Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine anyone but Alicia Silverstone as Cher, but at first the studio wasn’t too keen on the seventeen-year-old. With Paramount and Rudin on board, Heckerling’s attention turned to casting. As Heckerling recounts during an interview with Vice, “I told Scott Rudin, ‘here are all the things I used to have in the film’, and he told me to put it all back.” Cher became the main character again, and the romantic relationship between Cher and Josh was re-introduced back into the story. He convinced Paramount to make Clueless without forcing Heckerling to add more male characters into the story. Rudin thought the female-centric angle was an unique selling point and saw the script’s potential. It wasn’t until Scott Rudin (Oscar winning producer of the likes of No Country For Old Men, The Social Network and Lady Bird) got his hands on the script that things picked up again. She wanted to focus primarily on telling the story from a female perspective – still a relatively uncommon thing in the mid-1990s – and what the studio were proposing went against her entire vision for the movie, so she ultimately rejected it and walked away from the project. That’s not verboten, you know?” Still, Fox weren’t budging on their demands for more male characters, and this was the breaking point for Heckerling. Their parents were briefly married and father is still nice to. However, as Heckerling explained to them, “They’re not related. The Fox studio executives had another prboem with Heckerling’s script, namely the relationship between Cher and her ex-stepbrother Josh (Rudd). They kept pressuring me to create more of a life for the boys in the film, to create more of an ensemble piece.” As Heckerling discussed later in an interview withThe Baltimore Sun, “They were worried about something that was so female-oriented. Fox were keen on the idea, but had a caveat: they wanted more male characters. Heckerling proposed the idea of Clueless the movie to the Fox studio executives. The director was about to throw in the towel, when her agent told her not to despair, because he thought the idea could work as a movie, and actively began trying to line up a deal. However, the network executives decided against bringing Heckerling’s show to pilot. The theatrical trailer for Clueless from 1995. 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.” And the plot was so brilliantly laid out in Emma. Heckerling had been toying with the idea of Clueless ever since reading Austen’s Emma, and says, “I’ve always loved and part of it had sort of stored it away in my brain… So I really related to her and got into it. The idea of what eventually became Clueless came about after Heckerling’s No Worries script was rejected by Disney for being, “too smart”, Heckerling’s intention being to create a smart narrative with a typical ‘dumb blonde’ character at the centre of the film. In 1993, Heckerling was developing a TV show called No Worries which focused on the life of popular kids attending a California high school. What follows of course, is much hilarity as Tai finds herself a fish out of water, and all sorts of drama revolving around various boys, including a very young Paul Rudd.Ĭlueless was originally conceived as a TV movie. With the arrival of new girl, Tai (Brittany Murphy), on the scene, Cher and her BFF Dionne (Stacey Dash) are greeted with a new challenge, to make-over regular-looking Tai and transform her into the most popular girl in school. Based loosely on the Jane Austen novel Emma, it is the story of Beverly Hills socialite Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) who can’t help but get involved in the love lives of those around her. 25 years on since its original release, the film seems just as relevant, relatable, and entertaining as it was back in 1995. Amy Heckerling’s Clueless is an exception. Not many teen comedies from the mid-1990s have stood the test of time, or even been remembered.
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