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American Graffiti (1973) and Grease (1978): The Fifties as Myth and Comment

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The New Hollywood Historical Film

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Abstract

The 1970s nostalgia boom in American popular culture centred on a popular craze for the 1950s. This wave of nostalgia reflected a tendency to idealise the era as one of youthful innocence, social stability, economic security and global dominance, and was the inspiration for a wave of Fifties films. The two most emblematic and commercially successful of these films—American Graffiti (Lucas, 1973) and Grease (Kleiser, 1978)—are the subject of this chapter, which accounts for their significance with audiences in the 1970s. Demonstrating the complexity and diversity of the Fifties, it contends that the popularity and legitimacy of nostalgia for the 1950s arose from the era’s oppositional relationship to the social upheaval, political turbulence and economic uncertainty of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Christine Sprengler uses the term Populuxe which ‘marries ‘populism’, ‘popularity’ and ‘luxury’ to describe the material objects produced between 1954 and 1964, a materialistic ‘golden age”. See Christine Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), p. 42.

  2. 2.

    Daniel Marcus, Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), pp. 2 and 9–10.

  3. 3.

    This claim is based on the film’s over fifty to one investment to profit ratio. See William Baer, ‘An Interview with Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’, Creative Screenwriting, vol. 6, no. 1 (February 1999), p. 38. The rental figure is from Appendix 12 of David A Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002), p. 499.

  4. 4.

    See Roger Greenspun, ‘American Graffiti’, The New York Times, 13 August, 1973, www.nytimes.com.

  5. 5.

    Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 501.

  6. 6.

    Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2000), p. 71.

  7. 7.

    Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia, p. 43.

  8. 8.

    ‘The Nifty Fifties’, Life, 16 June, 1972, pp. 38–46.

  9. 9.

    Andrew H. Malcom, ‘Students Revive Good Old 1950s’, The New York Times, 17 May, 1971, The New York Times, www.nytimes.com (home page).

  10. 10.

    Michael Silverman, ‘The Uses of Cinematic History’, Intellect, vol.10, no. 2 (1975), p. 241.

  11. 11.

    Jeffrey St. John, ‘The Nostalgia Backlash’, The New York Times, 7 April, 1971, www.nytimes.com (home page).

  12. 12.

    Gerald Clarke, ‘The Meaning of Nostalgia’, Time, 3 May, 1971, www.time.com (home page).

  13. 13.

    Two articles detailing the production of American Graffiti: Larry Sturhan, ‘The Filming of ‘American Graffiti’: An Interview with Director George Lucas’, Filmmakers Newsletter, vol. 7, no. 5 (1974), pp. 19–27, and Stephen Farber, ‘George Lucas: The Stinky Kid Hits the Big Time’, Film Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 3 (1974), pp. 2–9.

  14. 14.

    Sturhan, ‘The Filming of ‘American Graffiti”, p. 25.

  15. 15.

    For analysis of the cultural meaning of James Dean, along with Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe in the early 1970s, see Marcus, Happy Days, p. 17.

  16. 16.

    David Brudnoy, for examples, makes a favourable comparison between American Graffiti and the ‘slick, crass and prettied up’ nostalgia film, Class of ‘44 (1973). See David Brudnoy, “So Long, Miss American Pie,” National Review, 9 November, 1973, p. 1251.

  17. 17.

    Joseph Kanon, ‘On the Strip’, The Atlantic Monthly, October 1973, p. 125.

  18. 18.

    See, for example: Champlin, ‘A New Generation’.

  19. 19.

    Marcus, Happy Days, p. 10.

  20. 20.

    Sturhan, ‘The Filming of ‘American Graffiti” p. 24.

  21. 21.

    See Stanley Kauffmann, ‘Stanley Kauffmann on Films’, The New Republic, 10 November, 1973, pp. 22 + 33.

  22. 22.

    Kanon, ‘On the Strip’, p. 125.

  23. 23.

    Champlin, ‘A New Generation’.

  24. 24.

    Kanon, ‘On the Strip’, p. 125.

  25. 25.

    Marcus, Happy Days, p. 10.

  26. 26.

    Marcus, Happy Days, p. 11.

  27. 27.

    See Robert Hatch, ‘Films’, Nation, 24 September, 1973, p. 283.

  28. 28.

    See, for example; Brudnoy, ‘So Long’.

  29. 29.

    See Sturhan, ‘The Filming of ‘American Graffiti”, p. 19, and Farber, ‘George Lucas’, p. 6.

  30. 30.

    Kauffmann, ‘Stanley Kauffmann on Films’, p. 22.

  31. 31.

