Amy Heckerling

Amy Heckerling (born May 7, 1954) is an American writer, producer, and director. Heckerling started her career after graduating from New York University and entering the American Film Institute, making small student films. Heckerling is a recipient of AFI's Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal celebrating her creative talents and artistic achievements. She struggled to break out into big films up until the release of Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

She has also directed the films Johnny Dangerously (1984), National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985), Look Who's Talking (1989), Clueless (1995), Loser (2000), I Could Never be Your Woman (2007) and Vamps (2012). She was a producer on A Night at the Roxbury (1998) and executive producer on Molly (1999). Many of Heckerling's films were adapted as television series. Fast Times at Ridgemont High evolved into the series Fast Times (1986), while Clueless (1995) became a television series that ran from 1996 to 1999.

Early life and education Heckerling was born on May 7, 1954, in The Bronx, New York City, to a bookkeeper mother and an accountant father. She had a Jewish upbringing and remembers that the apartment building where she spent her early childhood was full of Holocaust survivors. "Most of them had tattoos on their arms and for me there was a feeling that all of these people had a story to tell. These were interesting formative experiences." Both of her parents worked full-time, so she frequently moved back and forth from her home in the Bronx, where Heckerling claims she was a latchkey kid sitting at home all day watching television, to her grandmother's home in Brooklyn, which she enjoyed much better. Here, she frequented Coney Island and stayed up watching films all night with her grandmother. At that time Heckerling loved television, where she watched numerous cartoons and old black and white movies. Her favorites were gangster movies, musicals and comedies. She had a particular fondness for James Cagney.

After her father passed his CPA exam, the family became more financially stable and moved to Queens, where Heckerling felt more out of place than ever. She did not get along with other kids in her school there, nor did she want to continue to be classmates with them through high school, so she enrolled at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. On her first day of school there, Heckerling realized that she wanted to be a film director. During their first assignment, writing about what they wanted to do in life, Heckerling wrote that she wanted to be a writer or artist for Mad. She noticed that a boy next to her, that she claimed copied from her papers later on, wrote that he wanted to be a film director.

I was really annoyed because I thought that if an idiot like that guy could say he wanted to be a director, then so could I, and certainly I should be a director more than he should. It had never occurred to me that that was a job possibility. He put the thought in my head because until then I would never have thought of saying that I wanted to do that; it didn't seem to be one of the jobs in the world that could be open to me. Her father made just slightly over the cut-off for financial aid for the school, so Heckerling had to take out a large loan to cover her expenses. She claims this caused considerable stress in her life, and she was unable to pay them off until the end of her twenties.

Heckerling enjoyed her time at NYU, where she learned a lot and made great connections, such as Martin Brest, as well as noted screenwriter and satirist Terry Southern, who was one of her professors. Later she reflected on her time at the school as sloppy and unprofessional, saying that she had used very low-quality equipment and went through numerous technical problems. During her time at NYU, Heckerling was making mostly musicals. "I was the only one doing them and they were weird. It was the mid-70s and it was a bizarre combination of long hair with bell bottoms, the tail end of the hippie movement at its schlumpiest. With this, I sort of infused a 1930s idiotic grace that didn't go with the post-Watergate mentality that was prevalent at the time. They were weird films, but they got me into AFI." It also spawned a short-lived series on CBS called Fast Times, with Heckerling writing, directing and producing.

After doing Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Heckerling was bombarded with similar but lesser scripts. It was hard for her to find anything that wasn't about high school, preppy kids, or a story about a girl losing her virginity. Eventually she found her next film. Johnny Dangerously (1984), with Michael Keaton, Joe Piscopo, Danny DeVito, Dom DeLuise, and Peter Boyle, was an Airplane!-style spoof of gangster movies, but it failed to catch fire at the box office upon its initial release. Heckerling attributes the film's failure to the public's lack of familiarity with the gangster movies that the film was poking fun at. "It was pure satire of something nobody remembers. I think that was the main problem, because all the actors and writers did great jobs. But we were definitely satirizing something ... I mean, unless you watch 1930s movies on TV at night, people don't remember. Somebody told me that during a screening they were sitting next to Brian De Palma, who had just done Scarface, and he was in hysterics. If you studied those movies, you know what we were doing."

