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1979 - More American Graffiti

August 3, 1979

More American Graffiti is a 1979 American coming-of-age comedy film written and directed by Bill L. Norton. It is the sequel to the 1973 film American Graffiti. Whereas the first film followed a group of friends during the summer evening before they set off for college, this film shows where they end up a few years later.

Most of the main cast members from the first film returned for the sequel, including Candy Clark, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, Charles Martin Smith, Bo Hopkins, and Harrison Ford. Richard Dreyfuss was the only principal cast member from the original film not to appear in the sequel. It was the final live-action theatrical film in which Ron Howard would play a credited, named character.

Storyline

The film, set over the course of four consecutive New Year's Eves from 1964 to 1967, depicts scenes from each of these years, intertwined with one another as though events happen simultaneously. The audience is protected from confusion by the use of a distinct cinematic style for each section. For example, the 1966 sequences echo the movie of Woodstock using split screens and multiple angles of the same event simultaneously on screen, the 1965 sequences (set in Vietnam) shot hand-held on grainy super 16 mm film designed to resemble war reporters' footage. The film attempts to memorialize the 1960s with sequences that recreate the sense and style of those days with references to Haight-Ashbury, the campus peace movement, the beginnings of the modern woman's liberation movement and the accompanying social revolt. One character burns his draft card, showing a younger audience what so many Americans had done on the television news ten years before the movie's release. Other characters are shown frantically disposing of their marijuana before a traffic stop as a police officer pulls them over, and another scene shows the police brutality during an anti-Vietnam protest.

The fates of the main characters listed at the end of American Graffiti are updated at the end of this sequel.

  • John Milner is shown driving his trademark yellow deuce coupe toward another vehicle's headlights on New Year's Eve 1964. After disappearing over a small hill, neither his taillights nor the approaching car's headlights are seen again, hinting that this was the crash in which Milner was killed. The anniversary of John's death is mentioned in both the 1965 and 1966 sequences.
  • Terry "The Toad" Fields fakes his own death in Vietnam. Disillusioned with the war, he decides to desert, saying he plans to go to Europe. Terry's superiors believe him to be dead in 1965, as do Debbie in 1966 and Steve and Laurie in 1967.
  • Joe Young (the leader of The Pharaohs) is killed by a sniper in Vietnam after promising to make Terry a Pharaoh once they return to civilian life.
  • Steve and Laurie's relationship is strained by her insistence that she start her own career. Steve forbids it, saying he wants her to be a mom to their young twins.
  • Free-spirited Debbie "Deb" Dunham has switched from Old Harper whisky to marijuana and has given up her platinum blonde persona for a hippie/groupie one in a long, strange trip that ends with her performing with a country-and-western music group.

Wolfman Jack briefly reprised his role, but in voice only. The drag racing scenes were filmed at the Fremont Raceway, later Baylands Raceway Park (now the site of automobile dealerships), in Fremont, California.

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