George Lucas: The Stinky Kid Hits the Big Time

Abstract

George Lucas's American Graffiti is the surprise blockbuster of the year. Made for $750,000, it has already earned over $21 million; Universal is predicting that it may even outgross Airport. When he first conceived the film, Lucas could not have guessed that it would be released at the height of the nostalgia boom. Although actually set in 1962, American Graffiti is the quintessential fifties nostalgia movie a comprehensive recreation of the world of sock hops, drag races, cherry cokes, and Eisenhower complacency. The remarkable thing, however, is that the film recaptures the past without sentimentalizing it. A comedy with unexpected resonance, American Graffiti is neither a glorification nor a mockery of the period; it summons up the deeply conflicting feelings that we all have when contemplating our own youth and the primal experience of leaving home. Dressed like one of the characters in the movie -Ivy League shirt and T-shirts, chinos, sneakers, and white sox-George Lucas could have stepped out of a time capsule; his beard is the only incongruous touch, a hint that he combines some of the irreverence of the sixties with the square earnestness of the fifties. Either way Lucas has little in common with most of Hollywood's chic superstar directors. fact, he lives a long way from the studios-just north of San Francisco, in San Anselmo, in a spacious, beautifully secluded house that may remind him of the farm he grew up on. American Graffiti is probably as close to an autobiographical film as a studio-financed Hollywood product will ever be. Lucas, like his characters, grew up in Modesto, California, and graduated from high school in 1962; he spent most of his teenage years on the main drag, cruising. He says, In a way the film was made so my father won't think those were wasted years. can say was doing research, though didn't know it at the time. Most of the incidents in the film are things that actually experienced in one way or another. They've also been fantasized, as they should be in a movie. They aren't really the way they were the way they should have been. For example, there is a hilarious scene in which the hero demolishes a police car. Some friends of mine did that one Hallowe'en night, Lucas recalls, but all that really happened was that the car drove off and went clunk. It wasn't so spectacular. It just doesn't happen that way in real life. The movie follows four main characters: Steve, the superstraight class president dating the head cheerleader; John, the dragstrip champion who models himself on James Dean and drives the meanest deuce coupe in the valley; Terry, the dumb, creepy kid who only drives a Vespa finally gets a chance to play the stud; and Curt, the most sensitive and introspective of the group, who chases a mysterious blonde in a white T-bird, and reluctantly boards a plane out of town in the morning-the only one of the four to break free. Lucas says he is, in a sense, a composite of all four characters: I started out when was young as Terry the Toad, and think everybody sort of starts out as Terry the Toad. And went from that to being John; had a hot car, and raced around a lot. Finally got into a very bad accident and almost got r