American Graffiti

His second film, American Graffiti (1973), a sympathetic recollection of adolescent American life in the early 1960s, was a surprise success at the box office and was redolent of his youth as a Modesto hot-rodding enthusiast. Shot in less than a month for well under a million dollars,…

…successes as a producer, including American Graffiti (1973), directed by George Lucas; The Black Stallion (1979), directed by Carroll Ballard; and Lost in Translation (2003), the film with which his daughter Sofia Coppola established herself as a director.

…Curt Henderson in George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973). The character was the first in a long line of average fellows in stressful situations that Dreyfuss would portray in the coming decade. With a slightly stocky frame and plain, Everyman features, Dreyfuss was well-suited to a variety of “ordinary Joe” roles,…

…bit part in the successful American Graffiti (1973), the first major work of director George Lucas. The movie was produced by Francis Ford Coppola, who later directed Ford in The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979).

…his first big film hit, American Graffiti, and the following year saw the beginning of another of his best-known characters, Richie Cunningham, on the series Happy Days, which ran until 1980.