A cozy Friday afternoon movie of the kind that was often shown in Russia in the late 90s. Innocent pranks of a provincial American city. Cars with a needle, cover girls. Creating relationships and figuring them out with partners and ourselves. Thirty-year-old actors playing schoolchildren. This is how I remember American Graffiti (1973), the cult film by George Lucas.
The first meeting
In 2013, in Tyumen, I met Yevgeny Bushuev. He and his brother organized the OldMotors club. Eugene, in addition to cars, photography and everything in the world, understood movies about the 50s, greasers, musicians and so on. I asked him to make a list of must-see movies to keep up with the topic. I was looking for ideas in them as a musician, he’s like a retoucher. And both of us found the feeling of the unique and irretrievably gone. The list included the movie “American Graffiti”, I watched it for the first time in 2014.
Later in the public “Boredom Breakers” I wrote about the iconic films “about greasers” and “about musicians”. In the comments, someone reacted: “I used to be into graffiti too.” The author of the comment hardly watched the movie. Thanks to him, I thought, “Why graffiti?” One question was followed by another. The film’s tagline asks: “Where were you in ’62?” But why in 1962? Why “American” is just a story in the USA and about the USA. But why “graffiti”? It’s time to review the film and answer these questions. Which is what I’m doing in this article.
History in the USA and about the USA
In the opening scene, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around The Clock” sounds, just like in the film “School Jungle” of 1955. The characters with whom the viewer will spend their farewell evening with childhood are going to be like building a restaurant in which waitresses move on two-lane roller skates.
Curt, Terry, and Steve. Kurt has received money from the college, but is already hesitant to go. Steve is excited that this is his last night in town. God only knows what Terry has in mind.
Kert — in the realities of my school years — is informal. Rebel, what they are in reality. He thinks with his own head, does not drift with the rest. Positive rebellion, not marlonobrand leather jacket, rudeness, theft of a sports trophy and the way to nowhere. Terry is a nerd. Extremely vital trying to look beautiful and mature. On his feet, as if his father’s shoes, it seems, are three sizes too big. Scary, awkward, timid. But stubborn and adventurous.
John is a grown—up car mechanic and street racer, the fastest in the city, a diligent imitator of the slouching James Dean and a reliable friend. Well, who after “Rebel without a Reason” didn’t want to be like Dean? John is The Hero’s most tragic. The Hero, caught in a broken trough, carried away by the flow of events: peers leave for college, he stays, either envious, or just angry; his days of superiority on the road are numbered; he wants everything to remain as it was – friends, girls, rides, childhood. He can’t get his head around it, and reality oppresses him. A big strong kid who goes out of his way trying to turn back time.
The evening connects him with a thirteen-year-old traveling companion Carol. She just became a teenager, he’s already a couple of years out of that age. It’s like saying again that the glorious times are over. It’s getting harder to find a girlfriend for John, they’re already with the guys who left. It’s John’s birthday tonight, according to the cop who’s throwing another ticket at John. And also a new racer in the city, the battle with which is inevitable. So-so evening.
Steve is a small copy of an adult, a decent American citizen. It is noteworthy that the performer of this role, Ron Howard, is the youngest of the first-plan actors in the film, he is 19. Poster costume, hairstyle and made adulthood with painted, but blurred ideas. Look at how he hands Terry his car for the time of departure. Take care of the car like the apple of your eye, I have instructions — gasoline is such and such, tire pressure is such and such. Isn’t there a little information?
Steve is dating a girl named Lori, Curt’s sister. Steve and Laurie are big shots at school, they’ve been together for a long time and they’re each other’s first. At the beginning of the film, the first serious skirmish in their lives takes place between them about their future, which will be resolved only in the finale.
The prototype of the images of Kert, Terry and John was George Lucas himself, the director of American Graffiti. After graduating from high school, Lucas was professionally engaged in racing, but after the accident he went to make a movie. But Lucas didn’t know much about types like Steve, so he turned to screenwriters Gloria Katz and Willard Haik for help.
“American Graffiti” was the first film about rock and roll and teenagers. A template for “Grease”, “Happy days”, “Racers”. Not all followers were able to preserve the naturalness of The Heroes, not to create mannequins with well-groomed hairstyles and polka-dot dresses. The protagonists of “Graffiti” are so natural that you can almost smell them. Are these the only four main The Heroes?
The guys have their own cars right after school. An American phenomenon. The machine is an extension of every person. On the one hand, a prison on wheels, on the other — the key to freedom. You are what you ride. The Heroes do not appear by themselves — all on their own transport. And transport complements their portraits. Curt on the popular French Citroen 2SiVi (1967 model, “from the future”, but the model differs little from the post-war version), Terry on the Vespa scooter, Steve on the Chevrolet Impala 1958, and John on the Ford Coupe 1932.
