Posted by
Sam Heath on Tuesday, June 05, 2007 4:25:06 PM
“American Graffiti” worked for George Lucas; “Radioland Murders” did not. Born in 1947 and with a Modesto background Lucas lived the experiences of 1973 including the emphasis on cars, but he missed being raised with American radio of 1939 and actually experiencing this. However, it has been rumored Lucas refused to make another Star Wars film until his pet project of several years Radioland Murders (1994) was made. A commercial failure at the box office, it grossed only $1,299,060 upon its original release here in the U.S.
The failure of RM was primarily two-fold. It required absolute focused attention, something made very difficult because of the high-energy, frenetic slapstick and dialog, and only those of the radio generation could relate to the whole film. Attempting to make a success of such a film to the TV generation incapable of such focused attention and lacking the required background was an exercise in futility.
Notwithstanding its commercial failure and being panned by critics, RM is one of my favorite films because I did live the time represented and can relate to the whole movie. Radio was one of the reasons I can say my generation experienced the very best America has ever had to offer; the best of the culture, music, literature, films our nation ever produced, all of which went into the making of The Greatest Generation, the kind of Norman Rockwell generation that loved and believed in America and as a result could fight and win WWII.
What Lucas attempted to do was reach back to a time of the genuine goodness and innocence that actually existed here in America despite its manifold shortcomings. But what he actually did because he understood it far better than that era he missed by ten years is best represented at the end of the film when he has Lieutenant Cross say to the two cops who are mesmerized by the test pattern on that TV monitor, “Hey; I’m talkin’ to you guys.” It was this scene that told audiences why Lucas felt such a deep obligation to making the film. He had not lived the golden age of radio, but he knew the kind of sociological demon TV represented and RM was his attempt to pay homage to the best of what America had been as represented by radio, and represented by his own parents of that radio generation. And given his own genius Lucas knew the imagination radio required of people, the kind of technicians, writers, and talent required to make radio successful to the imagination and had been lost to the TV generation.
The high-energy slapstick of RM as a comedy belies the personal obligation Lucas felt to make the film a sober commentary on what America has lost of those things that made us a great nation, much of this our once being able to laugh at ourselves, this explaining why he felt the need to make the story a comedy, one in which the dark side of the “Force” would be subtle. And his pointed comment of the dark side of the Force by way of two cops mesmerized by a TV monitor was his way of lamenting the passing of an America that would never be again, an America and a time that may eventually be known only as the Camelot of fable with only a dwindling few like myself who lived it to tell the actual story of an “America once upon a time” and now fast fading to only a memory.
Tomorrow will be June 6, the date we commemorate the 1944 landing of allied forces in Normandy. I can easily relate to George Lucas wanting to hold on to the goodness of America, the best of what America has represented in the past. The moral traditions show through all his films, but the melancholy loss of my generation that knew and experienced that America now fading into fable, the loss of so many lives sacrificed to what America has now become because of a thoroughly corrupt government dedicated to globalization and profits cries out as a story to be told.
Because of my belonging to that generation of storytellers where imagination reigned supreme, I can easily imagine myself setting with other elders of my tribe just as my Cherokee ancestors telling our children of a land that used to be. But that English side of my family demands the story not just be told, but written as a testament of the truth about a land that used to be. George Lucas tried, and I’m grateful for his effort, but he was born ten years too late to do other than pay homage to radio and call attention to those two cops sitting in front of a TV monitor.