Amy Heckerling grew up in the Bronx watching the same James Cagney movie every night. That was the deal with Million Dollar Moviea local New York broadcaster that broadcast one movie repeatedly throughout the week: the same picture, the same time, over and over again until you could read every line of dialogue and anticipate every take. Most of the children were playing outside in the garden. Heckerling was inside, watching.
“By the end of the week, you knew all the dialogue and all the takes,” she says in the latest episode of her show. It happened in Hollywood. “If you were a little kid, this is what you wanted to watch.”
This education—supplemented with subway trips to foreign cinemas and a cheap membership to the Museum of Modern Art at the age of fourteen—meant that by the time Heckerling arrived at New York University’s film school, she had already seen most of what her professors were planning to show her. I went to the American Film Institute. She was ready in every sense of the word. What she needed was a movie.
I almost got one. One feature I developed at MGM was three weeks into production when the 1980 actors’ strike shut it down. The project collapsed. She spent the next phase of her career in Hollywood purgatory: meetings, half the money, competing projects, and executives who loved her but couldn’t commit. Then, one day, in an office hallway at Universal, she found herself down the hall across from a producer named Art Linson.
Linson showed her a script based on the book by Cameron Crowe, a former Rolling Stone The genius who spent a year undercover at a San Diego high school writes about teen culture from the inside. The script was good but sprawling – a collection of teenage lives that never really come together. Heckerling had an idea.
“I said, ‘These people are kind of spread out,’” she recalls. “But if you go with the old-fashioned soda shop mentality, a place where you can get everyone together, you can make the stories more concise.” She noted that malls have become just a thing. Linson loved it. Universal loved it. They told her to go meet Crowe.
“He was the most wonderful human being I ever met,” she says of Crowe, who went on to direct such great films as Jerry Maguire and Almost famous. “And when he’s interested in something, he’s an eye-catcher.” She and Qrow talked for hours about the book, about school, about everything that didn’t appear on the page. The job was hers. Only later did I find out that David Lynch had been shown the material first. “I would love to see this movie,” she says.
To pour Fast times at Ridgemont High School The day reads like a slam dunk: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, and Forest Whitaker in his first screen appearance, plus a brief role for a young Nicolas Cage, who Heckerling fought to be placed in a bigger part and was nixed by the studio.
But it was Ben who announced himself loudly. Heckerling remembers walking into an office and finding him already there, sitting on the floor. “I looked down and he looked up and I was like – well, some people, it just goes through you.”Stop. That’s someone.”
He got the role, then dug deeper and deeper into it as production went on, sending Heckerling photos of checkered vans for her approval, bringing the surfer’s authentic vocabulary to a role that could easily have been a caricature.
Word quickly spread that something very special was happening at Van Nuys High School, where the film was filmed on location. “Every day he was filming, every agent in town and every executive would come to the set,” she says.
She paired Penn with Ray Walston as the tyrannical history teacher Mr. Hand, an inspired collision of old and new Hollywood. Walston was a stage-trained legend. Ben was something else entirely. During Walston’s close-ups, Penn would improvise insults to provoke a reaction. The veteran actor would pull Heckerling aside afterward and complain about Penn’s “help.”
Fast times It was, by 1982 standards, an unusually honest film about teenage sexuality—not leering and not sanitized, but frank in the way that real teenage experience is frank. A subplot involving Lee’s character, Stacy Hamilton, getting pregnant and having an abortion was included without objection from the studio. Heckerling is still a little surprised about that.
“Things have not progressed,” she says. “In fact, they’ve gone backwards a lot.”
The classification board was a different battle. Heckerling shot the sex scene between Stacy and Mike Damon (Robert Romanos) with full nudity on both sides, a conscious act of justice in a genre that has always pointed the camera in one direction. The MPAA said no. This will result in an X rating.
“I said, ‘But if it were a woman, it wouldn’t be X-rated,’” she recalls. “And they said, ‘Well, the penis is aggressive.’ How do you combat that?”
The scene was cut. The original, restored copy, is with her now. “Part of me thinks maybe this is too much now,” she says. But at the time, it felt like the last gasps of something. “It was like there was a door slowly closing on sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Then the Reagans came in and they were saying no to everything. We walked in right as the door was closing.”
For the film, which would eventually gross $50 million on a $5 million budget, enter the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, and help launch six major careers, Fast times at Ridgemont High School He was released with unusual indifference.
Universal opened it in a few hundred theaters, on the West Coast only, without any advertising campaign — and what Heckerling described as a marketing concept involving “sexy girls inside a French fry container.”
The film found its audience anyway, through word of mouth and eventually through home video. But for years, every ownership statement she received showed it in red. She notes dryly that accounting in Hollywood is its own kind of education.
Apparently the former Universal CEO felt the same way. Years later, Heckerling was waiting for a meeting when the man saw her across the room. “He saw me and said, ‘I fucked you,'” she says.
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