Amy Heckerling

At 69 years old, Amy Heckerling has this physical status:

Amy Heckerling (born May 7, 1954) is an American film director.

An alumna of both New York University and the American Film Institute, she directed the commercially successful films Fast Times at Ridgemont High, National Lampoon's European Vacation, Look Who's Talking, and Clueless. Heckerling is a recipient of AFI's Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal celebrating her creative talents and artistic achievements.

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 this 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.

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. Though Heckerling considered her time at NYU to be a great time where she learned a lot and made great connections, such as Martin Brest and noted screenwriter and satirist Terry Southern who was one of her professors, she later reflects on her time at the school as sloppy and unprofessional, claiming that she used very low-quality equipment and had a lot of 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."

Personal life

Heckerling dated friend and fellow film director Martin Brest briefly when she first moved to Los Angeles. Though they later broke up, they remained good friends. Heckerling's first marriage was to David Brandt, from 1981 to 1983. In 1984, Heckerling married director Neal Israel, but divorced in 1990.

The couple's daughter, Mollie Israel, was born in 1985. Mollie was led to believe Israel was her biological father until 2004, when it was revealed to her that in fact Harold Ramis was her biological father. Heckerling has included Mollie in some of her films in bit parts, including Look Who's Talking and Loser, though Heckerling claims that her daughter never wanted to be a "girly girl" and distanced herself from much of her work, never adding any input to the lives of characters such as those in Clueless. Despite this, the two get along very well and Mollie frequently introduces her mother to new music, such as OK Go and films. Today Mollie sings in the band The Lost Patrol.

Heckerling lives in both Los Angeles and New York and continues to make films.

Heckerling is not especially fond of the sycophantic nature present in the film industry. She likens the idea to a term initially coined by her brother:

Actor and comedian Chris Kattan claimed in his 2019 memoir Baby, Don't Hurt Me: Stories and Scars from Saturday Night Live that he was pressured by Lorne Michaels to have sex with Heckerling so she would direct the 1998 film A Night at the Roxbury (although she ultimately only produced, rather than directed it). Heckerling's daughter Mollie disputes his claims saying that, although Heckerling and Kattan had an affair, it was when the film was already shooting.

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Career

Heckerling, a New York University graduate, decided to follow her friend Martin Brest to the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where she felt there would be more opportunities to break into the field. When she departed from NYC, Heckerling suffered with extreme culture shock, especially because NYC's public transportation made it impossible for her to learn to drive. When she did eventually learnt, she adapted to LA life and started working. She first worked in a television show was lip-syncing dailies, where she started making connections in the industry.

Heckerling made her first short film, Getting It Over With, about a girl who wants to lose her virginity before she turns 20 and the adventures she has had before midnight of her twentieth birthday. Since graduating from AFI with her MFA, Heckerling continued to film, using the editing studios at night to finish the project after work. She was in a car crash with a drunk driver who crashed into the side of her car, resulting in her hospitalization with a broken lung, bruised kidney, and mild amnesia, causing her to be barred from her editing job because she couldn't remember where the footage was shot.

When asked about film's ability to grant a form of immortality, Heckerling relates the event: "The whole thing-the yellow light and all the 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, but something about it pushes you forward." She waited and held a very enthusiastic reaction, prompting Heckerling to call it one of her life's best days. The filmmaker's next move was to get a job. Thom Mount, president of Universal Pictures, expressed a great deal in Heckerling, but because she was not represented by an agent she was unable to employ her, she could not hire her. Mount called Heckerling up on the phone and asked her to make a film after months of searching for an agent.

Heckerling's first film 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 seen by undercover Rolling Stone journalist Cameron Crowe. Sheckerling first attempted to do a lot of scripts, but Crowe's script for Fast Times at Ridgemont High stood out to her. Despite loving the book, she felt that it bore the characteristics of excessive studio interference, so she read the book, determined which parts were strongest, and consulted with Crowe to rewrite the script. Many actors, including Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, and Jennifer Jason Leigh were among the film's pioneers, including Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. In addition, it marks early appearances by several actors who went on to be actors, including Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, and Anthony Edwards. The most notable, however, is Sean Penn's appearance as Jeff Spicoli, who was thrust into fame thanks to his work. Even though everyone else was doing was looking up at her, Heckerling describes casting Penn, who first appeared outside of the casting office, as a feeling of being overwhelmed by his energy. Even though they had seen others who had read better for the job, she knew that this was her Spicoli. Ally Sheedy auditioned for Leigh's role as Stacy Hamilton, but Heckerling decided she wanted someone younger and more fragile.

Heckerling was judging the film's soundtrack. The film was supposed to have music by bands like the Eagles from the start. "I suppose a lot of people like that stuff, but I was younger than I was at the time, so I wanted a new edgy eighties music soundtrack." I wanted Fear, Oingo Boingo, The Go-Gos, The Talking Heads, and the Dead Kennedys. I was one of those obnoxious teenagers who thought the music I loved was fantastic, but everyone else screamed. It was a big fight to get the Oingo Boingo song into the film. However, I had to make some compromises and include songs that I didn't like at all."

The studio was uncertain how to sell the film, and Heckerling guesses that no one would want to watch it. The studio decided to start it in a few hundred or so theaters on the west coast of the west coast without any advertisement. It was a huge success when the film first opened, so the studio quickly opened it to theaters around the country. It came right out of the gate and went on to become a pop culture touchstone. At the box office in the United States, the film earned $27,092,880. It also became a short-lived series on CBS called Fast Times, with Heckerling writing, directing, and producing.

