He had trouble almost from the start. “The hardest thing is that it was all at night,” said Lucas later. “It was a very short schedule… in that the sun went down at nine at night and came up at five in the morning. That left a very short day, and… I only had twenty-eight of them, so it was a very, very, very fast and short schedule, especially considering it was all on location with cars that broke down and all the other drama that would go on.… It was just physically a very difficult thing to get through.”60 On the first night of shooting, Lucas gathered his crew on Fourth Street in San Rafael at 4 p.m. to begin the task of installing camera mounts onto the hoods and sides of several vehicles—a time-consuming process that ate up so much of the evening that Lucas didn’t begin filming until nearly midnight. After breaking for dinner—or maybe it was breakfast—at 1 a.m., Lucas shot nonstop until the sun came up at 5 a.m., but only barely managed to complete about half the scenes on his schedule. Already “we were half a day behind,” lamented Lucas, “and to fall half a day behind on a 28 day schedule is like the end of the world.”61
The second night was no better. Despite the agreement he had negotiated with the town of San Rafael under which he would pay $300 per night to film on Fourth Street, local businesses were already complaining about closing the street. When Lucas and his crew arrived in San Rafael on Tuesday evening, they learned the local council had withdrawn permission for him to film and would not permit the police to clear or control traffic on Fourth Street. Lucas made the most of the evening anyway, rapidly shooting his way through nineteen setups while Kurtz scrambled to find them a new location. “Then we had focus problems on the camera, and the assistant cameraman was run over by a car,” Lucas recalled with a sigh. “Then we had a five alarm fire. That was a typical night.”62
Kurtz managed to find a more receptive shooting location in the town of Petaluma, about twenty miles north of San Rafael, but that didn’t mean things were going to get any easier. San Rafael, to its credit, would permit Lucas to return for two more nights of shooting to film most of Graffiti’s cruising scenes, but Lucas was having problems beyond mere location. For one thing, he was exhausted. After shooting all night, Lucas would try to sleep during the day; but instead he generally spent the daylight hours watching footage shot the previous night, writing notes that he would pass along to Marcia, who was editing a rough cut of the film with Verna Fields as quickly as Lucas could bring it to them. By the time he arrived in Petaluma each evening to start filming, he’d hardly slept at all. Some nights Lucas would be found sound asleep in a chair, wrapped up cozily in Kurtz’s jacket; other times he’d fall asleep as he dangled in a harness off the side of a moving car, head lolling. “Night after night took its toll on George,” recalled Harrison Ford. “George was often asleep when it came time to say ‘Cut.’ I often woke him up to tell him it was time to try it again.”63 Even in June, northern California evenings could get chilly, and despite wearing his USC varsity jacket, Lucas shivered from the cold all night long. He eventually came down with the flu, and his diabetes, which he normally kept under control, was troubling him. “I don’t think I can last at this,” he told Milius shakily.64
Worse, he wasn’t happy with what he was seeing. Lucas was shooting American Graffiti in a documentary, almost disengaged style—setting up the camera, then letting it roll as the actors moved in and out of the shot. He was also filming in inexpensive Techniscope again, mostly because he loved the grainy look it gave everything. But his documentary approach still also extended to using mostly natural light, relying mainly on streetlights, headlights, and neon signs. With such poor lighting, however, nothing would stay in focus. “It just looked mushy,” said Kurtz.65 After watching a week’s worth of footage, Lucas knew he had a serious problem.
