for a notorious flop, but that’s another story . . .) Now when I see the film, after Cindy Williams has gone, that makes me deeply sad…. The character I’ve always most identified with in American Graffiti is Paul Le Mat’s John Milner, the sensitive tough guy who is the conscience of the movie and the only one with any historical sense. He’s unlike me in many obvious ways, but we share many attitudes, including a sense of distance from what’s going on around him. I find Milner a melancholy commentator on the transience of the youthful hijinks we see onscreen, the way Harrison Ford’s Bob Falfa (who almost gets killed at the end) is a “stupid” and reckless car racer, and I respond personally when Milner laments, “Rock ’n’ roll hasn’t been the same since Buddy Holly died.” I was watching American Bandstand in 1959 when Dick Clark announced that Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper had been killed in a plane crash, “The Day the Music Died.” And, speaking of the delightful soundtrack of pop tunes, I love it that American Graffiti begins with a blast of “Rock Around the Clock,” the record by Bill Haley & His Comets that kickstarted rock ’n’ roll in 1954, although The Chords’ “Sh-Boom” (Life Could Be a Dream)” had also played a role in developing the rock revolution that same year. I was into rock the second week in May 1954 when the phenomenon started, and “Rock Around the Clock” was the first record I bought. The musical nature of Graffiti influenced a script I wrote in 1976 spoofing Dick Clark and American Bandstand, Rock City, which was sold to Roger Corman’s company but wasn’t filmed, because Clark raised objections (we would have been ahead of The Idolmaker and Hairspray). As a result of that script, I was considered “an expert on teenagers,” which made me laugh, because, due to my own bad experiences in grade school and high school, I mostly shared the feeling Sam Fuller had when I asked him what he thought of Rebel Without a Cause: “I hate these goddam teenagers and their fucking problems.” Rock City led, however, to my co-writing the 1979 cult classic satire Rock ’n’ Roll High School, which is also indebted to American Graffiti…. I should add that the character I most resembled in 1962 was the comical nerd, Terry the Toad, played so expertly in Graffiti by Charlie Martin Smith. The first time I saw the film, I was upset that the Westwood audience roared with laughter when he was “pantsed” (i.e. had his pants pulled down) at a drive-in by bullies, because that had happened to me. It took me a while to get back into the film after that awful jog of memory. I felt then what Abe Polonsky meant about nostalgia, since my memories of 1962 were also mostly acutely painful.

Beverly Gray: Because the main cast was required to be on hand for the entire shoot, the young actors found themselves free in the daylight hours to sleep, to rehearse, or to make mischief. Actors Harrison Ford, Paul Le Mat, and Bo Hopkins quickly became the production’s major hellraisers, while Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Charles Martin Smith, and Cindy Williams took a more serious approach. Howard remembers that “it was a liberating experience. Being on location. Working all night. It was the first time I didn’t have parental supervision.” He spent his off-hours largely going to the movies, and discussing such favorite films as The Graduate with castmate (and future director) Charlie Martin Smith.

CHAPTER 5: THE CINEMATOGRAPHY

Rob Hummel (co-editor, American Cinematographer Manual Eleventh Edition): Techniscope was beneficial to lower-budgeted productions to give them a widescreen look but at half the negative cost.

Roy H. Wagner, ASC (cinematographer, Beauty and the Beast, Quantum Leap): I hated the look.

Rob Hummel: The traditional 35mm frame is four sprocket holes high. With Techniscope, instead of shooting with an anamorphic squeeze like you would with CinemaScope and Panavision, they shot 35mm spherically—meaning normal—but with just a two-sprocket-hole-high frame. Within the sound aperture area of the two-sprocket-hole-high frame was approximately a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The lab—Technicolor—would develop your two-sprocket-hole negative, and then they would not charge for the optical repositioning. They delivered your dailies that were blown up and squeezed into a four-sprocket-hole frame, so you could use a regular Moviola [for editing] and screen them in a regular cinema with an anamorphic projection lens and everything would look normal. So the production company benefit was suddenly their negative costs were fifty percent of what they would have been otherwise.

Roy H. Wagner, ASC: The fact that it was photographed 2-perf instead of 4-perf was a con game used to persuade producers to come back to Technicolor because it was half the price. The problem was that in order to release it into theaters that image had to go through an optical printer to blow the picture up and squeeze it to appear like anamorphic. Technicolor initially absorbed the expensive intermediates cost.

Rob Hummel: George Lucas wanted to shoot Star Wars in Techniscope, too, but Gary Kurtz, the producer, said “Absolutely not! We are not going to shoot and have that low-quality; we are going to shoot in Panavision anamorphic so we have better image quality.” And George yielded to Kurtz’s position on that, because one of the things about Techniscope is when you throw away fifty percent of the image area, there is an impact and a consequence. Techniscope movies look grainier than their CinemaScope counterparts. There is fifty percent more negative being used in anamorphic. And so when you cut that grain budget in half, the result is it looks grainier, and also the optical step involved to create the CinemaScope release prints—the process of blowing it up and squeezing it—enhances the grain quite a bit.

Roy H. Wagner, ASC: The process might have been okay for properly exposed negatives, but American Graffiti was highly under exposed because of the slow film stock (ASA 100) and the fact that everything was night. The grain was so large it looked like characters in the film! The same can be somewhat said for another Techniscope film, Once Upon A Time In the West. Of course that film was mostly daylight so it didn’t suffer the same exposure/night problems that Graffiti had. Today, going through a digital intermediate instead of Kodak’s dreadful intermediate film stocks, the image looks beautiful.

Rob Hummel: At the end of the day we are in the storytelling business, and so the storytelling is more important than the film format; the story is more important than the film grain. I don’t recall anybody walking out of American Graffiti going, “It sure was a lot grainier than I thought it should be!”

CHAPTER 6: THE EDITING

Paul Hirsch, ACE (co-editor, Star Wars; editor, The Empire Strikes Back, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off): I really don't have anything to say about Graffiti, other than that it is a wonderful film. I did ask George which of the characters was him. He said, all of them. He was Terry the Toad when he was a freshman, he was the Ron Howard character when he was a sophomore, Paul Le Mat when he was a junior, and Richard Dreyfuss when he was a senior. His life course was changed after he sped into a tree and was nearly killed.

Ray Morton: It’s marvelously edited—by Verna Fields but mostly Marcia Lucas. The intra-scene editing is terrific, but it is the balancing of all of the different elements for all of the various stories in the film that is really remarkable. For the multi-story structure to work, all of the pieces had to be arranged perfectly, which they were. One piece out of place and the movie wouldn’t have worked at all. The stories all progress so that the highs and lows of each match, giving the overall film a wonderful rhythm. The narrative progression within and between the various plots is always clear and understandable—the movie is easy to follow, which was not an easy thing to accomplish with so many elements in play. Many multiple plot films don’t work because one plot often takes precedence and the others get lost. That never happens in Graffiti.

