TMS Muse of the Week: Amy Heckerling

(via nymag.com)

I don’t know what it is, but filmmakers whose forte are feel-good, lighthearted movies are usually the directors who crash and burn the hardest in relevancy. John Hughes after Home Alone (1990)? Nothing but cheap cash-grabs and unnecessary sequels. Cameron Crowe after winning an Oscar for Almost Famous (2000)? Decent, until a sharp decline following Elizabethtown (2005) and the disastrous Aloha (2015). Has anyone heard from Richard Linklater since the unmemorable Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019)? Even legends like Billy Wilder you can see an obvious decrease in quality by the end of the career. One filmmaker who had all the talent, potential and hype to make it, yet never fully reached the top is Amy Heckerling.

Like some of her contemporaries, Amy started her career with a hit teen comedy: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Unlike her later work, Amy was a director-for-hire on the future classic, directing from a script written by Cameron, based on his own book with the same title. The two would go on to great success for the next two decades on their own and become voices for Gen X and older millennials. Though Fast Times was popular with young people, it took a while for the film to find its place in pop culture [most famously with Roger Ebert’s 1 star review during its initial release]. After officially breaking through in Hollywood, Amy next two efforts—Johnny Dangerously (1984) and European Vacation (1985) of John Hughes’ Vacation movie series—faltered with both critics and audiences. But she instantly bounced back with the surprise success of her family romcom Look Who’s Talking (1989), and the sequels Look Who’s Talking Too (1990) and Look Who’s Talking Now (1993).

1995 would be the year that defined Amy’s legacy and input as a storyteller in cinema. A year before Gwyneth Paltrow charmed audiences as the title role of Douglas McGrath’s 1996 screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma; Amy and teen starlet Alicia Silverstone already beat them to the punch with a modernized telling of the story as Clueless (1995). I have a clear memory of watching Clueless for the first time at a slumber party when I must have been 7 or 8 years old. It’s one of those generational staples in pop culture a lot of ‘90s kids and teens have fondness for. The hit also jumpstarted the teen movie genre’s peak in the late 1990s, which largely included more contemporary comedies based on classic literature, such as Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) and Robert Iscove’s She’s All That (1999). Amy and Alicia were both predicted for stardom, and Alicia was already on her way with a string of popular Aerosmith music videos on her resume. But various factors heled the actress back from becoming a superstar.

(via twitter.com)

Amy also struggled to keep a steady momentum after her second iconic film was released, beginning with dropping out of directing John Fortenberry’s SNL movie spinoff A Night at the Roxbury (1998). The filmmaker tried repeating Clueless’ success with Loser (2000), a modern take on Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) set at NYU with Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari, but was met with less than stellar reception. One might assume Amy was victim to both sexism and ageism in Hollywood, and I think there might be a little bit of that. But considering some of the crazy bombshells she’s unexpectedly been associated with in past celebrity gossip, I think it might actually be a bit more complicated. Whether it’s comic Chris Kattan claiming in his 2019 memoir, Baby, Don’t Hurt Me, that his former SNL boss Lorne Michaels encouraged him to sleep with Amy to convince her to make Roxbury; or actor-writer-director Harold Ramis’ daughter, Violet, deciding to tell the whole world in 2018 Amy’s daughter Mollie, was actually the product of an extramarital affair between the two filmmakers. Mollie was led to believe Amy’s second husband, fellow comedy director Neal Israel, was her father until 2004. Fortunately, things don’t seem too complicated between the mother and daughter based on social media posts. Probably Amy’s most bizarre moment was when she ranted on Gilbert Gottfried’s podcast in 2016 about how she can’t stand romantic comedies, despite quite a few of her movies qualifying in the genre.

Career wise, Amy’s actually still working, even if she never reached the same heights of Clueless and Fast Times again. You might have seen the episodes she’s directed of NBC’s “The Office” (2005), the CW’s “Gossip Girl” (2012), Amazon’s “Red Oaks” (2015-17) and every episode of Quibi’s “Royalties” (2020). Or her reunions with Alicia on the vampire farce Vamps (2012) and another Clueless alum, Paul Rudd, on the romcom I Could Never be Your Woman (2007). Though Amy never gained the same consistency as peers Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers, she’s responsible for two bona fide classics and will always be a recognizable name.