My Rating: 8 of 10

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Summary

I’ve made the argument that Clueless is one of the most important and underrated films of the 90s. This book (which I read after making that assertion) was extremely helpful in providing the evidence I need to bolster my argument. If you’re a fan of the film, definitely read.

Notes

More importantly, Clueless touched a chord in the culture that was clearly primed and ready to be struck. Preteen and teen girls—some of whom would eventually grow up to share their Clueless love with their own daughters—raced to malls in search of plaid skirts and knee-high socks, surprising higher-ups at major department stores who had not anticipated the hordes of wannabe-Cher shoppers.

NOTE: staying on top of trends. arbitrage.

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Using material gathered from more than eighty interviews with people who worked on the film, as well as professors, fashion experts, industry insiders, cultural critics, and fans of the movie, this book will tell the story of how hard it was—and often still is—for a female filmmaker with a point of view to get a movie green-lighted in Hollywood.

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It will delve more deeply into how Clueless used fantasy to create a world that, in a way, achieves a social ideal that reality can’t quite match: a place where a gay kid is accepted among his peers, where young girls are empowered to be their confident selves, and where the best friendship between a white girl and a black girl is so natural that no one bothers to bat a heavily mascaraed eyelash in its direction. This book will do a lot of other things, too, as you’ll see when you start turning these pages.

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This is a movie that uses a story first published in 1815 as its narrative blueprint. Yet it’s also a movie that’s steeped in the music and pop culture references of the 1990s, the time of Marky Mark pants-dropping and catchy Mentos ads. And somehow, it’s also a movie that, through a combination of Heckerling genius and glorious accident, managed to predict how we live now. In 1995, the idea that two friends would stand right beside each other while talking on their cell phones was a hilarious joke. Now it’s a snapshot of our daily existence, although now we speak less and text more. When Amy Heckerling decided that Cher should activate a snazzy computer program that allows her to dress herself like a virtual paper doll, do you know what Amy Heckerling did? She invented the freakin’ fashion app.

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Amy Heckerling, writer-director: Since I was a kid, any time I would see any article on slang and lists of words, I saved it. I have a folder with rusted paper clips and things from Time magazine from when I was a little kid.

My mother would take me to the movies when I was little. So in West Side Story: “He’s a real down guy.” “Down”: that means good. So when [Christian] goes, “You’re a down girl,” that’s from West Side Story.

I’ve been compiling this shit my whole life.

Every way that you say something positive says something about who you are, how old you are, where you live, how much money you have—which is sometimes why I can’t even talk, because everything’s too revealing. I made [a slang dictionary] for Clueless when I was writing it.

So I have that one for that moment in time. Also, [I had] to have a separate category for Christian-speak because that was Rat Pack language. Rat Packian, 1940s to ’60s, film noir, Dashiell Hammett, Frank Sinatra. I had a jive-talk dictionary that I found

NOTE: She created a slang dictionary and collected words. You have to collect stories before you need them.

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Production info: The pieces included in the movie’s opening montage were shot at various points throughout production, and at various locations, including several streets in Beverly Hills; the hallways of Grant High School, located at 13000 Oxnard Street in Van Nuys; the backyard of the house in Encino that doubled for the Horowitz home; and Burbank’s Crocodile Cafe, the restaurant where Cher, Tai, and Dionne discuss Cher’s “hymenally challenged” status. The scene in Cher’s closet was shot on January 20, 1995, in the pool house on the Encino property/Horowitz residence, a private home on Louise Avenue in Encino, California.

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Stacey Dash, Dionne: I had a cell phone at the time. It wasn’t foreign to me. But I loved the way she used the cell phones in the movie. It’s just the genius of Amy. She saw what was coming, and that’s what she’s good at. She has great foresight.

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Adam Schroeder: There was a lot of ancillary stuff to do with [the TV show]. I think that’s where the Contempo Casuals tie-in thing [came from]. And there were books. There was indeed a promotional tie-in with Wet Seal, which by then also owned all the Contempo Casuals stores.

Although the film had already generated some tie-in books, the series unleashed a new stream of Clueless-related young-adult fiction that synched up with the show. (In the interest of full disclosure: those titles were issued by the same publisher behind this book, Simon & Schuster.)

