Verna Fields - George Lucas and American Graffiti

George Lucas and American Graffiti

In 1967, Fields had hired George Lucas to help edit Journey to the Pacific (1968), which was a documentary film that she'd directed for the USIA. She had also hired Marcia Griffin for the job, and introduced Griffin and George Lucas; they subsequently married. In 1972, Lucas was directing American Graffiti. While Lucas had intended that his wife would edit the film, Universal Studios asked him to add Verna Fields to the editing team. Over the first ten weeks of post-production, George and Marcia Lucas, along with Fields and Walter Murch (as sound editor), pieced together the original, 165 minute version of the film. Each of more than 40 scenes in the film had a continuously playing background song that had been popular around 1962, when the film's story was set. Michael Sragow has characterized the effect as "using rock 'n roll as a Greek chorus with a beat".

Fields then left American Graffiti. It took another six months of editing to create a shorter, 110 minute version of the film, but upon its release in 1973 American Graffiti was extremely successful both with critics and at the box office. Shortly after its release, Roger Greenspun described the film and its editing: "American Graffiti exists not so much in its individual stories as in its orchestration of many stories, its sense of time and place. Although it is full of the material of fashionable nostalgia, it never exploits nostalgia. In its feeling for movement and music and the vitality of the night—and even in its vision in white—it is oddly closer to some early Fellini than to the recent American past of, say, The Last Picture Show or Summer of '42."

Verna Fields and Marcia Lucas were nominated for an Academy Award for Film Editing in 1974 for their work on American Graffiti; while the film won no Academy Awards, both of the Lucases, Murch, and Fields all won Academy Awards for later work. The commercial success of the film gave George Lucas the opportunity to direct his next film, Star Wars.