Clueless is a 1995 American comedy film loosely based on Jane Austen's 1815 novel Emma. It stars Alicia Silverstone in the lead role, Stacey Dash, Paul Rudd, and Brittany Murphy. The film is set in the town of Beverly Hills and was written and directed by Amy Heckerling and produced by Scott Rudin and Robert Lawrence. The plot centers on a beautiful, popular, and rich high school student who befriends a new student and decides to give her a makeover while playing a matchmaker for her teachers and examining her own existence.
Clueless was filmed in California over a 40-day schedule. The film's director studied Beverly Hills high school students to understand how teenagers in the 1990s talked and learned some appropriate slang terms from them.
The film was released theatrically on July 19, 1995 and grossed $88 million worldwide. It has received positive reviews from critics and is considered to be one of the best teen films of all time. Clueless has developed a cult following and has a continuing legacy. The film was followed by a spin-off television sitcom and series of books.
Plot
Cher Horowitz is a good-natured but superficial girl who is attractive, popular, and extremely wealthy. A few months shy of her sixteenth birthday, she has risen to the top of the high-school social scene, and is happy and self-assured in her insular, fashion-obsessed world. She lives in a Beverly Hills mansion with her father Mel, a ferocious $500-an-hour litigator; her mother has long since died, having succumbed to complications while undergoing liposuction surgery. Cher's best friend is Dionne Davenport, who is also rich, pretty, and hip, and understands what it's like to be envied.
Among the few people to find much fault with Cher is Josh, her socially conscious ex-stepbrother who visits during a break from college. Josh and Cher spar continually but without malice; she refers to him as "granola breath" and mocks his scruffy idealism, while he teases her for being selfish, vain, and superficial, and says that her only direction in life is "toward the mall." Illustrating that Cher's selfishness is usually innocent and relatively harmless, Cher plays matchmaker for two lonely, nerdy, hard-grading teachers, Mr. Hall and Miss Geist. She achieves her ostensible purpose—to make them relax their grading standards so she can renegotiate a bad report card—but when she sees their newfound happiness, she realizes she actually enjoys doing good deeds. Cher now decides that the ultimate way she can give back to the community would be to "adopt" a "tragically unhip" new girl at school, Tai Frasier. Cher and Dionne give Tai a makeover and initiate her into the mysteries of popularity. Cher also tries to extinguish the strong mutual attraction between Tai and Travis Birkenstock, an amiable skateboarding slacker, and to steer her toward Elton, a rich snob whose father is a music-industry executive.
Her second matchmaking scheme backfires when Elton rejects Tai and makes a play for Cher. Matters worsen when Cher's "project" works a bit too well and Tai's popularity begins to surpass Cher's, especially after Tai has a "near-death" misadventure at the mall that helps to skyrocket her to fame at school. Other classmates, including Dionne's and Cher's longtime rival Amber, soon gravitate toward Tai, and Cher finds herself demoted from queen to courtier at high school. Events reach crisis stage after Cher fails her driver's test and can't "renegotiate" the result. When Cher returns home, crushed, Tai confides that she's taken a fancy to Josh and wants Cher to help her "get" him. Cher says she doesn't think Josh is right for Tai, and they quarrel. Cher, left all alone, begins to think she has created a monster in her own image. Feeling "totally clueless," she reflects on her priorities and her repeated failures to understand or appreciate the people in her life. Most of all, she keeps thinking about Josh and Tai, and wonders why she cares so much.
After much soul searching (which includes a solo shopping spree around various Beverly Hills boutiques), Cher realizes she has fallen in love with Josh. She begins making awkward but sincere efforts to live a more purposeful life, even captaining the school's Pismo Beach disaster relief effort. A scene near the end of the film finds Cher and Josh stumbling over how to admit their mutual feelings for one another, culminating in a tender kiss on the stairs of her home. The film has a happy Hollywood ending for Cher: Mr. Hall and Miss Geist get married; her friendships with Tai and Dionne are reaffirmed and solidified; Tai and Travis are in love; and now, in Josh's arms, she too has finally found love.