CHAPTER 7: THE MUSIC

Jon Burlingame (film music historian, Variety; author, Sound and Vision: 60 Years of Motion Picture Soundtracks): From the beginning, George Lucas was smart about the use of music in his films. For THX 1138, he asked Lalo Schifrin for a futuristic soundscape, yet one that concluded with Bach's "St. Matthew Passion"; Schifrin worked backwards to incorporate choral elements of the Bach from the very opening of the picture…. But for American Graffiti, he defied convention by foregoing the traditional film score in favor of a non-stop collection of rock 'n' roll favorites from the 1950s and early 1960s—precisely the kind of thing he and his pals would have listened to as they cruised and partied before high school graduation in Modesto, California in June 1962…. These were the days before "music supervisors" took over as the clearance-and-licensing people who handled song rights. In fact, according to Lucasfilm itself, "George Lucas wrote Graffiti’s script with his childhood collection of 45 rpm records, noting specific songs for each scene in the film. Graffiti's music licensing was a huge undertaking, costing nearly 1/7th of its total budget (some music that Lucas hoped to include, like Elvis Presley’s, was excluded due to the high cost)." Only a handful of films before Graffiti utilized this kind of soundtrack (notably Easy Rider in 1969) and none had boasted so many popular songs. The soundtrack album, a two-LP set, was titled "41 Original Hits from the Soundtrack of American Graffiti," and MCA wasn't kidding: everything from "Rock Around the Clock" and "That'll Be the Day" to "Surfin' Safari" and "Barbara Ann," with songs sequenced in the order in which they are heard in the film, another pleasant surprise and one rarely repeated in subsequent similar all-song soundtracks. (IMDb lists a total of 44 songs within the film itself.) It was wildly effective in reminding audiences of the era ("where were you in '62?") as nearly all of the songs were from the 1954-62 period, and was even more successful as an album, an early and defining example of the all-song compilation that would be as commercially successful as the movie that spawned it. The album spent more than a year on the Billboard charts, peaking at no. 10, and has since gone triple platinum…. Four years later, of course, Lucas would move in exactly the opposite direction, hiring John Williams to compose a lavish symphonic backdrop for Star Wars.

CHAPTER 8: THE SOUND

Larry Blake (sound designer and film sound historian): I recently heard American Graffiti in the worst possible circumstances: tinny headphones on an airplane. (Equally bad for the picture: panned and scanned. The horror!) Although it was the stereo remix, it was trying circumstances in which to judge any film sound job. But, Graffiti is projection-proof, and while I’m happy that Walter Murch was able to do a stereo mix later in the Seventies, the great work was present from the get-go in the original Academy mono mix. (In the same way, the brilliance of the Apocalypse Now mix doesn’t need the much-heralded stereo surrounds.) The sense of space and depth with the music that Walter and George Lucas created back in 1973 allowed them to have music playing almost non-stop for 110 minutes. Their technique was absurdly simple: “Worldizing" the whole Wolfman Jack show (including all the music cues) by re-recording it through a small speaker in an alley, and then combining to varying degrees that along with the original “dry” track, sometimes with a second, sync-staggered worldized track…genius.

Steve Lee (sound archivist and founder of the Hollywood Sound Museum): Besides being a brilliant picture editor, Walter Murch is one of the founding fathers of modern motion picture sound design. On American Graffiti, he is credited with creating the process called "Worldizing." It's a simple but effective technique where sounds are re-recorded in a chosen acoustic environment to make them sound more authentic. On Graffiti, he and George Lucas created a two-hour radio show with Wolfman Jack playing all the songs for the film, which was essentially the film's "soundtrack." Then they took that recording and played it back on a speaker in a suburban backyard, and re-recorded it from about fifty feet away with a microphone and a Nagra. George held the speaker, randomly moving it—and Walter held the microphone, moving it randomly as well. They did this twice. Then during the mix of the film, they put those two tracks alongside the original unprocessed version, and would fade in and out of each of them, as needed creatively. They staggered the recordings a bit so they weren't perfectly in sync, so the music and DJ bits would occasionally be echoing, reflecting off buildings. It's the soundtrack of the whole city that night, what everyone's listening to... and "worldizing" the track really sells it. It's really effective.

Gary Leva: You hear [the “worldizing”] particularly during the cruising scenes when music inside the cars is contrasted with music heard by characters on the street as cars drive by. Walter and George were, of course, USC Film School buddies and fast friends. Walter’s extraordinary work elevates the film, just as Haskell Wexler’s photography does.

Larry Blake: I think of Graffiti, THX 1138, and The Conversation as a triptych of movies that feature outstandingly great sound jobs that hold up to today’s standards, irrespective of the fact that they were in mono and mixed on a small board that was very limited and primitive. To paraphrase Deep Throat in All The President’s Men: follow the ideas!

CHAPTER 9: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

John Cork: I first saw American Graffiti with my mother and future stepfather at the Montgomery Mall theater over New Year’s weekend, December 1973. The film had a very slow rollout, and Montgomery got it late. The line was so long to buy tickets that we got into the film after it started. There were many films where this seemed to happen, and you would just stay and watch the start of the film again to see what you missed. The theater was completely packed. The audience loved it, both those who had vivid memories of 1962 and those like me who had no living memory of that time. I went back to see the movie with many friends in 1974 at that same theater.

Ray Morton: It actually took me a long time to see the film for the first time. I didn’t see it when it first came out because I was a bit too young to go to the movies by myself and it wasn’t the kind of film my parents were going to take me to. So I had to wait a few years until I was a sophomore in high school. One of my teachers was a big fan of the movie and he arranged to rent a 16mm print of the film from Universal and showed it to the entire school on a Friday night. But halfway through the screening the projector broke and so I didn’t get to see the second half. I finally saw the entire film only when it was re-released in 1978. Of course, that was the restored version, although I did catch up with the original version at a revival house some time later.

Peter Krämer: I can’t remember when and where I first saw American Graffiti. I certainly didn’t watch it when it came out, although it might well have been the kind of film I would have liked as a teenager living in a provincial German village and longing for some connection with the whole wide world. I later found out that there was a link between the teenagers in the film and me: it wasn’t to do with cars or high school dances, but with the radio show they were listening to. As it happened, Wolfman Jack’s show was broadcast on the American Forces Network in Germany in the seventies. I was intrigued by the ominous howl announcing the show and by the Wolfman’s unique voice and patter, which to me came to represent the promise of “America,” the land of unlimited possibilities. So this was probably the aspect of the film I most strongly responded to when I first saw it, which was probably in the late 1980s or early 1990s, by which time I had actually visited the United States and was living in the UK. In fact, I developed a strong personal as well as academic interest in the careers and films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and when I started teaching a course on these two filmmakers, American Graffiti was on the syllabus. It was through teaching that I really came to appreciate the film. It slowly grew on me until it eventually became one of my favorite movies.

William Kallay: My parents took me to see Animal House at the Stadium Drive-In in Orange, California. Still not sure why they let me [as a ten-year-old] see a very raunchy R-rated comedy; I did not care since I was in stitches with laughter! The second feature on the bill was American Graffiti. We stayed for about the first hour and my mom said she really did not care for the film. I recall being bummed and mentioning that I liked it. My dad turned on the ignition and we drove off.

Ray Morton: I loved the film when I (finally) first saw it all the way through. I found it funny and touching. I liked all the characters and really identified with Curt. I loved the music—it was not my era, but most of those songs were still playing on the oldies station when I was a kid, so they were familiar. And I loved the way the movie was made—I was just learning about filmmaking at the time and the craftsmanship of the piece was really impressive to me even then.

