American Graffiti
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American Graffiti
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1995.
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American Graffiti is a 1973 American coming-of-age comedy-drama film directed by George Lucas, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, written by Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz and Lucas, and starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Harrison Ford, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, Bo Hopkins, and Wolfman Jack. Set in Modesto, California, in 1962, the film is a study of the cruising and early rock 'n' roll cultures popular among Lucas's age group at that time. Through a series of vignettes, it tells the story of a group of teenagers and their adventures over the course of a night.
Why It Rocks
- After the financial and critical failure of Lucas' previous film, THX 1138, he decided to target his next film at a demographic he felt was being ignored by Hollywood: adolescents (primarily around 16). The film's meant to be an autobiographical coming-of-age story centered around a night in the lives of several teenagers in a small town similar to Modesto.
- With the film's story being set in 1962, Lucas is able to avoid a lot of turmoil involving civil rights, the Vietnam War, drug use, the hippie culture, etc., while still dealing with a recognizable pop culture.
- Relating to the film being autobiographical Lucas was intent on re-creating a critical period in his life, the last time he felt comfortable with the world and his position in it. Unlike in THX 1138 — where he had been guessing about the characters, imagining their society and how they operated in it — he felt he knew the 1960s — the clothes, the songs, the hobbies and cars. The film's characters in were for the most part on the verge of sexual knowledge, a condition Lucas has repeated in his films to this day. (The story could be occurring just at the time Lucas had his car accident.)
- The film's structurally an ensemble piece, assembled like a jigsaw puzzle, with dramatic moments alternating between slapstick and action. (It should also be noted the film takes place almost entirely at night.) While, this is far from the first time a film featured four separate but interlocking story lines (Intolerance, and The Rules of the Game did that decades earlier in 1916 and 1939)
- This is also far from the first film to make extensive use of rock music (The Girl Can't Help It from 1956, Jamboree from 1957, A Hard Day's Night from 1964, and dozens of other teen-oriented movies did the same thing earlier) However, the soundtrack contains over forty hits that typically function as background music to define the emotions, dreams and frustrations of the group.
- The film helps establishes an entire generation of movie stars, being the first, or most important, resume entry for a surprising number of actors and crew members.
- Critics at the time saw the film as a warm, nostalgic look at an era that had barely ended. Nowadays, viewers will likely notice how subversive Lucas’s vision was. The film's not about mainstream characters, the normal people who trudged through high school on their way to boring careers. And it isn't about the athletes, cheerleaders, and student council members who are consistently mocked in the course of the film. It's about loners, misfits, and outcasts, the nerds who couldn't get dates, the gang leaders who had no gangs, the borderline tramps with bad reputations. Lucas understood that, in terms of drama, more things happen to these people than to the mainstream. He also sensed that moviegoers could simultaneously relate to and feel superior to outsiders. It's a lesson that helped drive the plot to Star Wars.
- It's one of the earliest films to use an commonly-used form of the "Where Are They Now?" epilogue. Here most of the characters have happy endings that are stated with pointed postscripts, at the end of the film.
The Only Bad Quality
- Considering the film's mostly a nostalgic, autobiographical coming-of-age story set in the 1950s about a bunch of random teenagers getting into mischief with some occasional romance subplots, and not really having a overarching plot with random unrelated events occurring throughout the film, the film's definitely not going to appeal to everyone. This would especially be the case for newer generations who didn't grow up -- and in some cases weren't even BORN -- during the period when the film's set in. They more than likely wouldn't understand why the film's so beloved.