How Clueless Got off the Ground
Amy Heckerling kicked off her career as a Hollywood director with a movie that became a perennially quotable teen classic: 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Though its sensibility was different from that of Clueless—Fast Times was steeped in much more reality than Cher’s fluffy, feathery fantasy land—the movie became culturally significant for many of the same reasons Clueless later would, too.
Like Clueless, Fast Times launched the then-still-early careers of several impeccably cast, promising young actors, including Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, and Forest Whitaker; it featured dialogue, as scripted by Cameron Crowe, that seemed to enter the lexicon the second it emanated from cineplex speakers; and it forever embedded several iconic movie moments—most notably, Phoebe Cates’s slo-mo removal of that red bikini top—into the collective memory of a generation. Fast Times became a touchstone movie for teens of the 1980s, the same way that Clueless would for teens in the decade that followed.
Though Heckerling would spend the rest of the 1980s exploring other cinematic worlds—including ones involving gangsters (Johnny Dangerously), Griswolds (European Vacation), and babies that sound like Bruce Willis (Look Who’s Talking)—it wasn’t surprising that in the early 1990s, she would again feel compelled to revisit high school hallways. Initially, that was something that 20th Century Fox actively encouraged her to do.
In 1993, Heckerling began developing a TV show for Fox that focused on the popular kids at a California high school, including a central female character fueled by relentless reserves of optimism. At that point, the project was called No Worries, one of several names used (I Was a Teenage Teenager was another) before Clueless earned its official title status. Given Heckerling’s established skill and success with coming-of-age comedy, it seems like No Worries should have come together with . . . well, no worries, or at least very few. But that wasn’t the case.
In its formative stages, the project eventually known as Clueless went from potential Fox TV show to potential Fox feature film, and then—for a short but frustrating period before landing at Paramount—almost didn’t happen at all. Its path to the big screen is a tale about a filmmaker inventing a very positive character, then dealing with frustration, Hollywood sexism, and rejection, but ultimately finding the support to make her movie by staying true to her vision. It’s also a tale in which Heckerling explains the connection between her own family and the ex-stepsibling romance between Josh and Cher.
Amy Heckerling, writer-director: I remember reading Emma. I remember reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Those characters: what I gravitated to was how positive they could be. There’s a word that’s thrown around a lot now—entitled—which is a way older people can look at young people in a kind of negative way. But I always feel like people that have that optimism and feel like they can do things, there’s something so endearing and charming about that, because you know life will beat everybody down eventually. Maybe not everybody, but many people. There’s something very life-affirming to see that quality in people. So I liked those characters.
One of, obviously, my favorite characters in Fast Times is Spicoli because it doesn’t occur to him that, oh, the teacher will think badly of him for coming in late, wanting to surf, any of that. He doesn’t mean anything negative about anybody else, and it wouldn’t occur to him that they’re thinking that about him.
There was an episode of Gidget that I saw, obviously, when I was a little kid. A friend of Gidget’s father’s had a student from Sweden or something come to stay with them. She was a big nerd and completely didn’t know how to dress or act with boys or anything. Gidget took it upon herself to make her over.
When Gidget made this girl over, the girl became very popular and actually started to go after Gidget’s boyfriend. So I recall when I was first reading Emma, that I was thinking, This is like that episode of Gidget. [Laughs] There are a lot of things in Gidget and Dobie Gillis and The Patty Duke Show, where the teachers are referencing great literature and then the characters go off and have their own take on it.
Twink Caplan, associate producer of Clueless and Miss Geist: We started working together way back when she was doing European Vacation . . . we were best friends, Amy and I. She directed me when I acted and then we became producing partners and they were just wonderful, wonderful years.
After Look Who’s Talking, Look Who’s Talking, Too, and a couple TV shows that we tried to do, Amy came up with this idea of Clueless, that was a takeoff on Emma. It was so exciting. I was the sounding board . . . it was all Amy—her brain. I just loved her brain.
Amy Heckerling: Sometimes you’re working on things and you think, “Oh, I have to write this” or “I’d better look at my notes.” And other times you just want to. That was how I felt writing Cher. I just wanted to be in that world, and in her mind-set.
All of [the Clueless characters] were in [the original TV pilot]. Well, not all the guys. But Cher and Dionne, and her father, and the teacher, Mr. Hall. [In the pilot] she was a rich girl that wanted a high-fashion grunge outfit so that a boy would think that she was smart. Because that was what she thought smart people wore.
