Clueless

Amy Heckerling’s film follows Cher, a Beverly Hills student who raises her own grades by matchmaking two teachers, then takes a new girl on as a project and is slow to see her blind spot. Heckerling’s rule was that Cher should not be unintelligent, only unaware of what she did not yet know. Heckerling read Jane Austen’s Emma at college and says that when the script stalled she asked herself what Austen would do. It began as a television pitch at Fox, where executives balked at the romance with the former stepbrother; at Paramount, Scott Rudin told her to put it all back. She can trace the slang word by word: As if came from a close friend, keeping it real from Donald Faison on set, going postal from a co worker. Silverstone’s mispronunciation of Haitians was not in the script, and Heckerling stopped the crew from correcting her. Mona May refused to dress the cast in what teenagers actually wore in 1995: the yellow plaid suit is Jean Paul Gaultier, the costume budget was about two hundred thousand dollars, and Cher gets sixty three changes. A good fit if you want that sixty three outfit shop window more than high school realism. Not for anyone waiting for the film to treat Beverly Hills money as the problem.