| Lucas had to rewrite the script once more before he could get any studio to consider making the film. Eventually, Universal Studios executive, Ned Tanen read Lucas' rewrite, noticed its potential, and agreed to finance the picture for $750,000. Still, Lucas wasn't entirely pleased with his screenplay. Right after he got the deal to make Graffiti (and about two months before shooting) he asked Huyck & Katz to do a quick rewrite. This time they were available, so they agreed and helped rewrite the weak areas of the script. "They didn't change the structure," Lucas says, "what they did was improve the dialogue, make it funnier, more human, truer. And they also wrote in the Steve and Laurie relationship. They took those scenes and made them work. So though they improved it a great deal," Lucas says, "it was basically my story. The scenes are mine the dialogue is theirs. But it's hard to be cut and dry about something like that because of course, they completely changed some scenes and others were left intact." By the time it was finished, the screenplay was too long. Ms. Katz recalls, "It was like 160 pages, and everybody was freaking out. So we got the tiniest type known to man, and it became 125 pages. Finally, with the writing problems solved, on May 10, 1972 Lucas had the shooting script he needed to begin filming. |
