Modesto Journal: George Lucas Visits Modesto for American Graffiti Parade

For the past hour, Mr. Lucas had served as the grand marshal of a classic-car parade, the highlight of this city’s annual three-day American Graffiti Car Show festival, which took place last weekend. He had ridden alone and then with his fiancée, Mellody Hobson, pointing out to her spots from his adolescence that became the setting for his 1973 movie, “American Graffiti.”

Over the years, Mr. Lucas has returned to his hometown, about a 90-mile drive east of San Francisco, in California’s rural Central Valley, to visit his sisters and attend high school reunions. But many here described this visit — his first public role in Modesto in four decades — as a full embrace, a homecoming to the town that both shaped his work and that he defined. It would serve as an epilogue to “American Graffiti,” whose running theme is about leaving Modesto.

Never comfortable in the spotlight, Mr. Lucas, 69, shied away from finding deeper significance in his visit. He said he was now “retired,” having sold Lucasfilm and the “Star Wars” franchise to the Walt Disney Company last year, and simply had more time.

“They’ve been asking me to do this parade for years. I’ve usually been in the desert somewhere — I was busy, and I really couldn’t do it. It was really my sister. She said: ‘It’s the 40th anniversary. You really have to do it,’ ” Mr. Lucas said, referring to his sister Wendy Lucas and the anniversary of “American Graffiti.”

Mr. Lucas spoke before the start of the parade inside a large room with Ms. Hobson, Ms. Lucas and another sister, Kate Lucas Nyegaard, at the Gallo Center for the Arts in downtown Modesto.

In “American Graffiti,” two high school graduates cruise downtown Modesto in 1962 the night before they are scheduled to leave for college in the Northeast, or “back East,” in the California parlance. Steve Bolander, the character played by Ron Howard, is determined to leave this “turkey town” and says at one point, “You know what I want out of life, and it’s just not in this town.” Curt Henderson, played by Richard Dreyfuss, is more ambivalent. Steve ultimately stays in Modesto and becomes an insurance agent; Curt ends up as a writer living Canada.

“Everything changed in the early part of the ’60s,” Mr. Lucas said. “Everything that you thought was rock steady changed.”

Part of accepting that change was leaving a small town like Modesto, he said, adding: “The need to stay is even stronger. The need to stay is comforting. The need to go is scary.”

Growing up here, leading a “Father Knows Best” existence in the 1950s, Mr. Lucas had never thought of leaving. “I lived that classic life, and I loved it,” he said, crediting it with instilling in him a sense of “optimism, inspiration and idealism.”

But a near-fatal car accident just days before his high school graduation in 1962 filled him with ambition for the first time. He went to Modesto Junior College and then considered studying art in Los Angeles, an idea that his father opposed.

“He wanted me to stay here,” he said. “He came from very humble beginnings, worked as a janitor in this stationery store when he was in high school, worked his way up to owning the store, building it up — and he did it for his only son. And then his only son said, ‘I’m never going to work somewhere where I do the same thing every day.’ He had a hard time dealing with that, and that was one of the bigger fights we ever had.”

He eventually left to study film at the University of Southern California, where he quickly won awards and his father’s approval.

After his first full-length feature, “THX 1138,” Mr. Lucas made “American Graffiti.” Having studied anthropology in junior college, he was interested in the teenage cruising culture as a uniquely American mating ritual.

The movie’s success helped revive cruising, which had declined in the mid- to late 1960s. But in keeping with the times, cruising had lost its innocence, bringing with it gangs, drugs and violence. Modesto banned cruising in 1993.

In 1999, the North Modesto Kiwanis Club started the American Graffiti Car Show. With cruising still banned in Modesto, classic-car owners participate in the controlled parade, said John Sanders, an official at the club.

With Mr. Lucas retired, what might Steve and Curt from “American Graffiti” be doing now?

“They’re actually retired, too,” he said. “They sort of fulfilled their stories in a way you would expect because some of those people were friends of mine. Some of them got to be kind of successful in business. Some of them are still working in car services and building cars. Some of them are dead. They either got killed in the war or in a car accident. It’s pretty much the way the movie happened.”