George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

  Two hurdles were making Graffiti a tough sell for Berg. One was the title, which studios found baffling; it sounded, they thought, like an Italian movie about American feet. The larger problem, however, was that Lucas was pushing American Graffiti not just as a movie but as some sort of musical, actually writing across the first page of the script: “American Graffiti is a MUSICAL. It has singing and dancing, but it is not a musical in the traditional sense because the characters in the film neither sing nor dance.” It was no wonder studio executives were confused. Making things worse, Graffiti was seen as yet another movie trying to cater to the youth market—a movement Dennis Hopper had crashed just as spectacularly as he had created it when his Easy Rider follow-up, The Last Movie, tanked at the box office.

  And then, in early 1972, the script landed on the desk of Ned Tanen at Universal. Tanen, an early fan of Lucas’s THX student film, was also a car lover—though he was a southern rather than a northern California cruiser—and so he thought he knew what Lucas was trying to do in his script. Tanen and Kurtz had a relationship as well, having worked together on Two-Lane Blacktop several years earlier. Tanen thought this was a team he could probably work with. He called Berg and told him he wanted to meet with Lucas to discuss American Graffiti.

  Lucas showed up in Tanen’s office with a cassette filled with music recorded from his own exhaustive collection of 45s: Buddy Holly. The Beach Boys. Elvis. The Platters—everything he had listened to cruising Modesto as a teenager. Just as the front page of his script promised, Lucas pitched American Graffiti as a musical—and as he described to Tanen the stories of each of his four main characters, Lucas played a corresponding song from his cassette. Each song, he knew, would evoke a particular moment in time—“what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about—from about 1945 to 1962,” he said later.36 And it worked; Tanen immediately got it. “It’s about every kid you ever went to school with,” enthused Tanen. “It’s about everything that ever happened or didn’t happen to you, or that you fantasize or remember as having happened to you.”37 Yes, he and Lucas could do business—but there were some conditions.

  First, Tanen generally produced only films budgeted at $1 million or less. Graffiti would be budgeted at $750,000. And Lucas would have no studio space at his disposal; the film would have to be made on location. More critically, there would be no additional budget set aside to cover the costs of clearing the music rights. If Lucas wanted to use Elvis songs in American Graffiti, that was fine—but he’d have to pay for it out of his $750,000. That was less money than Lucas had received for THX 1138, and he knew it might take as much as $100,000 to cover the music. Before he could shoot a single frame of film, Lucas knew at least 10 percent of his budget would be gone.

  Making things even more challenging, there was one final, and perhaps more difficult, demand: the studio wanted a well-known actor involved, someone whose name on a movie poster would capture the attention of an audience. Lucas argued that since the movie was about teenagers, the cast would likely be made up mostly of young, unknown actors, and he had no intention of compromising the story to arbitrarily insert a marquee-grade star. Tanen conceded Lucas’s point and suggested finding a big-name producer instead. And in the spring of 1972, following the release of The Godfather to outstanding reviews and box office numbers that stunned even its director, there was no bigger name than Francis Ford Coppola.

  Tanen and Coppola had tangled in the past—Tanen would always call Coppola “Francis the Mad”—but the idea of promoting American Graffiti with Coppola’s name attached to it dazzled Universal executives.38 Lucas was still nursing a grudge against Coppola over the demise of Zoetrope—and, if put on the spot, would likely have admitted he was hoping to be regarded as an independent filmmaker and the head of Lucasfilm Ltd. rather than as Coppola’s young apprentice yet again. But knowing Coppola as well as he did, he knew Francis would stay out of his way, leaving the day-to-day, on-location producing to Kurtz. Lucas told Tanen he’d be more than happy to have Coppola as his producer—and then went to discuss it with him.

  “Yeah, sure, great,” Coppola told Lucas—then threw out what he thought was an even better idea. “You know, we should be doing this picture,” said Coppola. “Let’s get it out of Universal. I’ll finance it myself.”39 Lucas, on the verge of a deal with Universal, thought that was a bad idea; if Tanen found out Coppola was trying to take the movie away from him, it might scuttle the deal altogether. But it was Francis being Francis again. Lucas decided to give Coppola a bit of time to see what he could do, and with his profits from The Godfather as collateral, Coppola went to the City Bank in Beverly Hills to secure a loan for $700,000 that he could put toward American Graffiti. But both his accountant and his wife put an immediate stop to Coppola’s plan before it could even get under way. Ellie Coppola didn’t like the script, and informed her husband in no uncertain terms that if he was going to gamble his profits on a film, it would be one of his own and not one by a protégé. Chastened, Coppola decided not to pursue the loan. He’d take Universal’s money instead.

