George Lucas Left Modesto and Never Forgot It

George Lucas graduated from Downey High School in Modesto in nineteen sixty-two and left for Los Angeles to study film. He made American Graffiti in nineteen seventy-three, which means he spent eleven years watching from a distance while the thing he was mourning disappeared.

The film is set on a single late-summer night in nineteen sixty-two in a town modeled on Modesto, specifically on McHenry Avenue, the main cruising strip where teenagers in cars had been doing loops on weekend nights for as long as anyone could remember. By the time Lucas shot the film at age twenty-eight, the cruising culture he depicted was already gone. Highway Ninety-Nine had been rebuilt into a freeway through the Central Valley. Suburbanization had reorganized the social geography of towns like Modesto around the freeway on-ramp rather than the downtown strip. The Friday night that American Graffiti depicts had become historical before the first reel was developed.

The film is so widely seen now, so thoroughly absorbed into the cultural memory of the era it depicts, that its original emotional register, genuine grief for a specific place and a specific time that the person making the film had lived in personally, tends to disappear behind the nostalgia machine the film eventually became. Lucas has described it as an elegy, and his word is the right one.

Modesto acknowledges the connection. The nature and location of the commemoration, what exists on McHenry Avenue today as of this production, is a gap in the sources this recording draws from. The city had installed replica signage referencing the film, according to discovery notes, but the specific installation has not been independently verified. What the city is actually commemorating, for anyone paying attention, is not the film. It is the fact that something was here, and then it was not, and someone noticed.