contact as much as ever. Hollywood mythology also enshrines the moment when Marvin Davis, the ursine oilman who bought Twentieth Century-Fox in the eighties, met Lucas and, overcome with appreciation, picked him off his feet and hugged him. Lucas, it’s said, ‘turned red, white and blue.’
A moment after his acolytes had passed through the crowd, the host emerged onto the verandah of the Main House. Flanked by his trusted inner group, he moved to the top of the steps and stood expressionless just out of the early-afternoon sun.
It looked like the old George. Grayer, of course, and plumper, but still in the unvarying uniform of plaid shirt, jeans, and sneakers, draped over the same short body.
John Milius was a connoisseur of excess. He had penned Colonel Kilgore’s speech ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like … victory,’ in Apocalypse Now; Robert Shaw’s reminiscence in Jaws of the USS Philadelphia going down off Guadalcanal, and the slaughter of its survivors by sharks; the bombast of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian.
‘I remember one time I was with Steven and Harrison Ford,’ Milius recalled. ‘These people were coming around and saying, “You can be in this line, and you’ll be able to see George if you’re over here,” and moving us around.’
On that occasion, Milius’s mind had flashed to other examples of the cult of personality. Preacher Jim Jones in Guyana, for instance, and those shuddering TV images of bloated bodies fanning out from the galvanized washtubs from which they’d dipped up their last drink of sugar water and strychnine. ‘If George gets up there and starts offering Kool Aid,’ Milius muttered to Ford and Spielberg, ‘I’m bailing out.’
They all laughed, but nobody else around them was smiling. They were all staring with an almost hungry intensity as the frail man in the plaid shirt, jeans, and sneakers moved toward them.
If there is a bright centre to the universe, this is the place that’s furthest from it.
Luke Skywalker, on Tatooine, his home planet, in Star Wars
There is no easy way into Modesto – nor, for that matter, any easy way out.
Most people approach from the south, up Interstate 5, toughing out the flat emptiness of the San Joaquin, the ‘long valley’ John Steinbeck made famous in his stories of rural life in the twenties and thirties. Then, as now, this was fruit and vegetable country, the kitchen garden of California. Orchards, geometric patches of dense, dark foliage, interlock with fields of low, anonymous greenery which only a farmer would recognize as hiding potatoes, beets, beans. Occasionally, some town raises a banner against mediocrity – ‘Castroville, Artichoke Capital of the World!’ – but the norm is self-effacement, reticence, reserve.
Zigzagging among the fields, a great irrigation canal, wide as a highway, delivers water from lakes set back in the hills. No boats move on its surface, no kids fish from the concrete banks, no families picnic on its gravelled margins. This water, fenced off from the fields and the highway behind chain link, isn’t for leisure but, like everything else here, for use.
Modesto sits on almost the same parallel of latitude as San Francisco, but there any similarity ends. Californian or not, this is a Kansas town set down twelve hundred miles west. Even more than for most places in California, the people here are relative newcomers, migrants from the midwest and the south who fled the dust storms of the twenties and the farm foreclosures that followed.
Laid out flat as a rug on a landscape without a hill to its name, Modesto’s sprawl of ranch-style homes and flat-roofed single-story business buildings is divided as geometrically as Kansas City by a grid of streets, in turn cut arbitrarily by railway tracks. Splintered wooden trestles spanning gullies choked with weeds and the rusted hulks of Chevies and Buicks indicate the high tide of rail in the forties, but traffic still idles patiently at level crossings while hundred-car freight trains clank by.
A garage or a used-car lot seems to occupy every second corner – in farm country, anyone without a car might as well be naked – but one sees almost none of the Cadillacs, Porsches, even Volkswagens common in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Pick-ups, trucks and four-wheel drive vehicles predominate, many of them old but mostly well-tended. Cars here aren’t playthings or success symbols, but farm machinery.
In so flat a landscape, anything resembling a skyscraper looks like insane audacity. The town’s one modern hotel, the Red Lion, twenty stories tall and stark as a wheat silo, respects scale as little as a chair-leg planted in a model-train layout. Building the Red Lion broke Allen Grant, the overambitious Modesto businessman who financed it. Defaulting on his loans, he sold out to a chain. Locals recount this cautionary tale with implicit disapproval of his recklessness. In Modesto, it’s the horizontal man who’s respected, not the vertical one. If he wanted to erect something, why not a mall? When Grant used to race sports cars, his mechanic and co-driver was George Lucas.
Appropriately, Modesto’s monument to its most successful son barely lifts its head higher than George Lucas’s five feet six inches. At Five Points, where the narrow downtown streets coalesce into McHenry, a ribbon development of shopping malls and parking lots, a small wooded park next to an apartment block shelters two bronze figures. They loiter against the forequarter of a ’57 Chevy, they and the car both cast from metal with the color and buttery sheen of fudge sauce. Toffee-colored Jane perches on the fender, ankles crossed, absorbed in mahogany Dick who, earnestly turning towards her, describes his latest triumph on track or field – it’s implicit that nothing which happened in class could remotely interest this couple. What they most resemble is an image from the Star Wars trilogy: Han Solo, frozen in carbonite to provide a bas relief for the palace of Jabba the Hutt.
A slab of green marble set into the sidewalk and incised in gold footnotes the figures:
GEORGE LUCAS PLAZA
The movie remembrance of Modesto’s past, ‘American Graffiti,’ was created by the noted film-maker, George Lucas, a Modesto native and a member of the Thomas Downey High School Class of 1962. This bronze sculpture, created by Betty Salette, also entitled ‘American Graffiti,’ celebrates the genius of George Lucas and the youthful innocence and dreams of the 50s and 60s.
The ritual that inspired American Graffiti no longer takes place: large signs specifically indicate ‘No Cruising.’ In Lucas’s time, drivers circulated on Tenth and Eleventh Streets downtown, exploiting a one-way traffic system introduced by shopkeepers to facilitate business parking. Later, the Saturday-night paseo moved to McHenry, but it wasn’t the same. McDonald’s didn’t provide either telephones or public toilets, so cruisers congregated in the parking lots of shopping malls, fields of naked asphalt lit by towering lamp standards.
Without the sense of community it enjoyed downtown, cruising became a magnet for the area’s rowdies, especially on the second Saturday in June – high school graduation night. In 1988, Modesto’s city council belatedly caught up with its own bandwagon and formalized the June weekend bash as an American Graffiti festival. As many as 100,000 people converged on Modesto to line McHenry and watch the parade of ’32 Deuce Coupes and ’57 Chevies. Deejay Robert Weston Smith, aka Wolfman Jack, was master of ceremonies, an honor he enjoyed six more times, the last when he was Cruise Parade Marshal for the 1994 Graffiti USA Car Show and Street Festival. By then, night-time cruising had been banned after repeated problems with drinking and violence. The 1994 parade took place in mid-afternoon. Jack didn’t approve: ‘My favorite thing was
