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Buzz Feed
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
34 'Clueless' Behind-The-Scenes Facts You Never Knew
This week marks the 30th anniversary of Clueless — and what better way to celebrate than to learn some fun facts about the classic? It's greater than a game of suck and blow... Writer/director Amy Heckerling originally pitched Clueless to Twentieth Century Fox as a TV series called No Worries — but the executives thought it "needed more boys". Even when working on it as a movie, it took awhile to settle on the title Clueless. Before that, Amy Heckerling used the titles I Was A Teenage Teenager and later Clueless in California. Cher was partially inspired by Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which Amy Heckerling also directed. She recognised he was the most popular character she'd created and decided that that was because he's "positive", so she wanted to create a lead who was positive and happy — which became Cher. It was when she was re-working the idea from a TV show to a movie that Amy Heckerling revisited Jane Austen's Emma and realized Cher was basically a modern Emma, and she could base the plot of Clueless on Jane Austen's novel. When she was writing the script, Amy Heckerling pictured the Beastie Boys' Adam Horovitz as Josh. Reese Witherspoon, Alicia Witt, Keri Russell, and Tiffani Thiessen all auditioned for the role of Cher — and so did Brittany Murphy, who went on to play Tai. Ben Affleck and Zach Braff both auditioned for the role of Josh, as did Jeremy Sisto, who got the role of Elton, and Justin Walker, who went on the play Christian. Before being cast as Josh, Paul Rudd originally asked to read for the role of Murray, not realising the character was black and thinking he was a "white guy who's trying to co-opt black culture". He also read for Christian and Elton before Amy Heckerling suggested he try Josh. Seth Green — who is Breckin Meyer's best friend — was the other top choice for Breckin's role of Travis. And Terrence Howard, who is close friends with Donald Faison, was a top contender for the role of Murray. Lauryn Hill auditioned for the role of Dionne. Sarah Michelle Gellar was offered the role of Amber, but couldn't get out of her obligations to All My Children, which she was working on at the time. Alicia Silverstone thought Cher was a "materialistic, annoying little bitch" when she first read the script. She changed her mind when she realised how much Cher cares about her dad and other people. She had no idea that Clueless was based on Emma until after she'd finished filming. Stacey Dash, who played Dionne, was 27 years old and had a six-year-old son at the time of filming. Before making Clueless, Jeremy Sisto had previously worked with Alicia Silverstone on a movie called Hideaway — he played a serial killer who goes after her character. Amy Heckerling based the role of Mr. Hall on a friend of hers who was a teacher, who helped her observe real classes while she was working on the script, and even had a cameo as the principal in the final movie. But she always had Wallace Shawn in mind to play Mr. Hall — and he was actually a teacher for three years in real life. Amy Heckerling had a cameo as a bridesmaid for Miss Geist's wedding to Mr. Hall — she is best friends with Twink Caplan, who played Miss Geist, in real life. Amy Heckerling borrowed the unique slang used in the movie from a bunch of places, including real teens at Beverly Hills High School and those auditioning for the movie, the castmembers and crew, the queer community, and, of course, her own brain. Executives wanted Josh and Cher to be next-door neighbours because they thought the ex-step-sibling relationship was "too incestuous" — but Amy Heckerling pushed back, arguing (truthfully) that her own grandparents had been step-siblings who met as teenagers. Breckin Meyer sprained his ankle while rehearsing one of the skateboarding scenes, and subsequent scenes that featured him had to work around the fact he couldn't really walk. A fake, cardboard credit card was used for the "suck and blow" scene because some of the actors couldn't "suck" on a real credit card long enough to film their shots. While filming Clueless, Paul Rudd's real life echoed the movie in a scary way — like Cher, he was robbed at gunpoint after he'd been out with a friend one night. The 'This is an Alaïa' dress wasn't originally part of the script — the dress was chosen first, and then written in. Alicia Silverstone had a massive 63 costume changes over the course of the movie. Paul Rudd wore a lot of his own clothes to play Josh — including the Amnesty International t-shirt. Donald Faison didn't actually have braces in real life — he wore them as Murray to hide an extra tooth he had (a baby tooth that had never fallen out). The hairclip Cher wears in the concert scene was later used on Amanda Bynes' character in She's the Man. Clueless costume designer Mona May later worked on Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, which she described as a "grown-up" version of Clueless, aesthetically. For the iconic opening looks Cher and Dionne wear, the plaid suits were meant to be reminiscent of schoolgirl uniforms, while the over-the-knee socks were inspired by Cabaret. Alicia Silverstone kept a lot of Cher's outfits, but ended up giving them all away. Two extras were randomly paired to makeout for a party scene — they later went on to get engaged in real life. Paul Rudd gave everyone one of those necklaces with their name written on a grain of rice as a farewell gift when shooting wrapped. Stream Clueless on Hulu.
