I played Richie. Potsie was played by Anson Williams, an energetic, upbeat guy from my high school’s crosstown rival, Burbank High. Richie’s parents were played by Harold Gould and Marion Ross. It was a good ensemble, and our show was being produced by Paramount Television. By my logic, if this show went to series, Gulf + Western, the powerful conglomerate that owned Paramount, would find a way to keep the young star of its hot new sitcom out of the jungle.
Gary Nelson directed the pilot. He was a relaxed and experienced pro who had directed me in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show and Clint in an episode of The Baileys of Balboa. The pilot’s story centered around the aforementioned TV set. Richie, at Potsie’s urging, used it as a magnet to lure over the girl of his dreams for a date. I had particularly good chemistry with Anson and Marion. As a matter of fact, Marion was the first person with whom I shared my good news: I got into USC’s film school! I happened to be on the set when I opened the envelope, and my TV mom hugged me and wished me the best.
ABC didn’t bite, though. New Family in Town did not get a series order. Instead, the network dumped it onto Love, American Style in truncated form, as a one-off segment entitled “Love and the Television Set.” （It has since been retitled “Love and the Happy Days” for the show’s DVD release.） So there went that potential safety net.
I turned eighteen on March 1, 1972, and registered for the draft, as required by law. I prepared to begin college at USC that September. I was convinced that I was done as an actor.
Then my agent got a call. Universal was financing a low-budget period feature about California teenagers in the early 1960s. It had a weird title: American Graffiti. The film’s writer-director had seen me on Love, American Style and liked my look and performance. His name, when I heard it, rang a bell—he was the young hotshot out of USC that I had read and heard so much about. George Lucas!
17
Growth Via Graffiti
RON
Dad hated the script. He didn’t get American Graffiti at all. He thought it was too episodic and loosely structured. He was a strict formalist that way. He had taken a class with one of the eminent gurus of playwriting and screenwriting, a Hungarian émigré named Lajos Egri, the author of a revered book called The Art of Dramatic Writing. Egri believed in plot lines driven by a classic protagonist-antagonist conflict. American Graffiti had neither a clear protagonist nor anyone who truly fit the bill as a villain. 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 didn’t know what it meant and had to look it up.
But I was excited by what I read. I saw something fresh and gently subversive in the script that Dad didn’t, and I was fascinated by the way George Lucas had situated the story in 1962: a mere ten years in the past, but an eternity ago in terms of social mores, given how fast American culture was evolving in the ’60s. 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, about a hundred miles inland from San Francisco in California’s Central Valley. 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.
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. I was exactly the right age for American Graffiti, eighteen, and I would be fresh out of high school when the production team was scheduled to film it, in the summer of ’72. 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.
For all his reservations about American Graffiti, Dad respected my enthusiasm and recognized that a job is a job. We were, at that point in our father-son dynamic, at a crossroads. 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. But Dad drew a circle around March 1, 1972, on the calendar—the date of my eighteenth birthday. On that day, he promised, he would step back and let me become the architect of my professional life. And he was as good as his word. Dad made it plain that he was always available to me if I wanted to confer with him, but nothing he said was to be taken as an edict. So he did not stand in the way of my signing on to play 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.