  “We didn’t get the [okay from Tanen] with the [script],” Kurtz recalled later. “We got it with Francis’s name.… They [Universal] thought the concept might work, but they wanted to be a little more certain, and his reputation provided the certainty.”40 With Coppola officially aboard, Tanen could ink the deal. As producer, Coppola would earn $25,000 plus 10 percent of the net; Lucas, meanwhile, would be paid $50,000 to write and direct, as well as 40 percent of the net profits.41 While the figures were small, the deal was generous, and one that promised to make both Lucas and Coppola quite a bit of money if—and this was a big if—American Graffiti could turn a profit. Finally, as he had in his initial agreement with United Artists, Lucas also rolled his untitled space opera—“the Flash Gordon thing”—into the deal with Universal. If all went well, it would be his next project.

  Lucas was generally happy with the arrangement, and it was Tanen, in fact, who’d gone to bat for Lucas with studio head Lew Wasserman, who was skeptical of American Graffiti and even more suspicious of the Flash Gordon thing. Tanen later said he simply had had a hunch about Lucas. “You could just feel something big was going to happen to him,” said Tanen.42 Lucas liked Tanen, too, and particularly appreciated the way he worked. “[Universal] in effect wrote you a check and told you to go away and come back with a finished movie,” Lucas said later. “They never bothered you at all. It was a very, very good atmosphere.”43

  Well, mostly. There was really only one thing Lucas didn’t get in the deal: control over the final edited version of the film. After the relative failure of THX, there wasn’t much room for Berg to negotiate the point on his behalf. Lucas grudgingly agreed to give Universal editorial control. And once again, he would end up regretting it.

  With Universal behind him, and Kurtz watching his back, Lucas put American Graffiti into pre-production immediately. He set up a production office in San Rafael, about fifteen minutes away from Mill Valley. Lucas liked the look of San Rafael’s main streets—unlike in Modesto, storefronts still looked much as they had a decade earlier—and he planned to shoot most of the movie’s exteriors there. Searching for cars from the appropriate era to cruise the streets during filming, Lucas put ads in Bay Area newspapers promising owners $20 a day to drive 1962-era cars in the background.44 Kurtz’s assistant Bunny Alsup—who was also his sister-in-law—photographed every car and driver who responded to the ads so Lucas would have a variety of cars to choose from. It was Kurtz, however, who found the 1932 deuce coupe with the chopped top that would be cleaned up and painted yellow—yet another yellow sports car!—to create American Graffiti’s most iconic automobile.

  Perhaps the most pressing business at the moment was getting the rights to the music. Without the music, insisted Lucas, there was no film; it was, he reminded everyone, a musical. Lucas had made up an extensive song list, selecting at least three songs for each scene in the event he couldn’t cle
ar one or two of them. When Kurtz ran the list by executives at Universal, they “practically had a heart attack,” said Kurtz, and urged Lucas to record the songs with an orchestra or a cover band instead. Kurtz blanched. “We can’t do that,” he said. “We have to use the original records.”45 Executives eventually agreed, but warned Kurtz that if clearances exceeded 10 percent of the budget, the difference was coming out of Coppola’s pocket.

  Lucas wasn’t going to be able to afford about half of the songs he wanted anyway. Right away, Elvis’s music was out; the rights were too expensive, and the King’s label refused to negotiate. Kurtz had better luck with the Beach Boys, mainly because he knew drummer Dennis Wilson personally, after working with him on Two-Lane Blacktop. Kurtz eventually secured a number of Beach Boys songs, including “Surfin’ Safari” and “All Summer Long,” for a reasonable fee—and once Kurtz and Lucas could point to the involvement of the Beach Boys, clearing song rights became much easier. Eventually Lucas would clear forty-three songs for the movie, including hits by Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, the Del-Vikings, and Booker T. & the M.G.’s. Lucas had just secured the sound track that would make the film—and he and Kurtz had brought the clearances in for around $90,000. Right on target.

