Clueless


Clueless is a 1995 American coming-of-age teen comedy film written and directed by Amy Heckerling. It stars Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Paul Rudd, Dan Hedaya, and Brittany Murphy. It was produced by Scott Rudin and Robert Lawrence. It is loosely based on Jane Austen's 1815 novel Emma, with a modern-day setting of Beverly Hills. The plot centers on Cher Horowitz, a beautiful, clever and rich high school student who befriends a new student named Tai Frasier and decides to give her a makeover.
Clueless was filmed in California over a 40-day schedule. The film's director studied real Beverly Hills high school students to understand how real teens in the 1990s talked and learn some appropriate slang terms.
The film grossed $56.1 million in the United States. It has received generally positive reviews from critics and is considered to be one of the best teen films of all time. Clueless has developed a cult following and has a continuing legacy. The film was followed by a spin-off television sitcom, series of books, and Paramount Pictures has announced that they are producing a remake.

Plot

Cher Horowitz lives in a Beverly Hills mansion with her father Mel, a $500-an-hour litigator; her mother died during a liposuction procedure when Cher was a baby. Cher is attractive, popular, and wealthy. She attends Bronson Alcott High School with her best friend, Dionne Davenport, who is also wealthy and beautiful. Dionne has a long-term relationship with popular student Murray; Cher claims that this is a pointless endeavor for Dionne.
Josh, Cher's socially conscious ex-stepbrother, visits her during a break from college. They spar continually but playfully. She mocks his idealism, while he teases her for being selfish, vain and superficial, saying that her only direction in life is "toward the mall". Later Cher plays matchmaker for two hard-grading teachers at her school, Mr. Hall and Miss Geist. She facilitates the relationship between the teachers to make them relax their grading standards so she can renegotiate a bad grade on her report card. After Cher sees their newfound happiness, she realizes she enjoys doing good deeds. Cher then decides to give back to the community by "adopting" a "tragically unhip" new girl at school, Tai Frasier. Cher and Dionne give Tai a makeover, which gives Tai confidence and a sense of style.
Cher also tries to extinguish the attraction between Tai and Travis Birkenstock, an amiable skateboarding slacker, and to steer her towards Elton, a popular and wealthy student. Elton rejects Tai and fails to seduce Cher. A handsome new student at their school named Christian becomes Cher's target boyfriend; she invites him over to watch a movie at her place and tries to get closer to him, but he rejects her advances. Murray explains to Cher and Dionne that Christian is gay. Despite the failure of this endeavor, Cher remains friends with Christian, primarily due to her admiration of his taste in art and fashion.
Matters take a turn for the worse when Tai's newfound popularity strains her relationship with Cher. Cher's frustration escalates when she fails her driving test and cannot change the result. When she returns home, crushed, Tai confesses her feelings for Josh and wants Cher's help in pursuing him. Cher says Tai is not right for Josh and they quarrel. Their disagreement ends with Tai calling Cher a "virgin who can't drive". 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 interest in Josh, Cher realizes that she loves him. She begins making awkward but sincere efforts to live a more purposeful life, including captaining the school's Pismo Beach disaster relief effort. Cher and Josh eventually admit their feelings for one another, culminating in a tender kiss. Ultimately, Mr. Hall and Miss Geist wed; Cher's friendships with Tai and Dionne are solidified; Tai and Travis are in love and Cher catches the wedding bouquet, helping Josh win a $200 bet. She embraces Josh and they kiss.

Cast

Development

According to the special feature titled "Creative Writing", Heckerling describes the origins of Clueless as follows:
She follows up on the connections to the Jane Austen novel, Emma:
Associate producer Twink Caplan, who also played Ms. Toby Geist in the film, recalls what the proposed TV show's initial title:
Fox picked up the picture, but put the film in a turnaround. The male studio heads wanted Heckerling to rewrite the script so that fewer women would feature. Six months later, the script made its way to producer Scott Rudin. Rudin liked the script and it was the subject of a bidding war, with Paramount Pictures beating out the other studios. Heckerling was excited, as Paramount owned several major youth-centered channels, such as MTV and Nickelodeon, which was suited to the film's target demographic.

Filming

Principal photography for the film began on November 21, 1994. The film had a 40-day filming schedule. Producers sat in on classes at Beverly Hills High School to get a feel for the student culture. Herb Hall, the real drama teacher at Beverly Hills High School, had a short scene as the principal in the film. Scenes depicting the high school campus, including the tennis courts, the outdoor cafeteria, the quad, and various classrooms were filmed at Occidental College in Los Angeles. The mall scenes were filmed at Westfield Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks, California.