William Kallay: [I finally saw the entire film in a theater during a special event for its 25th anniversary at the] Samuel Goldwyn [which is] one of the best places in the world to see a film. That evening’s presentation was excellent [and had the bonus of a cast and crew reunion and post-screening Q&A]. Finally seeing the film in Techniscope on a grainy yet clean 35mm print was a revelation. The roughness of the film grain leant texture of the film’s nostalgic look back on 1962. This looked nothing like Star Wars or Lucas’s later forays into digital cinema.

Ray Morton: Another thing that strikes me now much more than it did then was how Lucas made the early 60s feel like it was an era far, far in the past when in real time it was only eleven years previous to when the movie was made. It was recent history but Lucas made it feel like the epic past.

John Cork: My opinion of American Graffiti has only grown over time, particularly the writing and the editing. Weaving all those characters and stories with each character being so vivid, each one having their own journey worthy of a film devoted solely to them, and keeping the audience invested in each story thread, that is a magnificent feat.

Ray Morton: I love it just as much today—for me it remains a very well-made, very entertaining movie. The main difference between how I felt then and how I feel now is now that I am older, the movie—especially the ending—has more of a melancholy feel to it than I would have been able to register back then—all these bright, young characters with their whole lives ahead of them (as I was) facing a future that was not going to be as uncomplicatedly bright as they were all hoping it would be. I think it’s that melancholy that elevates American Graffiti high above so many other movies about teens.

Joseph McBride: I saw it again recently and was impressed all over again with its charm and technical brilliance and its ability to recapture much of the naive but touching feelings we had about pop culture and sexuality in the early 1960s, when I was a teenager. But my friend Abraham Polonsky, the blacklisted writer-director, when I asked what he thought about American Graffiti, asked me, “How could anyone be nostalgic about 1962?” Although I had volunteered for Senator John F. Kennedy in his 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign, I was still rather naive politically in 1962 and did not know about blacklisting then…. But another way to look at the question was suggested to me when I interviewed Richard Lester in London in 1973 and discussed the film he directed with the Beatles in 1964: “A Hard Day’s Night was a film which set out to mirror a point in time, a fictionalized documentary representing an enormous change in the social structure of this country [England]. How I Won the War was made about my feelings towards the Vietnam War, and the nostalgia about war and war films in 1965 or 1966. It means totally different things now because look what we’ve learned. Look how the world has moved on in its cynical or nonsensical way to make that not valuable, that type of film. The Beatles picture is dated, if you like, by its naive optimism. But that is precisely because one felt naively optimistic at that time, despite the fact that it happened a year before the Kennedy assassination, not long after the Bay of Pigs. In hindsight, I suppose there was nothing to be optimistic about. But people were”…. Abe Polonsky’s point about American Graffiti still is well taken, but the kids in that film are depicted as clueless about the world beyond their small middle-California town of Modesto, a particularly insular place, Lucas’s hometown. It’s noticeable now how Anglo the cast is; there are some Latino characters, the gang members who kidnap Richard Dreyfuss’s Curt Henderson, and they are likable guys despite beyond stereotypical, and we can see a couple of Asian kids at the sock hop. But no Black kids. Lucas later was excoriated for having no Black characters in the first Star Wars film, and people thought it implied Black people would not exist in the future (even though the film takes place long, long ago). He was so isolated from much of American life and so thoughtlessly biased that it hadn’t occurred to him to put Black people into his movie, so he rushed Billy Dee Williams into The Empire Strikes Back. But Lucas’s mindset is very white-bread…. Nevertheless, American Graffiti holds up beautifully as a reverie about the teenage culture of that period from the point of view of those kinds of smalltown kids who don’t know much about the outside world. Part of the dramatic tension of the film is whether the smartest of the kids, Curt, is going to leave his home town to go away to college and become a “presidential aide” (his dream is to shake hands with President Kennedy; I met Kennedy three times, twice during the campaign and once when he was president). Throughout the film, Curt is afraid and hesitant to leave his home town, but after a complex journey around the town that night and early morning and realizing how limited it is and his future would be if he didn’t leave, he gets on a plane at the end and goes on to a presumably more significant future…. Frank Capra (whose biography I wrote) admired American Graffiti. I realized it was partly because the story is so similar to It’s a Wonderful Life, which is also about a guy who’s frustrated with life in his small town and struggles to leave but can’t quite ever do so. Partly it’s because James Stewart’s George Bailey loves Donna Reed’s Mary Hatch, the way that Ron Howard’s character, Steve Bolander, loves Laurie Henderson (Cindy Williams); their story about whether Steve will go away to college or stay with her (as he does at the end) is the most dramatic and moving element in the film, paralleling and contrasting with the story of Curt, who is Laurie’s brother. Capra always told me he loved films about people, and American Graffiti is a film about people par excellence. He also liked Star Wars. I asked why, if he liked films about people, he would like a film in which the robots are the most memorable characters. He said Lucas’s achievement in that film is to make the robots seem like people. A good point!

CHAPTER 10: MEMORABLE SCENES

Joseph McBride: The sock hop scenes are marvelously charged with energy, humor, and nostalgia. The drag race and crash at the end—based on an incident that changed Lucas’s life when he was in high school—is powerful. But really the film is all of a piece, and the cruising scenes that dominate the movie are all beautifully done. The cars gleam like precious gems, and the film is a funny paean to and something of a satire of the American obsession with car culture. The cars compete with the actors as characters, much as the robots and space ships do in the Star Warsmovies. I found it intriguing on a recent viewing that American Graffiti, unlike most films today, takes the time to linger on emotional scenes in its last parts rather than getting more frenetic.

Ray Morton: The cruising “ballet” of cars that comes soon after the opening scenes at Mel’s…. Milner and Carol’s shaving cream and tire deflation “revenge” on the girls in the Cadillac…. Milner and Carol’s walk through the junkyard…. Curt’s walk through the empty halls of his high school and his subsequent encounter with Mr. Wolfe…. Ripping out the axel of the police car…. The liquor store scene…. Curt’s meeting with Wolfman Jack…. The climactic race between Milner and Falfa…. Curt seeing the white T-Bird as he looks down from the airplane…. The “where are they now” legends that appear just before the end credits.

John Cork: The Toad trying to park his Vespa at the film’s opening breaks me up every time. The look on John Milner’s face when Carol gets into his hot rod, the reaction of Curt when Joe, the head of the Pharaohs, mentions a “blood initiation,” the carefully-planned out “let’s see other people” talk that goes sideways between Steve and Laurie, and Debbie talking about The Goat Killer as The Toad tries to suppress his rising fear.

Ray Morton: Curt’s meeting with Wolfman Jack. It’s a sweet scene (literally and figuratively--“Sticky little mothers….”) with a lovely twist at the end. It also perfectly summarizes the message of the movie—if you want to make something of your life, you have to leave the comfort and safety of home and head out into the big wide world. It’s the exact message that Curt needs to hear. That all of us need to hear.

John Cork: My favorite scene is Curt going to the radio station to get a request out for the girl in the T-Bird, and the complex moment of honesty as he realizes the man to whom he’s been talking is the legendary and glamorous Wolfman Jack, and the realization that The Wolfman is just a local DJ who never made it out of the small town, whose dreams and ambitions are melting away each night like the popsicles in the station’s broken fridge.