In 1989, Heckerling had her biggest success with Look Who's Talking, starring John Travolta, Kirstie Alley and a baby voiced by Bruce Willis. Heckerling got the idea for the film while she was pregnant with her daughter and developed it into a feature. Heckerling says that she loves to write comedies, such as Look Who's Talking, because she notes that when a film is made, everyone working on it puts more than a year of their lives into making it, so she wants that year to be happy and fun. Heckerling, who loved Travolta, was ecstatic to work with him, though many people consider the film's release to be during the end of a low point in Travolta's career. After the film's release, Heckerling was able to cross off the second of two goals that she had set for herself in college, the first being to make a studio feature, which she did with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and the second being: "I wanted to have hits the way boys had hits, not like a 'girl hit' that made 50 million, but a boy hit that made 100s of millions."

Filmmaking style Heckerling's films have been characterized as having a proto-feminist perspective. Heckerling focuses on the female life at pivotal turning points. With films such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless, Heckerling has focused on women finishing high school and going into what would be their adult lives. Her characters are constantly going against the norms that women are pushed into within society. Heckerling has a tendency to prioritize the female friendships within her films, along with a larger discussion of gender positioning within teenagers' lifestyles.

Personal life Heckerling dated fellow film director Martin Brest when she first moved to Los Angeles. Though they later broke up, they remained good friends. Heckerling's first marriage was to musician David Brandt, from 1981 to 1983. At one point she hired director Neal Israel to work on one of her films. Ten months afterward, he asked her out; they married in July 1984. The marriage ended with a 1990 divorce. when it was revealed to her that in fact Harold Ramis was her biological father. Heckerling has included Mollie in some of her films in bit parts, including Look Who's Talking and Loser, though Heckerling claims that her daughter never wanted to be a "girly girl" and distanced herself from much of her work, never adding any input to the lives of characters such as those in Clueless. Despite this, the two get along very well and Mollie frequently introduces her mother to new music, such as OK Go, and films.

Actor and comedian Chris Kattan claimed in his 2019 memoir Baby, Don't Hurt Me: Stories and Scars from Saturday Night Live that he was pressured by Lorne Michaels to have sex with Heckerling so she would direct the 1998 film A Night at the Roxbury (although she ultimately only produced, rather than directed it). Heckerling's daughter Mollie disputes the claim, saying that although Heckerling and Kattan had an affair, it began once the film was already shooting. . When asked about the matter during an interview with The Daily Beast , Heckerling referred to Kattan as a "nut" and stated, "You know, I don’t comment about that, because basically I have no interest in helping his book sales. I don’t even want to know or hear the dumb shit he came up with.”

Awards and nominations In 1995, Heckerling won the National Society of Film Critics Best Screenplay award and was nominated for the Writers Guild of America award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen for her screenplay, Clueless. The film was also nominated for a WGA Award for Best Screenplay. In 1998, she received the Franklin J. Schaffner Medal from the American Film Institute. In 1999, she received the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through endurance and excellence, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.

Filmography Film work Year Title Director Writer Producer Notes 1977 Getting It Over With Short film – AFI thesis film 1982 Fast Times at Ridgemont High 1984 Johnny Dangerously 1985 National Lampoon's European Vacation 1989 Look Who's Talking 1990 Look Who's Talking Too 1993 Look Who's Talking Now! 1995 Clueless 1998 A Night at the Roxbury 1999 Molly 2000 Loser 2007 I Could Never Be Your Woman 2012 Vamps

Television work Year Title Director Writer Producer Creator Notes 1986 Fast Times 3 episodes 1988 Life on the Flipside TV movie 1991–92 Baby Talk 35 episodes (characters created by) 1996–99 Clueless 4 episodes 2005 The Office Episode: "Hot Girl" 2012 Gossip Girl Episodes: "Father and the Bride" and "Monstrous Ball" 2013–14 The Carrie Diaries 3 episodes 2014 Suburgatory Episode: "Victor Ha" 2014 Rake Episode: "Three Strikes" 2015–17 Red Oaks 6 episodes 2019 Weird City 2 episodes 2020 Royalties 10 episodes

Acting roles Year Title Role Notes 1985 Into the NightShips Waitress 1995 CluelessMaid of HonorUncredited 1996 Eek! The Cat Nel Erving (voice) Episode: "Bonfire of the Vanna Tea" (Klutter! segment) 2020 Royalties Cindy McMann Episode: "Kick Your Shoes Off", uncredited