    Sturhan, ‘The Filming of ‘American Graffiti”, p. 27.

  32. 32.

    Colin L. Westerbeck Jnr, ‘The Screen: The American Dream’, Commonweal, 5 October, 1973, p. 13.

  33. 33.

    Jay Cocks, ‘Fabulous ‘50s’, Time, 20 August, 1973, www.time.com (home page).

  34. 34.

    The practice of producing ‘new-old films’ that summon the ‘memories of media forms’ is characterised by film scholar Marc Le Suer as ‘deliberate archaism’. Quoted in Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia, pp. 83–86.

  35. 35.

    Greenspun, ‘American Graffiti’; Sturhan, ‘The Filming of American Graffiti’, p. 20.

  36. 36.

    Jon Landau, ‘“American Graffiti: A Sixties Novella”’, Rolling Stone, 13 September, 1973, American Graffiti clippings file/AMPAS. See also Kauffmann, ‘Stanley Kauffmann’, p. 22.

  37. 37.

    Landau, ‘“American Graffiti”’.

  38. 38.

    Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia, pp. 48–58.

  39. 39.

    Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia, p. 57.

  40. 40.

    Sprengler, Screening Nostalgia, p. 45.

  41. 41.

    Pauline Kael, ‘Current Cinema’, The New Yorker, 29 October, 1973, p. 154. In his interview with Larry Sturhan, Lucas acknowledged the validity of Kael’s criticism; see Sturhan, ‘The Filming of ‘American Graffiti”, p. 22.

  42. 42.

    Kael, ‘Current Cinema’, p. 155.

  43. 43.

    Frank P. Tomasulo, ‘1976: Movies and Cultural Contradictions’, in Lester D. Friedman (ed.), American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), p. 178.

  44. 44.

    Bervele Houston and Marsha Kinder, ‘American Graffiti’, Film Heritage, vol. 9, no. 32 (1974), p. 35.

  45. 45.

    Kael, ‘Current Cinema’, p. 156.

  46. 46.

    Sturhan, ‘The Filming of ‘American Graffiti”, p. 24.

  47. 47.

    Houston and Kinder, ‘“American Graffiti”’, pp. 33–35.

  48. 48.

    “Grease’ Film Spurs B.O. For B’way Original’, Variety, 19 July, 1978, pp. 1 + 107.

  49. 49.

    Thomas S. Hischak, The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 301.

  50. 50.

    ‘Behind the Scenes of “Grease”’, American Cinematographer, no. 8, vol. 59 (1978), p. 756.

  51. 51.

    ‘Rock Tycoon’, Newsweek, 31 July, 1978, p. 41.

  52. 52.

    Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 55.

  53. 53.

    Peter Krämer, The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (London: Wallflower, 2005), p. 41.

  54. 54.

    Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 209.

  55. 55.

    The success of the revisionist musical Cabaret and the Billie Holliday biopic Lady Sings the Blues in 1972 indicated musicals were following the broader trend in Hollywood towards more ‘adult’ themes and content.

  56. 56.

    ‘Rock Tycoon’, p. 43.

  57. 57.

    Vincent Canby, ‘Having Fun With the 50s’, in The New York Times Film Reviews 1977–78 (New York: The New York Times and Arno Press, 1979), p. 223.

  58. 58.

    Canby, ‘Having Fun With the 50s’.

  59. 59.

    ‘The Yellow Brick Road to Profit’, Time, 23 January, 1978, Grease microfiche, British Film Institute Library, London.

  60. 60.

    Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 5.

  61. 61.

    Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001), pp. 78–101.

  62. 62.

    Late 1970s rock musicals or movies set during the 1950s, included Grease, American Hot Wax (1978) and The Buddy Holly Story (1978); the music and subcultures of the 1960s was represented by I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) and Hair (1979); and features such as Saturday Night Fever and The Wiz were influenced by contemporary musical trends. A factor that significantly enhanced the commercial prospects of these productions was the improvements in sound recording and playback in the latter part of the 1970s, as monaural or monophonic sound was increasingly replaced by Dolby-encoded stereo; there were 800 dolby-equipped theatres by the end of 1978. In the end, however, the success of rock or pop musicals or orientated movies was, at best, mixed. 1978, for example, the year Grease was released, the biggest musical hit of the 1970s, also witnessed one of the decade’s biggest flops in The Wiz. Essentially an updated version of the Wizard of Oz with an all black cast, the film produced a net loss of $10.4 million against an investment of $24 million. See Cook, Lost Illusions, pp. 219 and 386.

  63. 63.

    Majorie Rosen, ‘Musical Grease’, American Film, vol. 3, no. 4 (1978), p. 12.

