So the first thing I told George was that I could neither sing nor dance. My agent had informed me that American Graffiti was going to be a musical. In those days, George could be reticent and awkward around actors, so Geno served a valuable role as his go-between. George was a slight, soft-spoken man with thick, curly dark hair and a beard. First, I had to meet with George Lucas and Geno Havens, the film’s assistant casting director. Still, my getting cast in the movie was not a given. On that day, he promised, he would step back and let me become the architect of my professional life. But Dad drew a circle around March 1, 1972, on the calendar: the date of my 18th birthday. He had held the reins to my career pretty tightly throughout my childhood as long as I was a minor, he and Mom were going to be the primary decision-makers about my career and future, though I was always respectfully looped in. We were, at that point in our father-son dynamic, at a crossroads. In fact, it would be my first acting job where I was no longer required to have a welfare worker on set, a freedom that I relished almost as much as the script.įor all his reservations about American Graffiti, Dad respected my enthusiasm.
I was exactly the right age for American Graffiti, 18, and I would be fresh out of high school when the production team was scheduled to film it, in the northern summer of 1972.
The whole movie took place in the space of one night near summer’s end, the last one before a group of childhood friends went their separate ways: some off to college, others to work or points uncertain. It was a world of souped-up hot rods and sleek Ford Thunderbirds, closer in feel to the 1950s than to the tumultuous years that lay ahead. George was looking to capture the lost innocence of the cruising culture that he and his friends had enjoyed as teenagers in his hometown of Modesto, 160 kilometres inland from San Francisco in California’s Central Valley. It was so radically different from any other script that I had ever come across, including the fact that it had the word “graffiti” in its title I had to look it up.īut I saw something fresh and gently subversive in the script and was fascinated by the way George Lucas had situated the story in 1962, a mere 10 years in the past, but an eternity ago in terms of social mores, given how fast American culture had evolved in the ’60s. He thought it was too episodic and loosely structured. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text sizeĭad hated the script.
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