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“American Graffiti” Opens in 1973

American Graffiti opened in the United States on August 11, 1973. The movie, directed and co-written by George Lucas, captured a nostalgia for a summer in 1962. I can hardly believe that now we are more than four times as much removed in time from the movie as the movie was removed from its characters.

American Graffiti follows two recent high school grads played by Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfus. The two are spending their last night in town before they are scheduled to leave for college the next day. During the evening and night, their stories intertwine with a number of other young men and women cruising in cars around town. The movie not only captures a time and a place (and hot rods!), but it also reveals some of what it is like to be in high school.

The coming-of-age movie featured a number of stars and future stars, including Paul Le Mat, Harrison Ford, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, Candy Clark, and Suzanne Somers. Also, radio DJ Wolfman Jack makes a special appearance. The film also contained a lot of great music from the period and a wonderful soundtrack.

Reception

Critics and viewers generally loved American Graffiti. The movie was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture. The movie failed to win any Oscars and lost the Best Picture award to The Sting. But the film set in Modesto, California became a beloved classic. It also aided the careers of many involved in the movie. And it helped spawn a nostalgia for the 1950s and early 1960s.

American Graffiti ends with title cards reporting what happened to all of the characters, even though Lucas’s co-writers did not like such an ending, which was largely depressing. That, however, did not prevent an interesting but mediocre sequel in 1979, More American Graffiti.

When I was in high school, a few years after the movie was released, one of my teachers showed us the movie on a TV in class. We were studying the period around the 1950s. Our class was in the days before DVDs and VHS, so it was a big deal to see a commercial movie in class back then. So, I will always have a special fondness for the movie.

In the clip below, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel discuss American Graffiti for the film’s debut on television (starting at the 16:30 mark). Check it out.

What do you think of “American Graffiti”? Leave your two cents in the comments.

Movie Lovers Should Join The Important Cinema Club (Podcast Review)

Siskel & Ebert Go Door-to-Door

Roger Ebert Keeps Us Thinking

Happy 70th Birthday Roger Ebert!

The Star Wars Holiday Special 1978

Trailer for Roger Ebert Documentary “Life Itself”

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The Long Lost Chuck Cunninghams

Happy Days Chuck — Even the DVD cover omits Chuck.

Chuck Cunningham was Richie’s older brother on Happy Days who famously ate sandwiches, dribbled basketballs, and then disappeared, never to be heard from again. The way his character vanished and was never mentioned again by this TV family eventually led to the name Chuck Cunningham Syndrome.

What you may not remember about Chuck, though, is that he was played by two different actors. Gavan O’Herlihy initially played the character in the series, followed by Randolph Roberts. According to IMDb, O’Herlihy appeared as Chuck during the first season in seven episodes from January to March 1974. Later in the year, during the second season, Randolph Roberts appeared in two episodes as Chuck. [Update: The clip of a show with Chuck is no longer on YouTube, but if you find the series debut episode, “All the Way,” at around the 7:40 mark you may see O’Herlihy enjoying dinner with the Cunninghams. A brief part of the clip also appears in the TMZ video below.]

Reportedly, the reason the show eventually got rid of Chuck was that he was never a big character and the producers realized that Fonzie (Henry Winkler) had become the “big brother” to Richie (Ron Howard). Several websites note that Gary Marshall, the series creator, humorously stated that his response to the question about what happened to Chuck was that the character got a basketball scholarship in Outer Mongolia.

But why were there two Chucks in the series? In the following video, O’Herlihy, who had been a champion Irish tennis player, explains at around the 4:04 mark how Happy Days gave him his big break in acting. But after he realized that they expected his character to have a limited role, dropping in from college occasionally, he wanted to go on to other work. So apparently, the producers then brought in Roberts briefly before deciding to dump the character all together.

O’Herlihy went on to appear in a number of roles in films like Willow (1988), often playing a villain such as in a standout performance in Lonesome Dove (1989). By contrast, Roberts continued in some acting roles for a little more than a decade before leaving acting and, according to Wikipedia, becoming an education supervisor for ITT Technical Institute in San Diego.

On an additional note, technically, there were three Chuck Cunninghams. In the original Happy Days pilot version that appeared as a segment of Love, American Style (discussed in another post), Chuck was played by actor Ric Carrott. As in the Happy Days series, Chuck only appeared briefly in the Love, American Style episode (eating dinner). Carrott went on to appear in a number of TV shows during the 1970s as well as in small parts in a number of films before leaving acting. He may be best known for his work as Captain Chris Gentry on the Saturday morning kid’s show Space Academy.

Regarding the TV series Happy Days, it is interesting to speculate whether or not the show would have abandoned Chuck Cunningham had O’Herlihy stuck around, as it seems likely that the loss of the first actor hastened the character’s demise. One might image that if O’Herlihy had not left the character, the writers might have kept Chuck in the family, occasionally dropping by while he was at college and then off living somewhere else. Or maybe the series occasionally would have covered him playing basketball in Mongolia.

2015 Update: After this article was posted TMZ did a short segment on the Chuck Cunningham mystery where they caught Ron Howard with the question about what happened to Chuck. Check it out.

Who is your favorite TV character who suffered from Chuck Cunningham Syndrome? Leave your two cents in the comments.

