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In Hollywood, the past doesn’t gather dust — it glows. Sometimes, all it takes is a shoebox full of Polaroids to remind you just how luminous it was. When actress Candy Clark was interviewed by writer Sam Sweet back in 2022, he ended the conversation with a question: “Got any souvenirs from the seventies?”
She did.
“I said, yeah,” Candy recalls during a phone interview. “And I pulled out all these old Polaroids I’d taken back in the early seventies — [Steven] Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison [Ford]… all of these people who were just starting out.”
Out spilled time itself. A quiet miracle of memory, 18 snapshots taken with a Polaroid SX-70, tucked away for half a century, now staring back like ghosts from the golden hour of American cinema. And just like that, the idea for a book was born.
The result is Tight Heads, a 78-image love letter to an era that reshaped Hollywood — and a visual diary of Candy’s life as it gently drifted into the stratosphere. Printed with a dual-process technique that nearly scared off the printers (“they said all the ink would make the pages puffy,” Candy laughs). Each photo floats on the page like it has just finished developing. On the facing page: reflections. Memories. Sharp, sweet commentary from a woman who didn’t just witness history — she lived it.
And now she’s coming home.
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On June 20–21, Fort Worth gets to time-travel too. “The American Graffiti Tribute Classic Car Show” rolls into Tarrant County College’s South Campus, complete with vintage chrome, doo-wop dreams, and Clark herself. It’s her birthday weekend — and a high-octane tribute to the film that introduced her to the world: “American Graffiti.”
“I was a model in New York,” Candy remembers, “and I kind of stumbled into acting.” One of her earliest gigs was as an extra in “Who Is Harry Kellerman,” a Dustin Hoffman flick. That led to a day on set for the screen tests of “The Godfather.” “Francis Coppola told me I almost got him fired,” she laughs. “I kept showing up wearing this cape and hat, and we did this little routine at the end of the shoot — he’d pretend to crank me down like a toy, and I’d sink into the floor. Someone at Paramount saw the film and thought he was wasting time.”
But nothing was wasted. That day led to a screen test for “Fat City,” a John Huston film starring Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges. Candy got the role and a little bit more. “Jeff and I met on that screen test and started going steady that day,” she says. “I’m sure Jeff put in a good word for me.”
From there, the ride just accelerated. “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” “American Graffiti,” an Oscar nomination, a kind of cool-kid immortality that’s still unfolding. And through it all, a Polaroid in her hand.
That sense of wonder carried over to the set of “American Graffiti,” shot in 28 nights on the cold streets of Petaluma, California. “There were no chairs between takes,” she says. “If you wanted to sit, you sat on the curb or leaned on one of the cars.” The cars weren’t reliable. The budget barely budged. But something sparked. You can still hear it in the roar of the engines and the needle drop of “Rock Around the Clock.”
At the first cast and crew screening of the now iconic film, the crowd jumped to its feet once the chords to this classic song began. “We got a hit,” Candy remembers thinking. “Everyone knew it.”
Looking back at it all — the images, the memories, the way her life kept turning corners she never expected — Clark just shrugs, with that telltale glint of someone who never over-planned her now iconic career.
“I’ve always said,” Candy continued, “everything that’s ever happened to me has been by chance — never by design.”
