If you are a returning reader, thank you!
If this is your first time, I hope you enjoy Highly Transmissible, a free daily newsletter about what to watch during quarantine.
Today is the last Friday in May. School is out. The weather is warming up. Cities are slowly reopening after the coronavirus induced coma of the past three months. It’s a time of changes: High school graduates are enjoying a final summer before college, workers looking at a new future of remote labor, and drive-in movie theaters are open for business and somehow more popular than ever.
With all of that in mind, Highly Transmissible will be changing its format as well. With restrictions easing, the logic of a daily film newsletter is not as compelling as it was at the start of the lockdown. Hopefully, people are watching less TV and getting more (safe) exercise now, and, as testing becomes more common, perhaps even socializing a bit. But never fear, this newsletter is NOT disappearing.
Going forward, Highly Transmissible will be published on a weekly basis, every Friday. Each issue will be more robust than the daily entries have been. There will still be movie reviews, but also writing about television now. Likewise, I will continue to include cocktail recommendations and guest posts, and I will increasingly promote the work of emerging filmmakers.
Highly Transmissible will also still include an essay — typically with deeper reporting and research — and most issues will also include a Q&A. Next week’s issue will include an interview with Magic Sword, one of my new favorite indie bands. Magic Sword channels a straight ‘80s soundtrack vibe into contemporary electronic tracks. They also wear masks and have a comic book series about the band. Cool.
I hope you enjoy tonight’s movie. It’s one of my favorites, and it’s the perfect film for changing circumstances. Be well, enjoy the weekend, and you’ll hear from me again next week. Cheers!
Today’s Film: American Graffiti (1973)
Before George Lucas became a household name thanks to Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, he wrote and directed a small movie about cars and the end of high school called American Graffiti. Made for only $777,000 and released at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, the film — with its quintessentially American story about teenagers cruising on a late summer night — made waves once it hit the U.S. and earned five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and over $200 million at the box office. Overnight, Lucas went from being a basically unknown auteur to a critical and industry darling.
Now, almost 50 years later, American Graffiti holds up as a masterpiece of American filmmaking. Visually, it’s a striking movie filled with flashy cars, brightly-lit drive-ins and brilliant chrome. Narratively, it’s actually quite complex. While superficially it’s about a group of friends navigating the last evening of summer vacation before going off to college (or not), it weaves between constantly shifting social allegiances and constantly moving cars with a virtually uninterrupted soundtrack of classic 1960s radio hits — DJed by Wolfman Jack — playing on car speakers.
The soundtrack is surprisingly important. The radio broadcast and its DJ rarely stop, and they become a through-line for disparate narrative threads. When Wolfman Jack cuts in to the music, his words act as a sort of Greek chorus for the action on screen. And when the camera leaves one car to pick up a different set of characters in another car, the same song is playing in both. This seamlessness is a bit of a head fake; while the events of one scene may actually have nothing to do with the next, the uninterrupted music ties them together nonetheless. (As an aside, in one of my Master’s level film editing courses, the assignment was to recut American Graffiti to be an hour-long. With most films, this would mean removing non-critical scenes, but it turned out to be basically impossible with American Graffiti because of how Lucas had interwoven the radio broadcast into the film.)
The most compelling of the characters is Curt, played by Richard Dreyfus in his first leading role in a feature film. Curt is lovesick and becomes obsessed with a woman in white whom he briefly sees in another car. Finding the woman becomes a sort of quest for Curt and takes him through the night and across teenage cliques. Yet while Dreyfus’ story is film’s most memorable, American Graffiti’s cast is huge, including Ron Howard and Harrison Ford (also in his first major feature role), and each character receives their own journey in miniature.
In the end, American Graffiti doesn’t have a profound message or a moral takeaway. Rather, it’s the perfect mood piece about summer, transitions, the end of childhood and new beginnings. It’s about music and driving around with the windows down, and it’s a whole lot fun because of that. Plus, the classic hotrods are awesome.
Care for a drink?
What goes better with the most American of movies than a spiked milkshake? Enjoy the first hot days of the year with a cool blast of liquified ice cream with a kick.
Combine the following in a blender:
1.5 cups of milk.
1.5 oz. of bourbon (it’s going in a milkshake, so just use whatever you’ve got).
A couple of scoops of vanilla bean ice cream. If it’s too thin, add more ice cream. Too thick, add a little milk.
Pour it in a glass and serve with whipped cream, a maraschino cherry, and a striped straw. Enjoy.
Reading List:
For those dreaming of the open road, Smithsonian Magazine has a wonderful feature about why Utah’s Valley of the Gods is so awe-inspiring.
Long Beach Island, New Jersey’s annual Lighthouse International Film Festival is switching to a drive-in format, and I cannot wait. See you there.
Benjamin Reeves is an award-winning screenwriter, journalist and media consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. Follow him on Twitter @bpreeves or write to him at breeves.writer@gmail.com.