Chaney - As if! : the oral history of Clueless as told by Amy Heckerling, the cast, and the crew

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To my best friends from Tilden Intermediate School and Walter Johnson High School, who remain my dearest friends today. And to every preteen or teen who ever watched Clueless and wondered whether the Chers, Dionnes, Tais, Murrays, Travises, and Joshes in their lives will still matter to them twenty or thirty years later. I can assure you, from experience: they will.

In mid-July of 1995when American culture was fixated on such matters as O. J. Simpsons ill-fitting glove, TLCs insistence on not chasing waterfalls, and the box office domination of Batman Forever, Pocahontas , and Apollo 13 the fact that a modestly budgeted teen movie called Clueless was about to arrive in theaters, become a major hit for Paramount Pictures, catapult the careers of its stars, influence fashion for two decades, and become a permanent cultural touchstone for multiple generations... well, lets just say it was something most people couldnt predict at the time. (You cant blame them, really. They were very busy focusing on the rivers and the lakes they were used to.)

Executives at Paramount Picturesthe studio that took on the film after others, regretfully, it would turn out, passed on the projecthad great confidence in writer-director Amy Heckerlings shiny, girly comedy about a shopaholic Beverly Hills teenager with a few Jane Austen DNA molecules in her genetic code. Sherry Lansing, then the head of the studio, liked it so much that after screening it, she didnt have a single story note. She said, This is fantastic. I dont have anything I think you should change, remembers Adam Schroeder, one of the films producers.

Its not like Clueless was flying entirely below the publics radar. The comedy benefited from some serious promotional juice courtesy of MTV, which, like Paramount, was part of the Viacom family, and pitched the film heavily to its Real World addicted Gen X and Y audience. Media buzz about the break-out potential of Alicia Silverstonethen best known for her appearances in a trio of Aerosmith videos and the thriller The Crush , in which she stalked a post Princess Bride , pre- Saw Cary Elwesalso started to build well before the films release. Entertainment Weekly splashed an image of Silverstone in a shimmery baby-doll dress on its cover in March of 95, headlining it with the supremely confident statement A Star Is Made. If all goes as planned, the coming months will witness Silverstones transformation from gym-locker pinup to household name, the story read. En route to theaters are Silverstones True Crime , a thriller in which a Catholic schoolgirl turns gumshoe; Le Nouveau Monde , a Gallic coming-of-age story directed by Alain Corneau; and, most notably, Clueless , a teen comedy due this July thats described by its creators as a Rodeo Drive version of Jane Austens Emma . Most notably was, it turned out, an understatement.

But in Hollywood, even a gorgeous, on-the-rise young starlet and a director with a track record for making profitable hits (see Heckerlings Fast Times at Ridgemont High, European Vacation , and the Look Whos Talking pics) do not guarantee success. Given the landscape for teen movies at the time, its understandable that industry insiders and observers werent necessarily sure that Clueless would click with ticket buyers. While TV shows and movies about adolescents and young adults had not disappeared entirely from the landscape, the high school movie as a bankable genre had more or less petered out by 1995.

Then Clueless made its debut on July 19, 1995 (a Wednesday), and became the number one movie in the country that day. The weekend of July 2123, it generated $10.6 millionit was the number two movie in America for that three-day period, right behind Apollo 13 and immediately was branded as one of the summers most unexpected triumphs. In the midst of a summer of mostly desultory films, along came Clueless, said a New York Times piece that ran the Monday after that strong debut, confirming in print that it had emerged as a sleeper hit of the summer.

The movie went on to earn $56.6 million in the US and Canada, a figure that Hollywood data-tracking site Box Office Mojo equates to $105.7 million in contemporary inflated dollars. Thats a nice return for a film whose production budget landed in the $13 million range. Reviews were positive as well. Heckerling walks a fine line between satire and put-on, but she finds it, and her dialogue could be anthologized, wrote Roger Ebert. New York magazine critic David Denby proclaimed it a comedy of goodness that made the nastiness of a smart teen movie like Heathers seem like a failure of imagination. In the New York Times , Janet Maslin called the movie as eye-catching and cheery as its star.

More importantly, Clueless touched a chord in the culture that was clearly primed and ready to be struck. Preteen and teen girlssome of whom would eventually grow up to share their Clueless love with their own daughtersraced to malls in search of plaid skirts and knee-high socks, surprising higher-ups at major department stores who had not anticipated the hordes of wannabe-Cher shoppers. Almost immediately, Paramount began working with Heckerling to develop a TV show adaptation. Within a year, the movies soundtrack would sell enough copies to be certified gold; it would eventually reach platinum status. The success of Clueless also would defibrillate the barely breathing high school movie genre, resulting in a flood of teen movies in the late 90s and early 00s, many of which featured Cher-esque female protagonists and blatantly targeted the young-and-XX-chromosomed demographic that had made Clueless such a smash.

Career doors began to open wider for almost everyone involved after the movie came out, most notably Silverstone. At the age of eighteen and mere weeks after Clueless sent her industry stock into the stratosphere, she inked a reported $10 million deal with Columbia Pictures that made headlines in the trades and elsewhere. Suddenly, it felt like the whole world was making a cameo at the Val party.

Coverage of Silverstone went from excessive to inescapable, with stories and photos of her everywhere: in Vanity Fair, Time , and New York magazine, and on the cover of Rolling Stone , where she dressed in all pink and parked her frilly-bikinid bottom next to the headline Ballad of a Teen Queen. Entertainment Weekly name-checked both Austen, whose Emma inspired the Clueless narrative, and Silverstone in its year-end list of the most significant entertainers of 1995, while Vanity Fair s 1996 Hollywood issue featured Heckerling in an Annie Leibovitz photo spread focused on the industrys most influential female filmmakers. Heckerling also won an award for best screenplay from the National Society of Film Critics and was nominated for best original screenplay by the Writers Guild of America. The media credited Clueless for, as New York Times columnist Peggy Orenstein put it, proving theres a market for movies in which girls are in charge of their own fates, active rather than reactive.

Whats even more remarkable is that twenty years later, Clueless is still as omnipresent in American culture as it was back then. Thanks to its presence on cable, DVD, and streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, Clueless is still watched on a regular basis by longtime fans as well as young people discovering the magic of Murrays freshly shaved head for the first time. Tributes to the moviein the form of Twitter accounts, Buzzfeed listicles, and start-up tech companies that encourage users to dress their bodies just like Cher does in Clueless are ubiquitous in the digital sphere. Fashion designers and labels continue to riff on the costumes created for the film by Mona May. (Are you in a Macys, H&M, or Urban Outfitters, like, right now? Stop. Look around. Theres probably a sheer shirt, a pleated miniskirt, or some knee-highs in your field of vision that, thanks to the circle-of-life nature of fashion trends, easily could have been yanked out of Cher Horowitzs ridiculously substantial closet.)