  Casting, too, was critical. Lucas still intended to use young actors, close in age to the characters they were playing, even scouring local high school drama productions looking for promising talent. On the recommendation of both Coppola and Kurtz, Lucas turned to veteran casting director Fred Roos to help him through the process. For Lucas, the casting wasn’t just important; it was personal: each of the four main characters was rooted in his own personality and life experiences. “I’m sort of everybody,” Lucas said later.46 “They were all composite characters, based on my life, and on the lives of friends of mine,” he told a reporter.47 “I was Terry the Toad, fumbling with girls, then I became a drag racer like John.… And finally I became Curt. I got serious and went to college.”48 Really, the only character he had struggled with in his script was the overachieving Steve. “[That was] the only character I really wasn’t,” he said. Nevertheless, “I have a lot of friends who were the Steves, who stayed and just sort of followed the path that was laid out for them.”49

  For weeks, Lucas held open auditions so he could sift through as many actors as possible. With Roos next to him, Lucas saw thousands of young performers in ten-minute increments, six days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day. Lucas took notes on everybody, scratching his thoughts down in notebooks in his crabbed handwriting and rarely saying much of anything. His silence distressed some of the young actors. “He hardly said two words to me,” said Candy Clark, who would end up with the role of the ditzy but well-intentioned Debbie. “He was mostly looking at me, which makes for a very uncomfortable audition when someone is just sizing you up, not interacting.”50

  Once the first round of auditions was complete, Lucas picked four or five actors for each of the major roles, paired them up into boy-girl couples, then videotaped them so he could watch their performances closely, over and over again—a practice that would become an industry standard. After poring over the videos, Lucas would then take the best two or three from each couple and record their performances again, this time on 16 mm film. It was a long, excruciating process, but Lucas was determined to make exactly the right choice for each role.

  The weeks of hard work paid off, as Lucas was able to assemble a note-perfect cast, the majority of whom would go on to long careers. Lucas had been impressed enough with Richard Dreyfuss to offer him his choice of playing either the intellectual but adventurous Curt or the popular but conflicted Steve. (Dreyfuss chose Curt, believing he was much more like that character.) Suzanne Somers, in her first real film role, was given the part of the enigmatic Thunderbird-driving blond bombshell who nearly persuades Curt not to leave his small town—to escape, as Lucas explained it, the same theme that had driven THX 1138. Curt’s all-night quest for the blonde in the hot car has more than a whiff of Lucas’s own truth to it; according to his mother, “George always wanted to have a blonde girlfriend. But he never did quite find her.”51 Curt wouldn’t either.

  The character who did land the blonde, however, was probably the one the most like Lucas: Terry the Toad, played with geeky enthusiasm by Charles Martin Smith. “There’s so much of George in Terry the Toad, it’s unbelievable,” said John Plummer. “The botching of events in terms of his life, his social ineptness in dealing with women.”52 Smith had missed the first rounds of Graffiti auditions, but Lucas ran into him in a studio office building and asked him to try out. And it probably didn’t hurt that with his thick-rimmed glasses, Smith even looked a little like Lucas.

  Cindy Williams, who landed the role of Laurie—the ingenue role, Lucas called it—was jet-lagged and bleary-eyed throughout the audition process and thought she’d be so bad in the role that she very nearly didn’t accept it until pressed by Coppola. “I was just awestruck that Francis Coppola would call me,” Williams said. “I was, like, hypnotized: Yes, evil master, I will do the film, I said. Of course I will.”53

  The role of Steve, the character Lucas had struggled with the most on the page, went to one of the more experienced, and youngest, actors in the film, eighteen-year-old Ron Howard. While Howard had more than a decade of acting experience—including an eight-year run on the highly successful Andy Griffith Show and a memorable role in the film The Music Man—it was still uncertain whether he could carry a film as an adult, mainly because it wasn’t clear whether audiences would accept that Andy Griffith’s precocious Opie had grown up.