Eventually the TV people put it in turnaround and I was very frustrated. I had moved to a new agency then. That’s when Ken Stovitz became my agent and I showed him that pilot, and he said, “This is a movie.”
Ken Stovitz, Amy Heckerling’s agent: You know, when you get into business with someone, you find out what really is the home run, dream come true. And early on, she told me about this project. So I said, all right, if I can do anything for her, I’m going to do what I can to get this made.
Amy Heckerling: Then Fox movies bought it from Fox TV.
Ken Stovitz: I think it was under [Fox film executive] Elizabeth Gabler’s [purview]—and she was nothing but totally supportive and everything. But eventually she couldn’t get it made there.1
Amy Heckerling: She was a real champion of the project: a smart woman, familiar with Jane Austen, and somebody you could talk to about characters and structure, and really loved it. She was a pleasure to work with. She was so passionate that when her bosses put it in turnaround, she was so upset, like in tears. So I love her.
Twink Caplan: I remember one of [the Fox executives] thought it would be better if the boys were more prominent. It wasn’t about that. It was about these girls.
Amy Heckerling: During the development there was a concern that it was too much about one female, and that I should make Josh a bigger part, and he should be living next door, and his mother [should be] in love with her father, they weren’t ex-stepbrother and ex-stepsister. They thought that was incestuous. Like: “What if the Brady Bunch got involved with each other?” I didn’t watch The Brady Bunch, so I couldn’t really argue.
The thing is, my grandparents were stepbrother and stepsister. In the Jewish ghetto in the Pale of Settlement in Europe, it was pretty verboten to have a female that was [perceived as] loose. My great-grandmother was a widow with children. For a female to be alone with children, there weren’t opportunities. In this small little world, a woman that was not in a marriage was going to become destitute and there’d be children [involved]. I mean, I’m not Isaac Singer so I can’t tell you exactly how life went there. But if there was a free-floating female—if your brother died and he had a wife and children, you would marry the woman and take care of the kids. Everybody took care of things rather than looked for the big love experience.
My grandmother’s father was a widower, and my grandfather’s mother was a widow. [My great-grandparents] both had children, and so they got married; they all had grown children. Then my grandmother was a teenager, and she had an older stepbrother. Totally not blood-related. When I was a kid all she did was complain about her stepmother to me, her evil stepmother and how mean she was to her and would hide her in the closet when the social worker came so she wasn’t sent to school and she could be kept at home to do the cleaning. But her stepbrother, whom she later married, was always a protector. They were married. They knew each other from the time they were teenagers. He was almost one hundred when he died; she was in her late eighties. So they were fighting for, like, eighty years. I mean, fighting. But when one got sick, they were completely lost. They were so dependent on each other and so angry all the time with each other. Anyhow, they cracked me up. So it did not seem like a crazy thing to me [for Josh and Cher to be together].
When the studio tells you, ooh, this is incestuous and you’re going: this is my grandparents. I mean, it’s the Jewish ghetto. You don’t leave a woman out on the street, because she has no money and how will she feed the kids? Widowers marry widows and that’s how it is, and [their respective children] are not related.
Twink Caplan: So we went into turnaround. And I guess we started working out of Amy’s house, actually. Which wasn’t a bad thing because I got a dog, Leon, a Maltese, and he played with Sir Mix-A-Lot, her Maltese. . . . We were very depressed, though.
Ken Stovitz: We had set it up at Fox. We couldn’t get it going. I took it out once, twice, maybe three times to the rest of the community. And only the last time did we attach Alicia Silverstone based on the music video.
What we submitted was the screenplay and the music video. I told everyone it was a $13 million movie. I gave them the budget, I gave them Amy’s track record, which was—I mean, if you look at her ratio of cost to success, I think Look Who’s Talking was done for $6.5 million and I think it did $285 million.2
In those days, $13 million for a really polished movie—that movie today would cost, I’ll take a guess and say, $35 million. Because everyone actually got paid. It wasn’t like doing a movie where everyone worked for no money.
We got rejected so many times it was a joke.
Amy Heckerling: [Ken] just refused to let it die. I mean, he was a bulldog in pursuing it and pushing and not making me feel like it wasn’t good or I should be thinking of other things. He really was a champion.
Ken Stovitz: Everyone in Hollywood wants to do what is in vogue at that time, and an unheard-of teenage-girl movie that looks at the lunacy of how we live our lives, and what importance we place on things, and her crazy friends—I don’t think they thought that people cared about it that much. Whatever was happening at that time wasn’t that.
