Amy Heckerling

She struggled to break out into big films up until the release of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). She has also directed the films Johnny Dangerously (1984), National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985), Look Who's Talking (1989), Clueless (1995), Loser (2000), I Could Never be Your Woman (2007) and Vamps (2012). She was a producer on A Night at the Roxbury (1998) and executive producer on Molly (1999). Many of Heckerling's films were adapted as television series. Fast Times at Ridgemont High evolved into the series Fast Times (1986), while Clueless (1995) became a television series that ran from 1996 to 1999.

• Name — Amy Heckerling • Born — 7 May 1954 • Birthplace — New York City, New York, U.S. • Occupation — * Director • producer • writer • Education — * New York University (BA) • AFI Conservatory (MFA) • Years Active — 1977–present • Children — 1

Heckerling was born on May 7, 1954, in The Bronx, New York City, to a bookkeeper mother and an accountant father. She had a Jewish upbringing and remembers that the apartment building where she spent her early childhood was full of Holocaust survivors. "Most of them had tattoos on their arms and for me there was a feeling that all of these people had a story to tell. These were interesting formative experiences." Both of her parents worked full-time, so she frequently moved back and forth from her home in the Bronx, where Heckerling claims she was a latchkey kid sitting at home all day watching television, to her grandmother's home in Brooklyn, which she enjoyed much better. Here, she frequented Coney Island and stayed up watching films all night with her grandmother. At that time Heckerling loved television, where she watched numerous cartoons and old black and white movies. Her favorites were gangster movies, musicals and comedies. She had a particular fondness for James Cagney. After her father passed his CPA exam, the family became more financially stable and moved to Queens, where Heckerling felt more out of place than ever. She did not get along with other kids in her school there, nor did she want to continue to be classmates with them through high school, so she enrolled at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. On her first day of school there, Heckerling realized that she wanted to be a film director. During their first assignment, writing about what they wanted to do in life, Heckerling wrote that she wanted to be a writer or artist for Mad. She noticed that a boy next to her, that she claimed copied from her papers later on, wrote that he wanted to be a film director. She graduated from high school in 1970, focused on directing and studying film at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Her father made just slightly over the cut-off for financial aid for the school, so Heckerling had to take out a large loan to cover her expenses. She claims this caused considerable stress in her life, and she was unable to pay them off until the end of her twenties. When Heckerling was in high school and focused on directing, her father was opposed to the idea, wishing that she had chosen a more practical aspiration. Despite this, he gave her Parker Tyler's book Classics of the Foreign Film: A Pictorial Legacy. Heckerling pored over the book, marking off films that she had seen until she had eventually watched most of them. She claims that by the time she got to NYU, because of this book, she had seen almost all of the films that they had to watch in her classes. Heckerling enjoyed her time at NYU, where she learned a lot and made great connections, such as Martin Brest, as well as noted screenwriter and satirist Terry Southern, who was one of her professors. Later she reflected on her time at the school as sloppy and unprofessional, saying that she had used very low-quality equipment and went through numerous technical problems. During her time at NYU, Heckerling was making mostly musicals. "I was the only one doing them and they were weird. It was the mid-70s and it was a bizarre combination of long hair with bell bottoms, the tail end of the hippie movement at its schlumpiest. With this, I sort of infused a 1930s idiotic grace that didn't go with the post-Watergate mentality that was prevalent at the time. They were weird films, but they got me into AFI."

After graduating from NYU, Heckerling decided that she wanted to follow her friend Martin Brest to the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los Angeles, where she felt there would be more opportunities to break into the business. Heckerling experienced severe culture shock upon moving to LA, especially because NYC's public transportation had made it unnecessary for her to learn to drive. She eventually adjusted, and began working. Her first studio job was lip-syncing dailies for a television show, where she started making connections in the business. During her second year at AFI, Heckerling made her first short film, Getting it Over With, about a girl that wants to lose her virginity before she turns twenty and the adventures she has before midnight of her twentieth birthday. Heckerling continued to work on the film after she graduated from AFI with her MFA, using the editing studios at night to finish the project after work. As soon as she finished the edit and sent it away to be processed, she was in a car collision with a drunk driver who hit the side of her car. Hospitalized with a collapsed lung, bruised kidney, and mild amnesia, she was fired from her editing job because she could not remember where certain footage was. When asked about film's ability to grant a form of immortality, Heckerling describes the experience during the accident: "There was the whole thing-the yellow light and all that stuff-and what went through my mind right then was, 'Well, at least I got the film to the lab.' So it's not going to save you from anything, obviously, but something about it pulls you forward." Eventually, she finished the film and held a screening that gained a very positive response, causing Heckerling to call it one of the best days of her life. Her next step was to use the film to get a job. Thom Mount, president of Universal Pictures, showed a lot of interest in Heckerling, but because she was not backed by an agent they could not hire her. After months of struggling to find an agent, Mount called Heckerling and asked her to make a film.

