Enormous thanks to the following, for their love, support and advice. You guys can be my posse in an eighties teen film anytime: Andy Bull, Carol Miller, Nell Freeman, India Knight, Catherine Shoard, Tim Robey, Julia Kingsford, Charlie Campbell, Ed Howker, Adam Curtis, Patrick Kennedy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dixie Chassay, Kamila Shamsie, Michael Hogan, Peter Bradshaw, and Arthur Ferdinand Freeman.
Huge thanks, too, to my editors at the Guardian, Catherine Shoard (again), Malik Meer, Tim Lusher, and Nosheen Iqbal for commissioning me to interview various eighties legends for the newspaper during the writing of this book, thereby making it much easier for me to track them down. You guys are nothing like the evil bosses in eighties movies.
Endless gratitude to two people in particular: first, my agent, Georgia “patience of Job” Garrett, who had faith in this book when no one else did, myself very much included (I know that’s a terrible cliché for a writer to say about their agent, but it really is the truth here). Next, to my ceaselessly supportive editors in the United Kingdom and United States: Louise Haines at 4th Estate and Emily Graff at Simon & Schuster.
For professional insights and interviews, thank you so much to Celestia Fox, Steven Gaydos at Variety, Paul Feig, Judd Apatow, Col Needham at IMDB.com, Jill Soloway, Jeffrey Tambor, Peter Biskind, Mark Cousins, Tom Shone, Mark Kermode, Linda Ruth Williams, Lynda Obst, and Melissa Silverstein. Rebecca Wind and Laura Lindberg at the Guttmacher Institute helped me with research on the history of U.S. sex education while Natika Halal and Bekki Burbidge at the Family Planning Association, Harriet Gill at Brook Advisory, and Lucy Emmerson at the Sex Education Forum provided me with the British perspective. Joan Graves at the MPAA and David Cooke patiently talked me through the ratings systems in their two countries. Dr. Helen Sharpe at the Institute of Psychiatry talked to me about the influence of celebrities’ body shape on teenagers’ self-image, a subject matter I didn’t, in the end, write about in this book but may well return to in another. Eileen Jones at the University of California, Berkeley and Dr. James Russell at De Montfort University were fascinating about the depiction of social class in movies. Professor Mark Anthony Neal at Duke University and Professor Anna Everett at University of California, Santa Barbara very kindly talked to me about African-American pop culture in the 1980s and helped me to place both Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee in context. All of the mistakes in the discussion of these subjects in this book are mine.
Finally, enormous thanks to all my eighties movie interviewees for pretending not to notice that I was and am utterly starstruck by them all: Molly Ringwald, John Landis, Ivan Reitman, Jon Avnet, Matthew Broderick, Amy Heckerling, Andrew McCarthy, Michael J. Fox, Cary Elwes, Nancy Meyers, Tom Hanks, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover, Howard Deutch, Tim Burton, Rick Moranis, Kathleen Turner, Geena Davis, Eleanor Bergstein, Olympia Dukakis, Bob Harling, Bob Gale, and Ron Howard.