Amy Heckerling: Well, there was a moment in time where a number of movies seemed to be about, for lack of a better word, stupid young people. There was a movie called PCU. Actually, I thought it was a very smart movie, commenting on the political correctness craze. David Spade and Jeremy Piven—I thought they were wonderful. But I guess it didn’t perform the way they wanted. There was another movie, Airheads, which was about a rock band that wasn’t doing well, [with] Adam Sandler and Steve Buscemi and I think Brendan Fraser. Which was a really funny script and a funny movie, but the fact that it’s called Airheads and here’s another thing called Clueless . . . [Airheads] didn’t do well, so by association, we’re not making another one that sounds like that. They didn’t get the irony. You could say Beavis and Butt-Head is not about smart people, but it’s a very smart cartoon.
Adam Schroeder, Clueless coproducer and then president of Scott Rudin Productions: Teen movies were just not happening. It was almost like a relic of the John Hughes movies in the eighties.
Amy Heckerling: Everybody passed on it. Then Scott Rudin liked the script. Then there was a bidding war for it, without anything being different.3
Ken Stovitz: When you’re an agent, that’s what you do. As soon as you get interest, you let everyone else know. “Hey, man, I’ve got a thing going on over here. I’m going to be dating this girl. If you want to come out with me, you gotta . . .”
Amy Heckerling: There were two different people who showed it to [Rudin]. One was my ex-boyfriend from film school who was working as, I think, an assistant cameraman on a movie Scott was doing. And one was a music supervisor who had gotten ahold of it, who was a friend of Scott’s. So separately, those two people showed it to him and he responded. That stamp of approval was enough for the town.
Ken Stovitz: I gave [the script] to Scott. And by the way, they may have also. But I know I gave it to him.
Adam Schroeder: Fox was not going to do it and they gave them, let’s say, a limited turnaround. That’s where we were able to kind of get into it. We were at Paramount at the time. Again, it wasn’t one of those safe bets either. But Scott was so prolific in terms of the movies that he was doing—really big studio movies, and they would be kind enough to let him do smaller movies, usually more artsy-fartsy movies. But this was something really special and different.
Barry Berg, coproducer and unit production manager: Just having [Scott’s] name on the film meant so much to so many. It became an important film the moment he signed on to produce it.
Adam Schroeder: I had read it when it was [called] I Was a Teenage Teenager, and we were quoting passages from it all the time, the assistants [in Rudin’s office] and the junior executives. We were big fans of Fast Times. That was such a benchmark movie for me and for my youth.
The fact that Amy had mined this kind of territory before in such a seminal way with Fast Times, and here she was doing it again but on such a sophisticated level—and not sophisticated in a way that was going to alienate teenagers, but potentially embrace adults in a nostalgic way. It was based on Emma. It was more than just a teen comedy and set pieces and sex and all. It had real, deep characters and other layers.
Amy Heckerling: When Scott read [the script], his notes were pretty much what brought it back to the way it was [originally].
Ken Stovitz: I didn’t just sell the script, we got a production commitment. These days they have to have a green-light committee. Everyone in the world votes on it: the head of marketing and distribution, head of international. It just doesn’t happen like this anymore, unfortunately.
Twink Caplan: Maybe I shouldn’t even add this, but it is part of the history for me personally that I was a producer with Amy at 20th Century Fox. But by the time it went to Paramount, Scott had hired—he gave a producer credit to Adam, who worked with him, and to line producer Barry [Berg], who, I guess, got a producing credit. And they didn’t have enough producer [credits] to give me one, who was with Amy the whole time. So they gave me [the title] associate producer even though, you know, whatever.
Ultimately, I think I set a precedent for being associate producer and being on the one-sheet at Paramount, because I had parity with the other men and that was the deal that I struck: at least give me parity.
The upside of that was I’ve never worked with so many incredible people in my life.
Ken Stovitz: Rejection can either be the thing that kills you or the thing that inspires you to just say, “I’m not going to take no for an answer.” We chose to do the latter. We chose to say, “We know we’ve got something good here. We’re not going to take no.”
1. Elizabeth Gabler was an executive vice president at Fox during the 1990s. She is currently the president of Fox 2000, a division of 20th Century Fox responsible for bringing Life of Pi and The Fault in Our Stars, among others, to the screen.
2. Actually, Look Who’s Talking did even more than that: it made $296.9 million worldwide, on a budget that the New York Times reported was closer to $8 million. Still: pretty great cost-to-success ratio.
3. Scott Rudin is one of the most prolific and successful Hollywood producers of the past two decades; his credits include The Truman Show, The Hours, No Country for Old Men, and The Social Network.