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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”.

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