Chapter Two
More American Graffiti Bridge
By Brett Ballard-Beach
September 28, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I have an even harder time not going into a film with any expectations. If I know the director, or the actor, or the screenwriter, or the source material, or the genre, or the country of origin, a suggestion is at least planted in my mind. Writing a column about sequels would seem to be, and often is, an exercise in futility on both counts. But in the case of this week’s pair of rarely discussed sequels, I knew about as little going into either of them as I did, say, when I went to the Telluride Film Festival in ’97 and saw the North American premieres of U-Turn, Gummo, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, and about a dozen other films. It’s not a common occurrence - much like me attending a film festival - and I felt it deserved something out of the ordinary. Hence, this week’s Chapter Two
I chose to write about this week’s picks in one column for the express purpose of being able to say More American Graffiti Bridge over and over and over. (This is also my suggestion for a “Movie Title Before and After” puzzle on Wheel of Fortune, one that is sure to confound the general pool of contestants, and probably Pat and Vanna as well. Yahoo Serious Festival, anyone?)
More American Graffiti and Graffiti Bridge are follow-ups (respectively) to American Graffiti, George Lucas’s 1973 classic about a group of teens in late summer ‘62 on the verge of being flung into adulthood; and Purple Rain, Albert Margolis’s landmark rock film from 1984 that hurled the already successful musician Prince into the sales stratosphere and the cultural pantheon with one fell swoop (or rather 111 minutes of film and an accompanying 45 minute soundtrack).
Those films were both Oscar nominees: American Graffiti was up for five and took home none but Prince made off with a statue for Best Music, Original Song Score, beating out Kris Kristofferson and The Muppets. In addition, both were inexpensive films that achieved commercial success, critical acclaim, and cultural notoriety. Their sequels achieved… very little of any of that. Graffiti Bridge was up for five Razzies, but didn’t win any so it least has that going for it. If you had never heard of either it would not shock me in the least.
Shocker: The Empire Strikes Back was not Lucas’ first sequel. And long before Lucas made Darth scream “Noooooo!” or found a way for a gratuitous Boba Fett cameo that would lead one to presume the bounty hunter was spending his off time on the casting couch, Lucas was gaining experience at tweaking his films. For American Graffiti’s fifth anniversary re-release, he trimmed a few minutes and replaced them with additional footage of stars Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, and Harrison Ford (crooning!), who had become much bigger in the interim. He also splurged on one digital effect (making the opening static backdrop for the title sequence less drab) and changed some of the wording in the closing scrawl that revealed the ultimate fates of four of the characters.
This last bit is the most relevant for Chapter Two as it hints at the release the following summer, in August 1979, of More American Graffiti. Lucas would only serve as executive producer but virtually the entire cast (including disc jockey Wolman Jack!) would return in their same roles, save for Dreyfuss, whose character Curt Henderson, isn’t even referred to in passing. Writing and directing chores fell to one B.W.L. Norton, who had only a handful of credits to his name at the time.
In the three decades since, he has mostly worked in television (as Bill L. Norton) but has compiled an impressively far-flung resume, directing everything from Lifetime “women in jeopardy” tele-movies in the early '90s to multiple episodes of Buffy, Angel, Roswell, and The Unit last decade, and single gigs of at least two dozen other shows in all. He also contributed to the scripts of the Tom Cruise-Shelley Long sex comedy Losin’ It, and Back to the Beach, the spoof/homage/reboot of the Frankie and Annette “Beach Party” series.
If American Graffiti was one of the most influential exercises in packaged nostalgia that the movies have ever offered, More American Graffiti goes out of its way, sometimes successfully, to avoid riding that wave of sentiment. (I would imagine it has the only soundtrack ever to feature The Supremes, Andy Williams, Country Joe and the Fish, and Frank Zappa). Instead it traffics in fatalism throughout, in its subject matter and structure, and in its relation to audience expectations - for those who have seen the first film and know, or may think they know, what is going to happen to some of the characters. There will be spoilers in what follows so beware.
