AMERICAN GRAFFITI

In the middle of the Vietnam- and Nixon-obsessed days of the early 1970s, director George Lucas and producer Francis Ford Coppola switched gears radically with this tender, nostalgic look at drive-ins, drag races and the death of doo-wop in a Northern California town in 1962. Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul LeMat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips and Harrison Ford head a cast of almost complete newcomers, in one of the most purely personal (and phenomenally successful) films of the New Hollywood era. Edited by Verna Fields and Marcia Lucas.