CHAPTER 11: SUCCESS!

William Kallay: [During the Q&A at the Academy’s 25th anniversary screening,] George Lucas was his usual self and did not make a big deal with how successful his film was. He spoke about how Universal and Ned Tanen were not enthusiastic about American Graffiti and that there was a desire to simply put it on TV instead of releasing it in theaters. As the legend goes, producer Francis Ford Coppola stepped in and wanted to buy the movie. Tanen relented and, of course, the film became one of the biggest hits of all time.

Peter Krämer: The reason I became so interested in the careers of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg was that they managed (separately and jointly) to make a string of massive hit movies across the 1970s and 1980s (and beyond). It was (and is) so rare that filmmakers succeed at the box office with several films in a row, and it is even rarer that they do so with films which are based on original stories that they have come up with and developed themselves (often with the help of other writers). Throughout American film history most films have flopped at the box office, and most hit movies have been based on previously-published material (that is they have been adaptations of novels, stage musicals etc. or they have been sequels, prequels, spin-offs etc.). But here is American Graffiti, only Lucas’s second film (the first one having been a terrible flop); the story is largely based on his own youth and he co-wrote the screenplay. What is more, unlike almost all previous big Hollywood hits, Graffiti had no stars and a, by the standards of the time, tiny production and marketing budget. And yet it became one of the highest-grossing films in Hollywood history up to this point, while also being enthusiastically received by critics, eventually coming to be recognized as one of the best American movies of all time. I would call that very noteworthy indeed. Of course, it is also the case that the success of American Graffiti enabled George Lucas, whose film career might otherwise well have ended in the early 1970s, to make Star Wars—and that film in turn changed American and indeed global cinema culture forever.

Beverly Gray: Writer-director George Lucas, not yet thirty, used the events of one hot summer night in a Northern California town to capture the essence of being a teenager in 1962, before Vietnam became the nation’s predominant nightmare. The movie, shot in Petaluma, California (standing in for Lucas’s own Modesto) over the course of twenty-eight nights, cost a mere $775,000. After its release in August 1973, it racked up $115 million in domestic box office, then went on to be nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Ray Morton: Not bad for a little movie that cost under a million bucks to make and that the studio didn’t want to release.

CHAPTER 12: SIGNIFICANCE AND INFLUENCE

Gary Leva: The film was hugely influential, particularly in two areas. The first is the use of popular songs instead of a score. The idea of scoring an entire film with Top 40 songs was revolutionary. No one had ever used more than a handful of songs in a film. In fact, the term “Song Score” hadn’t even been invented yet. Today this is commonplace, but it all started with American Graffiti.

Ray Morton: The Graduate was the first significant film to use pop music as a score, but apart from “Sounds of Silence,” the songs in The Graduate were composed for the film, or were at least introduced in the film. And all of the music in The Graduate were written by the same person and performed by the same artists. Graffiti was the first significant film to use existing pop songs by a multitude of artists as score, an approach to music in movies that eventually became standard.

Gary Leva: The second influential aspect of the film is the way the story is told. Rather than focusing on a single protagonist, Graffiti follows four separate stories that rarely intertwine until the film’s final scene. In fact, this unconventional structure is one of the reasons the script was initially turned down by the studios. Today, this kind of storytelling is commonplace—Pulp Fiction is a good example.

Rob Hummel: The reason John Bailey and Lawrence Kasdan wanted to shoot Silverado in Super Techniscope [aka Super-35] was because of films like American Graffiti, THX 1138 and Once Upon a Time in the West and the great depth of field they were achieving in the Techniscope format.

John Cork: It is incredibly complex in its structure, filled with brilliantly understated comic performances that launched the careers of oodles of stars. Its staggering success gave cinema some of the most talented and influential behind-the-camera creators in the history of the medium. Although it was not the first “American teen coming of age” film of that era (the success of Summer of ’42 and The Last Picture Show, both released in 1971, paved the way for American Graffiti to get made), it is the one that defined the genre, and it remains unabashedly the best.

Ray Morton: Along with Summer of ’42, it made coming-of-age movies a viable genre, and along with the stage musical Grease, it was one of the pop culture items that kicked off the 50s nostalgia craze of the 70s.

Joseph McBride: For one thing, it’s still Lucas’s best film all these years later. It showed he could make movies about real life and about people’s complex dilemmas. He mostly abandoned that mission (Capra’s comment aside). Lucas kept claiming that when he made money, he would go back to making little films like Graffiti and his first feature, THX 1138, but of course he never has. The Star Wars saga was a Faustian bargain that helped ruin him artistically though not financially. American Graffitishows what he could and should have been.

Ray Morton: As cinema, it’s a classic—pure and simple. And, as my friend Brian observes, Graffitihas had a lasting impact on car culture, both in the U.S. and around the world: “The impact was nationwide, and spread to Europe and Japan at the least, (piggybacking somewhat) on GIs bring U.S. hotrod culture with them to bases around the world. In Europe there are still “Shine & Show” or “Show & Shine” gatherings for vintage cars and hotrods. Foreign roads really don’t lend themselves to “cruising,” but across the U.S., “Cruise Nights” at fast food restaurants or large parking lots popped up and continue to this day. “Show & Shine” car shows also still happen across the U.S. Some are spontaneous, some are sponsored by local car clubs. Some clubs went so far as to create a DJ trailer to play oldies at the gatherings. It’s a chance for car guys to bring out their pride and joy and show them off, to each other, and the next generation…. I’m not a car guy, but my lifelong friend Brian Finn is. He’s also a huge Graffitifan and he reminded me that the film gave a significant real-life boost to John Milner’s trusty ride. As Brian says: “I recall hearing that a car magazine writer, after seeing the film, had only one thing to say about it: …’the price of yellow deuce coupes just went way up.’ The Ford ’32 coupe was always a popular car, and (became one) of the first hot rods, but Graffitilaunched one yellow five window into icon status. In the film, the ‘Deuce Coupe’ is essentially a character, a supporting actor with no lines. It just has to be seen in the frame, to have an impact.”

Beverly Gray: American Graffitihad personal resonance for Ron Howard, as well as for audiences, because it touched on themes that were very much a part of his own life. The two central characters in the film, Steve and Curt, both wrestle with the challenge of growing up and leaving a familiar world. On the eve of their departure for an east coast college, Steve is only too glad to be “getting out of this turkey town,” while his friend Curt agonizes over whether it makes sense “to leave home to look for a home.” A teacher chaperoning the high school dance represents an object lesson: he once had a scholarship to Vermont’s Middlebury College, but retreated back to his hometown after only a semester away. By the end of the film, Curt has been persuaded by a mysterious DJ named The Wolfman that “there’s a great big beautiful world out there,” and that it needs to be explored. But Steve, faced with losing Laurie, ultimately opts to stay behind. The famous epilogue of the film reveals to the audience the future of these two young men: “Steve Bolander is an insurance agent in Modesto, California. Curt Henderson is a writer living in Canada.” Howard has said, “The fact that I knew that Steve was going to wind up being an insurance salesman and stay there definitely informed my performance. This was not an entirely adventuresome person.” The final-crawl device, updating the audience on the future lives of the film’s central characters, was soon to become a well-worn movie convention in its own right.

