High School Highs

It is the early Fall of 1978, Clairemont High School, San Diego and the first day of the new school year is getting underway. In the parking lot, kids gather next to the smattering of new, old cars paid for with the proceeds of tedious summer jobs. On the food court, last year’s tribes re-establish their old territories or try to mark new ones. And then there are the new kids, wandering the halls, clutching schedules and notebooks, scoping the social topography while trying all the while to melt into the background.  

Among them is Dave Cameron. He’s clad in the standard SoCal high school student uniform of the era: carefully curated T-Shirt, jeans, standard-issue footwear – Kickers or Keds. He’s a typical kid: quietly spoken, with a soft, oval face and watchful, sympathetic eyes over which his wavy brown hair occasionally flops. 

As the weeks pass he’ll become part of the background, woven firmly into the strange everyday tapestry of high-school life. He’s there that time some kid ordered a pizza to be delivered to history class; he gossips with the rest of them about the girl who got accidentally pregnant and had to get an abortion; he’s a witness to that time one kid totally lost it and yelled ‘You dick!” at a teacher.

And then the school year which has seemed, as they all do, to be endless, is suddenly over. The tribes disband and head to college or work or, for that unlucky few who have failed to graduate, a dismal repeat of the year just passed.

But Dave Cameron, who is not, in fact, 17 years old, but 22, doesn't need a job. He already has one. He clears away the magazines he has subscribed to, their mail wrappers bearing the name Dave Cameron, part of his artfully constructed cover, and sits down in front of his typewriter. 

"Stacy Hamilton lay under the covers, still fully dressed, and stared at the ceiling,” he writes. “Somewhere in the course of a long and uneventful Summer she had come to an important decision. There was no way she was going to start senior high school still a virgin."

Later, on the title page, he types: “Fast Times At Ridgemont High. By Cameron Crowe.”

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By the time he began his strange second journey into American high-school life, Cameron Crowe already had behind him one of the most unusual careers in pop journalism history. Something of a wunderkind who had skipped multiple school grades he had graduated early, at the age of 15. Early writing gigs had included rock mags Creem and Circus before he fell in with legendary writer Lester Bangs and started a career at Rolling Stone that saw him interviewing Dylan, Bowie and Clapton while still a teenager. But by the time he hit his early 20s the majesty of rock was slowly being replaced in his mind by another, even more fascinating potential subject: people.

“I had really started to feel the creative call of doing things beyond just rock profiles,” Crowe tells Empire over a late-night zoom call. “Every once in a while I’d begun to interview fans, and these conversations had been so fun. I mean, I remember thinking I was really interested in this guy who told me all about his car and how he had to pay for gas, but how he was the biggest Led Zepplin fan and paying for gas would have stopped him going. Slowly I just started to love telling those kinds of stories. I was suddenly just searching for characters.”
When, in 1977, Rolling Stone moved offices to New York, Crowe stayed in California and continued to freelance for the magazine. But, at some deep level, he was perhaps beginning to mourn the loss of the high-school life he had never really experienced. “I felt like I wanted to look through a window at what my senior year might have been,” he recalls. “So Fast Times started out as an article idea for Rolling Stone, but then a book agent got involved and the result was that I took some time off to write long-form, and in a style that I still use today.”
Miraculously Crowe persuaded the principal of Claremont High, near to his San Diego home, to let him attend the school as a senior. Only half a dozen teachers would know of the plan, or who he really was, and none of the students. “It helped both that my mom was a teacher and the principal was a Kris Kristofferson fan,” he smiles. “And I was able to tell him, well you know I’ve interviewed Kris.”

But the idea that the book might be adapted for the big screen never occurred to him. “I had no idea it could possibly be a film,” he says. “For a start, people told me that kids don’t go and see movies about kids. It was a nostalgic thing for adults to do a high-school story. And it’s a very episodic book. It’s kind of snapshots of these people, and their sense of yearning, really. But then Animal House came out and kind of changed things because it proved that there was a young audience.” 

Over at Universal Studios, a young producer called Art Linson had watched the success of Animal House and began to think the same thing.