The Guardian
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The entire industry said no': the story behind seminal teen comedy Clueless at 30
In the early 1990s, the writer-director Amy Heckerling was feeling down. Heckerling had burst on to the scene a decade earlier with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a groundbreaking coming-of-age comedy of libidinous teens, and scored a surprise box office hit with 1989's Look Who's Talking. But she was struggling to fit Hollywood demands. 'I was thinking: 'Oh, I'm never going to make a film that's what I want it to be, because you can't have protagonists that are female, you have to do slob comedies, but there's only a few actors that they accept in those roles, and you don't get a chance to work with them if you're a female,'' Heckerling told me recently. With little interest in catering to the prevailing tastes of the day, Heckerling went back to the drawing board: what did she want to write? A true native New Yorker with the accent to match, Heckerling 'gravitated towards darker stuff' – early gangster movies, David Lynch. But she was most amused by 'people who are very optimistic and happy. I just think, how the hell did they get that way?' Like the main character in the 1994 movie Ed Wood, perpetually pleased with his mediocre work, or the star of Gentleman Prefer Blondes (the book), sending herself flowers to stir the jealousy of men around her. She envisioned a woman in a 'big, pink bubble that can't be burst', convinced of her centrality but still winsome, relentlessly positive and naive. Someone like Cher Horowitz, the most impeccably dressed 16-year-old in America, hapless social matchmaker of Beverly Hills' Bronson Alcott high school and the lead of Heckerling's movie Clueless. Clueless, released 30 years ago on 19 July, remains a seminal teen comedy, the kind that immediately and indelibly stamps the culture. The instantly recognizable yellow plaid suit? 'Whateverrrr?' As if you could escape its cultural legacy. A loose adaptation of Jane Austen's 1815 novel Emma, Clueless reinvigorated the stagnant teen movie genre that flourished for the rest of the decade. 10 Things I Hate About You, Mean Girls, Easy A – the teen comedy staples of my teenage years in the late 2000s – live in the shadow of Clueless, which played almost daily on at least one cable channel after school. 'There are very few movies in history that have lasted 30 years with that kind of intensity, with that kind of a broad appeal to generations,' Mona May, the film's totally important costume designer, told me. 'It's truly beloved.' 'It's bright heartwarming and joyful – smart, funny and satirical in a way that still resonates,' said the film's star, Alicia Silverstone, via email. 'There is something about Amy's take on youth culture and coming-of-age stories that is timeless.' It also barely made it out of pre-production. Finding a studio home for Heckerling's script was, as Cher would say, 'like searching for a boy in high school ... as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie'. Heckerling first developed what she thought would be a TV series at 20th Century Fox, with the support of an executive named Elizabeth Gabler. She delivered the feature script to Fox along with a VHS tape she recorded off MTV of Aerosmith's music video for Cryin', featuring a young, blond, radiant actor named Alicia Silverstone. They passed. Heckerling's agent, Ken Stovitz, then doggedly shopped the idea around town, to no avail. The protagonists were female; 'Clueless' sounded too much like underperforming films on young slackers; studio brass thought Heckerling's still distinctive amalgamation of Valley speak, teenage slang and personal inspirations (the trademark 'as if!' came from 'my gay friends in their 30s') wouldn't translate to a wide audience. 'The entire industry said no,' Heckerling recalled. Except for Scott Rudin, the prolific, and prolifically volatile, film and theater producer, whose support ignited a bidding war. 'Usually I'd write something for some people and it would go where it was or we'd go to other people that might be interested,' Heckerling said. 'But never, 'we all hate it, now we all love it.'' And that's show business – 'it's stupid,' Heckerling laughed, 'but I love it.' With the backing of Paramount, Heckerling and casting director Marcia Ross began their search for actors to play the most stylish high-schoolers in the US, including some unsuccessful sessions shadowing real students at high schools in Beverly Hills and the San Fernando Valley. ('These kids walked around in these baggy clothes. They look just looked hopeless,' said Heckerling, though they perhaps inspired Cher's disdain for high school boys 'in baggy pants and oversized T-shirts looking like schlemiels – bleurgh'.) Heckerling first met with Silverstone at a cafe and was won over by, of all things, how she leaned her body over a cup to use the straw rather than pick it up, a move that reminded her of her eight-year-old daughter. 