Ray Morton: It’s the first successful film in the career of one of the major directors of the 1970s and one of the major filmmakers of all time, and it was one of the first films to treat teenagers and their lives and concerns realistically, rather than in sitcom fashion or as exploitation fodder. It is also one of the first films to tell teenage stories from the perspective of the teenagers themselves, rather than from an adult perspective, which so many films, especially in the 50s and 60s did.

CHAPTER 13: THE 1978 RE-RELEASE

Joseph McBride: Although I generally am supportive of directors adding back material the studios made them cut originally, I don’t think Lucas’s additions particularly helped.

John Cork: I don’t mind the changes. I love the used car scene with John Brent, which
was added for the 1978 release, and, apparently, was a cut demanded by the studio in 1973. The “Louie, Louie” sequence at the school dance doesn’t detract from anything for me. Remixing in Dolby didn’t faze me, but movies now have so many mixes for different theatrical and home theater formats that there is rarely a definitive mix on a film.

Ray Morton: I don’t mind the minutes that were added back in because they were taken out by the studio over Lucas’s protestations, so putting them back in was truly a restoration—putting the movie back the way Lucas originally wanted it. The additions don’t radically change the movie except perhaps to make Steve a slightly stronger character when he tells off the chaperone at the dance, although my buddy Brian feels that including the scene of Falfa singing to Laurie was a mistake because “it tries to humanize the character, who is a cocky, arrogant, outsider invading their turf. He’s the villain, you’re not supposed to sympathize until he’s defeated and his steed destroyed.”

John Cork: The only material change I really know about in the 1978 version is the change in the month of John Milner’s death. I didn’t know about that until someone pointed it out to me.

Peter Krämer: What is so annoying about Lucas’s penchant for modifications is the fact that it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to get hold of the original theatrical release versions. And in some cases, there is not even any acknowledgement that changes to that original version were being made. I think that the version of THX 1138 most widely available today is far removed from the original—and on my DVD there is not even a hint that the film ever looked differently.

CHAPTER 14: THE HOME MEDIA EXPERIENCE

William Kallay: This was one of the first VHS cassette tapes I bought once I got a job. My dad had very mediocre speakers, but I would still crank up the sound when I played this cassette.

John Rotan (Dave’s Video/The Laser Place): Aside from the tweaked sunset shot under the main title card, the MCA/Universal Signature Edition of American Graffiti is my personal favorite home video presentation of the film. The solid THX transfer combined with Walter Murch’s immersive sound montage make me feel as if I am right there, cruising through Modesto at night, alongside Curt, Steve, Milner, and Laurie.

John Cork: I certainly don’t mind the sunset shot at the beginning. The original script stated “the sun drops behind a distant hill.” Had they had a bit more money when they shot the film, Lucas would have gotten the shot, and since the film is an ode to an era on which the sun had set, I don’t begrudge him getting the shot like he wanted, even decades later.

Ray Morton: I don’t care for the new CGI sunset, because that’s an example of Lucas doing what we want him to stop doing—altering his old films rather than restoring them. My main objection to the new sunset is that the original blown-out sky is in line with the documentary style of the rest of the movie—that’s what a sunset shot by a doc crew on the fly without the time to perfectly balance the light and capture the sunset would look like. The revised version is too formal, too gorgeous. It feels like something out of a big budget epic rather than a low budget comedy.

William Kallay: I may have bought the LaserDisc, but I do remember getting my first DVD player. In the early days of widespread Internet, I bought the player from a retailer who included 10 DVDs for free. One of the discs I got was American Graffiti. The picture and sound quality for the time was very good and miles above VHS and LaserDisc. Too bad I had mediocre speakers from the same manufacturer as the ones my dad had!

Cliff Stephenson (home media special features producer, Knives Out, Everything Everywhere All at Once): Laurent Bouzereau’s Making of American Graffiti (along with his making-ofs for Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) still stands as one of the keystones of the modern “making-of” era. What Laurent did is essentially the same thing producers like me (and, to no surprise, Laurent) are still doing. While the tools to make them have changed and they’ve often become glossier and more tightly edited, the storytelling within The Making of American Graffitistill holds up. Certainly movie making-ofs had existed before, but this kind of retrospective making-of didn’t really exist in that form until Laurent came along. There hadn’t been a market (or frankly the perspective) to look back at some of these films until the 1990s and LaserDisc and DVD were the right formats at the right time to launch this new type of making-of. The fact that twenty-five years after this documentary was created, I’m doing essentially the same thing on titles like Saw X, Knives Out or Everything Everywhere All at Once is a testament to the format Laurent pioneered and The Making of American Graffiti, as I said, is one of the earliest examples of that. It’s also an incredibly important historical document because you get to hear stories and insights from people who are no longer with us. The experiences of Cindy Williams and Suzanne Somers (both of whom we lost in 2023), co-screenwriter Gloria Katz, and visual consultant Haskell Wexler all live on because of the existence of Laurent’s documentary. For as long as American Graffiti lives on as a film, Laurent Bouzereau’s Making of American Graffiti will live beside it. It’s a part of the film now that will accompany every release of American Graffiti forever.

Gary Leva: I had the pleasure of producing George’s video commentary for the Blu-ray of American Graffiti, which I did by simply setting up a camera in The Stag Theater at Skywalker Ranch and letting him talk to me as he watched the film again. What struck me was how sweet the memory of making the film was, despite all the difficulties he and his crew had to endure to get it in the can. They lost locations, had to move to a different city, were chronically underfunded… and yet it all came together. When I produce a commentary with a filmmaker, I study the film thoroughly beforehand. That way, in case he or she runs dry, I can ask intelligent questions to get them going again. So I knew American Graffiti really well when we shot the commentary, and having worked with George for so long—I produced all his Star Wars commentaries as well—I knew what sort of questions would intrigue him. But as well as I knew the film, I learned something sitting with him that day. I realized that all the male characters in the film are aspects of George. There is some of him in the straight arrow Ron Howard plays, some of him in the restless rebel played by Richard Dreyfuss, and some of him in the hot-rodding, grease monkey played by Paul Le Mat. George wanted to be a professional race car driver for years, until he was almost killed in a crash. In a way, Graffiti is like his sweet goodbye to that dream.

William Kallay: Recently, I saw that Netflix had American Graffiti, along with a number of Universal Studios titles, on its streaming service. Eagerly, I clicked on the American Graffiti icon on the screen and was horrified that they were showing it in 16:9! Why in the world, in this day and age of gigantic TV sets, are streamers and broadcasters going back to cropping widescreen images “to fit” them onto the TV screen? This film, and others, do not deserve this butchering. I can remember in the early days of Netflix that they would crop widescreen movies. For shame in 2023.

Bill Hunt (editor, The Digital Bits): Unfortunately, Universal’s recent release of American Graffiti in 4K UltraHD is rather unpleasant looking. It would appear to be a heavy-handed remastering effort (probably completed circa 2012) that was done by someone who decided that no photochemical grain or fine detail at all should appear in the remastered image. It appears artificially smoothed and decidedly unnatural looking—essentially comparable to Fox’s much derided Predator: Ultimate Hunter Edition Blu-ray. This 4K Digital release should therefore be avoided at all costs. At the very least, one should try to get a peek at the 4K Digital release before spending money on the physical media version.

