Aggie Guerard Rodgers has designed memorable costumes for many classic American films, including American Graffiti, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, The Color Purple, Beetlejuice, and Benny & Joon. She joins Deborah Nadoolman Landis in conversation following the screening to discuss the challenges of the costume design process from script to screen

“You can't stay seventeen forever,” one teenager advises another in George Lucas's vivid recollection of the summer of 1962, but American Graffiti preserves the end of innocence in an amber glow. As the film cruises through one long night in small-town Northern California, from dusk at Mel's Drive-In to dawn over the golden Central Valley, Rodgers's costumes establish each character's place in the teen social taxonomy: buttoned-down college-bound boys, greasers with Camels rolled in their shirtsleeves, good girls in Peter Pan collars, gang members in matching jackets like a varsity team from an alternate universe. Like nostalgia itself, these looks, and these characters, are both specific and eternal.