'When I first saw the Cryin' video, my initial reaction was: 'Oh, she's a hot chick,'' said Heckerling. But after the first meeting, it was: ''Oh, I want to take care of her.'' She connected with her vision for Cher – a girl who 'thinks she's all that and she's acting like a grownup who knows everything, but there's a child in her'. Stacey Dash, a 25-year-old from New York, won the part of Dionne, Cher's relatively more experienced best friend. Dash 'was much more savvy already', May, the costume designer, recalled. 'She was sassy.' To play Josh, Cher's intellectual, very undergrad-y stepbrother-turned-love interest, the team cast a fresh-faced actor named Paul Rudd. And for the 'clueless' Tai, a homely new kid Cher mentors – and misleads – as part of her initiative of 'good deeds', Ross found a 17-year-old newcomer named Brittany Murphy. 'Everybody loved her,' said Heckerling. Peppy, open-hearted, eager to help, Murphy was always the frontrunner for Tai, though she wasn't confident in her chances. After a chemistry read with Silverstone, 'Alicia was trying to tell me: 'Oh my God, it has to be her,'' Heckerling recalled. 'And I was already like: 'Yeah, we know.'' Filming commenced in November 1994, and proceeded over 40 days in Los Angeles like 'a well-oiled machine', said Elisa Donovan, who played Cher's haute couture-loving frenemy Amber. (Cher's assessment: 'Do you prefer fashion victim or ensemble-y challenged?') Fresh to LA with just a few TV credits, Donovan walked on to her first film set and 'thought: oh, this is how movies work. Brilliant women write them and direct them. They're in charge. They're the ones who hire all the right people. They tell everyone what to do in like a fun and kind, but firm way. They know what they're doing.' (On subsequent sets, she 'learned pretty quickly that this was highly unusual'.) Key to this environment was the partnership between Heckerling and May, who assembled the entire wardrobe for the film – 63 designer looks for Silverstone, 45 changes for the other principal actors, and all the extras' outfits – for a budget of about $200,000 (about $413,000 today). 'Amy is an amazing writer,' said May. 'She wrote the blueprint for me – high school, Beverly Hills, rich girls, high fashion.' But in 1994, 'everybody was wearing grunge,' not Alaïa – a Parisian designer May had to personally beg, via French translator, for the iconic red party dress, as they were out of money; the designer loaned it – May designed the peacocking feather jacket to complete the look – and got name-checked in the script. May took clues from runway shows, sourcing looks from department stores, old collection books and magazines. The characters 'had Daddy's credit cards, they could go shopping at the runway shows in Paris or Milan or wherever', said May, but the clothes had to communicate 'real girls that then you can emulate and love' – elevated and chic, but also youthful, fun and innocent. Such as, say, a yellow plaid Jean-Paul Gaultier blazer May pulled off the rack at a department store, the third choice behind a blue and red riff on the classic Catholic school uniform. (Yellow is 'a tricky color', Heckerling noted. 'It's sunshine, but it's also jaundice.') Blue didn't work, red was too Christmas. But the yellow one on Silverstone was a goosebumps moment – 'Oh my God, this is Cher,' said May. 'She's the queen bee.' It was through the clothes that Silverstone, then 18, transformed from budding environmental activist into airheaded, but well-meaning, Beverly Hills queen. 'She was already saving animals and walking around in her sweatpants and flip-flops with two dogs in tow into the fitting. She was not Cher in real life,' May recalled. Silverstone confirms: 'I was not one bit interested in fashion at that time personally, and my usual outfit was jeans and my favorite green T-shirt.' But, 'I looked at Cher as being extremely confident and having a deep, healthy love of herself.' The set, overall, was 'just really fun and vibrant', Donovan recalled. 'It was all magic,' said May. 'Amy is such a great director – she opened us up, she's very collaborative, she's very encouraging.' Silverstone, as the star, was a bit more circumspect: 'I was in almost every scene, so I was working hard and taking the role seriously. When I hear about all the fun the other actors had, I get whatever the past tense of Fomo is.' Filming wrapped at the end of 1994, and Clueless hit theaters seven months later, becoming an instant hit among the target audience – something quickly clear to Donovan, who was swarmed by a group of teens at a mall a fews weeks after release. It took longer for Heckerling to catch on. 'I didn't feel like it was like a big [hit] at the time,' she said. 'I have friends that are [male] movie directors, and they have hits that are gigantic. I mean, Animal House and Beverly Hills Cop and Ghostbusters, those are big money-making movies. And Clueless did not make that much. It was a hit, but it wasn't in every theater like that.' But it did catch on, winning fans on the then booming home video market and launching an endless tradition of Cher Halloween costumes. 