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It isn’t very often with this column - or my movie going in general - that I go into a film “blind." I read Entertainment Weekly, I go to movie-related websites, and I read samplings of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I don’t watch trailers anywhere near as frequently as I used to, but on any given weekend if a film is getting any kind of wide (600 screens) to ultra-wide (3000 screens) release, the odds are good that it has been on my radar for a while. Well, either that, or I have made a conscious decision on behalf of my brain to keep it off my radar.

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.

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