Heckerling's first feature was Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), based on the non-fiction account of a year in the life of California high school students as observed by undercover Rolling Stone journalist Cameron Crowe. When Heckerling first signed on to do a feature for Universal, she read a lot of scripts, but it was Crowe's script for Fast Times at Ridgemont High that stood out to her. Although she loved the script, she felt that it bore the marks of excessive studio interference, so she read the novel, determined which parts were strongest, and sat down with Crowe to rework the script. The film helped launch the careers of numerous stars, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold and Phoebe Cates. In addition, it marks early appearances by several actors who later became stars, including Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, and Anthony Edwards. Most notable, however, is the appearance of Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli, who was launched into stardom by his performance. Heckerling describes casting Penn, whom she first met while he was sitting on the floor outside of the casting office, as a feeling of being overwhelmed by his intensity, even though all he had done was look up at her. She knew that this was her Spicoli, even though they had seen other people who had read better for the role. Ally Sheedy read for the role of Leigh's character Stacy Hamilton, but Heckerling decided that she wanted someone that seemed younger and more fragile (though Jennifer Jason Leigh is more than four months older than Ally Sheedy). Heckerling was discriminating about the film's soundtrack. Originally, the film was supposed to have music in it by bands like the Eagles. "I guess a lot of people like that stuff, but being young as I was at the time, I really wanted a new edgy eighties music soundtrack. I wanted Fear, Oingo Boingo, The Go-Gos, Talking Heads, and the Dead Kennedys. I was one of those obnoxious teenagers that thought that the music I liked was great and everything else sucked. Getting that Oingo Boingo song in the film was a big fight. But I had to make some compromises and put in some songs that I didn't like at all." The studio was unsure of how to market the film, and Heckerling guesses that they did not think that anyone would want to watch it. The studio decided to just open it in a few hundred or so theaters on the west coast without any advertisement. Once the film opened, it was a huge success, leading the studio to quickly open it at theaters around the country. It became an instant hit right out of the gate, eventually going on to become a pop culture touchstone. The film earned $27,092,880 at the box office in the USA. It also spawned a short-lived series on CBS called Fast Times, with Heckerling writing, directing and producing. After doing Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Heckerling was bombarded with similar but lesser scripts. It was hard for her to find anything that wasn't about high school, preppy kids, or a story about a girl losing her virginity. Eventually she found her next film. Johnny Dangerously (1984), with Michael Keaton, Joe Piscopo, Danny DeVito, Dom DeLuise, and Peter Boyle, was an Airplane!-style spoof of gangster movies, but it failed to catch fire at the box office upon its initial release. Heckerling attributes the film's failure to the public's lack of familiarity with the gangster movies that the film was poking fun at. "It was pure satire of something nobody remembers. I think that was the main problem, because all the actors and writers did great jobs. But we were definitely satirizing something... I mean, unless you watch 1930s movies on TV at night, people don't remember. Somebody told me that during a screening they were sitting next to Brian De Palma, who had just done Scarface, and he was in hysterics. If you studied those movies, you know what we were doing." In subsequent years, however, it has garnered a substantial cult audience. The following year, she directed National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985) with Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo, a sequel to the popular National Lampoon's Vacation. With it, Heckerling scored her second solid hit, earning $74,964,621 at the box office. The film, like many of Heckerling's films, received poor reviews from critics but proved to be very popular with audiences. Heckerling, despite being well educated and loving the work of such intellectual writers as Franz Kafka, has admitted that she loves "silly things," which has proven to make her commercially successful in the comedy genre. In 1989, Heckerling had her biggest success with Look Who's Talking, starring John Travolta, Kirstie Alley and a baby voiced by Bruce Willis. Heckerling got the idea for the film while she was pregnant with her daughter and developed it into a feature. Heckerling says that she loves to write comedies, such as Look Who's Talking, because she notes that when a film is made, everyone working on it puts more than a year of their lives into making it, so she wants that year to be happy and fun. Heckerling, who loved Travolta, was ecstatic to work with him, though many people consider the film's release to be during the end of a low point in Travolta's career. The film has been Heckerling's highest-grossing film to date, earning $296,999,813. After the film's release, Heckerling was able to cross off the second of two goals that she had set for herself in college, the first being to make a studio feature, which she did with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and the second being: "I wanted to have hits the way boys had hits, not like a 'girl hit' that made 50 million, but a boy hit that made 100s of millions."

Two Look Who's Talking sequels would follow—1990's Look Who's Talking Too—also directed by Heckerling and co-written with her then-husband Neal Israel. The film added another baby to the storyline and was a moderate success. Heckerling then produced, but did not direct, the third and final sequel, Look Who's Talking Now—a flop. The films also spawned a brief television show called Baby Talk, although Heckerling had little involvement. In 1995, she wrote and directed Clueless, reworking and updating Jane Austen's Emma as a 1990s teen comedy about wealthy teenagers living in Beverly Hills. Heckerling originally thought of Clueless as a television show, because she loved to write the character of Cher, who she saw as a "happy, optimistic, California girl", and wanted to explore all of her adventures, but after she pitched it to her agent she was told that it would make a great feature. To research for the script, Heckerling sat in on classes at Beverly Hills High School where she observed how teenagers acted, although she admits that most of the movie script was made up. She notes that teenagers at the high school did not dress in high fashion every day as the characters do in the film; in reality the students there dressed just as frumpily as everyone else. She did, however draw on many of her observations, especially the tendency of teenage girls to groom themselves constantly. "You would think that within, you know, the few minutes that they've been in class, that their makeup wouldn't be needing so much repair and yet they're constantly painting and sculpting and... doing to themselves." As with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, it quickly caught on with teenagers and went on to become a significant pop culture reference point. The film went on to gross $56,631,572 and helped launch the careers of most of the cast, including Alicia Silverstone, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd, Donald Faison, Breckin Meyer, and Stacey Dash. It was spun off into a moderately successful TV series, with Heckerling writing the pilot, and also directing several episodes from the first season. She described the show as basically the same as the film, only cleaner, and says that she still loves the characters.

