Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982); So Fast Even Modern Hollywood Hasn’t Caught Up With it Yet (Review)

Released to Criterion Blu-ray this week is the perennial favourite of the American high school teen comedy, 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. A film of debuts – it was the directorial debut of Amy Heckerling, the scriptwriting debut of Cameron Crowe and inevitably launched the careers of many young American actors in its ensemble cast, including leads Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Phoebe Cates and, in supporting roles, Forest Whittaker, Anthony Edwards, Eric Stoltz, and Nicolas Cage – it tells the story of a school year at the eponymous high school from the POV of its sophomores Stacy and Linda, the former’s older brother Brad, and their classmates sweet-natured Mark, ticket scalper Mike and stoner Jeff. On the cusp of adulthood, the film explores them juggling their studies with their part-time work commitments at the mall, whilst all the while navigating the perils and pleasures of romance.

You have one David Cameron to thank for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. No, I’m not talking about the C-3P0 made of ham, pig-fucking corrupt former British Prime Minister, I’m talking about an alias used by the film’s screenwriter Cameron Crowe. At twenty-two years of age, the former child prodigy turned rock journalist decided to return to high school to catch up on the grades and experiences his prodigious talent had seen him effortlessly skip. He adopted the name Dave Cameron and proceeded to go undercover at San Diego’s Clairemont High with a view to writing his experiences up. This always struck me as very weird and kind of icky – after all, in the mid-90s in Glasgow, Brian MacKinnon enrolled at Bearsden Academy under the assumed name of fifteen-year-old Brandon Lee, when in fact MacKinnon was actually in his thirties and was discovered whilst on holiday with two female classmates. A thirtysomething man, pretending to be a teenager to get close to girls half his age is pretty seedy, right? I’m not about to suggest that Crowe’s motives were impure however and, unlike MacKinnon/Lee, he had the permission of the staff or Clairemont to pursue his ruse. Unlike his English namesake, ‘Dave Cameron’ didn’t need to lobby the school for a slice of the pie to achieve his ends, he simply regaled the principal with his tales of interviewing Kris Kristofferson for Rolling Stone magazine. A different kind of magazine, Playboy, carried an article of Crowe’s experiences in the autumn of 1981 and shortly after, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Ridgemont being the alias for Clairemont) was published in book form by Simon & Schuster.

Crowe’s unusual assignment was the result of his time spent touring with rock bands. In his introduction to the book, Crowe recalls how ‘the kids’ was a habitual concern within the music industry; “Kids were discussed as if they were some huge whale, to be harpooned and brought to shore. It began to fascinate me, the idea of ‘The Kids’. They were everywhere, standing on street corners in their Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts, in cars, in the 7-Eleven. Somehow, this grand constituency controlled almost every adult’s fate, yet no adult really knew what it was nowadays – to be a kid” Crowe’s resurgence into the life of those enigmatic ‘kids’ helped create the characters we see on screen here. All the protagonists were based on real-life students at Clairemont, albeit with some poetic licence used – if only perhaps to spare their blushes and protect the guilty.

Of course, mention Fast Times at Ridgemont High and there’s one scene that will inevitably be discussed – the pop video-style fantasy sequence that sees Phoebe Cates’s Linda remove her red bikini top which so *ahem* ‘inspires’ Reinhold’s Brad. An iconic moment in ’80s Hollywood, it is said that Blockbuster Video (ask your parents) were forced to habitually replenish their stock of the film because of the damage the rewinding, pausing and slo-mo of that moment by horny viewers did to the tapes! Whilst this was undeniably a wickedly funny, quasi-gross-out taboo-busting look at the sexuality of teenage boys which no doubt went on to inspire the envelope-pushing antics of subsequent films like the American Pie franchise or even The Inbetweeners, it would be wrong to judge (pun not intended) Fast Times at Ridgemont High for this one moment. This film may be surprisingly male-gazey for a female director, but this is far removed from the sexualised antics of a film like Porky’s, the surprise hit from Canada made the previous year. And the reason for this is Crowe’s research. Poetic licence aside, the characters created here are based in reality and that authenticity is the dominant theme of the film, which is just as well as it chooses to go down some very mature narrative paths involving losing one’s virginity and even abortion.

