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.
