It was exhilarating: Ron Howards happy days on the role that changed his life – Sydney Morning Herald

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Dad [actor Rance Howard] hated the script. He didnt get American Graffiti at all. He thought it was too episodic and loosely structured. 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 had to look it up.

But I saw something fresh and gently subversive in the script and was fascinated by the way George Lucas had situated the story in 1962, a mere 10 years in the past, but an eternity ago in terms of social mores, given how fast American culture had evolved 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, 160 kilometres inland from San Francisco in Californias 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 summers 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, 18, and I would be fresh out of high school when the production team was scheduled to film it, in the northern summer of 1972. 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. 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 18th birthday. On that day, he promised, he would step back and let me become the architect of my professional life. He was as good as his word.

Still, my getting cast in the movie was not a given. First, I had to meet with George Lucas and Geno Havens, the films assistant casting director. George was a slight, soft-spoken man with thick, curly dark hair and a beard. In those days, George could be reticent and awkward around actors, so Geno served a valuable role as his go-between.

I had one concern. My agent had informed me that American Graffiti was going to be a musical. So the first thing I told George was that I could neither sing nor dance. Thats okay, George said. It is a musicalbut nobody sings. He paused when I looked puzzled. Its a musical in that its built around songs, George explained. The songs are playing on the radio. Theyre part of the atmosphere, the setting for the characters.

This was my introduction to Georges outlier thinking. But I would be 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.

Two auditions later, I found myself in a room reading in front of Fred Roos. This was a good sign. Fred was the hottest casting director around, an associate of Francis Ford Coppola, one of Graffitis producers, and he 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 in which Id starred for eight years from 1960 to 1968]. 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 the part of head cheerleader Laurie.

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.

Finally, to my delight, I received good news from Bill Schuller, my agent. After months of call-backs, each one of which made me more pessimistic about my chances, he told me that I had won the part of 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.

He laid on a caveat, though. Its a very low-budget picture, Ronny, Bill said. Theyre only paying the other actors $US750 a week. I pressed hard and got you up to a thousand a week because youre the only one with any name value.

Fine by me. I didnt 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 recognise your name from The Andy 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, the University of Southern California (USC). Youre going to love it, George said. Make sure you take some animation classes, because animation is pure filmmaking. You dont 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 didnt 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 15-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 art-house film by a visionary indie director from whom I might learn something. The movies budget was in the $US700,000 range. By contrast, budgets for The Exorcist and The Way We Were, shot in the same period, were $US12 million and $US15 million, respectively.

Money was the least of my concerns at that point in my life. I had turned 18 in March, whereupon my parents turned over to me the custody of my bank account and bonds. My net worth, I discovered, was well into the six figures: a sum that I was proud of, though I didnt breathe a word of it to my friends at Burroughs High School in Burbank, lest I come off as a jerk. I was irked, I will admit, when I came in third in the senior classs voting for Most Likely to Succeed. Third? Third? Cmon! Hadnt I already frickin succeeded?

No, what concerned me was uncertainty about my future. One day, a few weeks after I registered for the draft, I checked the mail at our house in Toluca Lake in Los Angeles. Among the envelopes was one from the US Selective Service System, addressed to me. Shit. I opened it. Inside was a letter notifying me that I was to report to a local military office for a physical. I had heard from friends that this was how it worked: you got this letter, you took your physical, and if you passed and were drafted, you were inducted into the military on your 19th birthday.

George Lucas (at left) had a spontaneous approach to directing, confusing Ron Howard at times.Credit:Alamy

The American Graffiti script carried another sting. One of Georges most brilliant, wrenching twists was that the movies teenage high jinks and poignant goodbyes were followed by a final beat: an end card explaining what happened to four of its male protagonists. Mine, or Steves, was that I stayed local, presumably to marry Laurie, and I was working in Modesto as an insurance salesman. Paul Le Mats character, John, died in a car crash. Rick Dreyfusss character, Curt, was a writer living in Canada, the inference being that he moved there to avoid the draft. And sweet, geeky Terry the Toad, played by Charles Martin Smith, was reported missing in action near An Lc, in South Vietnam, just three years after the events depicted in the film. It was another reminder, not that I needed one, of the worst-case outcome for any young man who was shipped over.