Reception

Box office

The film became a surprise sleeper hit of 1995. 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 behind Apollo 13. The film grossed $56,631,572 during its theatrical run, becoming the 32nd-highest-grossing film of 1995. This box office success brought the then-largely unknown Silverstone to international attention. The film also developed a strong cult following after its release.

Critical response

The film was well received by critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives it a score of 81% based on reviews from 68 critics and judged it "Certified Fresh" with an average rating of 6.92/10. The site's critical 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." On Metacritic, the film has a 68 out of 100 rating based on 18 reviews, which indicates "generally positive reviews".
The film was seen as a teen flick that had a strong influence on fashion trends and lingo. Fashion as a form of self-expression played an important role in the narrative and character development of the film, television series, and novels, which are topics examined by Alice Leppert.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars. Janet Maslin of The New York Times notes, "Even if Clueless runs out of gas before it's over, most of it is as eye-catching and cheery as its star." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film four stars, contrasting it to the more adult-oriented film about teenagers released around the same time, Kids, stating, "The materialism in Clueless is almost as scary as the hopelessness in Kids."

Accolades

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly selected Clueless as one of the "New Classics," a list of 100 released between 1983 and 2008; Clueless was ranked 42nd, and they named it the 19th-best comedy of the past 25 years.
American Film Institute recognition:
Clueless is a loose adaptation of Jane Austen's 1815 novel Emma, and many of its characters have counterparts in the novel.
Clueless was released on VHS and LaserDisc on December 19, 1995 by Paramount Home Video. It was released on DVD on October 19, 1999. The special features only included two theatrical trailers.
The film was reissued in a special tenth-anniversary "Whatever! Edition" DVD on August 30, 2005. The new issue included featurettes and cast interviews, including:The Class of '95, Creative Writing, Fashion 101, Language Arts, Suck and Blow, Driver's Ed, We're History, and two theatrical trailers.
It was released on Blu-ray on May 1, 2012. Special features were carried over from the "Whatever! Edition" of 2005 and included a new trivia track.

Soundtrack

Cultural impact and legacy

Cast

After the death of Brittany Murphy, Silverstone stated that she "always felt connected to as shared a very special experience in lives together", and said "I loved working with Brittany. She was so talented, so warm, and so sweet."
Heckerling later described Silverstone as having "that Marilyn Monroe thing" as a "pretty, sweet blonde who, in spite of being the American ideal, people still really like."
The surviving cast reunited in 2012 for an issue of Entertainment Weekly.
Heckerling later reunited with both Silverstone and Shawn for the vampire comedy Vamps.

Popular culture and society

The film was well known for the characters' catchphrases and vocabulary. Cher's verbal style is also marked by ironic contrasts between current slang and historical references, such as when she compares Tai to "those Botticelli chicks".
Fashion trends influenced by Clueless include Donatella Versace’s 2018 collection.
Clueless was the main inspiration for Australian rapper Iggy Azalea's music video for her 2014 song "Fancy" featuring Charli XCX. Many visuals and costumes inspired by the film were used in the video, which is filled with remakes of Clueless scenes. The outfits are also reinvented to channel the famous stylings of the film with a slightly modern edge. "Fancy" was shot in the same Los Angeles high school where Clueless was filmed.
In the second episode of the second season of the BBC America thriller series Killing Eve, "Nice and Neat", the Russian assassin Villanelle calls her agency and uses the codename Cher Horowitz to secretly inform her boss that she is in trouble and needs to be rescued after being kidnapped.
In a 2020 Discover Card commercial, a clip from the film was featured which consisted of Cher Horowitz saying her famous phrase "Uh uh, no way".

Spin-offs and adaptations

Television

In 1996, the producers created a spin-off television series, which followed the continuing adventures 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. 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 will be centered around Dionne after Cher goes missing, and is described by Deadline 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."

Books

spun off a collection of paperback books, from 1995 to 1999, aimed at adolescent readers.
In 2015, to celebrate the film's twentieth anniversary, pop culture writer Jen Chaney published a book titled As If!: The Oral History of Clueless. The book is based on exclusive interviews with Amy Heckerling, Alicia Silverstone, and other cast and crew members. Excerpts from the book were published in Vanity Fair.

Comics

A comic book series was launched in 2017.

Stage musical

Clueless: The Musical opened in New York City on December 11, 2018, as part of The New Group's 2018–2019 season. The show was written by Heckerling and starred Dove Cameron as Cher and Dave Thomas Brown as Josh. It closed on January 12, 2019.
The musical was a jukebox musical featuring pop songs from the 1990s, though with lyrics mostly or entirely rewritten by Heckerling to fit the storyline. Songs adapted from the movie's soundtrack included "Supermodel" and "Kids in America."

Web story

In 2017, Episode launched an animated web story based on the film.