That said, my getting cast in the movie was not a given. First, I had to meet with George Lucas and Geno Havens, the film’s assistant casting director. George was a slight, soft-spoken man with thick, curly dark hair and a beard. Geno stood less than five feet tall and walked with a crutch, having been born with brittle bone disease, a genetic disorder that impairs growth. In those days, George could be reticent and awkward around actors, so Geno served a valuable role as his go-between, translating George’s visions into directions that the actors could understand. He hung around for the duration as the film’s dialogue coach.
I had not yet been given the script when I met with George, and I had a concern. My agent had informed me that American Graffiti was going to be a musical. So the first thing I told George was that, The Music Man notwithstanding, I had no musical talent and could neither sing nor dance. “That’s okay,” George said. “It is a musical . . . but nobody sings.” He paused as I puzzled over what struck me as an incongruity. “It’s a musical in that it’s built around songs,” George explained. “The songs are playing on the radio. They’re part of the atmosphere, the setting for the characters. That’s why it’s called American Graffiti.”
This was my introduction to George’s outlier thinking. But I was put through the wringer. Apparently, they were conducting a nationwide search for young actors. 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. Maybe two auditions later, I found myself in a room reading in front of Fred Roos, Geno’s boss. This was a good sign for two reasons. First, Fred was the hottest casting director around; he was an associate of Francis Ford Coppola, one of Graffiti’s producers, and had put together the unimpeachably great cast of The Godfather. Second, Fred knew me! A decade earlier, he had been the casting director for The Andy Griffith Show. So I felt like I had an ally.
I did a total of six auditions. There was one where I had to improvise with other potential cast members. There was another where I did a chemistry read with Cindy Williams, who they had in mind for Laurie, Steve’s girlfriend and the head cheerleader. Then they convened the finalists for one last round that was filmed by George’s friend and mentor Haskell Wexler, the great cinematographer and an Oscar winner for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We read in Haskell’s little studio in Hollywood.
Finally, to my delight, I received good news from Bill Schuller, my agent. After months of callbacks, each one of which made me more pessimistic about my chances, Bill told me that I had won the part of Steve.
He laid on a caveat, though. “It’s a very low-budget picture, Ronny,” Bill said. “They’re only paying the other actors $750 a week. I pressed hard and got you up to a thousand a week because you’re the only one with any name value.”
Fine by me. I didn’t care about the money or my placement in the credits. Which was another issue that Bill brought up. “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 recognize your name from the Griffith show,” he said. “So I had to give ’em the Ronny.” American Graffiti would mark the last time I used my childhood moniker.
Before shooting began, I had a one-on-one meeting with George Lucas where I mentioned to him that after the shoot, I would be starting film school at his alma mater, USC. “You’re going to love it,” George said. “Make sure you take some animation classes, because animation is pure filmmaking. You don’t have to deal with the actors.”
This was a strange thing for a director to say to an actor about to be in his next film, but hey—everything about George was unconventional.
As psyched as I was to have this job, I didn’t regard it as a major career break. George, though he was a big deal to hard-core cineasts like me, was barely known to the public. At that point, he had directed one feature, a dystopian thriller called THX 1138, based on a fifteen-minute short he made at USC. It was critically respected but a box-office bomb. So, in my mind, I was making a cool little arthouse film by a visionary indie director from whom I might learn something. The movie’s budget was only in the $700,000 range. By contrast, the budgets for The Exorcist and The Way We Were, shot in the same period, were $12 million and $15 million, respectively.