Cars with a needle. The whole city is like an exposition of a museum of retro technology, cruising along the main street, guys driving, girls with their heads on the guys’ shoulders. There are rude, respectable citizens, hooligans, beauties, deceitful good-natured and criminals keeping their word. This is a wall for a novice “street artist” George Lucas.
Werewolf Jack
The voice of Wolfman Jack sounds from the receivers. He is a radio DJ, nowadays it is easy to underestimate and misunderstand the importance of such a figure. In 1962, radio was still the main way of communication. Television was already on its heels, and perhaps Kurt was thinking about it, perched on the hood of an unfamiliar car and watching a TV show with young Ricky Nelson on the increasingly accessible TVs in the shop window.
Wolfman worked as a radio DJ from 1960 until his last day in 1995. Lucas and his generation listened to Wolfman's pirated broadcasts in their youth.
Wolfman was doing what they’re doing on the radio now. He picked up notes and filled in the pauses between them, reading messages or answering phone calls. In the information hunger, barely quenched by radio interruptions, in the absence of a fast connection, when for you, as a teenager, life depends on whether your message reaches the person reading it for the whole city, or – what could be more exciting! — including your call in a live broadcast, becomes a prophet and savior. Everyone knows Wolfman — children love him for his elusiveness and mischief, adults hate him for corrupting their children. Adult fantasies are richer than children’s impressionability.
Teenagers are crazy about him — those who have just become “teens”, and those who will never cease to be them, those who receive grants from colleges, and those who will spend the rest of their lives in their chicken coop city.
So, Wolfman, multi-faceted and mystical, not claiming to be the messiah, just not like the rest, is the narrator of this story. But he tells it not with words, but with emotions that he evokes in characters and viewers, he twists the roving of music and radio dialogues into the yarn of the plot.
Everything is as in life
Imagine you’re seventeen. You are at the prom in a cheap tuxedo, a bow tie on the clasp, with a wild smile. Whether it’s a smile because two hundred people who spit on you are forced to watch you go up on stage for a certificate, and it gives you pleasure to torment them with your appearance. Whether it’s because your favorite school is behind you, but you still don’t realize what abyss you’ll have to balance over until the end of your days, and that the laws of attraction are different there, not described anywhere, not even transmitted by word of mouth, only known by the poke method. And they poke into these laws more often with their noses.
Now imagine ten years have passed. University, army, family, loneliness, broken or fulfilled dreams, moving, settling down, an unloved job that is scary to leave, a favorite hobby that it’s time to quit, a beloved wife once or to this day, a search for problems and a desire that there are no problems. It depends on where you swayed on the rope over the abyss. One way or another, you haven’t fallen yet and have begun to understand the rules.
And at this time, a film comes out that tells so accurately about that person sweating from arrogance or embarrassment at the graduation in the theater hall; a man who never confessed to the doomed feelings of the one he left messages on the desks, who was diligently tracking her every step. The rules of the abyss are studied before graduation.
Car hooligans, or make-up artists, did not wear leather jackets. Lucas remembers that in his youth they looked exactly like that.
The movie is about you. The film speculates on our ability to whitewash the past, our nostalgia. A common understanding of speculation is something done solely for the purpose of maximum benefit.But another meaning of speculation (from Latin — contemplation, speculation), which is older than capitalism, is an attempt to think about, understand and explain what you have not dealt with. For example, to argue about the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, when you don’t run further than the refrigerator and toilet bowl. The girls are smoking in the toilet, the young teacher is flirting with the students. Not so everything is bleached in these memories.
When the film was released in 1973, every thirty-something viewer could answer the question of the film’s slogan: “Where were you in ’62?” George Lucas’s innovative idea to remove the nostalgic cream not only earned him the nickname “Accountant” and gave money to create “Star Wars”. Her success gave rise to a culture and genre of films about growing up teenagers. Before him there were films about teenagers — masterpieces and garbage. “Rebel Without a Cause” and “High School. Secret!”. The characters of these films, who have created a cult or a reason to laugh, are “petrified”, as they are, they are. They make porridge, worry, struggle and are engaged in other heroic purposes. Their actions can lead to the death of others, and this is lousy enough. But they do not meet adulthood. That’s where the pitch darkness is. One darkness on top of another. So Lucas first proved himself to be a master. Nostalgia and the problems of growing up are experienced by all of us at all times. So why is the action in 1962?
1962
Innocent America. The Beatles and the Stones haven’t invaded yet. The States themselves did not invade anywhere. An arms race was quietly going on and a rocket was being built for a lunar mission. The world was as simple and clear as a child’s life in a small town. The Heroes of the film are the last generation of those very fifties. Naivnovinilov. It seems that everything possible has been squeezed out of the music of the era. Times had to change. The feeling of the inevitability of change sounds like a distant church bell in the film. The premiere in 1973 was attended by people who survived another war, acid test, free love and hippies. In “Graffiti” you feel that somewhere there is an inaudibly ticking bomb.
