Trivia / American Graffiti

• Breakthrough Hit: The film was a critical and commercial success and established George Lucas as a film powerhouse. However, most people know him more for the later Star Wars movies instead (despite Lucas not expecting it to be better-known).
• Budget-Busting Element: The film was made on a low budget ($777,000 in 1973 money) and more than a tenth of that ($80,000) was spent on music licensing.
• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • Cindy Williams originally wanted to play Carol, and was even willing to have braces put on her teeth for better effect.
  • George Lucas was so impressed by Richard Dreyfuss that he was offered a choice between playing Curt or Steve. Dreyfuss chose Curt as he figured it was closer to his true personality.
• Completely Different Title:
  • The film's Finnish title is Svengijengi -62 (Swing Gang '62).
  • In Sweden, the film was called "Sista natten med gänget", meaning "The Last Night with the Gang".
• Creator's Oddball: A realistically-grounded coming-of-age story from a director who's otherwise exclusively directed science-fiction and fantasy.
• Dawson Casting: Ron Howard and Charles Martin Smith, both 18 at the time, were the only two real teenage principal actors of the film. Most of the remaining principal cast members were in their 20s with the exceptions of the 12-year-old Mackenzie Phillips, and Harrison Ford, who turned 30 during filming.
• Executive Meddling: Universal trimmed four minutes from the film for its initial release. When it was re-released to theaters in 1978, following the success of Star Wars and Lucas' resulting clout, the cut scenes (including Toad dealing with a fast-talking car salesman and Bob Falfa serenading Laurie with "Some Enchanted Evening") were put back in. Producer Coppola openly sympathized with Lucas over the matter, as he himself also dealt with executive meddling while shooting The Godfather.
• The Merch: There's a line of American Graffiti die-cast model cars. Selections include a Dodge Aries.
• Revival by Commercialization: The movie and its best-selling soundtrack album sparked renewed interest in many of the performers featured, most notably Bill Haley & His Comets, whose 1954 recording "Rock Around the Clock" returned to the Top 40 charts in both the US and UK in 1974 thanks to renewed exposure in this film and the TV series Happy Days.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: George Lucas wanted a few Elvis Presley songs, but with the soundtrack being absurdly expensive right from the start, they were the first on the list to go.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Bob Falfa wears a cowboy hat because Harrison Ford refused to get a period-appropriate haircut and consequently be sidelined from working in other projects while waiting for it to grow back out.
• Star-Making Role:
  • For Richard Dreyfuss. Also the first significant non-child role for Ron Howard.
  • Despite the similarities, Graffiti was in no way related to Happy Days, except that Ron Howard (and, eventually, Cindy Williams) were involved with them both.
• Throw It In!:
  • Toad crashing his moped into the trash can during the opening credits was an actual, unscripted accident.
  • When John and Carol are sitting at the red light, a car full of girls pulls up next to them. One of the girls throws a water balloon through the window and it hits Carol. It was scripted to hit the side window and drench Phillips' face, who was then supposed to act really angry. However, she was accidentally hit square in the face and unable to refrain from laughing. Still, she kept going, ad-libbed through the scene and George Lucas kept it, as he did with many presumably garbled first takes in this movie.
  • When the guy robbing the liquor store tosses the bottle to Toad, he almost misses it. According to Charles Martin Smith, they had practiced the scene almost flawlessly, but Lucas decided to keep the one take that was the mistake.
  • Wolfman Jack's line, "Sticky little mothers, ain't they," when shaking Richard Dreyfuss's hand, was improvised.
  • The scene after the drag race in which John admits to Terry that he was losing when Falfa's car lost control and rolled was improvised by Paul Le Mat and Charles Martin Smith. They had not had time to prepare for that scene, as it had been scheduled to be shot at another time.
• Troubled Production: Although the shoot finished on time and on budget, it was no small miracle that it managed to do so:
  • The day before shooting was due to begin, a key crew member was arrested for growing marijuana, and setting the cameras up for location shooting on the first day took so long that they did not start shooting until 2am, putting them half a night behind before a single scene had been shot.
  • After a single night of outdoor filming in San Rafael, the city revoked their filming permit after a local bar owner complained that the road closures were costing him business, forcing them to move filming twenty miles away to Petaluma. On the second night, a local restaurant caught fire, and the noise of the fire engine sirens and the resulting traffic jams made filming impossible.