Heckerling directed and produced Loser (2000), a romantic college comedy with Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari. The film was not a critical or commercial success. After a break, Heckerling's romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007), starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd, never opened in theaters; rather, it received a direct-to-video release domestically, despite fairly good notices. Production of the film was troubled by financial issues, including the rights to distribution being sold off without Heckerling's knowledge, making it difficult for her to sell the film to a studio. At the time, Heckerling was also taking care of both of her parents who were very ill (her father was in the hospital and her mother had cancer). Though Heckerling disliked the baggage that the film carried and was upset about it not being released theatrically, she says that the experience was significant for her because she loved working with Rudd and Pfeiffer in England. Heckerling also directed an episode of the NBC version of The Office. In 2011, Heckerling directed the horror-comedy film Vamps with Sigourney Weaver, Alicia Silverstone and Krysten Ritter, about two vampires living in New York City as best friends and roommates. The film was released to theatres on November 2, 2012, followed by a DVD release on November 13. On July 4, 2016, Gilbert Gottfried posted an in-depth 81-minute interview with Heckerling on his podcast. In July 2017, a musical version of Clueless helmed by Tony nominee Kristin Hanggi received a developmental lab in New York City. A previous workshop starring Taylor Louderman (Kinky Boots) and Dave Thomas Brown (Heathers) took place in 2016. Heckerling wrote the libretto for the musical. The musical opened Off-Broadway on November 20, 2018 with Dove Cameron in the lead role.

Heckerling dated fellow film director Martin Brest when she first moved to Los Angeles. Though they later broke up, they remained good friends. Heckerling's first marriage was to musician David Brandt, from 1981 to 1983. At one point she hired director Neal Israel to work on one of her films. Ten months afterward, he asked her out; they married in July 1984. The marriage ended with a 1990 divorce. The couple's daughter, Mollie Israel, was born in 1985. Mollie was led to believe Israel was her biological father until 2004, when it was revealed to her that in fact Harold Ramis was her biological father. Heckerling has included Mollie in some of her films in bit parts, including Look Who's Talking and Loser, though Heckerling claims that her daughter never wanted to be a "girly girl" and distanced herself from much of her work, never adding any input to the lives of characters such as those in Clueless. Despite this, the two get along very well and Mollie frequently introduces her mother to new music, such as OK Go, and films. Actor and comedian Chris Kattan claimed in his 2019 memoir Baby, Don't Hurt Me: Stories and Scars from Saturday Night Live that he was pressured by Lorne Michaels to have sex with Heckerling so she would direct the 1998 film A Night at the Roxbury (although she ultimately only produced, rather than directed it). Heckerling's daughter Mollie disputes the claim, saying that although Heckerling and Kattan had an affair, it began once the film was already shooting.. When asked about the matter during an interview with The Daily Beast, Heckerling referred to Kattan as a "nut" and stated, "You know, I don’t comment about that, because basically I have no interest in helping his book sales. I don’t even want to know or hear the dumb shit he came up with.”

• Year — Title — Director — Writer — Producer — Creator — Notes • 1986 — Fast Times — 3 episodes • 1988 — Life on the Flipside — TV movie • 1991–92 — Baby Talk — 35 episodes (characters created by) • 1996–99 — Clueless — Executive — 4 episodes • 2005 — The Office — Episode: "Hot Girl" • 2012 — Gossip Girl — Episodes: "Father and the Bride" and "Monstrous Ball" • 2013–14 — The Carrie Diaries — 3 episodes • 2014 — Suburgatory — Episode: "Victor Ha" • 2014 — Rake — Episode: "Three Strikes" • 2015–17 — Red Oaks — 6 episodes • 2019 — Weird City — 2 episodes • 2020 — Royalties — 10 episodes

• Year — Title — Role — Notes • 1985 — Into the Night — Ships Waitress • 1995 — Clueless — Maid of Honor — Uncredited • 1996 — Eek! The Cat — Nel Erving (voice) — Episode: "Bonfire of the Vanna Tea" (Klutter! segment) • 2020 — Royalties — Cindy McMann — Episode: "Kick Your Shoes Off", uncredited

Amy Heckerling is recorded as having studied at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, AFI Conservatory and High School of Art and Design. Heckerling studied at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, AFI Conservatory, High School of Art and Design and The Center for Early Education.