CHAPTER 15: THE SEQUEL

Peter Krämer: I actually think that More American Graffiti is, formally and thematically, a very interesting film. It does deserve more attention (although I have to admit that I did not have space in my book to discuss the sequel). What I find so remarkable is that not only was it a commercial flop but one also gets the impression that Lucas actively sought to undermine the commercial viability of this potential “franchise.”

John Cork: I think it suffered greatly from the television success of Happy Days, which milked American Graffiti’s success (and cast) for all it was worth. [That said,] More American Graffiti is terribly underrated. It isn’t perfect by any stretch, and it suffers greatly from the absence of Richard Dreyfuss as the older brother Curt, who is replaced by Will Seltzer as Andy. I can only imagine that with Dreyfuss’s character, the storyline involving him and his sister Laurie would have had a powerful conclusion with him avoiding the draft or jail by escaping to Canada where he would have to live in exile. I love the style changes from each segment (which annoyed many critics at the time), and the performances are generally top-notch. Is it a great movie? No, but it is more than worthwhile to see, and it stays true to the heart and soul of the original.

Ray Morton: I think More American Graffiti is conceptually quite brilliant. The idea of setting the four different storylines on the same night in four consecutive years (as opposed to on the same night as in the original) was a clever way to cover all of the 60s in a single movie. The notion to shoot each story in a different cinematic style—one appropriate to the year each story is set in—is another amazingly innovative concept that demonstrates what a creative, out-of-the-box thinker Lucas has always been.

Craig Miller (Lucasfilm Director of Fan Relations, 1977-1980; author, Star Wars Memories): My understanding was that George wasn't originally very interested in doing More American Graffiti but Universal suggested that he still owed them a picture on his original deal with them and, since they owned American Graffiti, they could and would make a sequel with or without him. He decided if it was going to get made, he'd rather he was involved so that the film that happened was true to his original.

Ray Morton: I don’t think the film ultimately works, however. One big reason is the absence of Richard Dreyfuss—Curt was the main character in American Graffiti’s ensemble cast and he was the one who ended up in Canada, so he was the character through whose eyes the social and campus upheaval of the 60s needed to be witnessed. Without him, the film has a huge hole in its center. The other reason the film doesn’t work is that, except for John Milner, all of the main characters are really unlikeable. Steve and Laurie spend the whole movie sniping at one another, Terry the Toad comes across like an arrogant asshole, and Debbie seems like a dingbat. So it’s not much fun spending time with them and it’s almost impossible to care about any of them…. John Milner is the best character in the movie. The ending of American Graffiti lets us know that Milner gets killed in a car crash. So we go into the sequel knowing his terrible fate. To offset this, More American Graffiti allows Milner to have his best day ever. Brian Finn once again: “He wins the biggest race of his life, he gets the girl, and he rides off into the sunset.” And Paul Le Mat gives the film’s most likeable performance—this Milner is a bit older, a bit less cocky than the fellow in Graffiti. One gets the sense that—having become aware that his era is passing in American Graffiti—he has come to accept this fact, accept himself, and his place in the world…. There’s also some great filmmaking in the movie. It’s no secret that Lucas directed second unit on some of the Vietnam helicopter material and that he cut it together making two helicopters seem like an entire fleet. The 16mm TV news footage look of the material is great and the editing is virtuoso stuff. It gives us a look at how a George Lucas-directed Apocalypse Now might have looked and felt had he been able to carry that project through to completion…. As good as the helicopter stuff is, the best shot in the movie is the last one and for my money it’s one of the best final shots in movie history. Shot by the great Caleb Deschanel, that final twilight image of Milner’s deuce coupe disappearing over a hill as the lights of the car that will soon kill him appear in the distance is stunning beautiful, visually poetic, and movingly elegiac.

Joseph McBride: I liked Lucasfilm’s More American Graffiti (written and directed by Bill L. Norton, based on the original script’s characters, 1979) at the time but haven’t seen it since. I found it an intriguing experimental multipart film that didn’t deserve the attacks on it. When you make a sequel that is substantially different from the original and is sort of a downer, people jump on you, unfortunately. I particularly liked the 16mm Vietnam segment, which resembles Lucas’s earlier plans to film John Milius’s script Apocalypse Now in 16mm as a semi-documentary kind of story film on actual locations in Vietnam during the fighting(!). I wish they had done that, though Francis Ford Coppola’s film is mostly brilliant, even if parts are misjudged…. World War II veteran Sam Fuller told me he found it implausible that Martin Sheen would take a boat down the river so natives could shoot arrows at him rather than taking a helicopter (the boat was a leftover from the original source, Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness; when I said Sheen needed a boat to get into Kurtz’s compound, Sam said they could have strapped one below the chopper). Sam also wondered why the U.S. Army didn’t give Kurtz a medal rather than having him assassinated for killing all those Vietcong. The original script by Milius, which I read before Coppola rewrote it and made the film, made more sense, since Kurtz had formed his own army and was killing both Vietcong and American troops…. I liked the plot turn at the end of American Graffiti of having the local clown, Charlie Martin Smith, winding up going to Vietnam and becoming missing in action. Audiences in 1973 were expecting realistically downbeat endings, unlike later escapist audiences. The fate of Terry the Toad captured the period. In the sequel, it turns out he deserted and went to Europe. The sequel’s far more sophisticated social awareness gives it more weight but turned off the more frivolous 1979 audience. The original has social awareness too, but it’s more oblique.

CHAPTER 16: THE UNINITIATED

John Cork: I would simply say that American Graffiti is the best coming of age film ever made.

Ray Morton: American Graffiti is a warm, funny coming-of-age movie set in the Kennedy era—a relatively optimistic and hopeful time nestled in between the post-war 1950s and the socially turbulent 1960s—celebrating classic American car culture, universal teenage rites of passage, and the last days of cruising.

CHAPTER 17: THE LEGACY

John Cork: Do you love Grease? Animal House? Porky’s? Cooley High? I Wanna Hold Your Hand? None of those films exist without American Graffiti. Neither does The Hollywood Knights, Diner, The Pom Pom Girls, Ode to Billie Joe, Citizen Band(aka Handle With Care), Losin’ It, and many, many more. One can even make a solid argument that both The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off owe a lot to American Graffiti with their coming-of-age storylines that take place in less than a single day.

Gary Leva: American Graffiti is one of those films—Diner is another—where a filmmaker brings his youth to the screen with such a sense of sweetness and genuine nostalgia, that his or her personal recollections somehow become universal for the audience. Even if you didn’t grow up like that, the feeling of being that age, of facing the first meaningful crossroads in your life, is something we can all relate to. And George brought it to the screen with such a light touch and so much humor.

Ray Morton: It has inspired many filmmakers to create their own coming of age movies based on their own youths. Without Graffiti, it’s unlikely we would have had such classic films as Diner and Breaking Away. And, of course, we never would have had Happy Days [laughter].

Peter Krämer: I do think that it is Lucas’s best film—but, no doubt, Star Wars is his most influential work.