I simply folded it up and put it in my wallet, where it practically vibrated in the back pocket of my jeans. I figured that if I ignored the problem, it might go away. Still, that piece of paper haunted me.

I told no one about the Selective Service notice. I simply folded it up and put it in my wallet, where it practically vibrated in the back pocket of my jeans. I figured that if I ignored the problem, it might go away. Still, that piece of paper haunted me. Sometimes, when I was alone, I took it out, unfolded it, and reread it, hoping that its meaning would somehow magically change in the process of rereading: an act of futility if ever there was one. No matter what, I kept that damned notice to myself. I didnt want to upset anyone, least of all Mom and my girlfriend Cheryl [whod go on to become my wife]; nor did I want to make them complicit in a potential felony.

When American Graffiti began filming, I drove my VW Bug up the coast to San Rafael, where the cast and crew were staying in a Holiday Inn. San Rafael was supposed to stand in for Modesto, which George decided had become too modernised to plausibly resemble his hometown as he remembered it. But we ended up shooting mostly in the town of Petaluma, whose city council proved more willing to take on the disruptions of a film crew and a bunch of vintage cars cruising their main drag.

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I immediately saw that there was something of a cultural divide between me and most of the cast. With the exception of Charlie Martin Smith, who was my age, the rest of the movies principals were significantly older than me and much more worldly-wise. Rick Dreyfuss, Paul Le Mat, Candy Clark, Harrison Ford, Bo Hopkins: these folks were anywhere from six to 12 years my senior. I initially took Cindy Williams to be my age because she looked so young, but I soon found out she was a seasoned, womanly 24.

She sensed, correctly, that her 18-year-old acting partner was inexperienced at kissing scenes and a bundle of nerves about performing them. We cant kiss for the first time on camera, she said. We better practise. With the professionalism of Hollywoods intimacy co-ordinators, who supervise and choreograph sexually explicit scenes for film and TV, Cindy taught me how to make out convincingly for the camera without overstepping. She was not interested in me romantically, nor was I in her. She performed this service out of generosity, saving me from embarrassment and pre-emptively ensuring that our scenes did not end up on the cutting-room floor.

Cindy, Charlie, and Rick were the actors I ended up hanging around with the most. And Jeff Bridges a little, too, because he was seeing Candy Clark and occasionally came to visit. Harrison and Paul were the cast hellions. They treated that Holiday Inn like it was the Sunset Marquis and they were Led Zeppelin, trashing their rooms and generally raising a ruckus.

Harrison Ford, who played Bob in the film.Credit:Alamy

One Saturday, when we had time off, they were drinking beers and pitching their empty bottles out the window, watching them crash in the parking lot. Then they tossed an unopened beer, which exploded on the blacktop in a gusher, which made them double over in laughter. I was concerned that the shattering bottles were getting just a little too close to my still-new Bug. Harrison, Paul, I said, you can have your fun, but I have to go downstairs and move my car. Can you hold your fire while I do that?

Sure, Ronny, sure. Go ahead, said Harrison.

As soon as I got to the parking lot, a bottle exploded at my feet. Harrison and Paul poked their heads out the window. Dance, Opie, dance! Paul shouted [Opie was the name of my character in The Andy Griffith Show]. Then more bottles came flying in my direction, accompanied by the sounds of nefarious cackling from above. I somehow managed to pull away in my car before they did any damage.

That incident was the only Opie-shaming that I experienced, though I did occasionally endure some razzing because, at that point, I was the sole cast member who was recognisable to the public, and the locals liked to approach me for autographs. But this teasing was all in the spirit of fun, as was Rick Dreyfusss penchant for calling me Ope, which rhymed with hope. For example, when he and I were trying out some improvised dialogue on each other, at Georges urging, I noted that I had never worked this way before. Rick smiled his mischievous smile. You aint in Mayberry anymore, Ope! he said.