When it came to solving lighting problems, Lucas knew exactly who to call for help: Haskell Wexler. He had actually wanted Wexler at his side as a cameraman right from the start, but Wexler had refused; he didn’t like shooting in Techniscope, and he already had his hands full shooting commercials in Los Angeles. “But when we got in trouble and I asked him to do it, he did it—as a friend, to help me out,” said Lucas fondly.66 Wexler’s schedule would be nearly as rough as Lucas’s; every day he would shuttle back and forth between Los Angeles and San Francisco, shooting commercials all day and American Graffiti all night. While Kurtz worried that the pace might take a toll on Wexler’s health, Wexler claimed it didn’t bother him a bit. “It didn’t affect me,” he said with a shrug. “I loved it. I loved working around those kids, around George, and the story.… It was a great experience.”67
Wexler’s expertise would make a difference immediately. Lucas had instructed Wexler that he wanted American Graffiti to look like a jukebox, “very garish, bright blue and yellow and red”68—“ugly,” muttered Marcia69—and Wexler had delivered, installing brighter bulbs in signs and streetlights, and strategically placing low-wattage lights in cars to directly illuminate the faces of actors. Wexler, said Lucas, was “a lifesaver.”70 Lucas couldn’t praise him enough. “He’s really terrific so I just let him do it and I didn’t worry about it anymore… and he did a fantastic job. The movie looked exactly the way I wanted it to look.”71
With the technical problems in Wexler’s capable hands, Lucas could concentrate on setting up his shots, guiding his actors, and bringing the film in on time. Lucas was well aware that working with actors was his biggest weakness, so he was fortunate to have chosen a cast that needed very little real direction. “George was given this cast, and he had to shoot so fast that there wasn’t any time for directing,” said Coppola. “He stood ’em up and shot ’em, and they were so talented.… It was just lucky.”72 Richard Dreyfuss thought there was more than just luck involved. “He trusted us,” said Dreyfuss. And why not? In Lucas’s view, he had hired the best actors, carefully chosen for each part, so why shouldn’t he trust them to deliver?
Lucas’s style as a director, however, could be wildly unpredictable. Sometimes he would talk briefly with the actors before a scene, run through a number of options or variations, then finally nod and ask, “Is that the way you wanna do it?” before disappearing to set up the shot. After a scene, Lucas wouldn’t offer any feedback beyond “Great! Terrific!” and maybe “Let’s try again!” It was “a little unnerving,” said Ron Howard, “because George didn’t really particularly talk to us much.”73 Other times, Lucas wouldn’t talk at all, and would simply set up several cameras without telling his actors which one would be filming the master shot. Partly this was a matter of speed and economy; with two cameras rolling, Lucas was essentially getting two different versions of every scene to choose from in the editing room. But it also gave the film a documentary style, almost a “found footage” look, that Lucas loved. With multiple cameras rolling, actors were often uncertain which one to play to. “Just keep doing the scene!” Lucas would shout—an approach Ron Howard found as thrilling as it was confusing. “Often we couldn’t tell where the cameras were. You didn’t know if it was a long lens getting you in close-up at any given moment,” said Howard. “So at first it was disorienting—but ultimately it was incredibly liberating.”74
“[George] was sort of a control freak,” said Willard Huyck sympathetically, “and directing was out of his control.”75 And it was those out-of-control moments that could result in cinematic perfection. In Graffiti’s opening scene, Terry the Toad cruises into Mel’s Drive-In on a Vespa moped, then lurches up over a curb, engine sputtering, and crashes into a row of vending machines. It had all been accidental on the part of actor Charles Martin Smith, who had merely tried to let the clutch out quickly on the Vespa so the moped would stop with a jerk. “Instead it took off with me still hanging onto it,” said Smith, who limped away from the bike, still in character, with his pride intact—an unintentionally note-perfect entrance for Graffiti’s resident nerd.76
As the weeks wore on, even with Wexler’s steady presence behind the camera and Kurtz’s stoic calm behind the scenes, th
ere were problems Lucas couldn’t avoid. Axles broke on several of the cars, the yellow ’32 coupe blew its reverse gear, and Lucas’s beloved Éclair camera—the one he cradled in his arms and carried like a prize pig—was badly damaged when it fell off a tripod.77 And away from the set, some of his cast members were misbehaving. “If you put a group of young people together in a Holiday Inn, what’s going to happen?” said Candy Clark. “There is going to be some drinking! When they weren’t working, they would just hang out and drink beer or whiskey. It wasn’t abnormal behavior or anything scandalous.”78 Harrison Ford in particular could be a mischievous drunk, throwing beer bottles into the hotel parking lot just to watch them explode, and scaling the Holiday Inn sign to place a bottle on top. Eventually Kurtz pulled the actor aside to read him the riot act—a scolding a contrite Ford never forgot. “[Kurtz] was the guy who told me no more drinking beer on the streets,” said Ford, “and then no more drinking beer in the trailer, and then no more drinking beer.”79 Fortunately, neither Ned Tanen nor any of the suits at Universal showed up in Petaluma very often to check on things—and when Tanen did visit the set, Lucas made a point of ignoring him. “George has no social graces,” said Gloria Katz. “And in his psychology, the suits had no business other than writing the checks. He didn’t want to hear what they said, he didn’t respect them, nothing.”80
If there was anyone on the set who did have Lucas’s utmost respect, it was probably the larger-than-life personality Lucas had chosen to serve as the film’s Greek chorus and conscience: a thirty-four-year-old deejay named Robert Smith, better known as Wolfman Jack.