Here Lucas wove American realities, the collapse of the generation’s dreams of World War II and the crack of the country’s politics. The young man, well-mannered according to the patterns of small towns, declares that one day he will succeed and shake hands with President Kennedy himself. In 1973, the viewer understood that this was another unrealistic maximalist’s dream, Kennedy, a little over a year after the events of the film, would no longer be able to shake hands with anyone.
Relay of space athletes: USSR — USA, Gagarin — Armstrong. The focus of the film — both the accent and the canvas — on the vinyl-car boom is immersed in that decade, like a jump from a small bridge into a river outside the city.
During the filming, the owners of the establishments complained that the team was taking up all the parking spaces. The general plans and dialogues were filmed in different cities.
This was followed by the US intervention in the Vietnam War, which ended precisely in 1973. And coincidentally, on August 8, 1973, three days before the release of the film, the “Watergate scandal” ended. The shattered teenage dreams, which the film tells about, are intertwined with the shattered dreams of a generation, dreams of a just, incorruptible, better state. This rope of emotions tied “American graffiti” to the classics of cinema.
The film shows the innocence of young people, even spoiled at first glance. And he hints that soon innocence will have to say goodbye. Elegant understated and tearfully moving drama. In a picture that begins as an ordinary party of old school friends.
The Heroes’ Balance
Slowly heating up like a Lysva stove burner, the film, tough in meaning, remains endlessly cute in the best sense. There are no saints and sinners among The Heroes, they are all balancing, perhaps anticipating the approach of that abyss of adult life. The author does not stigmatize the characters, does not instruct the viewer, they say, this one is good, this one is bad. No fabulous morality. Fairy tales of the characters are in the past. Against the background of other films about teenagers that I have seen, after the fifth minute of the first viewing, I had a premonition of obscene instructiveness — when a cigarette is set on fire in the frame, and then a third-rate character pushes about the problems of erectile function that smoking leads to. It’s worth knowing what leads to what before shoving it into yourself, but I don’t think feature films are a suitable place for propaganda. “American graffiti” does not propagandize — here you are, here is your abyss and your rope. Balance as best you can.
The Heroes are children brought up with the ideal “you should become like your parents.” I remember my school years. I myself and half of the boys from the class dressed up and looked like smaller copies of their fathers. Circus of Freaks — dim-witted puberty in classic costumes with thoughts of a junior high school teacher in a translucent blouse and daily three-time masturbation. Part of me is still in high school.
The Heroes have this ideal in their blood, not yet in their DNA, hopes for arranging their own little room are warm, but this situation creates comical situations. The Hero protests, wants to leave the town where he spent his whole life. No one dissuades him.
Except for the internal program. He asks himself: “Why leave home to look for a new one?” Retelling of the Russian motif “where I was born, I came in handy there.” Or is it the fear of the unknown? The question boomerangs back to the guy who asked it. This time he caught the boomerang.
The theme of “fathers and children” is avoided in the film. And this seems to me to be a vulnerability of the script. The guys make their own decisions, but the viewer is not shown how these decisions were born. Their origin is hardly guessed. In life, behind all the big things like choosing a place of study or life, there are years of suggestion. We will consider the city such an inspirer.
Symbols
The film shows a kink. Kert, Steve, John and Terry have the last night with the same company. Everyone has their own life for tomorrow. They drive around the city all night. Suddenly, on a ride, Kert, who received a college grant far from home, but is thinking about staying in his hometown, sees a snow-white girl in a snow-white car. She bursts into his evening like a ghost, confesses her love, he tries unsuccessfully to catch up with her. Her, driving her usual route every evening. Some tell him that she is married, others that she is a prostitute. Everyone knows about her, but no one will tell you where to find her.
A woman in a white car that appears, unattainable, disappears and reappears — memories and emotions washed clean, which cannot and cannot be touched so as not to get dirty; the ghost of childhood, forever settled in your hometown. He loves you, of course. And he doesn’t want to let go. Do you need this love? If you want to see him, you know where to find him. The usual route.
The final shots are the darkest part of the film. The text on the screen tells about the future of Kert, Steve, Terry and John. As if about the future of each of their peers. The end of the movie does not mean the end of the abyss. Without this ending, it would have been possible to leave the hall, emitting a pink light. I didn’t agree with this ending before, but now I think it perfectly paraphrases “I didn’t get into a fairy tale” and makes a drama out of a youth comedy. What a fine line — I learned a little about the future and the fairy tale was gone. Do we want to know our future?