“I knew Cameron because he had done an article about American Hot Wax,” Linson, who would go on to produce The Untouchables and Fight Club, tells Empire. “We continued to talk once in a while. Then he said he’s writing this book about high school. I got hold of it and you didn't have to be a terrific producer to realise that, God, this is amazing. He’d unlocked this authenticity that a blind mouse could have seen. It was really audacious. I’d done a couple of movies for Universal and I took it to [Universal head] Ned Tanen. I don’t know if he ever read it. He was just, ‘Yeah yeah, we’ve done a car wash movie, let’s do a high-school movie’. If he’d really read the book I don’t think he would have done it.”

Concerned that Hollywood might defang his story, and run scared from the frank treatment of adolescent sex and abortion, Crowe was relieved when Linson urged him to preserve the book’s picaresque, authentic tone. “The whole thing felt like a big gamble,” he says. “The huge decision from Art, and then Amy Heckerling, was not to make this into a sexploitation comedy. We did kind of sneak our movie through on the gust of wind from Animal House. But Amy gave it its personality. It’s quietly humorous, sarcastic and soulful. What she brought to it was so much heart.”

For Heckerling Linson’s eventual call couldn't have come at a better time. The then 27-year-old had just seen her debut feature put into turnaround, then bought, then cancelled because of an actor’s strike. “I was trying to be an up-and-coming producer, she was trying to be an up-and-coming director,” Linson says. “I called her, she’s got this Brooklyn accent, and she says, ‘Well I’ll do it but I don't know anything about soiyfers.’ And that’s ironic because it was a surfer who saved our bacon.”

 

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Jeff Spicoli, the lank-haired, permanently stoned surfer was the key to the movie, and Linson, Heckerling and Crowe all knew it. Casting had been a drawn-out process, mainly because of the plethora of young talent that the movie had to draw on. “There just didn’t seem to be many good parts for young actors back then,” remembers Crowe. “The blood just rushed to any movie where there were good parts for young people. I think we looked at everybody apart from Matthew Broderick.” (In fact, Broderick did audition, as did Ralph Macchio, Carrie Fisher, Ally Sheedy and Michelle Pfeiffer.)

The result was a movie became an incubator for Hollywood’s aristocracy of the 1980s and beyond: Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forest Whitaker, Judge Reinhold, and Eric Stoltz would all begin their careers on Fast Times. (Cage, then acting under his family name, Coppola later reported having a miserable time on set. “I was surrounded by actors, whose names I won’t mention, who were not very open to the idea of a guy named ‘Coppola’ being an actor,” he later said, also recalling the kids gathering around his trailer and loudly reciting lines from Apocalypse Now. Months later he changed his name to Cage.)

But Spicoli was a problem. Nobody seemed to be quite able to nail the amiable stoner. “A Ridgemont legend since third-grade,” as Crowe had described him, “his long dirty-blond hair was parted exactly in the middle. He spoke thickly, like molasses pouring from a jar.”

“Cameron and Art had a very strong vision of him, and they knew that his character was really going to emerge from the movie,” Heckerling remembers. “Art originally described the movie to me as being ‘ten girls and Spicoli, who will be stoned.’” 

“He’d done this movie called TAPS for Harold Becker which hadn’t been released yet,” says Linson. He was with Timothy Hutton and Tom Cruise and the word was the kids were really great. So we went to the editing room and saw a cut. And he was very good. But he had this military buzz cut. We couldn’t quite see it.”

Penn subsequently wigged-up and auditioned, but the first impressions weren't good. “He was awful, just Godawful,” casting director Don Phillips later said. “He gave us no sense of the stoner image whatsoever.” Linson and Heckerling politely kicked him out of the room. But Phillips determined Penn was the man for the job, turned him around and brought him right back in for a second run at it. This time Penn pulled his T-Shirt over his head and half rapped the scene. “He was brilliant,” remembers Linson. “We were very lucky. I mean you can do this 20 times and Sean Penn doesn't walk in the door. At least we were smart enough to say, yeah, you’re hired.”