Heckerling was bombarded with similar but less scripts after doing Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It was difficult for her to find something that wasn't about high school, preppy children, or a tale about a girl losing her virginity. She eventually found her next film. Johnny Dangerously (1984), with Michael Keaton, Joe Piscopo, Danny DeVito, Dom DeLuise, and Peter Boyle, was a spoof gangster films released on Airplane!, but it didn't seem to be on fire at the box office upon its first appearance. Heckerling traces the film's demise to the public's lack of familiarity with the gangster films that the film was mocking. "It was pure satire of something no one recalls." I think that was the primary issue, because all the actors and writers did great jobs. But we were certainly satirizing something... People don't remember if you watch 1930s movies on television at night. Somebody told me that they were sitting next to Brian De Palma, who had just done Scarface, and he was in hysterics. You'd know what we were doing if you read those films." Despite this, it has acquired a large cult following in subsequent years.

She produced National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985), a sequel to the famous National Lampoon's Vacation, the following year. Heckerling had a second good showing, earning $74,964,621 at the box office, and she had her second straight hit. Critics gave the film, as many of Heckerling's films, poor feedback, but it was still very popular among audiences who simply wanted to watch a funny movie. Heckerling, despite being well educated and adoreing the work of such scholarly writers as Franz Kafka, confesses that she loves "silly things" which has helped her become a household name in the comedy genre, which has made her very profitable in the comedy market.

Heckerling's 1989 appearance with Look Who's Talking, starring John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and a baby voiced by Bruce Willis, was her best success with Look Who's Talking. Heckerling was intrigued with the film when she was pregnant with her daughter and later turned it into a film. Heckerling says she loves writing comedies like Look Who's Talking because she finds that when a film is produced, everyone involved puts more than a year of their lives into making it, so she hopes that it will be happy and enjoyable. Heckerling, a Travolta enthusiast, was ecstatic to work with him, though many others believe the film was released at a time when Travolta's career was at an end. Heckerling's highest-grossing film to date, earning $296,999,813. Heckerling's second goal after the film's premiere was to cross off one of her two priorities set for herself in college, not like a 'girl hit' that made 50 million, but a boy's hit made 100 million dollars.

Two Looks Who's Talking sequels will follow—looking Who's Talking Too, which was also directed by Heckerling and co-written with her then-husband Neal Israel in 1990—is the basis of a discussion. The film was a moderate success, adding another baby to the storyline. Heckerling later created, but did not direct, the third and final sequel, Look Who's Talking Now, a flop. Heckerling's baby Talk television series was also spawned by the films, which was largely written by Heckerling.

She wrote and directed Clueless in 1995, reworking and updating Jane Austen's Emma as a 1990s teen comedy about wealthy teenagers living in Beverly Hills. Heckerling originally intended Clueless as a television show because she loved to write the story of Cher, who she described as a "good, optimistic, California girl," and wanted to see all of her adventures, but she was told that it would make a good feature. Heckerling spent time in Beverly Hills High School, where she observed how teenagers behaved, but she admits that the majority of it was made up. Teenagers at the high school did not dress in high heels every day as the actors do in the film, and she claims that the students dressed just as frumpfully as everyone else. She did, however, draw on several of her observations, particularly the tendency of teenage girls to groom themselves often. "You'd expect that within, you know, the few minutes they've been in class, that their makeup won't be needing so much repair, and yet they're still painting and sculpting, sculpting, and... doing to themselves." It catches up with teens and went on to become a crucial pop culture reference point as with Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The film, which included Alicia Silverstone, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd, Donald Faison, Breckin Meyer, and Stacey Dash, all helped launch the careers of most of the cast members, including Alicia Silverstone, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd, Paul Rudd, Donald Faison, Breckin Meyer, and Stacey Dash. It was turned into a moderately profitable TV series, with Heckerling directing several episodes from the first season. Heckerling says the show looks and feels like the movie, although the film is also cleaner, and that the characters are still love the characters.

Loser (2000), a romantic college comedy starring Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari, was directed and produced by Heckerling. The film was not a critical or commercial success. Despite promising reviews, Heckerling's romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman (2006), starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd, never opened in theaters; rather, it was a direct-to-video release domestically. The film's development was hampered by financial constraints, including the right to distribution being sold off without Heckerling's knowledge, making it impossible for her to sell the film to a studio. Heckerling was also taking care of both of her parents who were critically ill (her father was in the hospital, and her mother had cancer). Though Heckerling dislikes the film's baggage and is angry that it is not being released theatrically, she says it was an enriching learning with Rudd and Pfeiffer in England. Heckerling also produced an episode of The Office on NBC.

With Sigourney Weaver, Alicia Silverstone, and Krysten Ritter, Heckerling produced the horror film Vamps about two vampires who live in New York City as their best friends and roommates in 2011. On November 2, 2012, the film was released in theatres and on November 13, 2012, there was also a DVD release.

Gilbert Gottfried did a 81-minute interview with Heckerling on his podcast on July 4, 2016.

Kristin Hanggi, a Tony nominee, was given a New York City developmental lab in July 2017. Taylor Louderman (Kinky Boots) and Dave Thomas Brown (Heathers) were in a previous workshop in 2016. Heckerling wrote the libretto for the musical. On November 20, 2018, the musical premiered Off-Broadway.

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