American graffiti

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Movie
German title American graffiti
Original title American graffiti
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1973
length 108 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director George Lucas
script George Lucas,
Gloria Katz ,
Willard Huyck
production Francis Ford Coppola
camera Jan D'Alquen ,
Ron Eveslage
cut Verna Fields ,
Marcia Lucas ,
George Lucas
occupation
synchronization
chronology

Successor  →
The Party is over… The continuation of American Graffiti

American Graffiti [ əˌmɛrəkən grəˌfidi ] is an American film producer, screenwriter and director George Lucas from the year 1973 . The surprising commercial success of American Graffiti enabled the expansion of George Lucas' film company Lucasfilm Ltd. and boosted the reputation of the director, on the basis of which he produced Star Wars four years later .

American graffiti should be like an autobiographical film drama, which Lucas' own youth in his hometown Modesto partially retells. The special feature of the film at that time was the unusual film music, consisting of over 40 licensed rock 'n' roll titles.

action

Beginning of September 1962 in Modesto, California : A radio tuned to a rock 'n' roll station while the sun sets over the Mel's Drive-In fast food restaurant . Terry Fields, called Frog Eye, Steve Bolander, Curt Henderson and John Milner meet in the parking lot in front of the restaurant. Steve and Curt are about to leave town for college on the east coast. This is the last night with her friends.

Steve and Curt go to the sock hop of junior college's new senior year, but John makes off to drive through the streets. Terry drives off in Steve's Chevrolet. While Curt is driving down 10th Street with Laurie and Steve, he sees a pretty blonde in a white Ford Thunderbird . She looks at him, her lips forming the words "I love you", then she turns and disappears. After he has left the dance event, Curt is forced to ride in their car by the gang of thugs The Pharaohs . The popular program by Wolfman Jack is on the radio . He learns from the gang members that the station is not in Mexico, but on the outskirts. After Curt has passed a test of courage and is about to be accepted as a member of the gang, he continues through the night and drives to the radio station to get a message from the Wolfman. Once there, he meets a bearded man whom he takes to be the Wolfman, but he denies this. Curt hands the man the message for the blonde in the Thunderbird. As he leaves, he hears Wolfman's voice and turns around. He sees the man speaking into the microphone.

The remaining three storylines contain breakups and reunions. More and more the individual stories combine to form a coherent plot, until Terry and Steve are standing on Paradise Road and watching John and Bob Falfa deliver a race with Laurie as their passenger. The sounds of Booker T. & the MG's Green Onions emanate from the cars as the cars and spectators gather. The race is over within seconds, because Falfa bursts a tire and ends up in the ditch. Steve and John run to the accident car, which explodes immediately after Bob and Laurie were able to climb out dazed. Annoyed, Laurie clings to Steve and begs him not to leave her.

The ringing of the phone in a phone booth wakes Curt awake. He picks up the phone and speaks excitedly to the mysterious blonde . She tells him they might see each other cruising in the evening . He replies that it doesn't work. At the airfield, Curt says goodbye to his parents, sister and friends. The plane takes off, and when Curt looks out of the window, he sees the city and with it his previous life disappears. A white Thunderbird races on the street below.

The last shot of the film serves to fade in a few short biographies, which underline the fact that American graffiti is not an excursion into the realm of memories. While Curt's machine disappears into the blue firmament, photos from the college yearbook are faded in for the characters in the plot and brief information about their future lives is given.

John Milner is run over by a drunk driver in December 1964.
Terry Fields has been reported missing since a deployment to An Loc in December 1965.
Steve Bolander is an insurance broker based in Modesto, California.
Curt Henderson is a writer and lives in Canada.

History of origin

While THX 1138 was still being produced (1971), Francis Ford Coppola , a long-time friend of George Lucas and managing director of American Zoetrope , suggested that Lucas write something that felt warm and human for the next project. Even in college, while studying anthropology , Lucas had the idea that cruising was actually a clearly American mating ritual. Lucas intended to document this form of flirting that was typical of his generation.

