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Eric D. Snider<\/strong> and Mental_Floss<\/strong><\/a> present 13 Nostalgic Facts About American Graffiti<\/strong><\/a>. Here are three of my favorites…<\/p>\n 3. CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF, THERE IS NO ACTUAL CONNECTION BETWEEN AMERICAN GRAFFITI<\/em> AND HAPPY DAYS<\/em>.<\/strong><\/span> 8. THE PRODUCER HAD TO BECOME MACKENZIE PHILLIPS’ LEGAL GUARDIAN FOR THE SHOOT.<\/span><\/strong> 2. IT WAS SAVED FROM BECOMING A TV MOVIE BY THE GODFATHER.<\/span><\/strong> \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 13 Nostalgic Facts About American Graffiti. Here are three of my favorites… 3. CONTRARY<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":912,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17,63,54,64,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-celebs","category-humor","category-movies","category-music","category-trivia","comments-off"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/912"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16043"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16044,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16043\/revisions\/16044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nHappy Days<\/em> premiered five months after American Graffiti<\/em> was released. It was set in the ’50s, had Ron Howard playing a teen very similar to his American Graffiti<\/em> character, used “Rock Around the Clock” as its theme song, and even borrowed the American Graffiti<\/em> font for the credits. You’d think that Happy Days<\/em> was somehow a spin-off of the movie, but you’d be wrong. It actually began as an unsold pilot in 1971 and aired in 1972 as part of the anthology series Love, American Style<\/em>. (Lucas watched it at some point when he was considering casting Howard in American Graffiti<\/em>.) After the movie took off, and with ’50s nostalgia in high gear (Grease<\/em> was burning up Broadway), ABC reconsidered the Happy Days<\/em> pilot, ordered a series, and did everything they could to make it remind people of American Graffiti<\/em>. It ran for 10 years and was one of the most popular sitcoms in TV history.<\/p>\n
\nMackenzie Phillips was just 12 years old when she arrived to make the film, and though she had showbiz experience (her father, John Phillips, was in The Mamas & the Papas), neither she nor her parents realized that California law required her to have a guardian present. “They were almost going to have to recast me, but Gary Kurtz”\u2014a producer on the film\u2014”and his family said, ‘We’ll take her,'” Phillips said in 1999. ” So they went to the courts in San Francisco and got guardianship of me.” Phillips lived with the Kurtzes for the duration of the shoot and described it as a happy experience.<\/p>\n
\nUniversal Pictures gave Lucas a budget of $600,000, or about $3.5 million in 2016 dollars, to make the movie\u2014in other words, not very much. When Coppola came onboard as a producer shortly after the release of The Godfather, Universal gave Lucas another $175,000. Later, when the film was finished and had test-screened positively, Universal inexplicably wanted to drastically re-edit it and release it as a TV movie. Lucas objected but had no clout. Coppola, on the other hand\u2014by this time an Oscar-winner\u2014could make studio executives listen. He convinced them to do only a little bit of trimming (the deleted scenes were reincorporated for home video release) and to release the film theatrically.<\/p>\n