Cast
- Alicia Silverstone as Cherilyn "Cher" Horowitz
- Stacey Dash as Dionne Davenport
- Brittany Murphy as Tai Frasier
- Paul Rudd as Josh Lucas
- Donald Faison as Murray Duvall
- Elisa Donovan as Amber Mariens
- Breckin Meyer as Travis Birkenstock
- Jeremy Sisto as Elton Tiscia
- Dan Hedaya as Melvin "Mel" Horowitz
- Aida Linares as Lucy
- Wallace Shawn as Mr. Wendell Hall
- Twink Caplan as Miss Toby Geist
- Justin Walker as Christian Stovitz
- Julie Brown as Coach Millie Stoeger
Production
Development
The idea for Clueless first originated as a television pilot in 1993.[1][2][3] Writer and director Amy Heckerling said: "Twentieth Century Fox said they wanted a show about teenagers—but not the nerds. They wanted it to be about the cool kids. The most successful character in anything I'd ever done was Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times. People think that's because he was stoned and a surfer. But that's not it. It's because he's positive. So I thought, 'I'm going to write a character who's positive and happy.' And that was Cher."[2] Heckerling, having read the Jane Austen novel Emma in college and loving the title character's positivity, decided to write the script around an Emma-like character, saying, "I started to think, 'What's the larger context for that kind of a 'nothing can go wrong' 'always looks through rose colored glasses' kind of girl? So I tried to take all the things that were in this sort of pretty 1800s world and see what would that be like if it was in Beverly Hills."[1]
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As research for the script, Heckerling sat in on classes at Beverly Hills High School to get a feel for the student culture,[4] commenting, "...one thing I observed was these girls in a constant state of grooming."[2] Ken Stovitz had become Heckerling's agent at the time and told her the script had the potential to be a feature film after he read it. The finished script, which was titled "No Worries", contained the main characters that would end up in the Clueless film.[3] Twink Caplan, Heckerling's friend who had worked with her on past projects, said film executives at Fox were wary of the story being too female-oriented to appeal to a large enough audience. "It was obvious they didn't get it. They thought the script needed more boys in it. They were afraid that if they focused on girls, we wouldn't get any guys to see it. So it went into turnaround. It was dead", said Caplan.[2] Six months later, the script found its way to producer Scott Rudin, who gave it his stamp of approval.[1][2] Rudin's support led to increased interest in the script, and it became the subject of a bidding war between studios which was eventually won by Paramount Pictures. Heckerling was excited, as Paramount owned several major youth-centered TV channels, such as MTV and Nickelodeon, which were suited to the film's target demographic.[1]
Casting
Heckerling first saw Alicia Silverstone in the Aerosmith music video for "Cryin'" and kept her in the back of her mind for the role of Cher. When the film was still in development at Fox, executives suggested Alicia Witt, Keri Russell, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie for the part.[3] Heckerling met with Reese Witherspoon, who already had a few film roles to her credit.[3] Though Silverstone only had the 1993 thriller The Crush as her previous film, the studio did not pressure Heckerling to cast big stars, and Silverstone ultimately won the role of Cher.[4] Ben Affleck and Zach Braff auditioned for the role of Josh.[3] Sarah Michelle Gellar was offered the role of Amber Mariens but turned it down due to her commitments to All My Children, while Zooey Deschanel auditioned for the role of Amber as well.[5] Seth Green auditioned for the role of Travis and Alanna Ubach was considered for the role of Tai, while Terrence Howard and Dave Chappelle were considered for the role of Murray.[3] Jeremy Renner and Jamie Walters auditioned for the role of Christian, and Jerry Orbach and Harvey Keitel were considered for the role of Cher's father, Melvin Horowitz.[3][6]
The character of Wendell Hall, played by Wallace Shawn, was inspired by a real-life debate teacher at Beverly Hills High School and a friend of Heckerling's. Prior to full-time acting, Shawn had been a teacher and drew on his experience for his portrayal of Mr. Hall.[4]
Filming
Principal photography for the film began on November 21, 1994,[7] and consisted of a 40-day filming schedule.[8] Brittany Murphy, who was 17 at the time, required a parent or guardian present during filming.[9]
Scenes depicting the fictional Bronson Alcott High School campus including the tennis courts, outdoor cafeteria, and the quad were filmed at Occidental College in Los Angeles.[10] Ulysses S. Grant High School in Valley Glen provided filming locations for the school's interior sets. Other notable filming locations include the former Westside Pavilion shopping mall, Circus Liquor in North Hollywood, where Cher is mugged in her designer dress, and Rodeo Drive, featured in Cher's "crisis" scene as she dejectedly wanders around after a failed driver's test and a confrontation with Tai.[11] Paul Rudd bought everyone gifts after filming wrapped.[12]
Costumes
Mona May did the costume designing for the film. The iconic plaid set worn by Cher Hororwitz in the film was "a nod to a Catholic schoolgirl uniform, but taken to another level and, turned designer."[13] Cher wore several designer clothes ranging from Azzedine Alaïa to Anna Sui. The "underwear" Calvin Klein dress worn by Cher was actually designed by Sui who, at the time, was an emerging designer.[14] Calvin Klein was credited due to more brand recognition during the time.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Clueless Creative Writing
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Clueless {1995}
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 The Definitive Oral History of How Clueless Became an Iconic 90s Classic
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 22 Facts About Clueless On Its 25th Anniversary
- ↑ 14 things you never knew about Clueless
- ↑ 5 Things You Didn't Know About 'Clueless,' According To The Casting Director
- ↑ Alicia Silverstone Stars in 'Clueless,' A Romantic Comedy Written and Directed by Amy Heckerling
- ↑ We're Totally Buggin' Over These Secrets About How Clueless Was Made
- ↑ 16 Secrets Behind the Making of Clueless
- ↑ A 'Clueless' Walk Down Memory Lane
- ↑ Clueless (1995) | Film Locations
- ↑ 20 Things You Never Knew About Clueless
- ↑ Clueless Designer Mona May Proves Iconic Costume Design Pays off in Hollywood
- ↑ Creating Clueless's Iconic Wardrobe