American Graffiti by Braden Anderson

"American Graffiti" A couple of high school grads spend one final night cruising the strip with their buddies before they go off to college.

This movie was definitely George Lucas' first real movie he had made out of film school. Filmed in 30 days for exactly 777,777.77 dollars, it became one of the most profitable films ever, grossing over 115 million dollars after its 1973 sleeper success and 1978 re-release. That's a considerable amount of money for a film with a simple and elementary plot; just a group of teenagers on their last night of summer in 1962 trying to figure out what to do with their lives. Lots of movies like this have been made with a similar plot, but most of them faded into obscurity or were just plain bad. So what did this movie have that others did not?

Well, to start off with, George Lucas picked a good year to set it in. (Not to mention it made for a catchy tagline). 1962 was between the innocence and conservatism of the Eisenhower years and the turmoil of the later sixties, say, after 1965, when America was escalating its fight in Vietnam, passing landmark civil rights legislation, and protesting and assassinating everything in its way. No, this was a year of promise, dubbed "Camelot" by First Lady Jackie Kennedy. Kids fought authority, but more in a playful way, and still showed respect for it, a sharp contrast with the latter half of the sixties. It seemed like all they did was cruise up and down main drag and go to sock hops at the school, listening to some of the most influential artists of all time. It was the fact that it was just simple, good, clean fun. And when George Lucas made this film in 1972, people were ready to remember that innocence they had just ten years before. Not to mention, it's just a funny movie.

Another reason why I believe that this movie was so good was because George Lucas was under the gun. He had under a million dollars, 30 days, and a full length movie to make just covering one night. He had to cut costs, so he opted to use TechniScope cameras and film, which only used half a 35 mm frame, which Lucas believed would give it a documentary feel when shown in widescreen. I think that he succeeded in this, as the film has this certain feel that it was still professional, but at the same time it wasn't. Kind of like a tuxedo t-shirt. He also used outtakes; he was so pressed for time that he needed fillers, and some of the outtakes were better than the real takes. Several of the shots with the character Toad were unplanned outtakes that just fit his character. The opening shot when Toad lost control of his scooter and ran into a trash can was in fact an outtake, but looked surprisingly planned.