While Lucas always claimed to remember listening to Wolfman Jack while cruising in high school, that wasn’t quite true; Smith didn’t create his Wolfman persona until at least 1962, when he was still spinning discs as “Big Smith with the Records” on KCIJ-AM in Shreveport, Louisiana—and even then, his voice couldn’t be heard much beyond the borders of the state. In 1964, however, Smith moved to Mexican radio station XERF-AM—which blasted its signal across most of North America with 250,000 watts behind it—and then, in 1965, over to XERB in Tijuana, another “border blaster” that nearly anyone in the United States could tune in to at 1090 on the AM dial. This is where Lucas, in his early days at USC, would have first heard the Wolfman as he yelped and howled his way into stardom, fascinating listeners with his raspy voice and hipster delivery: “Are you wit’ me out deh?” he would ask every night. Listeners didn’t know if he was white or black, or whether he was broadcasting from Mexico, California, a boat in the Pacific, or the moon, for that matter.81
Lucas loved every minute of it. “He was a really mystical character, I’ll tell you,” said Lucas. “He was wild, he had these crazy phone calls, and he drifted out of nowhere. And it was an outlaw station. He was an outlaw, which of course made him extremely attractive to kids.” Lucas, too, understood better than most the power of a deejay; it was with good reason that he had chosen deejay Emperor Hudson as the subject of his first USC documentary: “A lot of teenagers have a make-believe friend in a disc jockey, but he’s much more real because he talks to them, he jokes around.… He’s part of the family. You listen to him every day, you’re very close to him, you share your most intimate moments with him.”82
Wolfman Jack’s involvement was critical to the film; it would be the music from his radio show, intercut with the Wolfman’s on-air patter, that would carry the movie from scene to scene. In fact, Lucas sat down with Jack to record an entire radio show, which Lucas planned to edit into the film’s sound track, including real radio footage of the Wolfman taking phone calls and bantering on the air with actual listeners. Lucas was grateful to the enigmatic Jack for agreeing to take the role. It would be the first time most of his listeners would see him, which Jack worried might remove some of the luster from his on-air personality. While Lucas’s limited budget meant he could pay the deejay only $3,000, Lucas gave Wolfman one of his points in the film. If the film turned a profit, so would the Wolfman. It would turn out to be one of the best-paying gigs Jack ever had.
Lucas also put the deejay at the center of one of Graffiti’s most important moments, as it would be the Wolfman who would deliver the film’s central message: “Get your ass in gear,” he tells Curt serenely, dispensing wisdom in thoughtful sound bites much as Yoda would advise Luke Skywalker a decade later. For Lucas, it was a similar though more mature message than that of THX 1138. That film had been about escaping; Graffiti was about growing up. For Lucas, and so many others of his generation, 1962—the year before the Kennedy assassination—was the year before the world changed forever, for better or for worse. Those who lived through it had a simple choice: evolve or face extinction.
