‘All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine...’
As Doncaster Film Club are screening Almost Famous next month, this felt like a good time to revisit the filmography of Cameron Crowe, historically one of my favourite directors. While his first film was Say Anything in 1989, Crowe wrote the screenplay to seminal teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982, so it is here that we must begin…
As with other high school classics like Dazed and Confused and American Pie, Fast Times… doesn’t really have a single main character. Instead, an ensemble cast featuring Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, Robert Romanus and Phoebe Cates (as well as minor roles for Eric Stoltz, Nic Cage and Forest Whitaker) act out a week or so in the life of an American high school student in 1982. Nothing much happens in terms of plot, but then that’s what life as a teenager is. Nothing much happens until it does.
Based on Crowe’s novel of the same name (he famously went undercover in an actual high school to gather material), and directed by Amy Heckerling, who would go on to redefine the teen movie again with Clueless over a decade later, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, along with Porky’s a year earlier, ushered in a new dawn of raunchy teen comedies. That being said, while Porky’s is very much told from the male gaze, Fast Times… is much more interested in its female characters as more than just sex objects. Yes, there is nudity that probably seems gratuitous by today’s standards, but it makes sense with the narrative of the film, and it is the relationship between Leigh’s naive and unsure Stacy and Cates’ more experienced Linda that anchors the film. Crowe, always a sensitive writer, eschews schmaltz and sentimentality here, but he handles the more serious moments, particularly the abortion storyline, with a maturity and tenderness that telegraph the kind of filmmaker he would go on to become.
Aside from Cates (the first real love of my life), it is Penn who makes the biggest splash. The perma-stoned Spicoli was a star-making turn for the legendary actor, and the back-and-forth relationship he shares with Ray Walston’s no-nonsense teacher Mr Hand provides some of the film’s best moments. All of this is wrapped up in a killer soundtrack, and it is no surprise that so many people involved in this movie went on to have long and distinguished Hollywood careers.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High set the blueprint for a thousand high school comedies that followed (for better or worse); the fact that it still holds up today is a testament to Crowe’s timeless screenplay, Heckerling’s assured direction and a series of memorable performances from a once-in-a-lifetime ensemble cast – a true American classic.