Beverly Gray: Regarding Happy Days, I don’t know much about the contracts involved, but the sitcom was being built around Ron Howard well before American Graffiti was made. So, when it finally became a series, I don’t think he was likely to have rejected his starring role. What he didn’t anticipate was the unexpected rise of Henry Winkler, who was at first supposed to be a one-episode character. There was some quiet friction until Howard and Winkler (nice guys both) acknowledged that the series needed both of them—at least for many years.

John Cork: On television, Happy Days was developed as a direct response to the success of American Graffiti, with Henry Winkler playing the alternate reality version of Paul Le Mat’s bad boy character. The movie cast basically became the shopping ground for hit sitcoms of the 70s, with Laverne & Shirley, One Day at a Time, and Three’s Company all featuring American Graffiti alumni. And, of course, without the success of American Graffiti, there is no Star Wars, and no Indiana Jones. Further, American Graffiti laid out a roadmap for Hollywood to embrace a new, younger generation of filmmakers who reshaped the industry in so many remarkable ways.

Joseph McBride: I wish its legacy would be to make filmmakers today go back and watch it and realize that audiences want to go to see good films that deal with real human problems, not just spectacle. We are back in what film historian Tom Gunning has called “the cinema of attractions,” the emphasis on spectacle and sensation that dominated early cinema before filmmakers discovered narrative. It would be good if Hollywood would go back to characters and stories, but I’m not holding my breath. American Graffiti now seems like the end of something rather than the beginning, and like the film’s storyline, that historical fact gives it a further undertone of sadness.



IMAGES

Selected images copyright/courtesy Los Angeles Times, Lucasfilm Ltd/Coppola Company, The Modesto Bee, National Screen Service, The New York Times, Universal Studios, Universal Studios Home Entertainment

SOURCES/REFERENCES

The primary references for this project were the motion picture American Graffiti(Universal, 1973), regional newspaper coverage, trade reports published in Boxoffice,The Hollywood Reporter, and Variety, and interviews conducted by the author. All figures and data pertain to North America (i.e. United States and Canada) except where stated otherwise.

SPECIAL THANKS

Jerry Alexander, B. Baker, Jim Barg, Don Beelik, Larry Blake, Jon Burlingame, Ray Caple, John Cork, Nick DiMaggio, Mike Durrett, Bill Gabel, Beverly Gray, Sheldon Hall, John Hazelton, Paul Hirsch ACE, Rob Hummel, Bill Hunt, William Kallay, Bruce Kimmel, Peter Krämer, Bill Kretzel, Steve Lee, Stephen Leigh, Mark Lensenmayer, Gary Leva, Stan Malone, Joseph McBride, Craig Miller, W.R. Miller, Ray Morton, Gabriel Neeb, Tim O’Neill, Jim Perry, Richard Ravalli, John Rotan, Cliff Stephenson, John Stewart, Roy H. Wagner ASC, Vince Young, and a very special thank-you to the librarians, genealogists and private researchers who assisted with this project, in particular Nicole Adams (Oshawa Public Libraries), Rachael C. Altman (Carnegie History Center), Amy (Halifax Public Libraries), Amy (Olean Library), Ann Marie (Anne Marie (Boise Public Library), Ashley (New Bedford Free Public Library), Laura Baas (State Library and Archives of Florida), Zach Baker (Leavenworth Public Library), Ben (Bristol Public Library), Katie Biehl (Bozeman Public Library), Deb Bier (Peoria Public Library), Barry Bradford (Tangipahoa Parish Library), Linda Bridges and Cheri Lewis (Live Oak Public Libraries), Kelly Bucci (Hamilton Public Library), Diane Buckley (Virginia Beach Public Library), Cedric E. and Lisa (Virginia Beach Public Library), Michelle Burkhart (Michigan City Public Library), Olivia Bushey (Washington Memorial Library), Judy C. and Renee Schmutz-Sowards (Boyd County Public Library), Laurie Carroll (Duluth Public Library), Morgan Chance (Texarkana Public Library), Chris (Fredericton Pubic Library), Nan Cinnater (Provincetown Public Library), Colette, Jodie, Kaylie and Monique (Greater Sudbury Public Library), Caitlyn Cook and reference staff (New Jersey State Library), Mark Cousins (Prince Edward Island Public Archives and Records), CailÍn Cullun (Aurora Public Library), Lauren Cunningham (Quincy Public Library), Shane Curtin and Michael Lara (San Jose Pubic Library), David (Indiana State Library), Ron Davidson (Sandusky Library), Carol Davis and Greta Galindo (Woodland Public Library), Ruth Davis Konigsberg (Vineyard Haven Public Library), Tabitha Davis (Pueblo-City-County Library), Elisabeth Demmon (Kitsap Regional Library), Melissa Dennis (University of Mississippi Libraries), Laura Douglas (Emily Fowler Central Library), Erin Edwards (Boulder Public Library), Eric and Marnie (Wood County District Public Library), Emily (Jefferson-Madison Regional Library), Evan (Okanagan Regional Library), Laura Fazekas and reference staff (Chapin Memorial Library), Karen Feeney (Forsyth County Public Library), Fiona (Public Libraries of Saginaw), Gavin Furman (El Dorado County Library), Kevin Geisert and David Dennie (Norfolk Public Library), Karla Gerdes and Ann Panthen (Champaign County Historical Archives), Aron Glover (Mississippi State University Libraries), Doris J. Gonzalez (Joe A. Guerra Laredo Public Library), Dori Gottschalk-Fielding (Seymour Library), Jana Gowan (Tulsa City-County Library), Levi Groenewold (Monroe County Public Library), Cathy Hackett (Clark County Public Library), Jamie Hale (Norman Public Library), Carl Hallberg (Wyoming State Archives), Carl Hamlin and Jake Thomas (Cabell County Public Library), Brian Hargett and Shannon Hendrix (Lee County Library), Dinah Harris (Jackson-Madison County Library), Vanessa Harris (Waukegan Public Library), Heather (St. Catharines Public Library), Brianna Hemmah (Laconia Public Library), David S. Hess (Gary Public Library and Cultural Center), Darcy Hiltz (Guelph Public Library), Teresa J. Hobe (Stark Library), Caroline Huguet (Alachua County Library District), Isaac (Buffalo & Erie County Public Library), Susan Jackson (Torrington Library), Jillian Jakubowski (Sarnia Library), Debra James (Jonesboro Public Library), Jason (Birmingham Public Library), Jim (Parkersburg & Wood County Public Library), Endya Johnson (Waterloo Public Library), John Johnson (Keene Public Library), Marci Julson (Minot Public Library), Justin Kau (Athens-Clarke County Library), Kayla (Fall River Public Library), Katie Keckeisen (Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library), Matt Kendall (Yakima Valley Libraries), Kent and Tim (Jackson District Library), Perian P. Kerr (Starkville Public Library), Kim (Monterey Public Library), Tammy Kiter (Jacksonville Public Library), Nayt Knapp (Ohio County Public Library), Deborah Kitko (Wayne County Public Library), Dyron Knick and Edwina Parks (Roanoke Valley Libraries), LaDonna (Murray State University), Brittani LaJuett (Roswell P. Flower Memorial Library), Renée LaPerriére (Joe A. Guerra Laredo Public Library), Philippe Legault (Bibliothéque et Archives nationales du Québec), Brian Lind (Rochester Public Library), Sandy Linn (Calloway County Public Library), Carol Lockhart (Prendergast Library), Lois (Cortland Free Library), Lynette (Dauphin County Library System), Ethan Marek (University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg), Eric Mathis (South Georgia Regional Library), Max (Curtis Memorial Library), Genevieve Maxwell (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), Denise M. McLain (Cabarrus County Public Library), Meg (Falmouth Public Library), Mekayla (Portsmouth Public Library), Alex Merrill (Kalamazoo Public Library), Michael Miller (Sherman Public Library), Sana Moulder (Cumberland County Public Library), Katherine Muto (Osterhout Free Library), Lisa O’Donnell (Stillwater Public Library), Mark O’English (Washington State University), Jody Osicki (Saint John Free Public Library), Carrie Ottow (Corvallis-Benton County Public Library), Katherine Parker-Wright (Rochester Public Library), Robby Peters (Grand Rapids Public Library), Ann Poulos (Providence Public Library), Roxanne Puder (Onslow County Public Library), Alison Purgiel (Muskegon Area District Library), Suzette Raney (Chattanooga Public Library), Lynda Redden (Killeen Public Library), Reference Staff (Albany County Public Library), Reference Staff (Bay County Library), Reference Staff (Brownsville Public Library), Reference Staff (California State Library), Reference Staff (Cambria County Library), Reference Staff (Cape May County Library), Reference Staff (Carlsbad City Library), Reference Staff (Denver Public Library), Reference Staff (Durango Public Library), Reference Staff (Erie County Public Library), Reference Staff (Eugene Public Library), Reference Staff (Hall County Library), Reference Staff (Jones Memorial Library), Reference Staff (Moorhead Public Library), Reference Staff (Niagara Falls Public Library), Reference Staff (Portland Public Library), Reference Staff (Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library), Reference Staff (Thompson-Nicola Regional Library), Reference Staff (Thunder Bay Public Library), Reference Staff (Tulare County Library), Renée (London Public Library), Brandi Resendez (Gwinnett County Public Library), Melinda Ridgway (Logan County Libraries), Lauren Rogers (The University of Mississippi), Jonathan M. Roscoe (Maine State Library), Cathy Roy (Niagara Falls Public Library), Emily Rundle (Jervis Public Library), Stephanie Salvaterra (Mississippi University for Women), Daniel Sample (Fort Bend County Libraries), Sara (Moncton Public Library/Bibliothéque publique de Moncton), Emily Schaub (Peru Public Library), Renee Schmutz-Sowards (Boyd County Public Library), Melissa Searle (Coeur d’Alene Public Library), Jeannie Sherman (Connecticut State Library), Lauren Simon (Kitchener Public Library), Joyce Sonnier (Calcasieu Parish Public Library), Sonya (Toronto Metropolitan University), Stephanie (Peter White Public Library), Holly Stiegel (Columbus Public Library), Leann Stine and Taylor (Anderson), VanTryon (Danville Public Library), Susan (Newfoundland and Labrador Public Libraries), Salena Sullivan (Montgomery-Floyd Regional Library), Sean Sutcliffe (Waco McLennan County Library), Matt Swearngin (Daniel Boone Regional Library), Beth Swenson (Idaho Falls Public Library), Catrina Thomas (Dothan Houston County Library System), Lincoln Thurber (Nantucket Atheneum), Jace Turner (Santa Barbara Public Library), Rebecca Waite (Taunton Public Library), Kaitlyn Watson (Sault Ste. Marie Public Library), Galen Webb (Fort Smith Public Library), Christine Weislo (Anderson County Library), Darla Welshons (Ann Arbor District Library), Danielle Willett (Grace A. Dow Memorial Library), Abigail Williams (Utica Public Library), Diane Wilson (Belleville Public Library), Beth Wood (Fort Vancouver Regional Library), Carol Zoladz (Kankakee Public Library).

