Hear Me Out: Why ‘Ratcatcher’ is the greatest coming-of-age film ever
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Universal saw ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ as ‘porn’ in 1982
Creating a great coming-of-age movie is not quite as straightforward as it seems from the outset. Wanting to instil some impactful sentimentality without making things too saccharine, making the perfect movie about the adolescent transition is a feat few have managed to achieve. Richard Linklater, John Hughes, Lynne Ramsay and Céline Sciamma are just some of these filmmakers.
The genre of filmmaking is most well-known for the films of Hughes, who dominated the scene in the 1980s with such movies as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, with each one gaining great commercial acclaim at the time. While some such Hughes films have not stood the test of time, Amy Heckerling’s 1982 movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High still remains a classic.
Helmed by Amy Heckerling and penned by Cameron Crowe, the ’80s movie launched the careers of Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forest Whitaker and even Nicolas Cage, who takes a ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-him’ cameo in the film. Though, in a recent interview, supporting actor Judge Reinhold described how the movie almost didn’t happen after Universal found an issue with the release.
In conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Reinhold stated, “We were really heartsick because somebody high up said, ‘This is pornography, and there’s no way that Universal’s going to release this movie’”. Continuing, he added, “We didn’t see it as this horny high school movie at all. We saw it as having the opportunity to do something authentic that was based on the actual experiences of the kids that Cameron chronicled for that whole year”.
Based on Cameron Crowe’s own 1981 book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High came from his own high-school experience. At one point, director Amy Heckerling was worried the film would not be distributed.
On the film’s 40th anniversary, Heckerling also gave her thoughts on the publication, explaining, “They were going to put it on the shelf because they didn’t see how it would make any money. They decided they would just open it in a few theatres on the West Coast, and they did that, and people kept coming back and knew all the dialogue. So then they quickly put it out in the rest of the country. There was no advertising beforehand — I was bummed out”.
Eventually becoming a critical and commercial success, the film grossed over $27 million at the domestic box office and remained a cult coming-of-age classic. Far from a throwaway ‘pornographic’ movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High explored themes of consent, heartbreak and sexual exploration with refreshing honesty, even being one of the first to discuss and confront the issue of abortion.
“The whole theme, of even the title, is things are going too fast for young people,” the director further told the publication, adding, “They shouldn’t have to worry so much about sex at such an early age”.
Take a look at the trailer for the classic movie below.
