Synopsis
As a new school year at Ridgemont High approaches, six students are introduced. Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh) works at a pizza parlor in the mall. A good-looking stereo salesman gives her his card. Stacy’s best friend Linda Barrett (Phoebe Cates) implores her to be aggressive with him. “You’re fifteen years old. I did it when I was thirteen. It’s no big thing, it’s only sex.” Mark Ratner (Brian Backer) is assistant to the assistant manager of the movie theater and laments his pathetic social situation to his best friend, smooth talking ticket scalper Mike Ramone (Robert Romanus).

Stacy’s brother Brad (Judge Reinhold) is big man on campus, a jock with a popular girlfriend, and Employee of the Month at his after school job at All America Burger. Brad loses his cool with an obnoxious customer, gets fired, and suffers the indignity of accepting work at Captain Hook Fish ‘n Chips. Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) rejects the concerns of his peers, stating that all he needs are “some tasty waves, a cool buzz and I’m fine.” Spicoli runs afoul with his history teacher, Mr. Hand (Ray Walston), who has a unique system for paying back pupils who waste his time in class.

Stacy loses her virginity to the stereo salesman in a baseball dugout and never hears from him again. Harboring a crush on her throughout the semester, Ratner works up the nerve to ask Stacy out, and to his amazement, she says yes. Seeking dating advice, Ratner is given a five-step plan from Mike that culminates with, “When it comes down to making out, whenever possible, put on Side One of Led Zeppelin IV.” Too passive to take their relationship to that level, Ratner stands by while Mike plies his charms on Stacy.

Production history
Cameron Crowe started his journalism career at the age of fifteen, writing articles on rock music that ended up in Creem and Rolling Stone magazines. Most of the people he interacted with – editors, managers, musicians – were in a constant state of analyzing and trying to appeal to “the kids.” Who exactly “the kids” were intrigued Crowe. When Rolling Stone moved its offices from L.A. to New York, a colleague named David Obst went to work for publisher Simon & Schuster. Obst suggested that if Crowe really wanted to find out about “the kids,” he should go back to high school.

In the fall of 1979, a 22-year-old Crowe moved in with his parents in San Diego and got permission from the principal of Clairemont High School to enroll as a student, “Dave Cameron.” “The object, I told him, was to write a book about real, contemporary life in high school.” Crowe’s research culminated in six characters – a middle class brother and sister, her sexually experienced best friend, a nerd, a music loving ticket scalper and a stoned surfer. At the end of the school year, Crowe approached his subjects and revealed he was writing a book. At the time, they were largely indifferent.

Fast Times At Ridgemont High: A True Story was published in the fall of 1981. An executive at Universal Pictures named Thom Mount was familiar with Crowe’s articles and had a feeling his novel might be a modern day Catcher In The Rye. He purchased the film rights and brought in producer Art Linson – who Crowe had met while visiting the set of American Hot Wax – to shepherd Crowe through a screenplay adaptation. “Cameron was painstakingly into the detail of what he was trying to do. He took the slightest moments very seriously – how kids look at each other, how they feel about each other … It was unabashed, in a certain way.”

The first director Universal sent the script to was David Lynch. According to Crowe, the eccentric filmmaker’s response was, “This is funny, not really my material.” Linson had seen a thesis film by an AFI grad student named Amy Heckerling called Getting It Over With and offered her the job. Heckerling liked Crowe’s script, but when she read his book, responded, “I really thought they had been doing a disservice to it. Cameron knew all these people, and in the book he’d recorded very accurately everything that was going on with them, and it was very funny because of that, whereas I felt Universal were possibly trying to make more of a regular teen movie.”

Most of the up and coming actors of the day read for roles: Ralph Macchio, Michelle Pfeiffer, Matthew Broderick, Rebecca DeMornay, even Scott Baio. For the role of Spicoli, Heckerling felt Eric Stoltz gave the best reading, and considered going with Nicolas Coppola, who hadn’t done a movie or changed his name to Nicolas Cage yet (Stoltz and Cage won brief roles). Sean Penn gave a poor reading, but Linson recalled, “There was something special about Sean, you can always tell that in the room. Maybe he’s not right for Spicoli, but he’s obviously great, let’s put him in something. But he made it known Spicoli was what he wanted to do. And so we went, ‘Fuck it.’”

With a budget of $4.5 million, Fast Times At Ridgemont High commenced shooting in November 1981 around Los Angeles. The Sherman Oaks Galleria stood in for the mall, while the classroom scenes were shot at Van Nuys High School. Though only a minor character in the book, by the second week of filming, Linson felt Sean Penn was “just ripping it up” as Spicoli. Crowe was asked to beef up Penn’s role. He added scenes where Spicoli and his buds stroll into All American Burger, as well as a surfing dream sequence and a convenience store robbery blundered into by Spicoli.

Universal was so down on the film’s commercial prospects that they slashed the release from nine hundred screens to four hundred. Debuting August 1982, Linson recalls, “They were sure it was going to bomb. There was no television advertising. Nothing. Just trailers and a newspaper ad with bad reviews … Five years later, it’s on every top ten list of high school movies of all time. The New York Times - which didn’t even bother to review the film - now has it on a top ten list. Whenever they talk about high school movies, they either mention Fast Times or Blackboard Jungle. Everybody turned around on that one.”

Opinion
While the soundtrack is an odd mix of the ‘70s rock the producers felt “the kids” were still listening to, and the New Wave that Amy Heckerling saw coming, Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a minor masterpiece because writer and director infuse nearly every scene with an honesty – laugh out loud, quirky, tender, brutal – that few movies trying to appeal to teenagers ever aspire to. Career defining performances from some of the cast, one classic moment after another, and dialogue that’s come to define a generation make it difficult to overstate the impact this film continues to have.

Like the great films, Fast Times offers something new with each viewing. It also defies categorization. The duels between Sean Penn and Ray Walston are like highlights from a great stoner comedy, but Heckerling and Jennifer Jason Leigh refuse to soft peddle the sex, opting for stark realism. Small details – like students sniffing fresh mimeographs – stand out as much as showstopper moments, like Phoebe Cates rising out of a pool in one of the great fantasy sequences of all time. Hilarious, smart and cutting edge, the filmmakers use Spicoli’s class clown to ultimately suggest there might be more to growing up than sex and consumerism.

Lisa Skrzyniarz at Crazy for Cinema writes, “This film, and those of John Hughes, really created the teen flick genre, giving young adults a voice, albeit not always an intelligent one, on the big screen. A voice filled with longing, pain, resilliance and a hardy sense of humor. This is not an incredibly deep film, centering on the fantasies of a stoner, the sexual yearnings of a nerd and the burgeoning sexuality of a shy girl, yet it hits its mark with sharp humor and heartbreaking poignancy.”

“Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High is one of those hit films that was never good, always overrated and actually trivializes the 1980s as much as it always distracted from what was really going on at the time … However, it was this Cameron Crowe-penned film that was the bigger hit and the first problem is the incoherency of his young 1970s look at what we now call Classic Rock and Heckerling’s more Punk aesthetic,” writes Nicholas Sheffo at Fulvue Drive-in.

Kim Hollis at Box Office Prophets writes, “It all adds up to what I consider to be the greatest high school movie ever, as it illustrates a realistic cross-section of teenage life. It’s a particularly auspicious start to the outstanding career of Crowe … Fast Times at Ridgemont High captures the spirit and emotion of an era and a generation, and I’ll always have an affinity for the flick because it was released just as I was entering high school myself. Less slapsticky and punch-line driven than the John Hughes productions that also typify the ’80s, it’s an honest and genuine look at high school life in that period.”

© Joe Valdez