American Graffiti: The Unlikely Story of a Modern Classic

To mark the 50th anniversary of the original US release of George Lucas’s American Graffiti, Andy Willis discusses the movie, its maker and its historical context with film scholar Peter Krämer, author of American Graffiti: George Lucas, the New Hollywood and the Baby Boom Generation (Routledge, 2023).

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw dramatic changes in American cinema, culture and society, enormous creativity and progressive innovation being accompanied by a deep sense of crisis. During this time, under the guidance of Francis Ford Coppola, the young film school graduate George Lucas moved from his initial focus on documentary and experimental movies to making features for the major Hollywood studios.

When his first feature, the experimental Science Fiction movie THX 1138 (1971), met with devastating criticism after in-house screenings at Warner Bros. and then failed at the box office, Lucas considered abandoning his movie career. But he then developed two projects that he considered to have great commercial potential: a semi-autobiographical teen comedy about his youth in a small Californian town and an updated version of the Science Fiction serials he had seen on television as a child. Lucas had considerable difficulties getting the first of these financed, made and released, but, to everyone’s surprise, this star-less low-budget movie became one of the biggest box office hits of all time in the US and also one of the most highly acclaimed American films.

The success of American Graffiti in turn allowed Lucas to proceed with his Science Fiction project, which upon its release in 1977 changed popular cinema forever. The trajectory of Lucas’s career offers insights into the transformation of American popular culture in the 1970s, into the development of the vast baby boom generation he and the vast majority of his collaborators and of the audience for his films belonged to, and into the shaping of the modern world we still inhabit.