Happy Days on Love, American Style

Mork and Happier Days

“American Graffiti” Opens in 1973

A Christmas Carol: Dickens, Edison, Sim, and the Fonz

Andy Griffith Was America’s Favorite Country Boy

A Rushed “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” Goes to Hollywood and the Hall

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Andy Griffith Was America’s Favorite Country Boy

One of the legends of television, Andy Griffith passed away today at the age of 86. He died at his home on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, where he lived peacefully out of the spotlight. Griffith will always be remembered as the sheriff of Mayberry in The Andy Griffith Show (1960-1968), where Griffith also helped in developing the scripts for the series. Many of us grew up watching that show and Griffith’s role in the legal drama, Matlock (1986-1995), which actually ran longer than The Andy Griffith Show.

Griffith’s first big break came when his 1953 funny monologue, “What it Was, Was Football,” became a best-selling record. The story recounts a hillbilly’s attempt to try to figure out the sport.

On television, he appeared in the teleplay No Time for Sergeants in 1955 playing a country boy in the Air Force. The show would later inspire the Andy Griffith Show spin-off, U.S.M.C. Gomer Pyle, and it led to Griffith starring in the 1958 film version of No Time for Sergeants. The movie teamed Griffith with Don Knotts, who went on to co-star as Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show. The TV show pairing with the funny Knotts freed Griffith’s Andy Taylor from having to be the clown and allowed his character to develop as the small town’s heart. Knotts also became Griffith’s life-long best friend until Knotts died in 2006.

My favorite Griffith movie role is his starring performance in A Face in the Crowd (1957). The film, directed by Elia Kazan, starred Griffith as a power-hungry country boy, capturing something darker than we would usually see in Griffith’s characters. The film had mixed reviews initially, but today, most critics appreciate the film’s deep journey into revealing something scary underlying American popular culture. A Face in the Crowd now has an excellent 91% Critics Rating and a 93% Audience Rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website.

In later years, Griffith did not appear often on television. But in 2008 he appeared in Brad Paisley’s video for “Waiting on a Woman” and on a remix of the song on Paisley’s mostly instrumental album Play (2008). It was great to see Griffith in action again, once again dispensing some country wisdom to a new generation. Paisley became friends with Griffith, and told the older man that his TV role as Andy Taylor had taught him many lessons about raising his own son.

I still watch The Andy Griffith Show when I catch it on television, and I wrote about my trip last year to see Andy Griffith’s birthplace of Mount Airy, which claims to be the basis for the fictional Mayberry. So, for many of us, the story of Andy Griffith has to begin and end with The Andy Griffith Show because we so loved the character and the town he created. And we loved how the country boy in a simple town taught us something about being a man in a complicated world. And so I will end with one of my favorite short clips where Andy used birds to teach about responsibility to his son Opie (Ron Howard).

My, don’t the clouds in heaven seem nice and full today? RIP Andy Griffith (and Andy Taylor).

Eat Your Heart Out Barney Fife!

Pull Down Your Pants and Slide on the Ice

The Loss of Another Great TV Straight Man: Ernest Borgnine

RIP Colonel Potter

Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)

“American Graffiti” Opens in 1973

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Happy Days on Love, American Style

Did you know that the series “Happy Days” started out as a segment on the ensemble show “Love, American Style”?

Fonzi Happy Days — “Aaaay! Why wasn’t I on this Love show?”

Television producer Garry Marshall recently wrote a book, My Happy Days in Hollywood: A Memoir (2012). In promoting the book he has talked about how his work on Happy Days was his favorite favorite work (as opposed to the often contentious work on Laverne & Shirley).

Some of Marshall’s revelations include that Fonzie was based on a friend of his from summer camp. Also, Nathan Lane auditioned for the show. Recently, I discovered something else interesting about the origin of Happy Days.

Do you remember the television show Love, American Style that ran on ABC from 1969-1974? The hour-long show featured different stories and casts each week. For awhile Love, American Style was on the same nights as The Brady Brunch, The Partridge Family, The Odd Couple, and Room 222. While reading about some of these shows recently, I was surprised to discover that the series Happy Days got its start on Love, American Style.

According to Wikipedia, in 1971 producer Garry Marshall had the idea for a sitcom featuring teenagers growing up in the 1950s. He created a pilot called New Family in Town, featuring many of the characters and several of the stars that would later appear in the Happy Days series. There were a few exceptions. In the pilot, Harold Gould played the father Howard Cunningham and Susan Neher played sister Joanie.

But no network was interested in the pilot, so Marshall sold the show to the producers of Love, American Style. That ensemble series then ran the pilot as a segment. The segment was retitled for the show as “Love and the Happy Days” and ran in early 1972.

After the network saw the success of the Broadway play Grease and the movie American Graffiti (1974), they remembered the Happy Days pilot and bought the rights. Happy Days ran on television from 1974-1984. One of the reasons Ron Howard got the part in American Graffiti was because George Lucas saw him in the original pilot.

If you are interested in seeing how it all began, below is the opening of “Love and the Happy Days” from Love, American Style. If you have never seen Love, American Style, though, I should warn you that if you view the opening you might have the song going through your head the rest of the day.