Lucas also concentrated on motifs that he had already taken up. The themes of radio and escape in American graffiti mean that the film has some parallels to Lucas' student film The Emperor (1967) and to his first feature film, THX 1138 . During the making of the film, Lucas had to discard or change a number of scenes that had too many similarities in terms of these thematic parallels.

The film was supposed to tell the story of four groups of young people who drive up and down the streets of their small town on the night of the action, and that in times of marked social upheaval. Traditional rock 'n' roll music was about to be replaced by the beat groups of the so-called British Invasion , while at the same time the United States increased its troop presence in connection with the war in Vietnam .

production

financing

THX 1138 was Coppola's showpiece to prove that the little American Zoetrope studio worked and that Warner Bros. funding was not a bad investment. When Ted Ashley, the chairman and general manager of Warner Bros. saw THX 1138 , he was disappointed and upset with the film. Ashley then announced on November 19, 1970 that Warner Bros. no longer wanted to participate in the future of American Zoetrope. In addition, they asked back the financing in the amount of 300,000 US dollars. American Zoetrope was on the verge of bankruptcy , and Lucas was forced to find another American graffiti studio .

Attorney Tom Pollock realized how upset Lucas was at the rebuff that THX 1138 received from Warner Bros. Pollock became Lucas' legal advisor and helped him start his own company, Lucasfilm Ltd. The film-making couple Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz took the time to help Lucas write a fifteen- page treatment that was supposed to win over financiers to develop the script.

Lucas asked producer Gary Kurtz if he could budget for American Graffiti , hoping a studio assignment would mean a full-time production job. In this regard, Kurtz was ready to accompany the further production of American Graffiti .

Together with his friend and fellow writer Walter Murch , Lucas met David Picker, President of United Artists, during the screening of THX 1138 in Cannes . Picker was so intrigued by the project that he pledged Lucas $ 10,000 to develop the American Graffiti script .

script

Lucas hoped Gloria Katz and William Huyck would write a finished script for American Graffiti . But the couple was just about to begin work on the 1973 horror film Messiah of Evil , so Lucas had to find someone else to write the script for the film. After discussing the problem with Gary Kurtz, he decided to ask Richard Walter, an old friend from the University of Southern California .

Walter attempted to offer George Lucas a script called Barry and the Persuasions , a story about teenagers on the American East Coast in the late 1950s. However, Lucas stuck to his story of teenagers on the west coast in the early 1960s. He offered Walter the amount of $ 10,000 that David Picker had promised him. Walter set about developing the treatment into a script for American Graffiti . Lucas was horrified when Walter presented him with the results of his work, because to Lucas it looked like the book for an exploitation film . Although Walter then rewrote the script, his ideas did not match Lucas' specifications.

After Walter was paid by Lucas, the budget for the development of the story was missing. So George Lucas was forced to write the script himself. He wrote his first draft in three weeks, allowing the four parallel storylines to be steered towards the moment at which they linked together. Lucas was able to draw on his own collection of original 45s singles and imagined a specific musical background for each scene. American Graffiti was supposed to be the first film with such an extensive soundtrack of original rock and roll recordings.

The cost of the royalties on the 75 songs Lucas wanted to use was one of the main reasons United Artists ultimately rejected the script. In addition, the film studio was of the opinion that the project was too experimental. Lucas had to quickly find another buyer for the script. THX 1138 had inadvertently earned the director a reputation that led to him being offered film projects based on the successful musical Hair or the rock opera Tommy by The Who .

Pre-production

Lucas and Kurtz stepped up their efforts to find a buyer for American Graffiti and found interest at Universal Studios . At that time, Universal had been shaped by the ambiguous aftermath of Dennis Hopper's road movie Easy Rider (1969). Much like John Calley of Warner Bros., Universal's Ned Tanen was willing to nurture independent talent on the condition that their projects cost no more than $ 1 million. The studio made $ 775,000 available for American Graffiti , less than Lucas of Warner Bros. got for THX 1138 . In addition, Lucas should find a well-known actor, through whom the film would be upgraded in the cinema advertisements. Just because of the cost of the license fees for the rock 'n' roll songs, which he considered indispensable, Lucas couldn't hire a big star. Lucas turned to Coppola and asked if he would provide his American Graffiti name to reassure Universal. Coppola willingly took on the role of producer.