Viacom Consumer Products, the merchandising division of Paramount’s parent company, signed licensing agreements with other partners, including the toy behemoth Mattel, allowing the company to create numerous, largely fashion-focused Clueless products, including a CD-ROM game and a trio of dolls based on Cher, Dionne, and Amber.

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While merchandise opportunities were booming, Clueless ultimately did not perform as well in the ratings department as ABC hoped. Heckerling also wasn’t as happy in this TV-ified version of Cher’s world as she had been in the film version.

A few members of the original Clueless family, including Heckerling and May, opted to move on in the midst of or just after the first season.

Amy Heckerling: It was a lot of fun to do and it was nice that we all got to stay together for a while. But just the nature of the beast is that you have a network and a studio and it kind of gets into their Friday night schedule of very kid-oriented stuff. You know, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I was kind of already over [it], ready to move on, after the first six episodes.

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ABC canceled Clueless after its first season. However, the series had enough of an audience to entice UPN, Paramount’s television network, to pick it up for two more seasons. Danny Silverberg: There definitely was a tonal shift to the show. It became more of a poppy TV show, rather than Amy’s quirky spin on teen life. But the show itself was a very enjoyable experience.

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The Most Coveted Clueless Gadgets Circa 1997 All the Clueless dolls, clothes, books, and assorted paraphernalia may have seemed pretty rad to the average ten-year-old in 1997. But out of all the “As if!” tie-in merch that flooded the marketplace during that period, perhaps the most coveted items were these “high-tech” ones.

The Clueless Hands-Free Phone To be clear—and I know this sounds insane—this was not a cell phone. It was just a $29.99 landline phone that came with a headset for hands-free gabbing. But wait: there was more. It also had a special eavesdropper detector that would activate a security alert if your little brother had the audacity to listen in on the other extension, and buttons that would automatically insert three Clueless phrases (“As if!” “Whatever,” and “I’m Audi”) into any conversation, and a voice changer that, to quote from the back of the box, “lets you change your voice in five ways—from high and breathless to normal to low and sultry.” (Um, does normal really count as one of the five ways?)

It should be surprising to no one that, during the 1997 holiday shopping season, these phones were as coveted as Sing & Snore Ernie and Tamagotchi virtual pets. Clueless CD-ROM Also for a mere $29.99, you could pop this disc into your PC—don’t worry, it’s compatible with Windows 95—and, among other things, create your own virtual closet and engage in computer-game versions of makeovers. Who said you can’t buy a sense of control in a world full of chaos?

Dear Diary . . . Clueless Organizer This Clueless-ized version of the popular digital organizer, manufactured, like the hands-free phone, by Tiger Electronics, claimed to be for “ultra hip girls.” And it obviously was ultra hip because its features had names like “Wassup?” mode (otherwise known as the ability to schedule events on a calendar) and “Way Cool Happenings.” Oh, and it allowed users to save a list of “Trendy Stuff” that contained as many as fifty (!!) characters. Suck on that, iPhone.

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Perhaps the two people under the most pressure to decide on the “right” thing in the post-Clueless moment were the women most publicly poised to capitalize on it: Alicia Silverstone and Amy Heckerling.

After attending a Shakespeare boot camp in Massachusetts during the summer of ’95, Silverstone went in one splashy direction: she signed a deal with Columbia Pictures that Variety reported would net her $10 million, commit her to star in two films (the first being Excess Baggage, with Benicio Del Toro), and land her a three-year first-look production deal.

At eighteen, she instantly became one of the higher-paid actresses in Hollywood, and reportedly, one of the town’s youngest producers ever, which meant that her subsequent career moves—particularly her decision to play Batgirl in Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin—would be closely scrutinized.

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Alicia Silverstone: At the time, becoming a producer sounded really interesting and exciting, but the woman I am now knows that you can’t grow as an artist if you’re becoming a businessperson.

And you can’t grow as an artist if you’re becoming a famous person instead of an actress. If you asked me to produce something now, I’d be like, “Why?” I would rather write books about healing people and changing their lives. I’d rather inspire people to be their best, healthiest selves.

According to Ken Stovitz, Heckerling’s agent, she, too, was inundated with offers. But the writer-director’s approach was almost the opposite of her young star’s: she chose to play it low-key.

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Five Key Post-Clueless Teen Movies

As the 1990s began, the eighties teen movie boom had more or less gone bust.

