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 launch pad 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 Graffiti soon 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!”
