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!
