Flak Magazine: The Secret Origins of Tatooine, 05-16-02

In Star Wars, Luke wants to escape a barren agricultural world, where moisture farmers barely get by, and a big Friday night is going to Mos Eisley Station to pick up some landspeeder parts, or shooting womp rats. In Modesto, George Lucas lived among almond and peach farmers, and Friday nights meant cruising McHenry Avenue. Everything is hot and flat in Modesto, the skyline broken by the occasional grain silo. There is a beauty in the empty stillness and distant blue ridges, and Star Wars captures it, even though it's shot in Tunisia instead of California's great basin.

There are farm animals in Modesto, as on Tatooine. Like the lumbering Bantha of the first film, they just sit there. There are no pod races, computer-generated cartoon dinosaurs, or belching, carapaced monsters here. There are summer beauty contests for pregnant cows — the suspense lies in choosing your heifer without knowing how much she will bloat up. You can understand why a bright guy like George Lucas would imagine doing something drastic, like joining the Imperial Starfleet or enrolling in film school at the University of Southern California. Anything but spend another season hanging around in the '70s, waiting to join the family paper supply business.

These days Modesto prides itself on coming a long way from its small-town origins. When local daughter Chandra Levy disappeared in 2001, reporters from places like New York came to Modesto and found a "dusty" farmbelt city, where young men race cars at night, hang out at bars, yell at women from car windows for entertainment, all while swearing they'll leave town somehow.

"Can you believe this?" Modestans would ask each other, passing around the articles and laughing at how blind the Easterners seemed to the culture of New Modesto. A mall had gone up on the outskirts of town, and a multiplex theater downtown, with a smoothie place next door. A huge DoubleTree hotel, the only tall building around, now cut a figure across the skyline. And you had a choice of two Denny's restaurants on McHenry Avenue, a long row of car lots, tanning salons and gun, tattoo and car parts shops.

George Lucas is the hero of Modesto and the father of its culture, though he'd never come back. Look in a city guide for tourists, and you'll find that the main attraction is an A&W Root Beer restaurant that still has bellhops on skates — kept thanks to Lucas's movie American Graffiti. The film is about cruising McHenry Avenue, half-wanting to leave. Modestans forgive Lucas for the leaving part, and have made the movie the basis for "Back to Graffiti," "Graffiti '02," and a number of other classic car shows.

In front of Denny's #1 is a statue of a guy and a girl leaning against an old car. It's called "The Cruise." When a park was dedicated to George Lucas in 1999 for his contributions to the city, Lucas sent a representative, who said the filmmaker regretted not being able to make it. He was busy finishing The Phantom Menace, in which Tatooine looks like Disneyland.

Once a reporter was standing on a corner, waiting for the WALK light, when a stranger approached. "I'm new in town," he said. "Christ, is there anything to do around here but go to bars? Any pool halls or anything?"

The reporter wasn't sure.

"I was just reading in the paper that they've even outlawed cruising," he said in disgust as he headed across the perpendicular crosswalk.

"I wrote that article," the reporter said. That was me.

It's also said the model for Harrison Ford's character in American Graffiti is still in town. But he got caught up in some shady real estate deals involving car lots.

— John Gorenfeld (john@flakmag.com)