Quentin Tarantino on the movie that made George Lucas a “directorial superstar”
When Star Wars usurped Jaws to become the highest-grossing movie in cinema history following its release in the summer of 1977, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg marked themselves out as the biggest creative driving forces behind the industry’s game-changing shift into blockbuster territory. However, according to Quentin Tarantino, Lucas was already a “superstar” filmmaker long before then.
While his debut feature THX 1138 would become influential in its own right and establish the filmmaker’s penchant for sci-fi right out of the gate, it was his sophomore movie American Graffiti that cemented him as one of Hollywood’s brightest young talents behind the camera, with the coming-of-age dramatic comedy set in 1962 becoming a huge success at the box office and earning five Academy Award nominations, including Lucas’ first nod for ‘Best Director’.
Retrospectively reviewing the film for his New Beverly Cinema website, Tarantino noted its oxymoronic influence on the rest of the decade’s rose-tinted spiritual successors that would follow, espousing that “the sleeper success of American Graffiti kicked off the whole wave of ’50s nostalgia that threatened to overwhelm the entire decade, and yet Lucas’ film was set in ‘62.”
Regardless, that doesn’t alter his sentiment that “American Graffiti made George Lucas a directorial superstar and for good reason”. Comparing it to “a lot of great nostalgia pieces”, including Meet Me in St. Louis, Summer of ‘42, Cooley High, New York New York, and Dazed and Confused, the Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction writer/director offered that “it seems to get better the further it gets from its original release date”.
Explaining the machinations behind American Graffiti elevating Lucas into “superstar” territory, Tarantino reflects on how “George fills Graffiti with one clever stroke after another,” notably “the wall-to-wall ’50s rock-and-roll soundtrack that can be heard in the film from beginning to end”.
He added: “Usually emanating from various car radios. Including – in this radio soundscape – the voice of all-night disc jockey Wolfman Jack, who acts as the film’s de facto narrator.”
Further expanding on the aspects of its cinematic architecture that would go on to influence a slew of similar titles, Tarantino added: “Many other films would come along that tried to duplicate American Graffiti’s one-night structure, telling a story with a gang of characters, and then cross-cutting back and forth between them all picture long. But in other films, the different pockets of characters were usually given proper storylines. But the different vignettes of the shenanigans the Graffiti gang gets into never really rises to the level of story. It just poses different questions to the audience about what will or will not happen to the different characters as the night progresses.”
It may have been Star Wars that transformed Lucas into a household name, gave rise to one of the most enduringly popular properties of the modern era, and began his constant decades-long drive to push the boundaries of filmmaking technology to previously unseen heights, but Tarantino nonetheless stated his compelling case for why American Graffiti stands out as the work of a true cinematic “superstar”.
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