Word: graffiti
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There is currently some noise around to the effect that Cooley High-about growing up black in Chicago in 1964-is a separate but equal American Graffiti. Such impressions should be corrected immediately. It requires a certain defensiveness, or an anxious if inadvertent condescension, to maintain that Cooley High, crude of mind and clumsy of execution, can even compete with the smart high spirits of American Graffiti...
Cooley High has all the grace of an Army training film. Like the kids in Graffiti, the students in Cooley High are trapped near the dead end of their own young lives. The difference is that the odds of escape are even heavier against the blacks. They have to fight their poverty and the everyday threat of their streets even to get a chance. The Graffiti kids never really knew they had a chance. They took their fate-and everything else-for granted, which is a different kind of tragedy. Around Cooley High, you either knuckle under or you fight...
...high school graduate, Bartender is intelligent and knows it ("I used to see the brothers writing graffiti on the walls-spelling names wrong. I decided I wanted to help them"). He makes $121 a week as a porter at Kaiser Foundation Hospital, but his real life belongs to the Piru, the street gang of about 150 members who hang around Compton's Leuders Park taking drugs, playing basketball and planning robberies and burglaries. "I do my share," acknowledges Bartender, explaining: "People be broke." But mainly the Piru plots, attacks and defends itself against its hated enemies, the local chapter...
Dreyfuss amused himself by dating up any available women who happened to sail by. Duddy Kravitz had just opened to excellent reviews, and apparently everyone on the island had seen American Graffiti. Dreyfuss stood ready to enjoy all the perks of movie stardom, and would seize an assistant director's megaphone to pitch woo across the water. "You know why I get so many dates?" he told the envious Spielberg. "Because I have a 40-ft. face...
...edited by Spielberg and the remarkable Verna Fields (who also cut American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show), everything finally paid off. "If you look carefully," Fields points out, "you will see blue sky in one segment of a scene, cloudy sky in another, choppy seas in one scene, glassy in another." No one will feel detached enough to notice. The movie moves like gang busters, so fast that none of the mismatches really show. Even Bruce looks like a star. "Except when he heaved himself out of the water-when he had a plastic look -I was quite surprised...