For that reason, Lucas was never going to change the title, no matter how much studio executives fussed over it; even Coppola would encourage the cast and crew to try to come up with an alternative, with Coppola himself floating Rock Around the Block. But Lucas knew exactly what the title meant. The film itself truly was American graffiti—a unique moment in time, preserved on celluloid, scratching its essence on the movie screen like the etchings on Egyptian monuments, to ensure its memory wouldn’t be lost forever. “It’s about a period of transition in history in America where in one year you had a President that a lot of kids admired.… [Y]ou had a certain kind of rock’n’roll music, a certain kind of country where you could believe in things.… You had a certain kind of life,” Lucas explained in 1974. “But in the next two years everything changed: no longer were you a teenager; you were an adult going to college or doing whatever you were going to do. The government changed radically, and everybody’s attitude toward it changed radically. Drugs came in. Although it had always been there, a war surfaced as an issue. The music changed completely. Graffiti is about the fact that you have to accept these changes—they were on the horizon—and if you didn’t, you had problems.… You try to fight it… and you lose.”83 Get your ass in gear.
Lucas completed filming on American Graffiti on Friday, August 4, 1972. Perhaps predictably, the final two weeks had been bogged down by one mechanical failure after another, with a broken tie rod hampering the shooting of a stunt car, underexposed film requiring a long round of retakes, and a flat tire that kept the airplane in the final scene firmly on the ground. While Lucas had lightened things up in the last week of shooting with a real sock hop in the gym of Tamalpais High School—Coppola had shown up for that one, as had Marcia—Lucas was glad that it was over. “You couldn’t pay me enough money to go through what you have to go through to make a movie,” he complained to the New York Times. “It’s excruciating. It’s horrible. You get physically sick. I get a very bad cough and a cold whenever I direct. I don’t know whether it’s psychosomatic or not. You feel terrible. There is an immense amount of pressure, and emotional pain.… But I do it anyway, and I really love to do it. It’s like climbing mountains.”84
True to form, Lucas was looking forward to the editing process. “I’m really gonna direct it in the editing room,” he told Ron Howard. “That’s when I’m going to make my choices.”85 Most of the actual editing responsibility was in the hands of Tanen’s editor of choice, Verna Fields, who was assembling the movie in the garage of Coppola’s house. But because Fields had another, higher-profile job—she was editing Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon—she’d been assigned an equally capable assistant editor in Marcia Lucas. That, at least, ensured that Lucas would have some say in the edit. And just to make certain, he’d taken over another critical component of the editing process as well: the music. Lucas knew exactly which songs he wanted playing over particular scenes, but actually cutting the songs into the film so that they blended seamlessly into the scene was going to require a certain kind of flair. Lucas, who had called on Haskell Wexler when stuck with a lighting problem, knew exactly who to call when it came to finessing difficulties with sound: Walter Murch.
Lucas knew he couldn’t just dub the songs in behind the action in the film. “You would dr
ive your audience mad if you did that,” agreed Murch. Instead, he wanted the music in the film to sound like it was being broadcast over car radios, on public address systems in gyms, or out of tinny transistor radio speakers. They would have to figure out how to “worldize” their music, Lucas said—and Murch couldn’t wait to get his hands on it. Together he and Lucas recorded the entire sound track for the film—all the way down to Wolfman Jack’s patter—on speakers reverberating across gymnasiums, warbling out of old PA systems, or even in Lucas’s own backyard, where Lucas would slowly and randomly walk a speaker around the yard, blasting the sound track as Murch’s tape recorder rolled.86 “We took all of the music and made it so it would bounce around the environment… as a sound effect,” explained Lucas. “Then we took sound effects and used them in the places where we really needed tension and drama.”87
It was the first time a pop sound track had been given its own dramatic presence in a film—an innovation that filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Joel and Ethan Coen would embrace as they practically built films like Pulp Fiction and O Brother, Where Art Thou? around carefully selected songs from established pop and folk songbooks. In his desire to turn his sound track into a sound effect, Lucas had made the sound track—and the sound track album—a vital part of the movie experience. Editing the sound track into the film was hard work—it would take nearly five weeks just to cut in the sound—but Lucas loved every moment of it. “I love rock ’n’ roll,” he said. “Making Graffiti, I could sit down at my Steenbeck and play all this rock ’n’ roll all day; that was my job in editing. The editors were cutting the scenes and I was putting in the rock ’n’ roll saying, ‘Wow, that’s really great.’ It’s like carving something; it takes shape, and it’s a lot of fun.”88
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