Draggin' Tenth

George Lucas grew up in Modesto. His father ran a stationery store on J Street. Lucas graduated from Thomas Downey High School with the class of nineteen sixty-two, the same year he set his most autobiographical film.

The Modesto of his adolescence had a specific ritual: cruising. On weekend nights, teenagers drove their cars in slow loops through the downtown streets, stopping to talk, listening to the radio, moving through a circuit that functioned simultaneously as social life, performance, and courtship. In Lucas's teenage years, the route was Tenth Street. They called it Draggin' Tenth. By the late nineteen sixties, the route had shifted uptown to McHenry Avenue.

American Graffiti, which Lucas directed and released in nineteen seventy-three, is set in Modesto in the summer of nineteen sixty-two, on the last night before several of the main characters leave for college. The film is not a documentary. Lucas worked with screenwriters Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck to shape the characters, and the action is compressed and dramatized. But the setting, the social texture, and the specific ritual of the cruise circuit are drawn from what he experienced here.

Lucas explained the film's origin this way: 'Cruising was gone, and I felt compelled to document the whole experience and what my generation used as a way of meeting girls.'

The film was shot not in Modesto but in Petaluma. By nineteen seventy-two, when production began, Lucas decided the city had changed too much in a decade and that San Rafael and then Petaluma, about forty miles north of San Francisco, had preserved the scale and street character he needed. Principal photography ran from late June to early August of nineteen seventy-two, mostly in Petaluma, and the city that appears on screen is a composite of small-town California, playing Modesto.

There is a bronze sculpture of a nineteen fifty-eight Chevrolet Impala in George Lucas Plaza downtown, near where his father's stationery store stood. Graffiti Summer, an annual car-cruise event, has drawn classic cars to McHenry Avenue every June since nineteen ninety-nine.