A production office was set up in San Rafael and production assistant Jim Bloom was entrusted with the job of organizing the many cars that were needed for the filming. In addition, advertisements for tuned cars from around 1962 were placed in the Marin County newspaper and commercials were broadcast on local radio stations. In the end, Bloom had more than 500 cars available. Between 40 and 50 cars were shortlisted for the carefully choreographed cruising sequences that Lucas wanted to film on the streets of San Rafael.

The background music chosen by Lucas was extremely important for the effect of the individual scenes. Lucas had also determined an alternative music selection regarding the complications with copyright clearance. The head of the music department at Universal suggested that the pieces of music be re-recorded with an orchestra in order to save costs. However, since the original pieces were to be used, Universal proposed a uniform flat rate for all music labels. Most of the companies that represented rights to songs from Lucas' first selection accepted the offer. Only RCA refused, which meant that pieces of music by Elvis Presley were not used in the film.

occupation

The lengthy casting process was led by Fred Roos and Mike Fenton. The two of them showed a lot of patience during the interviews in the open auditions and contacted the amateur theater groups of numerous high schools.

The role of Curt Henderson was played by Richard Dreyfuss , who previously worked mainly for television. Lucas was impressed with Dreyfuss' sensitive interpretation of the role. In a radio documentary from 1978, the actor remembers that he assumed he would get the role immediately after the test recordings.

The actor Roos had chosen to play Steve Bolander was a child star he knew from the time he was the casting director for the CBS comedy The Andy Griffith Show . Griffith played Andy Tayler, the small town sheriff, and Ron Howard played his son Opie. The series ran from 1960 to 1968 and after its withdrawal Howard received a direct engagement for the follow-up series Mayberry RFD , which should be produced until 1971. When the casting directors of American Graffiti approached Ron Howard and offered him the role of Steve, he was no older than eighteen.

The third storyline brings the audience closer to the character of John Milner, a worried macho who drives through the streets with twelve-year-old Carol Morrison for most of the night. Milner was named after John Milius, although Lucas makes it clear that the character was influenced not by his friends at the University of Southern California, but by the hot rod fanatics he had known in Modesto. The 26-year-old boxer Paul Le Mat made his acting debut with this role.

The fourth narrative follows the losing streak of the outsider Terry Fields, also known as "frog eye". Eighteen-year-old Charles Martin Smith had first missed the audition appointments because he was on a walking holiday in England at the same time. After his return to California he was discovered by Lucas in the Thalberg building of MGM and got the role that later turned into an embarrassing laughing stock because of the unusual hairstyle in the film.

The four male main actors were each assigned a female figure. The blonde behind the wheel of the white Ford Thunderbird is played by Suzanne Somers . Although her appearance is limited to a few minutes playing time, her role is a key function, as she wants to seduce Curt as a symbolic siren figure to stay in his home country. Curt's sister Laurie is played by Cindy Williams , best known for her leading role in the long-running sitcom series Laverne & Shirley (1976-1983). John Milner's co-driver Carol is played by 13-year-old Mackenzie Phillips . She was noticed by Roos at a talent competition at the Troubadour Club in Los Angeles as the singer of her own band.

In the role of Wolfman Jack , the eccentric DJ of the station XERB, it was decided to pass the radio host as himself. Wolfman can be heard on the car radios throughout the entire film, although he only appears in person in the scene in which Curt visits his idol in the XERB broadcasting building. While Curt meets Wolfman, Lucas pulls the narrative threads of Steve, John and Terry together by assembling these characters in the final act on the outskirts. John Milner is challenged to a car race by hot rod pilot Bob Falfa, whose name is linked to Luca's friend Robert Dalva. This small role went to the still unknown Harrison Ford , who began his film career in 1966 with an extra role in Bernard Girard's crime comedy Whenever He Smelled Dollars .

