George Lucas grew up in a small town, Modesto, California, where on Friday nights the guys hopped in their freshly washed and waxed cars and cruised the streets, rock and roll blaring out of the rolled down windows. Everyone knew each other so the streets were alive as though one big party were happening.
Lucas, with William Huyck and Gloria Katz, would later write the screenplay for “American Graffitti,” a remarkable little film set in 1962 and a small town in California on the last night of summer before school begins. Loosely based on experiences Lucas had as a teenager, the film would become a touchstone for a generation, having an impact on pop culture no one expected. For the generations after the 1970s that have seen the film, it has the same curious effect, and without sounding self-important or condescending, that impact will grow as they, and we, continue to age.
Why? We knew people like this. We were people like this.
The film is familiar for almost anyone who ever went to high school, perhaps more so to small town natives. We all knew the town tough guy who hung around with the high school kids long after he had left school because he needs the adoration they give him. There was the class geek: glasses-wearing, short, trying a little too hard to please, but likable just the same.
The class jock, who would also be the class president dating the head of the cheerleader sqaud, and the intellectual, who could not wait to get out of the town and see what the world held for him. All of us, sometime in our lives at school, knew people like this, perhaps even were people like this.