  64. 64.

    Canby, ‘Having Fun With the 50s’.

  65. 65.

    See ‘Behind the Scenes’, p. 756, and Edwin Miller, ‘Flippin’ for the ‘Fifties’, Seventeen, April 1978, p. 222.

  66. 66.

    For a lucid, in-depth analysis of postmodern film see M. Keith Booker, Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange (London: Praeger, 2007).

  67. 67.

    See Al Auster, ‘Grease’, Cineaste, vol. 9, no. 1 (1978), pp. 41–42; Richard Schickel, ‘Black Hole’, Time, 19 June, 1978, p. 45.; Gene Siskel, ‘Travolta Cuts through flaws in surburbanised ‘Grease”, Chicago Tribune, 16 June, 1978, sec 3, p. 1; Terry Curtis, ‘How ‘Grease’ Got Slick’, Village Voice, 19 June, 1978, Grease clippings file, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverley Hills, California.

  68. 68.

    The film credited with launching rock and roll into the mainstream was Blackboard Jungle (1955), which was famous for its use of Bill Haley’s smash hit ‘Rock Around the Clock’ on the soundtrack. The movie was a huge commercial success, in part owing to its ambiguous status, on the one hand as a ‘social problem’ film about juvenile delinquency, and on the other hand as an articulation of generational rebellion. See Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005) pp. 137–9. See also Chapter 5: ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll, Blue Jeans and the Myth of Opposition, in Alan Petiguy, The Permissive Society: America 1941–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press, 2009) pp. 179–223, and Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilisation of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), p. 40.

  69. 69.

    Curtis, ‘How ‘Grease’ Got Slick’.

  70. 70.

    ‘Behind the Scenes’, pp. 762–3.

  71. 71.

    Rosen, ‘Musical Grease’, p. 17.

  72. 72.

    Richard Polenberg, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States since 1938 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 127.

  73. 73.

    Polenberg, One Nation Divisible, p. 137.

  74. 74.

    Polenberg, One Nation Divisible, p. 150.

  75. 75.

    Polenberg, One Nation Divisible, p. 145.

  76. 76.

    Polenberg, One Nation Divisible, p. 141.

  77. 77.

    Rosen, ‘Musical Grease’, p. 12.

  78. 78.

    Marcus, Happy Days, p. 32.

  79. 79.

    Marcus, Happy Days, pp. 30–2.

  80. 80.

    Canby, ‘Fantasy of the 50s’; Stanley Kauffmann, ‘Fin and Fantasy’, The New Republic, 1 July, 1978, pp. 18–19.

  81. 81.

    The film was less parodic and more romantic than the original stage production, it was noted. See ‘Merchants Tied To ‘Grease’ Pic; Win A Role Pitch For Youths’, Variety, 8 June, 1977, p. 5.

  82. 82.

    Auster, “Grease”, pp. 41–2.

  83. 83.

    Auster, “Grease”, p. 42.

  84. 84.

    Charles Champlin, ‘50s as Seen through ‘Grease”, Los Angeles Times, 16 June, 1978 [Grease clippings/AMPAS].

  85. 85.

    Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, p. 267.

  86. 86.

    Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, p. 270.

  87. 87.

    Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, pp. 272–3.

  88. 88.

    Harry M. Benshoff, and Sean Griffin, America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 210.

  89. 89.

    Benshoff and Griffin, America on Film, p. 273.

  90. 90.

    Arthur Knight, ‘Grease’, The Hollywood Reporter, 6 June, 1978. See also Murf, Variety, 7 June, 1978, p. 23; and Canby, ‘Fantasy of the 50s.’

  91. 91.

    Murf, Variety.

  92. 92.

    See John Simon, ‘Dog-Day distemper’, National Review, vol. 30, no. 29, p. 908, and Robert Hatch, ‘Films’, The Nation, vol. 27, no. 1 (1978), p. 27.

  93. 93.

    ‘Behind the Scenes’, p. 756.

  94. 94.

    See Tom Wolfe, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, and Other Stories, Sketches, and Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976).

  95. 95.

    Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978); Edward D. Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 159.

  96. 96.

    Berkowitz, Something Happened, p. 158.

  97. 97.

    ‘Rock Tycoon’, p. 43.

  98. 98.

    Schulman, The Seventies, pp. xv–xvi.

  99. 99.

    Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 386.

  100. 100.

    Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 59.

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  1. Arcadia University, London, UK

    Tom Symmons

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Symmons, T. (2016). American Graffiti (1973) and Grease (1978): The Fifties as Myth and Comment. In: The New Hollywood Historical Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52930-5_6

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