While the first film kept its action confined to a single town and a 12 hour timeframe and most importantly kept its characters united through their common listening to Wolfman Jack’s broadcast, More American Graffiti is comprised of four related but not entirely entwined vignettes, set on successive New Year’s Eves in 1964, ’65, ’66, and ’67. From the battlefields of Vietnam to campus unrest, and from a SoCal motor speedway to the psychedelic sounds rocking the Fillmore, Norton’s sequel finds its emotional impetus in the notes of uncertainty and melancholy that close out the first film (am I the only one who thinks that the ending long shot of Curt’s plane flying through the air is vaguely ominous, as if it is going to crash, a la The Day the Music Died?).
While this is more substantial than settling for nostalgia lite, it runs into exactly the sort of problem you would expect: the first film, as open-ended as it was, felt as if it had said all it needed to about these characters. By following them into young adulthood, a certain redundancy sets in. This isn’t, after all, Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” showing us the reality of what lies beyond “Happily Ever After.”
Norton shoots each segment in a different aspect ratio, which can be jarring at first. It is most noticeable in the second and third vignettes, the former adopting the 16 mm look of newsreels and the latter often presented in split screen for (I presume) the feel of Woodstock (the movie) even though the time period precedes Woodstock (the event) The film adopts the most basic of cross-cutting effects: spending anywhere from 2-5 minutes at a time in one particular time frame, before moving on to the next year, cycling through the four years about ten times in toto, before slipping backwards in the final minute as each time period sings along to “Auld Lang Syne”.
Thus, the film ends with hometown racing hero John Milner (Paul LeMat) in his hot-rod heading down the road on his way to a fatal collision with a drunk driver. Norton handles what could be a moment of unbearable bathos with restraint and tact, shooting in a medium long shot, cutting out the soundtrack (save for natural sound) and avoiding the use of the anticipated sound of metal meeting metal. We never see it either, as both cars have become hidden by a dip in the road.
But it has been expected for the length of the film (even longer if you have seen the first film) and it is the film’s strategy to use that impending doom to keep open the possibility that all of the other slices of life are going to end badly as well. (It was apparently Lucas’ intention that this installment be darker). Whether they do is, perhaps, open to interpretation, but Norton uses that unease as a counterbalance to American Graffiti’s bittersweet theme of friends growing up and beginning to grow apart, seeking out new companions and interests.
Here, separated by time and space, there is very little connection (intentionally) among the cast even when they are all together briefly in the ’64 segment, arriving late at the track to watch Milner race. This separation is amplified in each successive year before ultimately arriving at the ’67 installment which finds high school sweethearts Steve and Laurie (Ron Howard and Cindy Williams), now married, with three-year-old-twins, engaged in a continual shouting match and on the verge of splitting up.
An unexpected foray into radical campus politics and police violence (via Laurie’s younger brother, who I presume is meant to fill the void of missing older brother Curt) acts as an unlikely marriage counselor of sorts, but the problem with this and the ’65 segment in Vietnam is that they never quite find the balance, in their limited time, between the comic and horrific. The Vietnam segment with bespectacled kinda nerd Terry (Charles Martin Smith, later of Never Cry Wolf and The Untouchables, and director of this week’s surprise hit Dolphin Tale) wants to be M*A*S*H-esque but lacks Altman’s touch for finding the absurdity and humanity in the middle of the blood.
It is two strong performances that carry the film and help it keep a solid emotional core: those of LeMat and Candy Clark. Milner is a nice guy trapped in the body and profession of a meathead, but LeMat plays him as genuinely nice underneath an armor of cynicism, shrewd but not always the smartest guy in the room. The single best moment in the film is his blink-and-you-miss-it reunion with Carol (McKenzie Phillips) the pre-teen who crushed on him in the first film. Their tone and posture are far more telling than their words, and in the in-between spaces of silence and “what-ifs” that punctuate their brief dialogue, rests the more conventional plot path that the film opts to reject.