'You always hope your movie is a hit,' said May, who went on to design costumes for Romy & Michele's High School Reunion, Enchanted, The House Bunny and more. 'Every film-maker will say that, but you just never know. It has to just be the right moment and the right time and the right culture. And this was all right.' In true Hollywood fashion, the industry took some of the wrong lessons – instead of focusing on how the movie worked, or greenlighting more female directors, it spawned countless imitators. Afterwards, 'it wasn't like: 'Oh boy, here come all the great scripts,'' said Heckerling. It was: 'Here's the script that's this classic for teenagers, or that classic, but with teenagers. 'They only think you can do what's been done,' she added. 'It's like they needed a big insurance policy. Movies are expensive, so they only want to make sure that if you did Emma in high school, why don't you do Persuasion in high school?' Also in true Hollywood fashion, Clueless has become valuable IP – the basis for a spinoff TV show with Dash and Donovan that ran from 1996 to 1997; a West End stage show; and an upcoming, still vague adaptation with Peacock from The OC and Gossip Girl creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, with Silverstone set to reprise her role. Heckerling, an executive producer, declined to offer any details, citing prematurity and a well-earned development superstition. The 30th anniversary once again brings up the original film's still remarkable singularity, as well as the stark absence of Murphy, who died at the age of 32, igniting years of intense media speculation. 'I always think about Brittany and it's really hard to do any of this and not talk about her,' said Donovan. 'She was so talented and just had so much energy and so vibrant … just this hummingbird, frenetic sort of energy, but also like, 'everything's great. I got it. No problem.'' With the anniversary events, 'It makes me emotional because I feel like she should be doing a lot of this, like she would be doing a lot of this,' she added. But the milestone – the kids of Clueless now old enough to have their own headstrong high-schoolers – offers an opportunity to remember, as Heckerling put it, 'the goofy fun of it all'. 'People come up to me and say: 'Your designs changed my life,'' said May. 'To hear that in your lifetime, that something that you created has had an impact on people? It's incredible.'
The Guardian
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The entire industry said no': the story behind seminal teen comedy Clueless at 30
In the early 1990s, the writer-director Amy Heckerling was feeling down. Heckerling had burst on to the scene a decade earlier with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a groundbreaking coming-of-age comedy of libidinous teens, and scored a surprise box office hit with 1989's Look Who's Talking. But she was struggling to fit Hollywood demands. 'I was thinking: 'Oh, I'm never going to make a film that's what I want it to be, because you can't have protagonists that are female, you have to do slob comedies, but there's only a few actors that they accept in those roles, and you don't get a chance to work with them if you're a female,'' Heckerling told me recently. With little interest in catering to the prevailing tastes of the day, Heckerling went back to the drawing board: what did she want to write? A true native New Yorker with the accent to match, Heckerling 'gravitated towards darker stuff' – early gangster movies, David Lynch. But she was most amused by 'people who are very optimistic and happy. I just think, how the hell did they get that way?' Like the main character in the 1994 movie Ed Wood, perpetually pleased with his mediocre work, or the star of Gentleman Prefer Blondes (the book), sending herself flowers to stir the jealousy of men around her. She envisioned a woman in a 'big, pink bubble that can't be burst', convinced of her centrality but still winsome, relentlessly positive and naive. Someone like Cher Horowitz, the most impeccably dressed 16-year-old in America, hapless social matchmaker of Beverly Hills' Bronson Alcott high school and the lead of Heckerling's movie Clueless. Clueless, released 30 years ago on 19 July, remains a seminal teen comedy, the kind that immediately and indelibly stamps the culture. The instantly recognizable yellow plaid suit? 'Whateverrrr?' As if you could escape its cultural legacy. A loose adaptation of Jane Austen's 1815 novel Emma, Clueless reinvigorated the stagnant teen movie genre that flourished for the rest of the decade. 10 Things I Hate About You, Mean Girls, Easy A – the teen comedy staples of my teenage years in the late 2000s – live in the shadow of Clueless, which played almost daily on at least one cable channel after school. 'There are very few movies in history that have lasted 30 years with that kind of intensity, with that kind of a broad appeal to generations,' Mona May, the film's totally important costume designer, told me. 