There are moments in life that I think you can reflect back on and understand that they help shape and define the person you are. I think movies are like that as well. Movies I think can capture the tone and feeling of the time they were created. If the movie is an enduring on then it is probably not due to it’s technical prowess but due to the honesty depicted on screen, the truthfulness I will stand from the highest mountain that George Lucas’s American Graffiti is the most honest depiction of what it was like to be young in the early sixties. Th music, fashion, optimism are all woven into a honest tapestry honestly intermixed with a ballet of cars , rock and roll and the nocturnal rantings of the one and the only Wolfman Jack.
I watch this film at least once a year, and even after 44 years after it’s initial release, the scene where a DC-7 ascends into a blue California sky haunts me. As we see the yearbook photos of the lead male characters appear accompanied by a paragraph of their fate, you understand that you just witness one of the last summer nights of American innocence. Vietnam, Dealy Plaza and Watergate were soon to be on the American horizon.
The film release in 1973, was one of the most successful movies ever made. Produced on a budget of $750,000 the film would go on to make $55 million in the domestic market at a time when the average ticket was $1.77. The movie my any definition or criteria was a massive success. Graffitti allowed it’s maker George Lucas to unleash another movie on the world. A movie that would change a lot of things.
It’s been more than 40 years this month since “Star Wars” first exploded into theaters, but the swashbuckling sci-fi films from writer-director George Lucas have left a legacy no other blockbuster has surpassed.
I can talk about the use of classical myth, groundbreaking technology, financial impact and I can even talk about what St Wars shifted the movie business and in my eyes not for the better. I look back at the beginning of my love affair with the movies, with a bit of sadness knowing that cinemas best days arre behind her.
In the summer of 1973, I had an epiphany. I was rummaging around in my father’s closet looking for something illicit and adult and unexpectedly I can across an old Brownie 8mm movie camera. I had remember this camera from my early memory when my father was shooting movies at a family event. I gathered by pennies together and bought a roll of film for the camera, the cost at that time was $4.00. What was interesting about 8mm film is that it was really 16mm film split down the middle at the lab. You shot for about 90 seconds and them would have to in a dark room turn the film around. Often fumbling fingers in a dark room spilled the reel and it’s contents onto the floor.
The first film I made was a thwarted version of the Six Million Dollar Man…..I quickly got bored …turned my sister into flower and then summarily ran her over with a lawn mower. It was a clumsy first attempt but oooh so cathartic. I was thrilled that I could create these images, shape them and define perception in some kind of rough way. I was hooked.
I would go on to make a variety of stop motion animations featuring GI Joe’s and forms of Plasticine. As I entered high school, by fellow aspiring filmmakers decided to make a science fiction version of the Book of Revelations (okay we were far too serious to be teenagers).
Most of my fellow movie nerds were deeply influenced by the environmental space “Silent Running”. It’s dark account of an space ship carrying the last vestiges of plant and wildlife was a compelling one. Starring Bruce Dern and directed by 2001 veteran Douglas Trumbull the movie really appealed to many friends of mine, primarily because of the movie’s dark tone. I liked the movie, I frankly thought it was a tad morose and secretly would have rather watch more lighter science fiction epics like Robinson Crusoe on Mars or Franklin Schaffner’s Planet of The Apes…..but for the angst riddled teenager it was perfect. I had to tolerate multiple playings of Joan Baez singing the track behind the end credits.
We raised the money to make the movie by going to neighborhood bingo games, surprisingly we were rather lucky. We bought all the material for our sets when a local department store were selling all their displays at much reduced prices. We shot the our movie, pretentiously title DREAM UNTIL TOMORROW and then proceeded to edit it. The movie was shot silent with the audio put in afterwards. It was very basic filmmaking.
We threw everything we had into this project. One of my partners made a twelve foot long model out of balsa wood, emulating the spaceship Valley Forge out of the movie Silent Running. I read an article in Super-8 Filmmaker Magazine about painting on film with diluted bleach to make explosions and lasers. Painstakingly we drew lasers on the movie. I wrote Arista Records in London to get permission to use tracks from the Alan Parson’s Project on the movie. Quite generously they granted permission. It was amazing fun. We premiered the film in May of 1977, to a solid response. Two weeks after our movie premiered…another movie made it’s appearance….Star Wars
Then summer of 1977 was a heady one. The streets were filled with people lining up to see a movie. Disco versions of the soundtrack made their noxious appearance. North America was gripped by this cinematic fever. The summer wind blew a great change into the world of film. As I watched the opening scene in the movie…my jaw dropped and I lurched forward in my seat at the Uptown Theatre. The world at that moment changed and a huge paradigm shift occurred. After that summer nothing really was ever the same in the world of movies. Movies became bigger, screens shrank and the dreaded multiplex bloomed.
This week I had the deep pleasure of screening Patrick Read Johnson’s 5-25-77. The movie tells the story of a young Pat Johnson and his deep love of movies. While the title refers to the first release date
of Star Wars, the film is about a young man’s abiding and sometimes fanatical passion for everything cinematic. The journey that the lead character (played by John Francis Daley) made was more than familiar one, in many ways for me it was almost autobiographical. While the movie in some ways looks at the impact made by STAR WARS, but it really has much more alignment to American Graffiti. This is truly a film about what it was to be young and to love movies. It tells of a seduction by movies like 2001, JAWS, Planet of The Apes and Close Encounters of The Third Kind.
The movie is a well made tribute to both passion and a time in the movie universe that was naive, reaching and somewhat awkward. It is a telling and truthful tribute to a slice of American aspiration , at a point in American history where the country deeply wanted to regain it’s innocence. It pulls the audience in by the creative use of movie aspect ratios and engages the audience in the whimsy and angst that is the lead characters fantasy life. For me there is much in the movie that is hauntingly familiar.
It is a great movie…..a movie that should have a lot of play on screens during the summer movie season, I frankly could think of no better cinematic time that watching this movie at a drive-in and fondly reminiscing about a time when movies were truly fun. I loved watching this movie and also I loved living it.
Want to to book this movie and I think you should …..please contact Jason Leaf at Avatar Films jason@avatarfilms.com .