  In 1972, in fact, Howard was preparing to enter film school at USC, determined to become more than just an actor—but when he heard that Lucas was holding open auditions, Howard decided to read for the part. He did so “with some trepidation,” he said later, mainly because he too had been confused by Lucas’s insistence on calling Graffiti a musical. “George, I have to admit one thing,” Howard told Lucas during his audition. “I know I was in The Music Man, but I think they cast me because I couldn’t sing—because I really can’t. And I certainly can’t dance. In fact, I can just barely carry a tune.” Lucas shrugged. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” he told Howard. “You wouldn’t have to sing. No one really sings, but it is a musical.”

  “And that was it,” said Howard, who landed the part and never asked about singing again. But he would remain baffled, at least for a while, by Lucas’s “musical.”54

  It was casting director Roos who would bring in one of the more unconventional cast members, a self-taught carpenter named Harrison Ford. Struggling as an actor, Ford had taken up carpentry to pay the bills—and was so good that he had earned a reputation as the “Carpenter to the Stars,” building a recording studio for Sergio Mendes and a deck for Sally Kellerman, and doing odd jobs for the art rock group the Doors. Ford was doing so well, in fact, that he very nearly didn’t take the role playing hot-rodder Bob Falfa, since it paid less than half of what he was making doing carpentry jobs. While Ford eventually settled for a little more than scale, he drew the line at having his hair buzzed into a flattop. Lucas agreed to permit Ford to tuck his hair up into a white cowboy hat instead. It would not be the last iconic hat Ford would wear for Lucas.

  It had taken five exhausting months to cast the film. Working with actors was never Lucas’s strong suit anyway, but he had set himself a particularly grueling schedule, flying from San Francisco to Los Angeles each week to sit through auditions all day, then crashing on the couch at Matthew Robbins’s house in Benedict Canyon at night. Fortuitously, Lucas wasn’t the only one in Robbins’s house; that spring, Robbins was at work on a script for Steven Spielberg called The Sugarland Express, and Spielberg would drop by every evening to talk about the script over dinner. “So they’d still be around the kitchen table discussing their script,” said Lucas, “and we’d have dinner, talk, and hang out. That’s where we really got to know each other.”55

  From the moment of their first
meeting at the student film exhibition at UCLA in 1969—when Spielberg joked he’d been “insanely jealous” of Lucas as a filmmaker—Lucas and Spielberg’s relationship would always be a mixture of good-natured competition and warm admiration. In January 1971, for instance, after Spielberg had flashily directed an episode of the NBC series The Name of the Game titled “L.A. 2017,” Lucas had taken wry delight in pointing out that its setup—a vaguely dystopian future in which residents of Los Angeles live underground—bore more than a passing resemblance to THX 1138.56 But Lucas had nothing but praise for Spielberg’s most recent effort, an edge-of-the-seat made-for-TV thriller called Duel, about a mild-mannered motorist being stalked by the unseen driver of a tanker truck. Lucas had watched it at Coppola’s house during a party, shutting himself into an upstairs room while the festivities raged below him. “I ran downstairs and said, ‘Francis, you’ve got to come see this movie. This guy’s really good.’… I was very, very impressed with his work.”57

  Spielberg, too, would always look back fondly on those long evenings in Benedict Canyon, swapping stories with Lucas and grousing about the challenges of getting a film made. “We were the movie brats who got together a long time ago and decided to talk about how hard it is to make movies,” said Spielberg. “I mean, we’re constant complainers. We love complaining to each other.”58 The dinner table conversation at Robbins’s place—complaints and all—would cement their blossoming friendship for good.

  The last big task on American Graffiti was to get into shape the troublesome Lucas-penned script that had so annoyed Ellie Coppola. Lucas checked in with the Huycks again, and was relieved to find out they were available to work on the screenplay. Lucas and the Huycks began passing pages back and forth, writing and rewriting, at times even typing right over pages of an earlier draft. The Huycks wrote quickly, and Lucas was grateful for their help and generous in praise of their talent. “What they did was improve the dialogue, make it funnier, more human, truer,” Lucas explained. Still, he said, “it was basically my story. The scenes are mine, the dialogue is theirs.”59 The final script was finished on May 10, 1972, and just in time—for Lucas had his cameras ready to roll in San Rafael on Monday, June 26, the first day of a breakneck twenty-eight-day shooting schedule.