'It's truly beloved.' 'It's bright heartwarming and joyful – smart, funny and satirical in a way that still resonates,' said the film's star, Alicia Silverstone, via email. 'There is something about Amy's take on youth culture and coming-of-age stories that is timeless.' It also barely made it out of pre-production. Finding a studio home for Heckerling's script was, as Cher would say, 'like searching for a boy in high school ... as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie'. Heckerling first developed what she thought would be a TV series at 20th Century Fox, with the support of an executive named Elizabeth Gabler. She delivered the feature script to Fox along with a VHS tape she recorded off MTV of Aerosmith's music video for Cryin', featuring a young, blond, radiant actor named Alicia Silverstone. They passed. Heckerling's agent, Ken Stovitz, then doggedly shopped the idea around town, to no avail. The protagonists were female; 'Clueless' sounded too much like underperforming films on young slackers; studio brass thought Heckerling's still distinctive amalgamation of Valley speak, teenage slang and personal inspirations (the trademark 'as if!' came from 'my gay friends in their 30s') wouldn't translate to a wide audience. 'The entire industry said no,' Heckerling recalled. Except for Scott Rudin, the prolific, and prolifically volatile, film and theater producer, whose support ignited a bidding war. 'Usually I'd write something for some people and it would go where it was or we'd go to other people that might be interested,' Heckerling said. 'But never, 'we all hate it, now we all love it.'' And that's show business – 'it's stupid,' Heckerling laughed, 'but I love it.' With the backing of Paramount, Heckerling and casting director Marcia Ross began their search for actors to play the most stylish high-schoolers in the US, including some unsuccessful sessions shadowing real students at high schools in Beverly Hills and the San Fernando Valley. ('These kids walked around in these baggy clothes. They look just looked hopeless,' said Heckerling, though they perhaps inspired Cher's disdain for high school boys 'in baggy pants and oversized T-shirts looking like schlemiels – bleurgh'.) Heckerling first met with Silverstone at a cafe and was won over by, of all things, how she leaned her body over a cup to use the straw rather than pick it up, a move that reminded her of her eight-year-old daughter. 'When I first saw the Cryin' video, my initial reaction was: 'Oh, she's a hot chick,'' said Heckerling. But after the first meeting, it was: ''Oh, I want to take care of her.'' She connected with her vision for Cher – a girl who 'thinks she's all that and she's acting like a grownup who knows everything, but there's a child in her'. Stacey Dash, a 25-year-old from New York, won the part of Dionne, Cher's relatively more experienced best friend. Dash 'was much more savvy already', May, the costume designer, recalled. 'She was sassy.' To play Josh, Cher's intellectual, very undergrad-y stepbrother-turned-love interest, the team cast a fresh-faced actor named Paul Rudd. And for the 'clueless' Tai, a homely new kid Cher mentors – and misleads – as part of her initiative of 'good deeds', Ross found a 17-year-old newcomer named Brittany Murphy. 'Everybody loved her,' said Heckerling. Peppy, open-hearted, eager to help, Murphy was always the frontrunner for Tai, though she wasn't confident in her chances. After a chemistry read with Silverstone, 'Alicia was trying to tell me: 'Oh my God, it has to be her,'' Heckerling recalled. 'And I was already like: 'Yeah, we know.'' Filming commenced in November 1994, and proceeded over 40 days in Los Angeles like 'a well-oiled machine', said Elisa Donovan, who played Cher's haute couture-loving frenemy Amber. (Cher's assessment: 'Do you prefer fashion victim or ensemble-y challenged?') Fresh to LA with just a few TV credits, Donovan walked on to her first film set and 'thought: oh, this is how movies work. Brilliant women write them and direct them. They're in charge. They're the ones who hire all the right people. They tell everyone what to do in like a fun and kind, but firm way. They know what they're doing.' (On subsequent sets, she 'learned pretty quickly that this was highly unusual'.) Key to this environment was the partnership between Heckerling and May, who assembled the entire wardrobe for the film – 63 designer looks for Silverstone, 45 changes for the other principal actors, and all the extras' outfits – for a budget of about $200,000 (about $413,000 today). 'Amy is an amazing writer,' said May. 