Steve bolander american graffiti soundtrack

1973 film by George Lucas

Not to be confused with graffiti in the United States.

American Graffiti is a 1973 American coming-of-agecomedy-drama film directed by George Lucas, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, written by Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz and Lucas, and starring Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, Cindy Williams and Wolfman Jack. Harrison Ford and Bo Hopkins also appear. Set in Modesto, California, in 1962, the film is a study of the cruising and early rock 'n' roll cultures popular among Lucas' age group at that time. Through a series of vignettes, it tells the story of a group of teenagers and their adventures throughout a single night.

While Lucas was working on his first film, THX 1138, Coppola asked him to write a coming-of-age film. The genesis of American Graffiti took place in Modesto in the early 1960s, during Lucas's teenage years. He was unsuccessful in pitching the concept to financiers and distributors but found favor at Universal Pictures after every other major film studio turned him down. Filming began in San Rafael, California, but the production crew was denied permission to shoot beyond a second day. As a result, production was moved to Petaluma, California. The film is the first movie to be produced by his Lucasfilm production banner.

American Graffiti premiered on August 2, 1973, at the Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland, and was released on August 11, 1973, in the United States. The film received widespread critical acclaim and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Produced on a $777,000 budget (equivalent to about $4.1 million in 2023 dollars), it has become one of the most profitable films ever. Since its initial release, American Graffiti has earned an estimated return well over $200 million in box-office gross and home video sales, not includ

Vitals

Ron Howard as Steve Bolander, conflicted high school graduate

Modesto, California, Summer 1962

Film:American Graffiti
Release Date: August 11, 1973
Director: George Lucas
Costume Designer: Aggie Guerard Rodgers

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

“Where were you in ’62?” asked the promotional materials for American Graffiti, widely released 50 years ago today on August 11, 1973. George Lucas followed his directorial debut THX 1138 with a neon-lit nostalgic ode to his rock-scored youth cruising the streets of Modesto, California in the early 1960s.

The film centers around four recent high school graduates who meet in the parking lot of Mel’s Drive-In on the last night of summer vacation: even-keeled Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss), confident drag-racer John Milner (Paul Le Mat), the fittingly nicknamed Terry “the Toad” Fields (Charles Martin Smith), and the aloof Steve Bolander (Ron Howard), who lends his stunning white ’58 Impala to Terry while he’s away at college.

It’s a moody night for Steve, battling with his decision to leave both Modesto and his relationship with Laurie (Cindy Williams), summing up the movie’s thesis when he observes “you just can’t stay seventeen forever.”

American Graffiti broke cinematic ground, indicating how “smaller stories” could still be wildly marketable (grossing $140 million internationally against its modest $777,000 budget in addition to being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture), catapulting its young cast to stardom, and evolving the relationship between music and movies.

Indeed, the soundtrack was of vital importance to Lucas, who allocated more than a tenth of the film’s budget to licensing the 43 songs used in the movie from artists like The Beach Boys, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Fats Do

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.

Almost a half century ago, American Graffiti, directed by George Lucas, hit the big screen. Sandwiched between the quiet THX 1138 (1971) and the blockbuster Star Wars (1977), Lucas’s second feature peered back a decade earlier, taking place at the tail end of the summer of 1962. The movie is filled with images of an era already experienced as bygone—roller-skating diner waitresses, souped-up jalopies cruising the streets—and, just as critically, with its sounds. The latter were accomplished thanks largely to Walter Murch (“Sound Montage and Re-recording,” the opening credits state opaquely), who helped revolutionize the role of sound in film. Age thirty at the time of its release, Murch had just completed similar work on The Godfather, directed by American Graffiti producer Francis Ford Coppola, and would soon move on to Coppola’s The Conversation. Born and raised in New York City, Murch fell in with the California movie mavericks during graduate school at USC.

Nearly twenty years after American Graffiti’s release, literary critic Fredric Jameson, in 1991, singled it out as a central example of what he termed “nostalgia films,” citing it as nothing less than the “inaugural film of this new aesthetic discourse.” The movie’s fiftieth anniversary—this August—provides an opportunity to look back, just as Lucas’s movie itself did.

American Graffiti is set in what Film Quarterly reviewer Michael Dempsey called, at the time of its release, the “last year of the fifties.” The movie follows one extended, momentous, and mostly sleepless night in the life of teenagers in a small town not far from San Francisco. Some want to hook up, others to brawl, and a few dangle at the precipice of life-altering decision-making. Dempsey’s qualified chronology nods to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the following year; just as un

1979 film by Bill L. Norton

More American Graffiti is a 1979 American coming-of-agecomedy film written and directed by Bill L. Norton, produced by Howard Kazanjian. The film, shot in multiple aspect ratios for comedic and dramatic emphasis, is the sequel to the 1973 film American Graffiti. While the first film followed a group of friends during the evening before they depart for college, the sequel depicts where they end up on consecutive New Years Eves from 1964 to 1967.

Most of the main cast members from the first film returned for the sequel, including Candy Clark, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, Charles Martin Smith, Bo Hopkins, and Harrison Ford. (Richard Dreyfuss was the only principal cast member from the original film not to appear in the sequel). It was the final live-action theatrical film in which Ron Howard would play a credited, named character.

Plot

The film, set over the course of four consecutive New Year's Eves from 1964 to 1967, depicts scenes from each of these years, intertwined with one another as though events happen simultaneously. The audience is protected from confusion by the use of a distinct cinematic style for each section. For example, the 1966 sequences echo the movie of Woodstock using split screens and multiple angles of the same event simultaneously on screen, the 1965 sequences (set in Vietnam) shot hand-held on grainy super 16 mm film designed to resemble war reporters' footage. The film attempts to memorialize the 1960s with sequences that recreate the sense and style from those days, with references to Haight-Ashbury, the campus peace movement, the beginnings of the modern women's liberation movement and the accompanying social revolt. One character burns his draft card, showing a younger audience what so many Americans had done on the television news ten years before the film's release. Other characters are shown frantically disposing of their marijuana bef