While TV shows about adolescents hit big during that period—Beverly Hills 90210, Saved by the Bell, Party of Five, and, oh so briefly, My So-Called Life—the high school movie genre that reached peak, John Hughes–ian heights in the mideighties had more or less petered out in the mainstream by 1995.

But after the success of Clueless and, in 1996, Wes Craven’s Scream, the teen movie genre started to inhale and exhale again. With the teen population swelling—in 1997, there were 38.2 million “kids in America,” according to the New York Times, a number that was still growing—studios realized they had a ripe audience for high school movies.

By 1999, nary a weekend went by without at least one pubescent-oriented motion picture opening in theaters. Many of the films released during the ’90s/early ’00s coming-of-age wave are notable for their quality, their box office success, or sometimes both. But these five should be at the top of any Clueless fan’s Netflix queue, because the fingerprints of Cher and co. are all over them:

• Can’t Hardly Wait (1998) As a last-night-of-high-school movie, this was more like a nineties-set version of American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused. But the presence of several Clueless faces—including Donald Faison, Breckin Meyer, and Nicole Bilderback—makes it impossible to watch without being reminded of Bronson Alcott High.
• 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) Following on the heels of She’s All That (based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion) and Cruel Intentions (a modernized Dangerous Liaisons), this update of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew was part of the classics-redux trend that Clueless kick-started. This nineties take on the Bard definitely feels like something from the Amy Heckerling or John Hughes canon.
• Dick (1999) A comedy about two teen besties (Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams) who are smarter than they look and sound, and whose shenanigans update a different sort of classic tale: the story of the Watergate scandal, with Clueless’s Dan Hedaya as Richard Nixon. The only possible explanation for this widely praised film’s weak box office performance is that people were too embarrassed to say its name out loud. (“Have you seen Dick? Oh my God, I loooove Dick.”)
• Bring It On (2000) What Amy Heckerling did for the Valley Girl, screenwriter Jessica Bendinger and director Peyton Reed did for the American cheerleader, creating Torrance Shipman (Dunst, again), a rally girl with intelligence and determination to match all the sparkle in her fingers. Like Clueless, Bring It On focuses on Caucasian and African-American young women, and introduces a male romantic lead (Jesse Bradford’s Cliff) who, with his Clash T-shirts and antiestablishment attitude, is basically Josh in non-Rudd form.
• Mean Girls (2004) What happens when you breed the dark, catty undertones of Heathers with the bright color palette and smart…

Two full and tumultuous decades in American culture have passed since the summer that Clueless burst into theaters. But the platform-shoe prints of this comedy of nineties manners can still be seen all over popular culture.

In every TV show and movie that adopts a young-skewing female point of view—Pitch Perfect, HBO’s Girls, New Girl, The Mindy Project, Suburgatory (especially the episodes that reunited Alicia Silverstone with Jeremy Sisto), and others—hints of Clueless can be found. Its influence can be seen, too, in the myriad modernized Jane Austen tales that followed in its wake, including Bridget Jones’s Diary, The Jane Austen Book Club, Bride and Prejudice, the Hindi rom-com Aisha (which is far more Clueless than Emma), Austenland, and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.

“Clueless deserves to be much, much more recognized for its influence on popular culture related to Austen,” notes Austen scholar Dr. Juliette Wells.

On social media, the Clueless effect has resulted in scads of Tumblrs fire-hosed with “As if” GIFs or branded with names like “In Cher Horowitz We Trust”; Instagram feeds filled with Clueless screen shots or ladies dressed in Cher-wear for Halloween and New Year’s; and tweets peppered with Clueless quotes or, in the case of the @modernclueless Twitter feed created by writers Jessica Blankenship and Ella Cerón, devoted exclusively to 140-character, Cher Horowitz–ian interpretations of current events. That account, by the way, has more than twenty-eight thousand followers. (Sample tweet: “Cher: I’m captain of the Ebola epidemic

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Amanda Hess, writer, Slate: Clueless . . . has so many smart things to say about consumerism, I think, and it is really kind to its characters even when it is mocking them. I think especially for someone like Tavi [Gevinson] or the people who are in her community that she has created, they really are drawn to that.

They’re still really in this teen world that, in a lot of ways, is like ruled by this consumerist culture. There are parts of it that they want to engage in and parts they want to push back against. That movie is like a great gateway for understanding how that might be possible.