‘American Graffiti’ 50th anniversary: Before ‘Star Wars,’ George Lucas directed this Best Picture Oscar nominee

One of the most cherished movies of 1973 is “American Graffiti,” starring Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Richard Dreyfuss and Candy Clark. Written by George Lucas, Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck and directed by Lucas, the film is a nostalgic drama set during a 1962 high school graduation in central valley California. Released 50 years ago in August 1973, “American Graffiti” was a hit at the box office, making $115 million worldwide on a budget of just $777,000. After his first feature “THX 1138” flopped hard in 1971, Lucas saw huge success with his follow-up, which paved the way a few years later for his pet project “Star Wars” to finally get made. Read on for our celebration of the “American Graffiti” 50th anniversary.

Critics adored “American Graffiti,” including Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, who said it “acts almost as a milestone to show us how far we have come.” Dave Kehr in Chicago Reader wrote that it’s “a brilliant work of popular art, it redefined nostalgia as a marketable commodity and established a new narrative style.” And Jay Cocks in TIME Magazine declared, “This superb and singular film catches not only the charm and tribal energy of the teenage 1950s but also the listlessness and the resignation that underscored it all like an incessant bass line in one of the rock-‘n’-roll songs of the period.”

With the movie’s massive popularity among critics and audiences, “American Graffiti” was going to be a big awards player going into early 1974. It had stiff competition from “The Sting” and “The Exorcist,” both released in the final week of 1973, but “American Graffiti” showed promise at the precursor ceremonies, receiving four Golden Globe nominations, including Best Director for Lucas, and winning two prizes — Most Promising Male Newcomer for Paul Le Mat and Best Comedy Picture. “American Graffiti” also received nominations at the WGA Awards and DGA Awards, and Williams scored a BAFTA Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Despite being released in the summer, “American Graffiti” looked primed to be a major contender at the Oscars.

At the 46th Academy Awards, “American Graffiti” showed up in five categories: Best Film Editing, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress for Clark, Best Director and Best Picture. Although it didn’t appear in more technical or acting categories, the movie did well enough, especially considering the competition from popular 1973 releases that could’ve gotten into Director and Picture like “The Day of the Jackal,” “Serpico,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Paper Moon.” The question was, could “American Graffiti” win anything?

I would argue the movie’s best chance at a victory was in the Best Film Editing category, given how many characters and storylines “American Graffiti” juggles throughout its two-hour running time. With more than a dozen major characters, the editing needed to be creative and focused to keep the viewer interested, and Marcia Lucas and Verna Fields (the latter winning Best Film Editing for “Jaws” two years later) do a commendable job with Lucas’ sprawling vision. The project also could’ve won in the Best Original Screenplay category, given so much of its success is in the written word, and since that category wasn’t overly competitive.

Unfortunately for “American Graffiti,” however, this was the year of “The Sting,” the period crime drama directed by George Roy Hill that reunited Paul Newman and Robert Redford from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” The Christmas release was the major hit of awards season, especially at the Oscars, where it received a whopping 10 nominations and won seven. In fact, outside of Best Supporting Actress, “The Sting” beat “American Graffiti” for everything else it was nominated for — Best Film Editing, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture.

Academy voters likely went with “The Sting” because it opened in December and was fresher in everyone’s minds, and it’s a bigger, showier period drama enterprise than the quieter and more rambling “American Graffiti.” There’s nothing about the nostalgic teen drama that was going to ensure an Oscar win in Best Director and Best Picture, as “The Sting” was too far out ahead in the weeks leading up to the ceremony on April 2, 1974. The film didn’t have a shot in Best Supporting Actress either, with Clark facing stiff competition from two gifted child actors — Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” and Tatum O’Neal in “Paper Moon.” Despite the obvious category fraud for O’Neal, who appears in pretty much every scene of “Paper Moon,” she became the youngest ever competitive Oscar winner at age 10 for her performance.

“The Sting” might have been named the Best Picture of 1973 at the Academy Awards, but “American Graffiti” has throughout the decades continued to be a favorite among movie lovers and is today considered a classic of the 1970s. It’s an especially fascinating film today given that so much of Lucas’ legacy is “Star Wars,” but “American Graffiti” proved he was capable of so much more than space operas and science fiction stories. Alan R. Howard said in The Hollywood Reporter, “The movie is a comic poem which celebrates the past but also catalogues its textures with telling precision. ‘American Graffiti’ looks like no other movie, an achievement which is always the best measure of a truly gifted director.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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