IN MEMORIAM

Verna Fields (Co-Editor), 1918-1982
James Hogan (Production Manager), 1919-1985
John Brent (“Car Salesman”), 1938-1985
Jan Dunn (“Old Woman”), 1907-1986
Linn Phillips III (“Herby and the Heartbeats”), 1947-1993
Charles Myers (Second Assistant Director),1939-1995
Wolfman Jack (“Disc Jockey”), 1938-1995
Scott Beach (“Mr. Gordon”), 1931-1996
Jim Bohan (“Holstein”), 1946-1998
Del Close (“Man at Bar”), 1934-1999
Sam McFadin ((“Herby and the Heartbeats”), 1952-2001
Lew Wasserman (Universal Studios chairman), 1913-2002
Joe Miksak (“Man at Liquor Store”), 1913-2004
Debralee Scott (“Falfa’s Girl”), 1953-2005
Kris Moe (“Herby and the Heartbeats”), 1949-2005
Johnny Weissmuller, Jr. (“Badass #1”), 1940-2006
Henry Travers (Transportation Supervisor), 1937-2006
Manuel Padilla, Jr. (“Carlos”), 1955-2008
Betty Iverson (Key Hair Stylist), 1929-2008
Ned Tanen (Universal Studios executive), 1931-2009
Al Locatelli (Design Consultant), 1939-2011
Gerry Leetch (Key Hair Stylist), 1930-2013
James Nelson (Sound Editing), 1932-2014
Kim Fowley (Music Producer), 1939-2015
Haskell Wexler (Visual Consultant), 1922-2015
Gino Havens (Dialogue Coach), 1941-2016
James Cranna (“Thief”), 1943-2017
Al Nalbandian (“Hank”), 1921-2017
Gary Kurtz (Co-Producer), 1940-2018
Gloria Katz (Co-Screenwriter), 1942-2018
Chris Pray (“Al”), 1946-2019
Sid Sheinberg (Universal Studios executive), 1931-2019
Chuck Dorsett (“Man at Accident”), 1927-2019
Ned Kopp (First Assistant Director), 1935-2020
Dennis Clark (Art Director), 1939-2020
Tim Crowley (“Eddie”), 1953-2020
Mike Fenton (Casting), 1935-2020
Bo Hopkins (”Joe”), 1938-2022
Cindy Williams (“Laurie”), 1947-2023
Suzanne Somers (“Blonde in T-Bird”), 1946-2023

###

[Mike Blakesley]

American Graffiti was a great movie. It's hard to pick a favorite moment among so many. When we ran it at the Roxy, of course most people hadn't heard about the various punch-line scenes, especially the police car axle/chain scene, so I would go stand in the back of the audience for that scene every night. It was so fun to watch the audience reactions.

My boss at my day job did not like it, I remember that. He came to work the day after he saw it and said it was one of the dumbest movies he ever saw and had no plot. I said, what do you mean it had no plot? He said it was just like they filmed a bunch of kids driving around and called it a movie. So obviously he missed the whole point. I always wondered if he ever saw it again and changed his mind. I doubt it.

I first saw it at the Cine 3 theater in Billings, MT. The Cine 3 was the first multiplex in Montana, to my knowledge. It eventually became a four-plex and then later a seven-plex, and finally a sub-run discount house. Today it's closed and abandoned.

[Jesse Skeen]

Heard the 4k disc is a DNR’d mess.