American Graffiti was set in the outwardly more innocent period before the tumultuous 1960s. Credit:Alamhy

I sure wasnt. And it was exhilarating. I could just feel the generational shift taking place. We were all in our teens and 20s. Even George was only 28. The people involved in the production behind the scenes were mostly San Francisco-based, like George. They had long hair. They wore beads and bandannas around their necks. Some of them were women. I had to that point been exposed to nothing but old-line, hard-boiled, Anglo-Saxon, male Hollywood.

George boldly ignored the orthodoxies of traditional filmmaking. We had no make-up team or individual dressing rooms. We all got changed into our wardrobes inside a single Winnebago motor home that someone had driven to Petaluma for the shoot. The female actors applied their own make-up. The male actors didnt wear any. George shot most of the movie in continuity, as it plays on the screen, because he knew that we would look progressively more exhausted and undone after six weeks of night shooting, and he wanted us to come by our sunrise dishevelment naturally, in vrit fashion.

George didnt even give us traditional marks to hit. He used very low light levels because he wanted to capture the slightly dangerous late-night feel of a boulevard teeming with teens on the prowl for action and trouble. The camera team liked me because I was experienced and knew where to stand so that my face could catch a little light. I could look through their cameras viewfinders, see what kind of shot they were after, and get myself into the right place in the frame. But George didnt particularly care about this sort of thing. He was all about spontaneity and honesty.

I was so rules-bound that this took some getting used to. At one point, my confusion got the better of me. We were shooting at Mels Drive-In in San Francisco. Take after take, the only direction that George gave was Action!, Cut! and Terrific.

I approached him for a word. George, I said politely, youre saying, Action, cut, terrific for every take and then you change angles and say, Action, cut,terrific again.

Mm-hmm, said George.

Am I giving you everything you need? I asked. Is there something more I can do? Because Im happy to take some direction.

George matter-of-factly explained, I dont really have time to direct now. Im just gathering up lots of footage, then Ill direct in the editing room. He added, Thats why I cast you all so meticulously. It took me six months to find the right mix of people for what I want. And six months to find the right cars.

It was at this moment that it hit me: the cars were just as important to George as the actors. Or, rather, they were actors to him, playing characters just as his droids and starships would in the Star Wars movies. Paul Le Mats yellow Deuce Coupe represented the light side of hot-rod culture. Harrison Fords menacing 55 Chevy One Fifty represented the dark side. Bo Hopkinss chopped 51 Mercury embodied the whole greaser culture. Suzanne Somerss white 56 T-Bird with porthole side windows was as dreamy and unattainable as she was.

And my big ol 58 Chevy Impala with tail fins was the aspirational car of a solid citizen, which Steve was; he had been his classs president. For most of the movie, the car was driven on loan by Charlies character, Toad, who tried to impress Candys character, Debbie, by boasting that it was his set of wheels and that it had a 327 engine in it with six Strombergs as in carburettors a drag-racing modification that sensible Steve would never have made.

Paul Le Mat (who played John), Cindy Williams and Howard. Credit:Alamy

We really didnt know what we had when we were filming American Graffiti. As George said, he was going to do most of the directing in the editing room. This included the matching of music to scenes. It was unclear during the shoot which songs the production could actually clear the rights to, so only occasionally did they pipe in the songs that you hear in the finished film, mostly 50s classics like Almost Grown by Chuck Berry and Chantilly Lace by the Big Bopper. The Platters Smoke Gets in Your Eyes really was playing, though, when we filmed that heartbreaking scene where Cindy and I dance sorrowfully in front of the whole student body, having a whispered fight that no one else can hear.

Time moves more slowly when youre young, because life is still new to you, a process of discovery. Those six weeks felt more like six months, and all of us in the cast developed an extraordinary camaraderie, which was probably Georges plan all along. We rooted for each other like teammates. Part of the bonding process lay in the upside-down nature of filming all night. This required us to get our sleep during the day, so we became a strange pod of weirdos living outside the norms of conventional society.

As the baby of the cast, I also received an education in the ways of life and letters as they existed outside of my happy, but cloistered BurbankToluca Lake world.