'She wrote the blueprint for me – high school, Beverly Hills, rich girls, high fashion.' But in 1994, 'everybody was wearing grunge,' not Alaïa – a Parisian designer May had to personally beg, via French translator, for the iconic red party dress, as they were out of money; the designer loaned it – May designed the peacocking feather jacket to complete the look – and got name-checked in the script. May took clues from runway shows, sourcing looks from department stores, old collection books and magazines. The characters 'had Daddy's credit cards, they could go shopping at the runway shows in Paris or Milan or wherever', said May, but the clothes had to communicate 'real girls that then you can emulate and love' – elevated and chic, but also youthful, fun and innocent. Such as, say, a yellow plaid Jean-Paul Gaultier blazer May pulled off the rack at a department store, the third choice behind a blue and red riff on the classic Catholic school uniform. (Yellow is 'a tricky color', Heckerling noted. 'It's sunshine, but it's also jaundice.') Blue didn't work, red was too Christmas. But the yellow one on Silverstone was a goosebumps moment – 'Oh my God, this is Cher,' said May. 'She's the queen bee.' It was through the clothes that Silverstone, then 18, transformed from budding environmental activist into airheaded, but well-meaning, Beverly Hills queen. 'She was already saving animals and walking around in her sweatpants and flip-flops with two dogs in tow into the fitting. She was not Cher in real life,' May recalled. Silverstone confirms: 'I was not one bit interested in fashion at that time personally, and my usual outfit was jeans and my favorite green T-shirt.' But, 'I looked at Cher as being extremely confident and having a deep, healthy love of herself.' The set, overall, was 'just really fun and vibrant', Donovan recalled. 'It was all magic,' said May. 'Amy is such a great director – she opened us up, she's very collaborative, she's very encouraging.' Silverstone, as the star, was a bit more circumspect: 'I was in almost every scene, so I was working hard and taking the role seriously. When I hear about all the fun the other actors had, I get whatever the past tense of Fomo is.' Filming wrapped at the end of 1994, and Clueless hit theaters seven months later, becoming an instant hit among the target audience – something quickly clear to Donovan, who was swarmed by a group of teens at a mall a fews weeks after release. It took longer for Heckerling to catch on. 'I didn't feel like it was like a big [hit] at the time,' she said. 'I have friends that are [male] movie directors, and they have hits that are gigantic. I mean, Animal House and Beverly Hills Cop and Ghostbusters, those are big money-making movies. And Clueless did not make that much. It was a hit, but it wasn't in every theater like that.' But it did catch on, winning fans on the then booming home video market and launching an endless tradition of Cher Halloween costumes. 'You always hope your movie is a hit,' said May, who went on to design costumes for Romy & Michele's High School Reunion, Enchanted, The House Bunny and more. 'Every film-maker will say that, but you just never know. It has to just be the right moment and the right time and the right culture. And this was all right.' In true Hollywood fashion, the industry took some of the wrong lessons – instead of focusing on how the movie worked, or greenlighting more female directors, it spawned countless imitators. Afterwards, 'it wasn't like: 'Oh boy, here come all the great scripts,'' said Heckerling. It was: 'Here's the script that's this classic for teenagers, or that classic, but with teenagers. 'They only think you can do what's been done,' she added. 'It's like they needed a big insurance policy. Movies are expensive, so they only want to make sure that if you did Emma in high school, why don't you do Persuasion in high school?' Also in true Hollywood fashion, Clueless has become valuable IP – the basis for a spinoff TV show with Dash and Donovan that ran from 1996 to 1997; a West End stage show; and an upcoming, still vague adaptation with Peacock from The OC and Gossip Girl creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, with Silverstone set to reprise her role. Heckerling, an executive producer, declined to offer any details, citing prematurity and a well-earned development superstition. The 30th anniversary once again brings up the original film's still remarkable singularity, as well as the stark absence of Murphy, who died at the age of 32, igniting years of intense media speculation. 'I always think about Brittany and it's really hard to do any of this and not talk about her,' said Donovan. 'She was so talented and just had so much energy and so vibrant … just this hummingbird, frenetic sort of energy, but also like, 'everything's great. I got it. No problem.'' With the anniversary events, 'It makes me emotional because I feel like she should be doing a lot of this, like she would be doing a lot of this,' she added. But the milestone – the kids of Clueless now old enough to have their own headstrong high-schoolers – offers an opportunity to remember, as Heckerling put it, 'the goofy fun of it all'. 'People come up to me and say: 'Your designs changed my life,'' said May. 'To hear that in your lifetime, that something that you created has had an impact on people? It's incredible.'
