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SHOWTIMES<br />
Saturday, Nov 14, 5:15pm, CP- Lauderdale<br />
Following the film will be<br />
The Mel’s drive-in Party<br />
AMERICAN<br />
RETRO<br />
FILM STUDIO<br />
Sponsored by<br />
PARTY<br />
SEE PAGE 7<br />
INCLUDED<br />
AMERICAN GRAFFITI CANDY CLARKE TRIBUTE FILM<br />
Director: George Lucas / USA / 1973 / 110 min / BluRay<br />
PLOT: A couple of high school grads spend one final<br />
night cruising the strip with their buddies before they go<br />
off to college.<br />
Ok, the plot of this movie is simple, pure and true in so<br />
many ways. But as you will read Roger Ebert’s original<br />
(and excellent) review below, you learn the plot is secondary<br />
to the era. When I saw AMERICAN GRAFFITI it was<br />
the most joyous, yet melancholy movie moment of my life.<br />
And though I was 23 years old, when I saw Candy Clark<br />
as Debbie on-screen, I instantly developed a movie crush<br />
and regressed to my high school memories.<br />
Roger ebert’s review My first car was a ‘54 Ford and I<br />
bought it for $435. It wasn’t scooped, channeled,<br />
shaved, decked, pinstriped, or chopped, and it didn’t<br />
have duals, but its hubcaps were a wonder to behold.<br />
When I went to see George Lucas’s “American Graffiti” that whole world – a world that now seems incomparably distant and innocent – was brought back<br />
with a rush of feeling that wasn’t so much nostalgia as culture shock. Remembering my high school generation, I can only wonder at how unprepared we<br />
were for the loss of innocence that took place in America with the series of hammer blows beginning with the assassination of President Kennedy.<br />
The great divide was November 22, 1963,and nothing was ever the same again. The teenagers in “American Graffiti” are, in a sense, like that cartoon<br />
character in the magazine ads: the one who gives the name of his insurance company, unaware that an avalanche is about to land on him. The options<br />
seemed so simple then: to go to college, or to stay home and look for a job and cruise Main Street and make the scene.<br />
The options were simple, and so was the music that formed so much of the way we saw ourselves. “American Graffiti”‘s sound track is papered from one<br />
end to the other with Wolfman Jack’s nonstop disc jockey show, that’s crucial and absolutely right. The radio was on every waking moment. A character in<br />
the movie only realizes his car, parked nearby, has been stolen when he hears the music stop: He didn’t hear the car being driven away. The music was as<br />
innocent as the time. Songs like “Sixteen Candles” and “Gonna Find Her” and “The Book of Love” sound touchingly naive today; nothing prepared us for<br />
the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later. The Rolling Stones of 1972 would have blown WLS off the air in 1962.<br />
“American Graffiti” acts almost as a milestone to show us how far (and in many cases how tragically) we have come. Stanley Kauffmann, who liked it,<br />
complained in the New Republic that Lucas had made a film more fascinating to the generation now between thirty and forty than it could be for other<br />
generations, older or younger. But it isn’t the age of the characters that matters; it’s the time they inhabited. Whole cultures and societies have passed<br />
since 1962. “American Graffiti” is not only a great movie but a brilliant work of historical fiction; no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie’s success<br />
in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant.<br />
On the surface, Lucas has made a film that seems almost artless; his teenagers cruise Main Street and stop at Mel’s Drive-In and listen to Wolfman<br />
Jack on the radio and neck and lay rubber and almost convince themselves their moment will last forever. But the film’s buried structure shows an innocence<br />
in the process of being lost, and as its symbol Lucas provides the elusive blonde in the white Thunderbird -- the vision of beauty always glimpsed<br />
at the next intersection, the end of the next street. Who is she? And did she really whisper “I love you” at the last traffic signal? In “8 1/2,” Fellini used Claudia<br />
Cardinale as his mysterious angel in white, and the image remains one of his best; but George Lucas knows that for one brief afternoon of American<br />
history angels drove Thunderbirds and could possibly be found at Mel’s Drive-In tonight... or maybe tomorrow night, or the night after.<br />
a Few Important Nominations & awards<br />
CANDY CLARK: Academy Award Nomination Best<br />
Performance by an actress in a supporting role<br />
Francis Ford Coppola & Gary Kurtz:<br />
Academy Award Nomination for Best Picture<br />
George Lucas: Academy Award Nomination<br />
Best Director<br />
Francis Ford Coppola & Gary Kurtz: Golden Globe<br />
Award Best Picture – Musical or Comedy<br />
Richard Dreyfus: Golden Globe Nomination Best Actor<br />
26<br />
with Special Guest, Candy Clark<br />
Starring: Richard dreyfus, Ron Howard, Candy Clark, Charles<br />
Martin Smith, Paul Le Mat, Cindy williams, Harrison Ford, Mackenzie Phillips, wolfman Jack
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