Movie Review by Bill Rendall

American Graffiti

Pop songs are used extensively in American Graffiti to establish that the movie is set in an earlier period of time. The soundtrack proved to be at least as effective as the visual props in transporting the audience back in time. This lesson was applied in later films such as The Wedding Singer which used pop songs from the eighties, and Forrest Gump which used pop songs to trace the story from the fifties through to the eighties.

The songs in American Graffiti are a major part of the diegetic soundtrack. They inhabit the movie's world either as a radio broadcast or as the music played at the school hop. The movie has no music score.

The director of American Graffiti, George Lucas, considered pop songs to be an essential part of the movie but the studio executives were very concerned about the cost of the song rights. The movie may not have been made if Francis Ford Coppola had not agreed to pay for any cost overruns.

American Graffiti is loosely based on George Lucas's experience as a teenager growing up in the early sixties. It was made at a time when a new group of directors were making their mark on film making. The old studio system had lost touch with what young people wanted in a film. The preview of American Graffiti resulted in more resistance from studio executives who didn't like it and considered it to be unreleasable.

Once again Francis Ford Coppola, who got a producer's credit for his efforts, came to the defence. The movie was released and was surprisingly successful at the box office. American Graffiti was made on a modest budget and returned a good profit for Lucas and Universal Studios. This helped fund Lucas' project to make Star Wars although he had to take it to 20th Century Fox to get it made. Harrison Ford had a small role in American Graffiti and he also went on to bigger things with Star Wars.

Richard Dreyfus gives a convincing performance as a teenager in American Graffiti even though he was in his mid twenties at the time. Soon afterwards he shot to fame in the Spielberg blockbusters Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

American Graffiti is the ultimate in coming-of-age movies. We see a snapshot of individuals who are soon to lose their childhood innocence. We see a snapshot of a nation which is soon to lose its innocence with the Kennedy assassination and the escalation of the divisive Vietnam War. We hear popular music which is soon to lose its innocence through the influence of drugs and psychedelia.

There is no real plot in American Graffiti. It just meanders along following teenage characters in slightly larger than life adventures on a late summer night. The movie is so effective at drawing me into its world that I feel strangely nostalgic when I see it. The movie's tagline pushes the nostalgia angle with the question "Where were you in '62?" Actually I was somewhere completely different than the Californian town the movie is set in and I was too young to remember much of anything. But I feel like I was there.

American Graffiti is essential viewing because it originated many of the rules of the teen movie. Avoid the disappointing sequel More American Graffiti. George Lucas is credited as an executive producer of the sequel but I suspect his involvement was minimal.

Director: George Lucas

Screenplay: George Lucas, Gloria Katz, Willard Huyck

Further viewing:

Dazed and Confused follows the American Graffiti blueprint with prominent use of music to establish the time frame. Dazed and Confused is set in the mid seventies. The cultural changes and the loss of innocence make an interesting contrast with American Graffiti.

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