Time Magazine
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
'Clueless' Proved Amy Heckerling Was Brilliant. But It's Not Her Only Stroke of Genius
How do you measure the worth of a filmmaker's career? Do you tick off box-office returns, or the awards lined up on a shelf? Which is a better determination of success, a string of hits or a film that lives on in the cultural imagination for decades, and counting? Or how about this: Can you measure a career in terms of generosity of spirit? Writer-director Amy Heckerling's Clueless turns 30 on Aug. 19, and if she'd made no other movies, this delightful modern reimagining of Jane Austen's Emma would have been an accomplishment by itself. Alicia Silverstone's Cher, a Beverly Hills high school student with a closet of riotous and costly mix-and-match outfits and a knack for negotiating higher grades without actually earning them, comes off as shallow and spoiled. But there's kindness and decency there too: she tries her hand at matchmaking, at first to further her own aims, only to realize that she likes bringing people together. She's too pragmatic to want love for herself, until she's forced to acknowledge that she's fallen for the guy she'd always thought of as an annoying brother figure, Paul Rudd's Josh, the son of her father's ex-wife. Clueless is both original (credit Heckerling with bringing the phrase As if! into the lexicon) and expertly crafted (its smart, breezy gags are strung together as gracefully as a strand of pearls). It also shows great affection for its characters, even while mocking them gently. When Cher refers to one of the great sword-and-sandal epics as 'Sporadicus,' you love her more, not less: she's not demeaning movies and experiences that are unfamiliar to her—she's just so eager that she bungles some of the specifics. That's the Heckerling touch, the mark of a filmmaker who has always led with confidence rather than ego—which is why the industry, incapable of grasping the difference between the two, never knew what to make of her, not even after she'd made one of the greatest teen movies of the 1980s, if not all time, 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Maybe it takes an outlier to make comedies that endure, as Clueless and Fast Times have. And maybe the lesson of Heckerling's checkerboard career isn't that today's fractured world of filmmaking needs more people who know how to play the game—it's that we need more outliers who play on their own terms. Today we regularly and openly champion women filmmakers, to the point where it can feel performative. But Heckerling and a small group of her contemporaries—like her friend Joan Micklin Silver, who'd self-financed her first film, the marvelous immigrant-in-New York story Hester Street (1975)—were striving to make films when women directors were still treated as interlopers, not to be trusted with big studio budgets. At 28 the Bronx-born Heckerling—a graduate of New York University, with a master's in film from the American Film Institute—made her feature debut with Fast Times, adapted from Cameron Crowe's book about teenage life in a Southern California high school. Fast Times was like no other teen movie at the time, particularly for the unvarnished way it presented teen pregnancy—and abortion. Universal, the studio behind the film, nearly backed off when early test audiences responded negatively to that abortion subplot. The executives eventually relented, and Fast Times did well enough at the box office that Heckerling got to make two more films in quick succession: 1984's gangster spoof Johnny Dangerously, which didn't make money, and 1985's National Lampoon's European Vacation, which did. But Heckerling's biggest hit would be the 1989 comedy Look Who's Talking, starring Kirstie Alley as a single mother whose son—first as an infant and then as a toddler—wisecracks like a sailor on shore leave, though only the audience can hear it. (Bruce Willis provides the kid's voice.) The gimmick looks broad on paper, but the movie is both fun and stealthily forthright, a mischievously sympathetic film about a modern mom trying to hold it all together by herself. Sometimes the best way to deal with the most serious subjects is to treat them like a lark. Next, Heckerling took on one of the movie's two sequels, 1990's Look Who's Talking Too. Clueless would arrive five years later—but as adored as the film is today, it was only a moderate hit at the time. Heckerling's language has always been the mainstream comedy—a surefire way to get the guys at the top to take you seriously—which may explain why, since Clueless, she's never had the career she deserved. Her last feature was 2012's amiable horror comedy Vamps, starring Silverstone and Krysten Ritter as vampire girls who strive to hang on to their vampirific youth (they feast only on rats' blood) rather than be forced to age like humans. Since then, Heckerling has worked in television—directing episodes of Gossip Girl and Amazon Prime's Red Oaks—and has turned Clueless into a musical, now playing in London's West End. But let's track back to the idea of what it means to get 'the career you deserve.' That's