Milner’s subplot this time around - falling in love as the day progresses with an Icelandic exchange student who speaks no English - is so creaky, not even a can of oil could sort it out, but LeMat never allows Milner to become the stereotypical racing lothario on the make. With his soft-spoken performance, LeMat mines all the humor he can from the role and in doing so, he allows us to laugh with but not at Milner. The realization that it is going to mean something that his character dies is both heartbreaking and cruel.
I wish I could say that I had seen more of Clark, or had remembered seeing her, but I don’t. Beginning as a model, and switching to acting in the early '70s, she has worked consistently ever since, even originating the role of Buffy Summers’ mother in the 1992 movie, and most recently playing the mother of Matt Damon’s character in The Informant! She was the only cast member of American Graffiti to be nominated for her performance, playing Debbie Dunham, the big-haired, blonde-haired not-quite ditz, who surprises Terry by hopping into his car, and then keeps on surprising him (and the audience) the rest of the evening.
It was hard for me to get past that wig (it did its job) but in More American Graffiti, she delivers a memorable comic performance that is sold via her rubbery but awesomely warm and open face. I was grateful for the gratuitous split screen simply so I could study her reaction shots in triplicate. As a part-time girlfriend for an oft-jailed hippie who isn’t good enough for her, occasional topless dancer, and full-time wanderlust-er, Debbie is good-hearted but aimless, until an evening in the company of a rock band, threatens to point her in a more focused, but unconventional direction.
The ’66 segment is the most affected and the slightest of the four but it is Clark’s good-natured cheer, when coupled with LeMat’s honest portrayal of a small-town winner looking to break into the big time, that make More American Graffiti more groovy than bummer for me. It is an interesting experiment that might have been a bigger hit if Lucas hadn’t attempted to deny his commercial sensibilities or a more recognized cult classic if it had completely 180-ed and gone whole-hog dark and pessimistic. By being neither fish nor fowl, it perhaps foretold its own fate as a forgotten sequel.
Confession: I fibbed - a little - when I suggested that both of this week’s films had been sight unseen by me until last week. I did see Graffiti Bridge in the theater. I am almost certain. I think. It played for all of about three weeks in November 1990, posting $4.5 million in grosses, or roughly 1/17 what Purple Rain earned. I recall that I did want to see it, and as it wasn’t playing near me in Central Oregon, but was in Portland, where my family would be for a few days during our annual fall vacation away from running our resort, that I specifically made plans to see it at that time. I also recall an empty theater. I could not, however, summon up any memory of actually sitting through the film. After watching the film again, for the first time, I realize that my brain may have taken that memory and performed a highly localized lobotomy on it. I suspect it may attempt another one.
Between 1984 and 1990, Prince officially released seven albums (not counting the-shelved Black Album or projects such as Crystal Ball that did not come to fruition at that point in time), of which four were movie soundtracks (Purple Rain, Parade, Batman, and Graffiti Bridge). During this same epoch, he starred in three musicals (Purple Rain, Under the Cherry Moon, Graffiti Bridge) and a concert movie (Sign O’ the Times), directing all but the first of those. I have to wonder if intending Graffiti Bridge as a sequel to Purple Rain might not have been Prince’s own little personal (and cruel) joke against his corporate masters at Warner Bros. This was, after all ,only two years away from his becoming Glyph/Love Symbol/The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, and less than half a decade away from completing his contract with WB, and stepping off into the unknown to release what he wanted when he wanted.
As exhilarating and uplifting as I do find Purple Rain’s concert sequences, there is a cynical part of me that wonders if the film isn’t really something more than a thinly veneered autobiographical rise to fame tale. It could also be seen as either:
A veiled and failed attempt to promote Apollonia 6, the girl trio formed by Prince (as Vanity 6, before Vanity went solo) in real life and represented in the film as a cynical concoction of Morris Day, kind of like the Minneapolis funk answer to Malcolm McLaren’s creation of the Sex Pistols. They only perform one song (“Sex Shooter”, which became a minor hit) and only put out one EP. Or:
An attempt to counter the image of Prince’s aloof reputation
as a (brilliant) control freak by showing him making nice with The Revolution (notice how the Prince stand-in “The Kid” is not billed separately from the band) and in competition with The Time, another band he at least had a hand in forming and writing material for back in real life.
