Amy Heckerling (born May 7, 1954) is an American writer, producer, and director. Heckerling started her career after graduating from New York University and entering the American Film Institute, making small student films. Heckerling is a recipient of AFI's Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal celebrating her creative talents and artistic achievements. 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.
Early life and education 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.Jarecki, Nicholas. Breaking In: How 20 Film Directors Got Their Start. 2001. 142–156.
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."
Career 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.
Feature films
1980s 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.