American Graffiti

American Graffiti (1973) takes place over one night in California in the summer of 1962. Four boys have finished school and will or will not leave for college the next morning. The film spends that night in cars, cruising the main street and circling a radio station. Its structure is unusual: four stories run in parallel and the radio holds them together. Wolfman Jack plays all night and the music never stops between scenes; there are over forty period songs, almost all of them source music the characters can hear too. George Lucas directed, four years before Star Wars. After the first screening Universal wanted to recut it and considered it fit for television rather than cinemas. Producer Francis Ford Coppola sided with Lucas against studio executive Ned Tanen and offered to buy the film, reimbursing the 775,000 dollar production cost. 20th Century Fox and Paramount made similar offers. Universal refused all of them. The result: a 777,000 dollar budget against a total, including home video, of over 200 million. Harrison Ford was working as a carpenter at the time and took the part on one condition, that he would not cut his hair. The character needed a flattop; the compromise was that Ford wore a Stetson throughout. It runs 112 minutes. Good for: period portraiture, films about being young, and the use of music. Less good for: there is barely a plot and the film circles for a night. The women exist inside the boys' stories. Nostalgia is itself the subject, and if you do not enter that register it feels long.