Name: On Cinema Followup: George Lucas
Uploaded: 2012-06-12T15:51:29.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'On Cinema Followup: George Lucas' from Tim Heidecker on Comedy Buff. Published 2012-06-12. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'On Cinema Followup: George Lucas' from Tim Heidecker on Comedy Buff. Published 2012-06-12. Transcript available.

Hey everybody, welcome to this very special follow-up episode of On Cinema,
calling it a
On Cinema follow-up, regarding American Graffiti, and I'm so glad everyone
enjoyed the live from
Modesto, it was really fun. But I've been getting a lot of tweets and messages
from people suggesting
that American Graffiti was in fact not shot in Modesto. So I reached out to a
couple different
people, it took a lot of work, but I got a very special guest with me and he's
going to settle a
couple of some confusion that's out there regarding where American Graffiti was
shot.
People have been sending me these websites and things like IMDB that suggest
that it was not shot,
but it just goes to show you that you should never trust anything you see on
the internet.
My frequent guest, Greg Turkington, knows a lot about this movie in particular,
and I think it goes to show you when somebody suggests, tells you the truth,
you should just
accept it as the truth and not try to be a know-it-all and go on the internet
and claim that
they're wrong. So I would like to welcome my guest, he's the director and
producer of so many great
movies, Mr. George Lucas. Thank you, George, for coming into the garage here.
Sorry for the mess.
I wanted to ask you, just before we get into the whole Modesto thing, first of
all,
shooting this film in Modesto, even where the very idea for the movie came from.
Can you talk a little
bit about where the idea for American, where the idea for American Graffiti
came from?
I guess the anthropologist side of me never went away, and I was very
interested in the fact that in the 70s,
when I was working in the film industry, obviously we've been through the 60s,
and that whole innocence of the
50s, the mating rituals of the 50s, uniquely American mating rituals of meeting
the opposite sex in cars,
was very fascinating to me. I really liked this kind of lost ritual that had
gone on in the United States
between 1940 and basically the beginning of the 60s. And I saw the beginning of
the 60s as a real
transition in the culture and the way because of the Vietnam War and all the
things we were going through.
And I wanted to make a movie about it. And I had always liked the idea of Fellini's
film,
which is kind of the same issue about growing up, taking responsibility and
moving out of the house
and that whole trauma. And it was one of the themes that was in my first film,
THX, and I wanted to
expand on it. Francis had said, you know, why don't you do a regular movie, you
know, because THX was
pretty out there for a theatrical film. And Francis said, you can do a regular
movie. Why don't you do a
comedy? Why don't you do something that's really accessible to people? And so
American Graffiti was
the closest thing I could think of to an accessible movie. And the problem was
that the studios didn't see
it that way. They said it was, you know, not about anything. There was no story.
You couldn't tell four
different stories and cut them up like that to where you intercut them and they
weren't related to each
other. They said that was impossible. They said you couldn't put that much
music in a movie. It was just,
you can't just have a music track going through the whole thing. There were a
lot of issues that were very
controversial at the time that kept it from being made. And so for two years, I
struggled to get it
off the ground and get it made. And finally, I got a studio to approve the
project. They liked the
script. They wanted me to do it. But they needed a name to go with it. And then
Francis came back
after doing The Godfather and said, I'll, you know, stand up and be the
producer on it.
Cool.
Then I panicked and realized that I needed a better script and hired some
friends of mine
to rewrite it and make it work.
Right. Well, can you talk a little bit about, you know, shooting the movie in
Modesto and
some of the challenges that you had? I mean, you're from there and you must
have known a lot of people
and knew kind of how the city was laid out. And did that pose, was that helpful
in making the movie?
I mean, and you know, just like what were the challenges to make this movie? It
seemed because
if it was one of your first movies, it must have been hard.
Well, the hardest thing was that it was all at night. You know, it was very
short schedule. It was
28 nights. And it was short in that the sun went down at nine o'clock at night,
came up at five
o'clock in the morning. That made me a very short day.
Yeah.
Or night.
And I only had, you know, 28 of them. So it was a very, very, very fast and
short schedule,
especially considering it was all on location with cars that broke down and all
the drama
that would go on in that kind of situation.
Right.
So it was a, it was a, just physically a very difficult thing to get through.
All right. Well, thank you very much, George, for coming in. And maybe next
time you can come
back, we could talk about some of, some of your other movies. And again, it's
just been
a real pleasure. And thanks everybody for listening. I hope that clears it up
and stay tuned. Well,
thanks for listening and also listen for next week for the latest episode of On
Cinema. Thank
On Cinema. Thank you.
Bye.