Revision of the script

In the course of further work on the script, Lucas had problems with the plot of Steve and Laurie. Almost two years after the first collaboration, Lucas turned to Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz again and asked them to work on the third version. The couple were not involved in any film project at the time and agreed to focus their attention on the scenes with Steve and Laurie. Katz and Huyck wrote a script of 160 pages in a very short time. Since the shooting schedule was designed for only 28 days of shooting, one was forced to delete some scenes from the plot or merge them with other scenes.

The new 114-page version, signed “George Lucas, Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck” and dated May 10, 1972, bears the words “Rock-Radio ist AMERICAN GRAFFITI (Die Low -Rider saga) ".

Filming

Lucas chose his birthplace Modesto, a provincial town east of San Francisco in the San Joaquin Valley, as the setting for the location. On June 26, production began filming John's and Carol's story. With the shooting schedule tightly calculated and with only a few days available, Lucas reacted angrily when he noticed how long it took to attach the cameras to the cars.

There were also difficulties with street scenes. Due to a corresponding instruction from the city council to the San Rafael police, normal road traffic could neither be diverted nor controlled. The city council feared that local business life would suffer as a result of the filming, and had therefore limited the filming permit to two days. Nancy Giebink, the unit manager, negotiated with the city council of Petaluma , a similar-looking town 30 kilometers north of San Rafael, where they were more cooperative. Lucas was able to move almost all of the subsequent filming there without losing a day of shooting. Lucas also managed to convince the San Rafael city council to allow two more nights to film general cruising shots.

Filming in Petaluma began on June 28th and has progressed much faster. The film's documentary-like feel was enhanced by the use of Techniscope , a technique in which the widescreen format has the grainy image structure of 16mm film . However, this approach posed problems. Lucas had filmed the THX 1138 for the most part without additional lighting and noticed that this convenience could not easily be transferred to American graffiti . When shooting started, the shops on the roadside were mostly closed, so street lamps and car headlights were the only lighting for the actors. The cameramen Ron Eveslage and Jan D'Alquen had difficulties in creating the required depth of field in the dim lighting .

George Lucas decided to seek advice from his friend and cameraman Haskell Wexler , who was writing in 1967 for his work on Mike Nichol's debut film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had been awarded the Oscar . Lucas explained to Wexler that American Graffiti should resemble a " jukebox " in terms of color and luminosity , and Wexler did his best to implement that idea. He simulated street lights by adding 1,000 and 2,000 watt lamps to the existing ones, and asked the shopkeepers to leave the interior lights on at night to better illuminate the scenes on the sidewalk. Wexler installed 12-volt lamps in the cars, which were powered directly from the car battery, to illuminate the faces of the actors while cruising. In addition to the other crew members, Wexler also worked under the constant stress of the shooting schedule, but always saw the work as a volunteer friendship for Lucas. Haskell is only mentioned as a visual consultant in the credits of American Graffiti .

On August 3, Lucas drove the team to Buchanan Field Airfield in Concord to shoot the final scene of the film. Lucas found a propeller plane that was still in flight duty. He liked the fact that the name of the company that made the aircraft available, Magic Carpet Travel Services, could be used symbolically. By repainting, the logo on the fuselage of the aircraft was changed to "Magic Carpet Airlines" (in German "Fluglinie flying carpet").

As in many of his productions, George Lucas also included allusions to other works of his own during filming ( Easter Eggs ). The film THX 1138 can be found here as the license plate for the car of the character John Milner: THX 138. The missing "1" is explained because Californian license plates were six-digit at the time.

Post production

As with Lucas' first feature film production, THX 1138 , the idiosyncratic and experimental style of American Graffiti triggered numerous disagreements between Lucas and the Universal film studio. The shooting took place without any help or interference from Universal. American Graffiti was a low-budget production , and studio manager Ned Tanen didn't expect the drama to be financially successful.