The shoot was fast and, for a first feature, efficient. Heckerling and Crowe had relocated much of the action to the Sherman Oaks Mall where filming happened mostly at night. “It was a blast,” remembers Heckerling. “Even today I can see and smell those fast food places at the mall. I kind of wish I was running around with my second AD, picking extras to be in a scene. I remember how the cast were such babies. When you’re doing what you love and working with wonderful people, there’s nothing better.”

The good mood wouldn’t last. A few weeks after Heckerling wrapped Universal finally viewed the film they had paid for. And when the lights went up the news wasn’t so much bad as catastrophic.

They hated it.

 

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“It was worse than when Fincher and I showed Fight Club to Fox,” recalls Art Linson. “That paled by comparison. It was repulsive to them. I kept thinking, ‘Did nobody fucking read this?’ There’s nothing in the movie that isn’t on the fucking page. But they just decided to minimise their risk and hope the stench finally went away.”

The studio’s objections to the film were difficult to quantify and mostly impossible to fix. A brief shot of Robert Romanus’’ penis during the film’s awkward sex scene, included in the name of genital equality by Heckerling, was swiftly cropped out. But the real problem was the tone, the honesty and pointed absence of adult lecturing, of neat consequences, that was Crowe’s book’s strength. “The outrage was crazy,” remembers Linson. 

“There was this memo that went up the studio chain saying that the movie was near-porno and if they released it it was going to wreck the studio,” says Crowe. “They screened it in the most conservative areas in California and we got these cards that said really pissed me off and how dare you!” remembers Heckerling. The studio responded by cancelling the entire East Coast release, pulling all advertising and limiting the West Coast rollout to 200 theatres.  

“There were no TV ads, I think we had flyers on building sites like we were some underground band,” says Heckerling. 

But slowly Fast Times found its audience, kids who had never seen their lives so sympathetically rendered on the big screen, began to flock to the movie. “The weird thing was that now it was a successful movie, but Universal were still kind of disgusted by it,” says Linson. “The fact is that Cameron had done a brilliant job. He captured the essence of what a high school experience was like so perfectly people are still watching it. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t seen Fast Times.”

In the decades that followed it wasn’t in the cottage industry of teen movies that sprung up post-Ridgemont that the film’s oddly enduring influence is most powerfully felt. Fast Times’ DNA snakes through modern film in stranger, more unexpected ways. There’s Spicoli for a start. Bill & Ted, Lebowski’s The Dude, Brad Pitt mumbling from a couch in True Romance. All unimaginable without Penn’s echt-stoner. Echoes of its unique tone – funny, human, young, real – are unmistakably there in Richard Linklaters' loose, joyful comedies and romances. They ripple through Paul Thomas Anderson’s valley movies, nodded to most recently, and obviously, in Liquorice Pizza.

Long-time Crowe disciple Judd Apatow is one amongst the host of contemporary directors for whom the film acted as a career lodestar. “I first saw it when I was in high school,” Apatow tells Empire via email. “We all went nuts. It felt like someone made a movie about us. It was the first time I realized that you could make a movie with both a deeply emotional, credible storyline and also include riotous comedy about the madness of growing up.”

For Apatow it’s that crackling live third rail, the sense of teen lives lived, as opposed to recreated, packaged, that gives it its unexpected power. “It’s so much more than a comedy. It captured life,” he says. “When we made movies like Knocked Up and Superbad we were trying to catch that spirit. I thought about this film the entire time we made Freaks and Geeks. I always say I have spent my entire career copying Cameron Crowe. I have never gotten close and I still have done OK. That’s how good he is. You can be half as good as he is and still have a career.”

Rewatching Fast Times At Ridgemont High today it’s still thrilling to witness how it still connects more than almost any movie about being young. Even now, with the malls closed and teenage life, like almost everything else, having migrated online, it thrums with a realism, a truthfulness, that reaches back forty years to Dave Cameron wandering the hallways and classrooms of Clairemont High in the Fall of ‘78. 

Where the kids, it turns out, were all right.