Clueless
Clueless is a 1995 American coming-of-age teen comedy film written and directed by Amy Heckerling. It stars Alicia Silverstone with supporting roles by Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, and Paul Rudd (in his film debut). It was produced by Scott Rudin and Robert Lawrence. The film is a loose adaptation of Jane Austen's 1815 novel Emma. The plot centers on a beautiful, popular, and rich high school student who befriends a new student and decides to give her a makeover while playing matchmaker for her teachers and examining her own existence.
For other uses, see Clueless (disambiguation).
Clueless was filmed in Southern California over a 40-day schedule. The film's director studied Beverly Hills High School students to understand how teenagers in the 1990s talked and learned some appropriate slang terms from them.
The film grossed $88 million worldwide, and was further successful in the home video market.[4] It has received positive reviews from critics and is considered to be one of the best teen films of all time.[5][6][7][8] Clueless has developed a cult following and has a continuing legacy. The film was followed by a spin-off television sitcom and series of books.
Plot[edit]
Cher Horowitz is a stylish, good-natured, and popular teenager living in a Beverly Hills mansion with her wealthy father Mel, a gruff litigator; her mother died during a liposuction procedure when Cher was a baby. She attends Bronson Alcott High School with her best friend Dionne Davenport, who is also beautiful and from a wealthy family. Dionne has a long-term relationship with popular student Murray Duvall, though Cher believes Dionne should be dating more mature men. Josh Lucas, the socially conscious son of Mel's ex-wife of only a few weeks, visits Cher and her father during a break from college. She playfully mocks his idealism, while he teases her for her vanity and superficial lifestyle.
After receiving a poor grade, Cher decides to orchestrate a romance between two teachers at her school, Miss Geist and the hard-grading Mr. Hall, so that Hall will relax his standards and allow Cher to renegotiate the grade. After seeing their newfound happiness, Cher realizes that she enjoys doing good deeds.
When a "clueless" transfer student named Tai Frasier arrives at the school, Cher decides to make Tai her next project by giving her a makeover with the help of Dionne, providing Tai with confidence and a sense of style. Cher tries to extinguish the attraction between Tai and Travis Birkenstock, an amiable but clumsy slacker, and instead steer Tai towards handsome, popular student Elton Tiscia. However, Elton has no interest in Tai and instead tries to make out with Cher in his car after a party in Sun Valley. When she rebuffs him, he leaves her in a parking lot out of spite and she is mugged at gunpoint. Josh picks her up and the two begin to bond.
Fashion-conscious new student Christian Stovitz attracts Cher's attention and becomes her target for a boyfriend. When she goes to a party with him, Josh becomes jealous and decides to follow her to the party. She invites Christian to her home and tries to seduce him, but he deflects her advances. Murray subsequently tells Cher and Dionne that Christian is gay. Despite the failure of her romantic overtures, Cher remains friends with Christian due to her admiration of his taste in art and fashion.
Cher's privileged life takes a negative turn when Tai's newfound popularity strains their relationship, and when she fails her driving test and cannot change the result. When Cher returns home in a depressed mood, Tai confesses that she has feelings for Josh and asks Cher for help in pursuing him. Cher says Tai is not right for Josh, leading to the two girls falling out. Feeling "totally clueless", Cher reflects on her priorities and her repeated failures to understand or appreciate the people in her life. After thinking about why she is bothered by Tai's romantic interest in Josh, Cher finally realizes that she is in love with him.
In response to her epiphany, Cher begins making awkward but sincere efforts to live a more purposeful life, including captaining the school's Pismo Beach disaster relief effort. She accepts an invitation by Travis to a skating tournament in Long Beach where she reconciles with Tai. Cher and Josh eventually follow through on their feelings for one another, culminating in a kiss. Ultimately, her friendships with Tai and Dionne are solidified. Sometime later, Mr. Hall and Miss Geist get married, and Cher attends the wedding with Josh, Dionne, Murray, and Tai and Travis (who have begun dating). Cher catches the wedding bouquet, and she and Josh embrace and kiss.
