“Credits are strictly in alphabetical order, and I took a shot at having them list you as Ron rather than Ronny, but they want people to recognise your name from The Andy Griffith Show,” he said. I didn’t care about the money or my placement in the credits, which was another issue that Bill brought up. I pressed hard and got you up to a thousand a week because you’re the only one with any name value.”įine by me. “They’re only paying the other actors $US750 a week. “It’s a very low-budget picture, Ronny,” Bill said. After months of call-backs, each one of which made me more pessimistic about my chances, he told me that I had won the part of 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. 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.įinally, to my delight, I received good news from Bill Schuller, my agent. There was another where I did a chemistry read with Cindy Williams, who they had in mind for the part of head cheerleader Laurie. There was one where I had to improvise with other potential cast members. Second, Fred knew me! A decade earlier, he had been the casting director for The Andy Griffith Show in which I’d starred for eight years from 1960 to 1968]. Fred was the hottest casting director around, an associate of Francis Ford Coppola, one of Graffiti’s producers, and he had put together the unimpeachably great cast of The Godfather. Two auditions later, I found myself in a room reading in front of Fred Roos. 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. Apparently, they were conducting a nationwide search for young actors. This was my introduction to George’s outlier thinking. They’re part of the atmosphere, the setting for the characters.” “It’s a musical in that it’s built around songs,” George explained. “It is a musical … but nobody sings.” He paused when I looked puzzled. So the first thing I told George was that I could neither sing nor dance. My agent had informed me that American Graffiti was going to be a musical. In those days, George could be reticent and awkward around actors, so Geno served a valuable role as his go-between. George was a slight, soft-spoken man with thick, curly dark hair and a beard. First, I had to meet with George Lucas and Geno Havens, the film’s assistant casting director.
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Still, my getting cast in the movie was not a given.
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On that day, he promised, he would step back and let me become the architect of my professional life. But Dad drew a circle around March 1, 1972, on the calendar: the date of my 18th birthday. 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. We were, at that point in our father-son dynamic, at a crossroads. 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.įor all his reservations about American Graffiti, Dad respected my enthusiasm. I was exactly the right age for American Graffiti, 18, and I would be fresh out of high school when the production team was scheduled to film it, in the northern summer of 1972. 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. 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. 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, 160 kilometres inland from San Francisco in California’s Central Valley. 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 had to look it up.īut I saw something fresh and gently subversive in the script and was fascinated by the way George Lucas had situated the story in 1962, a mere 10 years in the past, but an eternity ago in terms of social mores, given how fast American culture had evolved in the ’60s. He thought it was too episodic and loosely structured. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text sizeĭad hated the script.
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