For all their boundary-baiting, the films that followed in the wake of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, films that are being made now in supposedly more progressive climates, have nothing on Heckerling’s film thanks to one key, significantly feminist instance – their refusal to acknowledge teenage girls as sexual beings in their own right. When you look at movies from perpetual teenagers like Judd Apatow it is clear that all they have really learned from Fast Times at Ridgemont High is that it is acceptable to candidly show women as male fantasy figures. These filmmakers repeatedly ignore the bulk of what made Fast Times at Ridgemont High so relatable and arguably so successful, its decision to openly and realistically depict two fifteen-year-old girls discussing not only their genuine interest in sex, but also – in the virginal Stacy’s case – their anxieties too. The depictions of teen sexuality and the actual act of intercourse now are almost always played totally for comedy or for raunch, and always exclusively from the male POV. The decision to show Stacy losing her virginity to a much older man in the dugout at a deserted baseball field is still a powerful scene, primarily because it is wholly from her point of view – even down to the camera showing us just what she sees in that moment, including the turn-off graffiti and the dugout’s lightbulb. If that scene still feels daring now, it felt positively explosive in 1982. Faced with Heckerling’s finished cut, Universal was unsure what to make of it. Many expected another Porky’s and were surprised when the sexuality on offer here was so real. There was even talk of canning it all together. Though it was of course released, it was not to universal acclaim – Roger Ebert went so far as to call it “a scuzz-pit of a movie” What was it about Crowe and Heckerling’s frank openness as opposed to the X-rated, slapstick sauce of Porky’s that left many ‘suits’ cold?

Speaking to James King for his book on ’80s teen cinema, Fast Times and Excellent Adventures, producer Thom Mount realises that the power the film had, both in its representation of a young woman’s sexuality and also in her rights, would be impossible to include now; “Studios would never make that movie today. In this country, in this atmosphere, in this poisonous political climate. A teenage girl gets pregnant, she goes to an abortion on her own, she doesn’t tell her parents, her brother picks her up and brings her up and life goes on just like life goes on!” In this, Hollywood’s new puritan age, the original sin must seemingly always be punished. It’s perhaps no surprise that one of the biggest genres that chose to depict ‘the kids’ that Crowe was once so intrigued by remains the slasher movie which invariably sees all the nubile teen babysitters who give in to their sexual urges dispatched by the psychotic bogeyman in the very next scene. Sex it seems today, is only for the boys. Ultimately Fast Times at Ridgemont High seemed so fast, even the present day hasn’t quite caught up with it yet.

Thankfully, the critical reaction from the previous generation and the consternation of the studio bosses was not shared by teen audiences upon the film’s release and it eventually grossed over $27million domestically, some six times its original budget. It’s easy to see why; after the nostalgic appeal of films like Grease, harking back to the high school experiences of their parents, 1980s teenagers wanted to see their own lives reflected back at them from the big screen and Fast Times at Ridgemont High did just that. The honesty of how it chose to depict life obviously helped, as indeed did the on-point So Cal fashions, but there was also – somewhat predictably given Crowe’s past life – the small matter of the music too. The filmmakers had been determined to fill their movie with contemporary pop and, although some concessions had to be made for the decidedly unhip money men (which is arguably why tracks by Jackson Browne and Eagles alumni Don Henley and Joe Walsh appear), the film’s soundtrack album soon proved a must-have, featuring the likes of The Go-Go’s, Oingo Boingo, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and The Cars, whilst Crowe’s association with Led Zeppelin secured the rights to their 1975 hit Kashmir appearing in the movie. Debbie Harry, Elvis Costello, Van Halen and the Rolling Stones may not appear on the soundtrack, but their presence is felt throughout the film, be it on bedroom walls, as mall record store promo cutouts or simply mentioned in passing. This appreciation of music and movies paved the way for the likes of John Hughes to liberally populate his films with cutting edge pop acts for the rest of the decade.

Criterion’s Blu-ray includes a new, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director Amy Heckerling, an audio commentary featuring the director and Crowe, a cut of the film specifically tailored for TV in the 1980s and interviews with cast and crew.

Why is a TV documentary about the one-time Ginger Spice our longest episode ever? Well, when it’s directed by Molly Dineen and it offers a window into the strange media landscape of turn-of-the-millennium Britain, there’s a fair bit to talk about. Graham is joined by Mark Cunliffe from We Are Cult (and The Geek Show, for that matter) to discuss celebrity in the Blair years, Geri Horner (then Halliwell)’s disastrous James Bond audition, her friendship with Prince Charles, the often prescient films of Dineen, “ass-flavoured bubblegum”, Derek and Clive for some reason… there’s a lot, OK.

MAY POP SCREEN +

Thanks for reading Mark’s review of Fast Times at Ridgemont High

For more Music and Pop Music Chat, check out our Podcast, Pop Screen