what happens when you deliver profits to executives. But what if you've made good or even terrific movies that have simply failed to land? Heckerling's so-called failures are better movies, with more heart, than many other comedy directors' successes. In the 2000 Loser, Jason Biggs plays Paul, a sweet but unhip Midwestern kid who gets a scholarship to NYU, only to be met with the sneering savagery of his rich-kid roommates. His crush, Mena Suvari's spiky, perceptive Dora, is involved with one of her professors (a weaselly Greg Kinnear). Loser is sharp and unyielding when it comes to human cruelty and boorishness; as always, Heckerling reserves her scrappy tenderness for the characters who deserve it. You really see that affection in 2007's I Could Never Be Your Woman, a film that, thanks to distribution-rights issues beyond Heckerling's control, was never released in U.S. theaters, going straight to DVD. Michelle Pfeiffer plays Rosie, a writer and producer on a TV show about entitled but seemingly average teenagers. (Heckerling based the movie on her own experience adapting Clueless into a television series in the late 1990s.) Rosie is in her mid-40s and divorced, with an 11-year-old daughter (Saoirse Ronan, in her film debut). She hasn't dated in forever. Then a new actor, Paul Rudd's late-20-something Adam, signs on for her show. She's reluctantly attracted to him. Is she too old? Is he too young? Most men wouldn't entertain those questions for long, but they hit Rosie hard. Pfeiffer vests Rosie's self-doubt with effervescent energy. There's no need to feel sorry for her—but you can't help wanting the best for her. Though Paramount had initially bought the script for I Could Never Be Your Woman, the studio declined to make the movie. 'There was some concern about doing a movie with an older female protagonist—not everybody's favorite demographic,' Heckerling told Entertainment Weekly in 2008. She went with an independent producer, which is where the movie's distribution woes began. Today, it's easy to stream if you seek it out, though relatively few people even know it exists. And that's how a brisk, intelligent movie ends up languishing. It could happen to anyone, and it happened to Heckerling. In the early 2000s, when many of us were complaining about the lack of smart romantic comedies for adults, this picture, one with charm and bite, was hiding in plain view. Now, at a time when the big-studio theatrical release barely exists, it's like a shining relic from a lost era. If this is what you leave behind when you haven't had the career you deserve, maybe that just means you've made a series of right choices. Anyone who thinks of them as wrong turns is the real loser.
Perth Now
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Sabrina Carpenter praises Emails I Can't Send as 'gateway' to career highs
Sabrina Carpenter says Emails I Can't Send was a "gateway to many special moments". The 26-year-old singer released her fifth studio album - which included singles Skinny Dipping, Fast Times, Vicious, Because I Liked A Boy and Nonsense - on July 15, 2022 and she has reflected on the impact of the record three years since it dropped. She wrote on her Instagram Story: "3 years of my dear emails. 'This album means so much to me and was the gateway to many special moments I couldn't see ahead. 'I will never take this chapter for granted and what it taught me and how much closer it brought me to each and every one of you. 'Thanks to those of you who sing along. I love you forever!' When Emails I Can't Send was released, it gave Sabrina what was then her highest ever Billboard 200 chart position at number 23. At the time, she wrote on Instagram: 'I kind of had to unlearn myself and learn myself again in order to make this album. "It's the one i'm most proud of thus far in my life. "It's the one I hope you listen to and feel like we were hanging and confiding in each other for an hour.' She toured the album, which included opening for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour, and then followed up with 2024 album Short n' Sweet, which featured hit singles like Espresso, Please Please Please, Bed Chem and Juno. The record topped the charts, and earned the pop star her first ever Grammy Awards. She's set to release her seventh studio LP, Man's Best Friend, next month. Sabrina shocked fans with the artwork, which shows her on all fours in front of a man pulling her hair. The album will include the lead single, Manchild, which upon its release, Sabrina thanked "men for testing me". She added on Instagram: "i wrote manchild on a random tuesday with amy and jack not too long after finishing short n' sweet and it ended up being the best random tuesday of my life "not only was it so fun to write, but this song became to me something I can look back on that will score the mental montage to the very confusing and fun young adult years of life. "it sounds like the song embodiment of a loving eye roll and it feels like a never ending road trip in the summer ! "hence why i wanted to give it to you now- so you can stick your head out the car window and scream it all summer long! (sic)"