Most days, we would emerge one by one from our rooms and congregate around the Holiday Inn pool in the mid-afternoon. I was usually the first one there, because I was terrible at day sleeping. Generally, I could only go from 7am to 11am, which compelled me to take catnaps later in the day and night in order to keep my wits about me. This developed into one of my signature life skills: the ability to conk out for 15 minutes at any given moment in any given place. It has served me well.

As the baby of the cast, I also received an education in the ways of life and letters as they existed outside of my happy, but cloistered BurbankToluca Lake world. Rick Dreyfuss became my intellectual mentor. He was an avid reader who was always carrying a paperback. His favourite place in the world was City Lights Books in San Francisco, where we sometimes went in our downtime. I confided to Rick my worries about being drafted (though never about the notice in my wallet) and told him that I was leaning toward voting for President Richard Nixon over George McGovern because Nixon had pledged that he would get us out of the war. This was before the Watergate story broke, and I had grown up in an apolitical household where we never really identified as Democrats or Republicans.

With a wiggle of his eyebrows and a pointed Huh-huh-ho! laugh, Rick said, You have a hell of a lot to learn, Ope. He lent me some books on politics and did his best to set me straight.

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Some of the casts activities were off-limits to me because I was only 18 and the drinking age in California was 21. When the Graffiti guys went en masse to a strip bar in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, Charlie Martin Smith and I got the boot almost immediately for being underage. He and I took to passing our time instead in a dive bar in Petaluma where the manager, a friendly lesbian biker chick, let us shoot pool and play ping-pong for as long as we wanted. It was the beginning of a friendship with Charlie, not the biker chick that still endures.

Cheryl came up for the wrap party, where George showed us all a 15-minute working cut of a few scenes that he had put together with music. George co-edited the film with his wife at the time, Marcia Lucas, and a long-tenured legend named Verna Fields, who also introduced George to Steven Spielberg.

At this screening, there was a collective gasp by the cast members, even the stoic Harrison. This is what we are a part of? Wow! It was riveting, seeing the vision in Georges head coming to life. We still had no clue if our movie stood a chance at the box office, but we knew we had something revolutionary. Afterwards, I drove home to Toluca Lake supercharged to start at USC and make as many films as I possibly could provided that Vietnam didnt get in the way.

George Lucass little $US700,000 picture went on to gross more than $US100 million, at the time the greatest return on investment in the history of cinema.Credit:Alamy

American Graffiti was released in August 1973, a year after we wrapped. I expected it to get some good reviews, and it did. The New York Times posited that it was arguably the most important US film since Bonnie and Clyde. Roger Ebert called it not only a great movie, but a brilliant work of historical fiction. But the film became so much more: a word-of-mouth hit with staying power. It played in movie houses for more than two years after its initial release.

I missed out on the premiere because I was on location for another film, but when I got back home, I drove past theatres where there was a two-hour wait to get into the next showing.

Cheryl and I caught the movie at the Avco Theatre in Westwood, near UCLA, and were astonished to come across a multigenerational audience that, as one, clapped along enthusiastically as Bill Haleys Rock Around the Clock played over the title sequence. George Lucass little $US700,000 picture went on to gross more than $US100 million, at the time the greatest return on investment in the history of cinema.

All of us in the cast benefited from our association with the movie, a phenomenon that I refer to as the Graffiti glow. Candy received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Rick and Paul were signed up to star in multiple movies by Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Demme, respectively. Harrison landed a role in George Lucass next movie, an off-the-wall, long-shot sci-fi flick called Star Wars.

The American Graffiti juggernaut had come in the wake of some similar phenomena: the success of the retro vocal group Sha Na Na, which had played Woodstock and was selling out major rock venues, and the original Broadway production of Grease, which opened in 1972 and proved so popular that it ran for the rest of the decade. This so-called 50s craze set off a scramble among the broadcast networks to develop 1950s-themed series for television.

It was at this point that writer and director Garry Marshall politely raised his hand and notified ABC they had a promising pilot for a 50s show in their vaults already. It was called Happy Days and starred one of the leads in American Graffiti.

Edited extract from The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family, by Ron Howard and Clint Howard (HarperCollins, $35), out October 13.

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It was exhilarating: Ron Howards happy days on the role that changed his life - Sydney Morning Herald