Cast
You can’t glue a masterpiece together without a script or without suitable actors. Of all the actors of “American Graffiti”, as an average moviegoer, I recognized only Harrison Ford of the pre-Han Solo era. The rest of the guys subsequently made a world career. But they were all new to Graffiti. Lucas conceived that the actors should be unknown. One Ron Howard, the performer of the role of Steve, was known for his children’s roles on television. How exactly teenagers from the outback came out of them: simple guys and girls. As if they weren’t actors at all.
The film crew did not have money to rent cars. They posted an ad: those who have retro cars in excellent condition, come to the shooting of a new film produced by Francis Ford Coppola. The one who created the Godfather a year earlier. 300 people brought their rare cars for auditions and filming literally for food. Among them somehow turned out to be the Chevrolet 150 from the 1971 road movie “Two-Lane Blacktop”. And the Mercury belonging to the Pharaohs, after filming in American Graffiti, will be in the hands of first “Big Daddy” Roth, and then Brian Setzer. In general, most of the “removed” cars as a result of the popularity of the film have found their own history, each of which deserves a separate article.
Curt has been trying in vain to open his locker recently. The code has been changed. Another sign that childhood has passed.
Here is the best interpretation that I have seen of the greasers — the “Pharaohs” gang. A real hopota, you see them on the screen – and immediately “run or fight.”
The main background role. A sound canvas created by the duo George Lucas — Wolfman Jack (it is to this canvas that the radio in the movie “Six-String Samurai” refers). Woven from classic songs of the vinyl fever of the second half of the 50s and recorded by Wolfman Jack’s live dialogues with listeners.
Music is not a litter under the action, it becomes a part of it. In one scene, it appears as a radio transmission in a car; in another, it sounds from a cafe and is reflected from the walls of neighboring buildings, giving volume to the action; in the third, it sounds from the stage at a dance in honor of the beginning of the new school year. The sound distortions characteristic of each of these situations make the movie as animated as possible.
In terms of music, it is clear why 1962 was chosen for the action. The year in which discrimination disappeared, if not in society, then in music. The music of whites and blacks has become inseparable completely. So in the soundtrack, the songs of black artists alternate with white recordings. And there is no longer a contrast either between songs or between music and action. There is only a general feeling of the joy of youth:
The protagonist of the abolition of musical segregation, if not all pop music, Elvis Presley does not sound in the film. Nothing from the releases of the Sun Records label sounds. It seems that there wasn’t enough budget for Elvis, but why Carl Perkins or Jerry Lee Lewis didn’t get into the soundtrack is not clear to me — whether it was the director’s idea or an accident.
There are 41 songs used in the film, and I’m afraid to imagine how hard they were selected, because it’s hard to choose — I want to add more and more, like at a successful party, when you add more and more so that the fun doesn’t end.
In the role of a group at school dances, “Herby and the Heartbeats”, real musicians, the revival band “Flash Cadillac and Continental Kids”. The guys not only gave their all on the set as at a live concert — expression, streams of sweat — but all the songs “At the Hop”, “Louie Louie”, “She’s So Fine”, they arranged and recorded especially for the film.
The dance scenes show the phenomenon of disco in socks or Hop Dance. They were held in school gyms with polished floors. Schoolchildren were forced to take off their shoes so as not to scratch the coating.
Coppola helped Lucas out with his stellar participation in the project. His participation attracted the best film crew, attracted viewers to cinemas. The film, in which 777 thousand dollars were invested, collected 55 million at the first box office. That’s how Lucas became an “Accountant”, subsequently repeating the success with “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones”.
So what does graffiti have to do with it?
In 1973, graffiti art as a modern street art was a newborn. The word “graffiti” does not appear in the film. I don’t think there is a reference to street art here. The traditional definition of “graffiti” and the definition of “street art” are close. The means by which they are created differ. I assume they used a fresh information guide: a meaning that accurately conveys the content, plus the growing popularity of the phenomenon and the word “graffiti”. What’s not a good marketing move?
Graffiti — literally “scratched” — inscriptions on any topic from domestic to sacred, scratched on any convenient surfaces from dishes to buildings. The film contains four motifs, the stories of four young people. Scratched inscriptions are the most reliable of information carriers. Not roomy, with a low recording speed, but almost immortal. As human maturation is likely, the difficulties of this age are familiar to everyone, they are scratched on our line of fate.
American Graffiti, when I saw them in 2014, they made an impression with something. It happens that you see and feel good. I felt, but I couldn’t tell my friends why the film was so good. Now I have a better understanding of why he is good, but what is great in a good movie is not necessary to understand. After the first viewing, I just felt like I had a great time in the company of old friends. I wish you to enjoy the night cast of heroes in adulthood. Enjoy watching!
