Clueless (film)

According to the special feature titled "Creative Writing", Heckerling describes the origins of Clueless as follows:

I went to 20th Century Fox and they said "We want you to do something about teenagers." And I thought "I'm so tired about doing stuff about teenagers." But they said, "We want you to do something about the 'in' crowd." I thought "I'll do it if I can make fun of them." So, we developed this script. It was a pilot for a TV show. And it was about this girl that was completely happy, no matter what happened. And I was really getting into that kind of character. But nothing happened with it. They passed on it, they didn't get it. And a number of things were sort of falling through. I was just getting very frustrated. So I switched agents and when I had my new agent, they said: "What have you been working on?" So I showed Ken Stovitz, one of the agents there, this pilot. And he said, "This is too good for TV. You should make this into a feature."[10]

She follows up on the connections to the Jane Austen novel, Emma:

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?" And I remembered Emma, which I'd read in college. So, I took it out and reread it, and I said: "Unconsciously, I've been writing an Emma-like character." Because I've always loved it and part of it had sort of stored it away in my brain... So I really related to her and got into it. And the plot was so brilliantly laid out in Emma. 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.[10]

Associate producer Twink Caplan recalls what the proposed TV show's initial title:

No Worries was the original television script that Amy wrote. Then, we went to I Was a Teenage Teenager because with every new draft that Amy writes, she picks a whole new title.[10]

Fox picked up the picture, but put the film in a turnaround. The male studio heads wanted Heckerling to rewrite the script so that fewer women would feature. Six months later, the script made its way to producer Scott Rudin. Rudin liked the script and it was the subject of a bidding war, with Paramount Pictures beating out the other studios. Heckerling was excited, as Paramount owned several major youth-centered channels, such as MTV and Nickelodeon, which was suited to the film's target demographic.[10]

The Westfield Fashion Square

Principal photography for the film took place between November 21 and December 31, 1994.[11] The film had a 40-day filming schedule. Producers sat in on classes at Beverly Hills High School to get a feel for the student culture. Herb Hall, the real drama teacher at Beverly Hills High School, had a short scene as the principal in the film. Scenes depicting the high school campus, including the tennis courts, the outdoor cafeteria, the quad, and various classrooms were filmed at Occidental College in Los Angeles. The mall scenes were filmed at Westfield Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks, California.

The film became a surprise sleeper hit of 1995. Clueless opened in 1,653 theaters on July 19, 1995 and grossed $10,612,443 on its opening weekend, which led to a ranking of second behind Apollo 13.[3] The film grossed $56,631,572 during its theatrical run, becoming the 32nd-highest-grossing film of 1995. This box office success brought the then-largely unknown Silverstone to international attention. The film also developed a strong cult following after its release.[12][13][14][15]

The film was well received by critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives it a score of 80% based on reviews from 65 critics and judged it "Certified Fresh" with an average rating of 6.88/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "A funny and clever reshaping of Emma, Clueless offers a soft satire that pokes as much fun at teen films as it does at the Beverly Hills glitterati."[16] On Metacritic, the film has a 68 out of 100 rating based on 18 reviews, which indicates "generally positive reviews".[17]

The film was seen as a teen flick that had a strong influence on fashion trends and lingo.[18][19] Fashion as a form of self-expression played an important role in the narrative and character development of the film, television series, and novels, which are topics examined by Alice Leppert.[20]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars.[21] Janet Maslin of The New York Times notes, "Even if Clueless runs out of gas before it's over, most of it is as eye-catching and cheery as its star."[22] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film four stars, contrasting it to the more adult-oriented film about teenagers released around the same time, Kids, stating, "The materialism in Clueless is almost as scary as the hopelessness in Kids."[23]

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly selected Clueless as one of the "New Classics," a list of 100 released between 1983 and 2008;[24] Clueless was ranked 42nd,[25] and they named it the 19th-best comedy of the past 25 years.[26]

American Film Institute recognition:

• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Laughs[27] – Nominated
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes – "As if!" Nominated[28]

Brittany Murphy

After the death of Brittany Murphy, Silverstone stated that she "always felt connected to [Murphy] as [they] shared a very special experience in [their] lives together",[32] and said "I loved working with Brittany. She was so talented, so warm, and so sweet."[32]

Heckerling later described Silverstone as having "that Marilyn Monroe thing" as a "pretty, sweet blonde who, in spite of being the American ideal, people still really like."[33]

The surviving cast reunited in 2012 for an issue of Entertainment Weekly.[34]

Heckerling later reunited with both Silverstone and Shawn for the vampire comedy Vamps.

The film was well known for the characters' catchphrases and vocabulary. Cher's verbal style is also marked by ironic contrasts between current slang and historical references, such as when she compares Tai to "those Botticelli chicks".[35]

Clueless was the main inspiration for Australian rapper Iggy Azalea's music video for her 2014 song "Fancy" featuring Charli XCX. Many visuals and costumes inspired by the film were used in the video,[36] which is filled with remakes of Clueless scenes. The outfits are also reinvented to channel the famous stylings of the film with a slightly modern edge.[37] "Fancy" was shot in the same Los Angeles high school where Clueless was filmed.[38]

In the second episode of the second season of the BBC America thriller series Killing Eve, "Nice and Neat" (2019), the Russian assassin Villanelle calls her agency and uses the codename Cher Horowitz to secretly inform her boss that she is in trouble and needs to be rescued after being kidnapped.

In a 2020 Discover Card commercial, a clip from the film was featured which consisted of Cher Horowitz saying her famous phrase "Uh uh, no way".

In 1996, the producers created a spin-off television series, which followed the continuing adventures of Cher and her friends. Several cast members from the film went on to star in the series, with the notable exceptions of Silverstone (who went on to sign a film deal with Columbia-TriStar worth $10 million) and Rudd (whose film career began to take off). Silverstone was replaced in the series with actress Rachel Blanchard.

In October 2019, it was announced that CBS would be adapting the film into a drama series. The series will be centered around Dionne after Cher goes missing, and is described by Deadline as a "baby pink and bisexual blue-tinted, tiny sunglasses-wearing, oat milk latte and Adderall-fueled look at what happens when the high school queen bee Cher disappears and her lifelong number two Dionne steps into Cher's vacant Air Jordans."[39]

Simon Spotlight Entertainment spun off a collection of paperback books, from 1995 to 1999, aimed at adolescent readers.[40]

In 2015, to celebrate the film's twentieth anniversary, pop culture writer Jen Chaney published a book titled As If!: The Oral History of Clueless. The book is based on exclusive interviews with Amy Heckerling, Alicia Silverstone, and other cast and crew members. Excerpts from the book were published in Vanity Fair.[41][42]

A comic book series was launched in 2017.[43]

Clueless: The Musical opened in New York City on December 11, 2018, as part of The New Group's 2018–2019 season. The show was written by Heckerling and starred Dove Cameron as Cher and Dave Thomas Brown as Josh. It closed on January 12, 2019 .[44]

The musical was a jukebox musical featuring pop songs from the 1990s, though with lyrics mostly or entirely rewritten by Heckerling to fit the storyline. Songs adapted from the movie's soundtrack included "Supermodel" and "Kids in America."

In 2017, Episode launched an animated web story based on the film.[45]