Such concerns, however, are often trumped by the vibrancy and urgency of the musical performances - largely of the full songs - in Purple Rain and the authenticity of its on-location shooting in Minneapolis. Graffiti Bridge, shot on highly stylized sets at “Paisley Park Studios” has neither of those attributes in its favor. This allows my cynical side to look for obvious parallels to Purple Rain. The film and the album (which was released the summer before the film and had already run its course by November) seems like nothing more than an audio/visual audition reel for New Power Generation, Prince’s first new side band formed since the dissolution of The Revolution. (They were foreshadowed on his 1988 album Lovesexy and would be billed alongside him on Diamonds and Pearls in 1991 and Love Generation in 1992.)
In directing and writing the screenplay, Prince allows his egomania to run loose, portraying “The Kid” this time as the sole savior of the music scene, vying with Morris Day for control of the club Glam Slam (although if this is still set in Minneapolis is never really made clear or addressed). Buried under what could only be described as a funk mullet, The Kid is as irresistible as ever to women and as brooding and pensive as ever to the rest of the world. But unlike his rocky but redeemed relationship with The Revolution, The Kid is de facto leader of the NPG and the only one allowed any kind of presence. Even the running rivalry between Morris Day and The Kid, which gave Purple Rain much of its comic energy, is tamped down and replaced with a more explicit misogyny as both parties treat women as mere side projects.
If Prince’s previous feature film, Under the Cherry Moon, was an anachronism centered in a forgotten Hollywood musical past, then Graffiti Bridge is a would-be sci-fi musical missing only the science fiction and the muse. Ingrid Chavez, playing Aura, is supposed to fill the second of those roles as an angel come down to Earth to… fan the flames of the Morris/Kid rivalry? Recite insipid poetry from her notebooks? But she has even less heft and substance to her acting chops than Apollonia did and comes off as Prince’s bland kid sister, who nabbed the gig through nepotism (which would be both icky, and yet not unexpected.)
At barely 90 minutes, the film sill seems interminably long thanks to screenwriter Prince’s inability to flow smoothly from scene to scene or point to point. Characters are never really developed; they are just kind of “there”. The choppy editing by Rebecca Ross and an uncredited Hubert C. De La Bouillerie - who between them also did Cherry Moon, Woodstock, Cyber Bandits, Police Academy 5 and 6, and Highlander II - makes a mockery of being able to enjoy the performances in the film, that take up about half the running time (would that they took up more).
There are numbers by The Time, George Clinton, and Mavis Staples, but 13-year-old Tevin Campbell walks away with the win thanks to the still catchy “Round and Round." And even two decades later, “Thieves in the Temple," Prince’s only hit from the soundtrack, crackles and burns like a lost track from the Batman sessions, brooding and dark but danceable. But with twice as many songs as Purple Rain in far less time, most of the tunes don’t receive their due. (This is definitely a case of “listen to the album and skip the movie,” even if the album suffers from a lack of cohesion as well. This could be due to the fact that the 17 songs were anywhere from three to eight years old when they were assembled, with the exception of “Round and Round”, “Thieves in the Temple” and the two-part “New Power Generation”, which were all written for the film, and were all singles.)
And when the film finally rambles and shambles its way to its supposedly tragic/epic/uplifting end and the lackluster ballad “Still Would Stand All Time” arrives to function in the same way that “Purple Rain” did - to lift your heart and bring a tear and help a flawed movie rise above the sum of its parts? Well, it doesn’t and you won’t.
Next time: His feature Drive is currently wowing critics and pissing off audiences in equal measure. Chapter Two looks at the second installment in the trilogy that helped make Nicolas Winding Refn’s reputation - With Blood on my Hands: Pusher 2. I understand it’s slightly violent.