The chairs of Universal had very little to do with the title of the film. As a result, Universal submitted a list of alternative film titles to the American Graffiti production office . The studio's favorite itself was Another Slow Night in Modesto (German: “Another sluggish night in Modesto”). However, George Lucas declined to change the title and insisted on postponing discussion of it until filming was completed.

Ned Tanen reacted angrily about what he had seen after showing the raw version of the film. He thought the film needed a thorough overhaul in order to live up to expectations. For Lucas there was now a new round of negotiations with high-ranking representatives of the studio. Coppola made use of the influence he gained with the success of The Godfather (1972) and managed to reduce the overall time of the scenes cut at the studio's request. Three scenes were completely lost.

cut

Lucas knew from the start that it would be a challenge to cut the intertwined narrative strands of American graffiti into a coherent whole. He reached out to film editor Verna Fields , who was working with director Peter Bogdanovich at the time. Universal agreed, and Fields reviewed the footage before Lucas even finished filming. The editor completed the rough cut and then returned to Rome.

After Field's departure, Lucas struggled with the structure of the film. The script stipulated that the four storylines should always be presented in the same order. This ABCD structure implied that a scene with John Milner always had to be followed by a scene with Terry, and then a scene with Steve and then another with Curt. Pragmatic reasons prevented us from adopting such a structure for the film, as American Graffiti was three and a half hours long after the first cut. In the course of the cuts, in which one and a half hours of footage were discarded, numerous scenes were removed and many others shortened or summarized. The film structure finally loosened so much that the sequence of scenes no longer corresponded to the ABCD scheme.

Film music

George Lucas was responsible for the selection of the music, which was composed of 40 rock 'n' roll titles from the 1950s and early 1960s. While writing the script, he searched his old high school records and selected suitable songs from them. Gil Rodin acted as the music producer for the film, and the release of the music rights cost around 80,000 US dollars.

Walter Murch was responsible for mixing the songs into everyday acoustics before adding them to the soundtrack . In doing so, he was guided by his method that he had also used for Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather . The recordings began in the garden of Lucas' house in Mill Valley . Lucas and Murch usually positioned themselves 15 meters apart, Lucas waving a loudspeaker back and forth in slow arcs while the music played. Meanwhile, Murch recorded the sound with a microphone. The result was two-hour tape recordings that included the entire Wolfman Jack show. This "everyday effect" meant that the band Herby and the Heartbeats , for example , who performed in the school gymnasium, sounded just as hollow and blurry as one would expect from a loudspeaker system in an unsuitable venue. Lucas often called this documentary type of visual and acoustic closeness to life, based on a formulation by Akira Kurosawa, as “flawless reality”.

The following pieces can be heard in the order of their appearance in the film:

Theatrical release

The US theatrical release of American Graffiti on August 1, 1973, the film's success quickly outstripped George Lucas' expectations after the flop of THX 1138 strongly kept within limits. Universal's critics fell silent when their $ 775,000 investment in cinemas around the world grossed over $ 118 million in revenue.

Lucas had received $ 70,000 for his two years as a director, but his share of the net income made him a millionaire. He shared his new wealth by passing on shares of the income to various participants, such as Haskell Wexler and Wolfman Jack . Additionally, the value of Lucasfilm Ltd. increased to around four million US dollars by the end of the year.

synchronization

The German dubbed version was created in 1974 at Berliner Synchron under dialogue direction by Joachim Kunzendorf based on a dialogue book by Ursula Herwig .

role actor German Dubbing voice
Curt Henderson Richard Dreyfuss Hans-Georg Panczak
Steve Bolander Ron Howard Michael Wuerden
John Milner Paul Le Mat Ulrich Gressieker
Terry "Frog Eye" (English: "The Toad") Fields Charles Martin Smith Joachim Tennstedt
Laurie Henderson Cindy Williams Marion Martienzen
Debbie Dunham Candy Clark Hansi Jochmann
Carol Morrison Mackenzie Phillips Monika Pawlowski
Wolfman Jack, radio host Wolfman Jack Günter Pfitzmann
Bob Falfa Harrison Ford Hans-Jürgen Dittberner
Joe Young, Pharaoh Bo Hopkins Manfred Lehmann
Ants, Pharaoh Beau gentry Wolf Roth
Wendy Deby Celiz Barbara Hampel
Mr. Wolfe, high school teacher Terence McGovern Joachim Pukass
Mr. Gordon, shopkeeper Scott Beach Edgar Ott

