Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Hey, Do You Remember...?
Christopher Schrader
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2020
⏱️ 94 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We didn't intentionally pick two Amy Heckerling movies back-to-back, but it certainly made for an interesting comparison. On this episode, we're revisiting her imminently quotable debut feature - Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Although this frequently gets lumped together with certain John Hughes movies and other popular 80s teen comedies, Fast Times actually has a fairly different tone than a lot of those films. That's one of the reasons the three of us weren't exactly sure what to make of it on our initial viewings. Opinions have shifted over time, however, and there might even be more to appreciate about this one now than when we were the age of these characters.
Topics include: Cameron Crowe's original novel and the unbelievable method he used to write it, how this is almost two different movies unfolding simultaneously and the way Crowe & Heckerling make that work, what this gets right about high school cliques, our own stories about teenage awkwardness, and much more!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, do you remember fast times at Ridgemont High? |
| 0:07.0 | Hello and welcome to Hey Do You Remember, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, then take off the rose tinted glasses to see how it holds up. |
| 0:32.0 | I'm Chris. |
| 0:32.6 | I'm Donna. |
| 0:33.3 | And I'm Carlos. |
| 0:34.2 | And today we're revisiting Fast Times at Ridgemont High. |
| 0:53.3 | Yeah. And I'm Carlos. And today we're revisiting Fast Times at Ridgemont High. By night, Cameron Crow was one of the youngest journalists employed by Rolling Stone magazine. |
| 0:59.0 | By day, he was using a fake identity to pose as a student at a San Diego high school. |
| 1:04.5 | For a full school year, Crow secretly observed his classmates and gathered stories about them. |
| 1:10.4 | The results were published in |
| 1:11.6 | 1981 as a nonfiction book titled Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Thanks to the notoriety |
| 1:17.9 | of that book, and specifically the method Crow employed to collect that information, a movie deal |
| 1:23.1 | fell into place pretty quickly, and the enterprising young writer was hired to pen the screenplay. |
| 1:28.8 | Meanwhile, Universal Pictures had shown a great deal of interest in an up-and-coming filmmaker |
| 1:33.2 | named Amy Heckerling. |
| 1:35.2 | A few years prior, Heckerling had made a short film called Getting It Over with, which followed |
| 1:40.0 | a 19-year-old girl trying to lose her virginity before she turns 20. |
| 1:44.7 | She used the positive reception this film received to get through the door at Universal, |
| 1:48.7 | and at that point, they were ready to work with her on basically any project she wanted to do. |
| 1:53.6 | After reading through dozens of screenplays, it was Crow's script for fast times that really |
| 1:57.6 | stood out to her. And that makes sense. They were around the same age. They had |
| 2:01.5 | similar sensibilities. And perhaps most importantly for this material, there was a true |
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