The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(78)

Growth Via Graffiti


RON


Dad hated the script. He didn’t get American Graffiti at all. He thought it was too episodic and loosely structured. He was a strict formalist that way. He had taken a class with one of the eminent gurus of playwriting and screenwriting, a Hungarian émigré named Lajos Egri, the author of a revered book called The Art of Dramatic Writing. Egri believed in plot lines driven by a classic protagonist-antagonist conflict. American Graffiti had neither a clear protagonist nor anyone who truly fit the bill as a villain. It was so radically different from any other script that I had ever come across. Including the fact that it had the word graffiti in its title—I didn’t know what it meant and had to look it up.

But I was excited by what I read. I saw something fresh and gently subversive in the script that Dad didn’t, and I was fascinated by the way George Lucas had situated the story in 1962: a mere ten years in the past, but an eternity ago in terms of social mores, given how fast American culture was evolving in the ’60s. George was looking to capture the lost innocence of the cruising culture that he and his friends had enjoyed as teenagers in his hometown of Modesto, about a hundred miles inland from San Francisco in California’s Central Valley. It was a world of souped-up hot rods and sleek Ford Thunderbirds, closer in feel to the 1950s than to the tumultuous years that lay ahead.

The whole movie took place in the space of one night near summer’s end, the last one before a group of childhood friends went their separate ways—some off to college, others to work or points uncertain. I was exactly the right age for American Graffiti, eighteen, and I would be fresh out of high school when the production team was scheduled to film it, in the summer of ’72. In fact, it would be my first acting job where I was no longer required to have a welfare worker on set, a freedom that I relished almost as much as the script.

For all his reservations about American Graffiti, Dad respected my enthusiasm and recognized that a job is a job. We were, at that point in our father-son dynamic, at a crossroads. He had held the reins to my career pretty tightly throughout my childhood; as long as I was a minor, he and Mom were going to be the primary decision makers about my career and future, though I was always respectfully looped in. But Dad drew a circle around March 1, 1972, on the calendar—the date of my eighteenth birthday. On that day, he promised, he would step back and let me become the architect of my professional life. And he was as good as his word. Dad made it plain that he was always available to me if I wanted to confer with him, but nothing he said was to be taken as an edict. So he did not stand in the way of my signing on to play Steve, a young man who is headed east for college and keen to persuade his high school steady, Laurie, that they should see other people while apart.

That said, my getting cast in the movie was not a given. First, I had to meet with George Lucas and Geno Havens, the film’s assistant casting director. George was a slight, soft-spoken man with thick, curly dark hair and a beard. Geno stood less than five feet tall and walked with a crutch, having been born with brittle bone disease, a genetic disorder that impairs growth. In those days, George could be reticent and awkward around actors, so Geno served a valuable role as his go-between, translating George’s visions into directions that the actors could understand. He hung around for the duration as the film’s dialogue coach.

I had not yet been given the script when I met with George, and I had a concern. My agent had informed me that American Graffiti was going to be a musical. So the first thing I told George was that, The Music Man notwithstanding, I had no musical talent and could neither sing nor dance. “That’s okay,” George said. “It is a musical . . . but nobody sings.” He paused as I puzzled over what struck me as an incongruity. “It’s a musical in that it’s built around songs,” George explained. “The songs are playing on the radio. They’re part of the atmosphere, the setting for the characters. That’s why it’s called American Graffiti.”

This was my introduction to George’s outlier thinking. But I was put through the wringer. Apparently, they were conducting a nationwide search for young actors. At that point, I had my sights set on the character of Curt, the part that ultimately went to a sharp little guy from Beverly Hills named Richard Dreyfuss. Maybe two auditions later, I found myself in a room reading in front of Fred Roos, Geno’s boss. This was a good sign for two reasons. First, Fred was the hottest casting director around; he was an associate of Francis Ford Coppola, one of Graffiti’s producers, and had put together the unimpeachably great cast of The Godfather. Second, Fred knew me! A decade earlier, he had been the casting director for The Andy Griffith Show. So I felt like I had an ally.

I did a total of six auditions. There was one where I had to improvise with other potential cast members. There was another where I did a chemistry read with Cindy Williams, who they had in mind for Laurie, Steve’s girlfriend and the head cheerleader. Then they convened the finalists for one last round that was filmed by George’s friend and mentor Haskell Wexler, the great cinematographer and an Oscar winner for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We read in Haskell’s little studio in Hollywood.

Finally, to my delight, I received good news from Bill Schuller, my agent. After months of callbacks, each one of which made me more pessimistic about my chances, Bill told me that I had won the part of Steve.

He laid on a caveat, though. “It’s a very low-budget picture, Ronny,” Bill said. “They’re only paying the other actors $750 a week. I pressed hard and got you up to a thousand a week because you’re the only one with any name value.”