Production[edit]
Development[edit]
The idea for Clueless first originated as a television pilot in 1993.[9][10][11] Writer and director Amy Heckerling said: "Twentieth Century Fox said they wanted a show about teenagers—but not the nerds. They wanted it to be about the cool kids. The most successful character in anything I'd ever done was Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times. People think that's because he was stoned and a surfer. But that's not it. It's because he's positive. So I thought, 'I'm going to write a character who's positive and happy.' And that was Cher."[10] Heckerling, having read the Jane Austen novel Emma in college and loving the title character's positivity, decided to write the script around an Emma-like character, saying, "I started to think, 'What's the larger context for that kind of a 'nothing can go wrong' 'always looks through rose colored glasses' kind of girl? So I tried to take all the things that were in this sort of pretty 1800s world and see what would that be like if it was in Beverly Hills."[9]
Release[edit]
Box office[edit]
The film became a surprise sleeper hit of 1995.[23] Clueless opened in 1,653 theaters on July 19, 1995, and grossed $10,612,443 on its opening weekend, which led to a ranking of second at the US box office behind Apollo 13.[24] The film grossed $56,631,572 during its theatrical run in the United States and Canada, becoming the 32nd-highest-grossing film of 1995.[25] Internationally, it grossed $31 million for a worldwide total of $88 million.[3] The box office success brought the then-largely unknown Silverstone to international attention and earned her a $10 million, multi-picture deal with Columbia TriStar.[26] The film developed a strong cult following after its release.[6][27]
Critical reception[edit]
The film was well received by critics. On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, it holds an approval rating of 81% based on reviews from 120 critics, with an average rating of 6.8/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "A funny and clever reshaping of Emma, Clueless offers a soft satire that pokes as much fun at teen films as it does at the Beverly Hills glitterati."[28] On Metacritic, the film has a 68 out of 100 rating based on 18 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews".[29] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[30]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars.[31] Janet Maslin of The New York Times noted, "Even if Clueless runs out of gas before it's over, most of it is as eye-catching and cheery as its star."[32] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone contrasted the film to a more adult-oriented movie about teenagers released around the same time, Kids, stating, "The materialism in Clueless is almost as scary as the hopelessness in Kids", but concluded Clueless is "wicked good fun to be had [and] Silverstone is a winner."[33]
Accolades[edit]
Clueless won the award for Best Screenplay at the National Society of Film Critics Awards[34] and Alicia Silverstone won the award for Breakthrough Performance from the National Board of Review.[35] The film was nominated for a WGA Award for Best Screenplay.[36] The film was nominated for four MTV Movie Awards, winning for Best Female Performance and Most Desirable Female for Silverstone.[37] Silverstone won the award for Funniest Actress in a Motion Picture at the American Comedy Awards.[38]
In 2008, Entertainment Weekly selected Clueless as one of the "New Classics", a list of 100 best films released between 1983 and 2008;[39] Clueless was ranked 42nd.[39] That year, the publication also named it the 19th-best comedy of the past 25 years.[40] The film is ranked as number 7 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 best high school films.[41]
Clueless is a loose adaptation of Jane Austen's 1815 novel Emma, and many of its characters have counterparts in the novel.[42][43][44]
Home media[edit]
Clueless was released on VHS and LaserDisc on December 19, 1995, by Paramount Home Video. It ended up in the top 20 for both video rental and video sales for 1996 in the United States.[45] It was released on DVD on October 19, 1999. The special features solely included two theatrical trailers.
The film was reissued in a special 10th-anniversary "Whatever! Edition" DVD on August 30, 2005.[46] The new issue included featurettes and cast interviews, including:The Class of '95 (a look at the cast), Creative Writing (Amy Heckerling talks about the script), Fashion 101 (how filmmakers invented the trendsetting style of Clueless), Language Arts (the director and cast members give facts on the groundbreaking slang and how Clueless revived Valspeak slang), Suck and Blow (how to play the game depicted in the Sun Valley party scene), Driver's Ed, We're History (stories from cast and crew of Clueless), and two theatrical trailers.
It was released on Blu-ray on May 1, 2012.[47] Special features from the "Whatever! Edition" of 2005 were carried over to the Blu-ray and included a new trivia track.
Clueless: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Spin-offs and adaptations[edit]
Television[edit]
In 1996, the producers created a spin-off television series, which followed parallel storylines of Cher and her friends. Several cast members from the film went on to star in the series, with the notable exceptions of Silverstone and Rudd, whose film careers had begun to take off. Silverstone was replaced in the series with actress Rachel Blanchard.
In October 2019, it was announced that CBS would be adapting the film into a drama series. The series is said to be centered around Dionne Davenport after Cher goes missing, and is described by Deadline Hollywood as a "baby pink and bisexual blue-tinted, tiny sunglasses-wearing, oat milk latte and Adderall-fueled look at what happens when the high school queen bee Cher disappears and her lifelong number two Dionne steps into Cher's vacant Air Jordans."[66] On August 14, 2020, it was moved to NBCUniversal's streaming service Peacock.[67] In May 2021, it was reported that the series would not be moving forward at Peacock and instead would be redeveloping at CBS Studios.[68]