Reviews

“In a small American town in 1962, some young people experience the limbo between youth and growing up in one night. A bittersweet, nostalgic reminiscence of the dreams of the past youth of the later Vietnam generation, atmospherically dense, with lots of old pop music and charming actors. "

- Lexicon of international film

"Producer Francis Ford Coppola and his protégé and ex-assistant director George Lucas created an extremely amusing and astute, autobiographical teenage comedy [...] Even the cast list can hardly be surpassed: Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat as bad boy Brilliantine in their hair, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Charles Martin Smith, the legendary rock 'n' roll DJ Wolfman Jack […] The young talents brought a lot of energy, humor, authenticity and skill - superbly supported by cameraman Haskell Wexler, one of Lucas' early mentors [...] In his second directorial work, Lucas demonstrated a charm and warmth that he missed in his cool, futuristic debut film THX 1138. "

- 1001 films - The best films of all time

Awards

Oscar 1974

Golden Globe Award 1974

further awards

continuation

Howard G. Kazanjian , an old friend from the University of Southern California, produced the sequel to American Graffiti on behalf of George Lucas . Bill L. Norton , who was best known for his drama Cisco Pike (1972), was responsible for the script and direction . Lucas himself only took over the production management. The film, titled The Party is over… The sequel to American Graffiti opened in American theaters on August 3, 1979.

The plot of The Party is Over ... The sequel to American Graffiti was divided into four narrative strands, which strictly followed the ABCD scheme that Lucas planned to use in the first film. The film deals with the further fates of the main characters of American Graffiti , whereby the original cast of Candy Clark, Bo Hopkins, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Mackenzie Phillips, Charles Martin Smith and Cindy Williams was retained. The complicated nesting of time levels made understanding difficult, so that many viewers could not follow the complex plot and left the cinema screening before the end of the film. The box office results of the predecessor could not be reached by far. The film was considered a flop because it brought in just under three times its production costs.

literature

  • James Bernardoni: The New Hollywood: What the Movies Did With the New Freedoms of the Seventies. McFarland, Jefferson, NC et al. a. 1991, ISBN 0-89950-627-5 .
  • Paul Gerhard Buchloh , Jens Becker, Ralf J. Schröder: Film philology: studies of English-language literature and culture in books and films. Press office of the University of Kiel, 1982, DNB 20933231X .
  • Jeffery P. Dennis: Queering Teen Culture: All-American Boys and Same Sex Desire in Film and Television. Harrington Park Press, New York 2006, ISBN 1-56023-348-6 .
  • Vera Dika: Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: The Uses of Nostalgia. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003, ISBN 0-521-81568-1 .
  • Peter Lev: American Films of the '70s: Conflicting Visions. Univ. of Texas Press, Austin 2000, ISBN 0-292-74715-2 .
  • George Lucas, Gloria Katz, Willard Huyck: American Graffiti: A Screenplay. Grove Press, New York 1973, ISBN 0-8021-0060-0 .
  • Glenn Man: Radical Visions: American Film Renaissance, 1967–1976. Greenwood Press, Westport 1994, ISBN 0-313-29306-6 .
  • Michael T. Marsden, John G. Nachbar, Sam L. Grogg: Movies as Artifacts: Cultural Criticism of Popular Film. Nelson-Hall, Chicago 1982, ISBN 0-88229-453-9 .
  • Charles J. Shields: George Lucas. Chelsea House, Philadelphia 2000, ISBN 0-7910-6712-2 . (English edition)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ according to documentation: The Making of American Graffiti
  2. ↑ American Graffiti ( Memento from April 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) at the Deutsche Synchrondatenbank, accessed on March 7, 2017
  3. ^ American graffiti. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on July 19, 2006 .