American Graffiti for the ’70s
Autobiographical teen tale set around first Star Wars movie was 12 years in making
In July, filmmaker Patrick Read Johnson was in Waukegan, Illinois, outside Chicago, shooting some extra footage for his long-gestating project 5-25-77, an autobiographical coming-of-ager about a teenage movie geek in tiny Wadsworth, Illinois, who somehow finagles his way into an advance screening of the original Star Wars before it is released in theatres on, yes, 5-25-77.
An ode to the 1970s and nascent fanboy culture, the comedy stars John Francis Daley (Bones and Freaks and Geeks), and if you watch the trailer, what jumps out is just how young the actor looks. That’s because the bulk of the film was shot in 2004, when Daley was 19 or 20, in locations around the outskirts of Chicago. Yet more scenes were shot in 2005. And 2006. Additional bits and pieces have been picked up along the way since.
It can take years to get a film off the ground. But even by moviemaking standards, this is drawn-out. When we spoke recently, though, Johnson seemed amiably philosophical about the film’s semifinished life span.
His previous credits as a director include the 1990 sci-fi spoof Spaced Invaders (which he also wrote) and then a couple of studio films: the 1994 comedy Baby’s Day Out (with a screenplay by John Hughes) and the 1995 teen dramedy Angus.
Neither film did well at the box office. “After 19 years in LA, I hated Hollywood,” Johnson said. He moved his family back to Wadsworth. “I knew I could continue to write screenplays and get script-doctoring work wherever I was.” Living there again brought back a flood of memories, of growing up as the lone movie geek in town and shooting his own popcorn movies in his backyard — including the 40 bottles of Rit fabric dye he used for fake blood when attempting to make a sequel to Jaws in the family swimming pool, which left a residue for months.
Now based in Winston-Salem, where he teaches film directing at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Johnson first made his way to Hollywood when he was 18, “in my little bright orange Ford Pinto, just like it is in the movie, 200 bucks in my pocket. And I very quickly got a job at a model-making company building miniatures. I was working mostly on television commercials and occasionally a film like King Kong Lives.”
In the meantime, he had cowritten a script with a friend and pitched it to 20th Century Fox.
That led to a writing deal, which was OK’d by then-studio head Sherry Lansing, “who was sitting there, hung over from the Taps wrap party the night before, dressed in a mock cheerleading outfit for the military academy where Taps takes place. She had not had a chance to change before coming to the office. It was the most bizarre and kinda wonderful thing that my first real Hollywood deal was approved by Sherry Lansing in a cheerleading outfit.”
It would be eight years before he would get his first screenplay produced (Spaced Invaders). Which is nothing compared with the 10-plus years he has been working on 5-25-77.
Some of that delay has been budget-related. Johnson said he encountered reluctance (from money people and distributors) when the Star Wars prequels came out and, rather than setting the world on fire, merely made hundreds of millions of dollars; there was a sense that the brand itself had lost some its lustre as an audience draw.
Funny how pop culture shifts, though. Exhibit A,B, C and D: San Diego Comi-Con, which is as mainstream as it gets. Doesn’t hurt that the Star Wars franchise has undergone something of a renewal thanks to 2015’s The Force Awakens. So a movie about a teenager caught up in the very earliest moments of Star Wars fandom? Not such a tough sell. Or as Johnson put it: “I don’t have to get people to go see a movie about nerds, because nerd culture is the dominant pop culture now.”
A distributor is finally on board, he said, after many false starts and life complications — one of which included a brief move to Chicago, where he was selling the occasional script but mainly earning a living at the Apple store in Lincoln Park. “I wasn’t even a genius at the Genius Bar — I was the 50-year-old selling you an iPhone. I was that guy. Didn’t bother me. It was actually one of the greatest jobs I had.”
Plans for the movie’s release have been announced before. Plans that never panned out. But Johnson insists this time it’s for real and that the movie will be out on May 25, 2017, 40 years to the day after Star Wars first hit theatres.
There is some legit Star Wars DNA behind the scenes: One of the producers of 5-25-77 is Gary Kurtz, whose credits include the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. But just as importantly, he was a producer on American Graffiti as well, which Johnson’s film so clearly emulates with its throwback esthetics and teenage nostalgia. The trailer suggests there’s also a bit of Breaking Away in there, as well as Freaks and Geeks. I have high hopes for this thing.
Another friend of Johnson’s who worked on the film is John Knoll, a pal from their modelmaking days who would become a visual-effects supervisor on films such as Avatar and now runs Industrial Light & Magic for Lucasfilm. Oh, and Knoll has a producer and story credit on the upcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Johnson’s film is pretty much completed and has played here and there at festivals. But he was back in Illinois to pick up a few extra shots last month outside the Genesee Theatre in Waukegan.
“There are a few moments in the film that we cobbled together and that would stand in for footage that we really wanted,” he told me. “And I would find myself almost apologizing for those scenes at film festivals. So this scene is where Pat and his best friend go riding around sort of doing the scoop the loop thing in downtown Waukegan, looking for girls and thinking they’re cool, when of course, they’re not. They called that ‘cruising’ in American Graffiti. In Waukegan we called it scooping the loop, because there are these streets that you loop around.”
Daley, his star, has aged past the point where he could be in these pickup shots. But Johnson said he already has that footage, and all he needed now were some shots from the kid’s point of view of his surroundings.
When you are finally done with the film, I asked, do you think you might feel a bit lost?
That got a big laugh from Johnson. “No. I want to do other things.”