  • Inevitably for a film featuring so many driving scenes, the cars and equipment required to film them in motion seldom behaved as planned. An assistant cameraman was run over after he fell off the back of the camera truck during filming of a road scene, while filming of the climactic drag race was hampered when one of the cars broke an axle, then broke the replacement axle, and then nearly ran over two cameramen lying in the road to film its approach.
  • Among non-technical problems, Paul LeMat had to be rushed to hospital after suffering a walnut allergy flare-up, Richard Dreyfuss had his forehead gashed after LeMat threw him into a swimming pool the day before his closeups were to be filmed, LeMat, Ford, and Bo Hopkins were claimed (according to a biography on Lucas with no source citations) to be drunk most nights and every weekend, and had conducted climbing competitions to the top of the local Holiday Inn sign and one actor set fire to Lucas' motel room.
  • And when the film was screened for a test audience, Universal Studios representative Ned Tanen told Lucas the film was unreleaseable, prompting an outraged Francis Ford Coppola (the film's producer) to offer to buy the film from Universal and release it himself while Lucas, burned out from the chaotic film shoot, could only watch in shock. Instead, Universal offered a compromise whereby they could suggest modifications to the film before release. It was not until 1978, after the success of A New Hope, that Lucas was able to re-edit and release the film as he originally intended.
• Wag the Director: Harrison Ford refused to cut his hair in a 1950s style, reportedly because he was working on other projects at the time and didn't want to have to wait for his hair to grow back, so as a compromise he was allowed to wear a cowboy hat.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Apparently, Mark Hamill auditioned for a role in this movie.
  • Bob Balaban auditioned for Curt but was instead offered the role of Terry, which he turned down for fear of becoming typecast, a decision he later regretted.
  • Budgetary reasons meant that George Lucas had to drop the opening scene, in which the Blonde Angel, Curt's image of the perfect woman, drives through an empty drive-in cinema in her Ford Thunderbird, her transparency revealing she does not exist.
  • If the Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Alien Exodus had been published, it would've been Canon Welding of the highest order— a descendant of Curtis Henderson, Dale Hender, and a couple of allies would've escaped Earth as it was being taken over by computers (leading to what occurred in THX 1138- Hender was to be the first of the THX series), only to fall into a hyperspace disturbance, into the Star Wars galaxy and onto what would eventually become Corellia (briefly facing a beast from Willow as well). A further story then detailed how Dale's descendant, Cosmo Hender, eventually became the first of the Skywalkers.
• Working Title: Universal wasn't all that keen on American Graffiti as a title, so they sent Lucas a long list of suggestions that everyone at Lucasfilm hated, before the studio finally relented. Thanks to the Lucas memo listing the titles going viral, they've entered internet lore. Themes for the alternate titles include:
  • Summer: The Wild Summer, The Last Free Summer, The Cherry Coke Summer, The Summer Before, The Fires of Summer, The Games of Summer.
  • Night: Another Slow Night in Modesto, Last Night Together, Last Night to Make Out (or Last Knight to Make Out; there's a typo that appears to have been struck out), A Night to Get Ready
  • Burger City: Burger City, Burger City Blues, Make Out at Burger City, Goodbye BURGER CITY (that's how it's capitalized on the list).
  • Rock: Rock Around the Clock, The Rock Set, Rock Generation, No More Rock.
  • Titles That Sound Like Horror: Summer Blood, Wild Is the Blood, The Young and the Doomed, The Fast and the Deadly, The Violent Four, The Frantic Heart, The Savage Heart, The Toy Dreams Gone.
  • Titles That Sound Like Science Fiction: The Yesterday People, To Learn About the World, A New World Tomorrow.
  • Titles That Sound Like Porn: The Hot Time, Color Them Wild, The Boys and Their Girls, Make-Out.
  • Titles That Sound Like a Musical from The '40s: Pals 'n Gals; Those Were the Days; The Good Times; Wine, Women & Song.
  • Various Approaches: Ask Wolfman Jack, The Young Crowd, Look Back Once, Before We Grow Up, High School's Over, Kids, Buddies No More, Buddies, Supercola, The Race, Growing Up, The Drag Years, The Sock Hop, Collage, Misadventure, Rebus.
  • 1962: A Night in '62, Remember '62, Class of '62 and the monumentally inane 1962 Was Some Year.
• Write What You Know: The film was inspired by George Lucas' teenage years. Notably, the street racing car crash draws from Lucas’s own accident when he was 18, which caused him to give up racing and turn to filmmaking.
• Write Who You Know: John Milner is based on Lucas' friend John Milius, with an affinity for cars in lieu of surfing and firearms.

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