The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: And this is Episode 444 of Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program it’s a deep dive on one of my favorite movies of all time, 1995’s Clueless, written and directed by Amy Heckerling. And that is all we are going to talk about today. These deep dive episodes are standalone, so if you’re listening to this is in 2033 we will not be referencing the current situation that we’re in. As far as you know everything is fine.
Craig: Everything is fine.
John: We’re just talking about Clueless.
Craig: It’s a normal day. It’s a Clueless day.
John: And for Premium members we are going to have a bonus segment where Craig and I talk about learning to drive which is of course a key plot point in the film Clueless.
Craig: Indeed.
John: Indeed. Craig, let’s set the table about why we are talking about Clueless. Because you just re-watched it. I know this movie from watching it a thousand times. To me this movie is a masterclass in many things that we want to let our listeners really appreciate. I really think about tone and POV in this movie and sort of how well it does everything. The narration we’ll get into. This is a movie that would not be possible without its narrator, without being able to see inside Cher’s head.
I’m always in awe of the denseness of its comedy. Like just the way it’s joke-joke-joke. There are no scenes that are joke-less. And it’s also just a terrific adaptation. So, Clueless is of course based on Jane Austen’s Emma. It is a weirdly faithful adaptation and yet such a smart adaptation. So as we look at updating old projects, Clueless is a great model.
Craig: Well, to talk about why the tone of Clueless and the comedy of Clueless and the characters of Clueless work so well, I think you have to start with one of the great heroes of American film comedy, Amy Heckerling.
John: Yeah.
Craig: In a just world Amy Heckerling is mentioned right up there with Billy Wilder, and Harold Ramis, and every great male director of comedy ever because she’s that important. I think so.
John: Yeah. So as a writer and a director, just phenomenal work throughout this. And also you look at the impact this film has had. I think it would be hard to imagine a Wicked or a Glee without Clueless tilling some soil ahead of them. You look at Glinda in Wicked and there is a template being forged by Cher in Clueless that is so I think relevant to this in terms of having a central character who is charming and popular and yet still needs to grow. And that feels like an obvious thing.
And of course the way it sort of revitalized how we do a high school comedy is another way that Clueless is so important. That these are characters who do speak like they are much more educated than they really would be. That to me was incredibly important to a whole generation of high school comedies.
Craig: Right. And it was the second time that Amy Heckerling did this. I mean, the first time was Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Amy Heckerling is such a good writer and such a good director it kind of blows my mind. So she made Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982 which was well before Clueless. And that was a kind of early definer of what a high school comedy should be. It sort of blew the doors off of what high school portrayal was and also launched the career of Cameron Crowe. Johnny Dangerously is a terribly underrated and so therefore vastly awesome spoof movie that happened – it just didn’t connect at the time in the theaters but it has since become a rightful cult classic.
So there’s your laugh-a-minute vibe. And she’s just kind of amazing at portraying families together, portraying young adults. And you’re absolutely right. The template that Cher creates has gone on forward now. When you say Glinda from Wicked it’s so true, because Glinda and Cher have this thing which is they’re incredibly popular, they’re incredibly beautiful, they’re self-involved, they are superficial, but they’re not bad.
John: No.
Craig: And that’s the most – that’s the thing about Cher that’s so fascinating is that she wore the kind of accoutrement of a bad person except she wasn’t bad. She just hadn’t yet had her eyes opened.
John: Exactly. So, this movie has been important for me for two different reasons. So this was a movie that I first saw when I came out and I remember seeing it in the theater, but I most remember seeing it the second time. So, I had driven out to Los Angeles in rusted out Honda Accord and by the time I was living in my third apartment in Los Angeles I had gotten hired to write the adaptation of How to Eat Fried Worms. I may have already started working on A Wrinkle in Time. And so I had enough money coming in that I was able to buy myself, lease myself a Volkswagen Jetta, which everybody in Los Angeles at that time leased the exact same Volkswagen Jetta. They were really cheap.
And that meant I could sell my old Honda Accord. And so on one Saturday morning I sold my Honda Accord for like $1,500 and it was cash. And I had never held that much cash in my hand at one time. And I decided to use some of that money to take all my friends to see Clueless with me again. So, it was one of those rare movies where I saw it twice in a weekend. And I just remember taking that Honda Accord money to see that movie.
The second point of connection to Clueless for me was in 2010 I was asked by Outfest, the Gay and Lesbian film festival in Los Angeles, if I wanted to screen a classic gay movie and give a talk about it. And so I picked Clueless which seems like a weird movie to pick because it’s not on its surface a gay movie, but what I argued in the show notes for it is that true to its title Clueless doesn’t know how gay it is. Amy Heckerling’s 1995 clever reworking of Jane Austen’s Emma gives us Alicia Silverstone as the stylish but shallow Cher Horowitz whose well-intentioned meddling leads her to deeper revelations about friendship and forbidden love, her ex-step-brother, the dreamy Paul Rudd. Along the way she falls for the gay guy, pursues the jerk, and gives her soul a makeover. Clueless is a blast of queer-adjacent sunshine.
Craig: Aw.
John: So, to me it is a very important movie for a whole generation of gay men as well. So, that’s another sort of big point of connection for Clueless for me.
Craig: Yeah. And as a straight guy, I do remember when I saw the movie when it came out, of course, and so I was – we’re pretty much the same age – so I was 23. And I remember thinking that this was maybe the first portrayal of a teenage gay young man that wasn’t “the gay.” Do you know what I mean?
John: Yeah.
Craig: He was just a guy.
John: Yeah.
Craig: He was a guy.
John: It came at a very right angle. And so we’ll talk about the Christian character. But they set him up in a way that once you understand that he’s gay it’s like, oh, I see what she was doing and I see what he was doing, but it wasn’t sort of the stereotypically gay character.
Craig: Yeah.
John: So let’s talk about how this script came to be. So, when we refer to the script, the best script I’ve been able to find is an August 1994 script. It’s 123 pages. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes. It very closely approximates what the final script is. There’s a lot of transcripts online and transcripts are useless. Never look at transcripts. Only look at actual screenplays that writers have written.
The backstory on this is Heckerling apparently wrote this as a TV pilot for a TV show called No Worries that was later retitled I Was a Teenage Teenager. And it was the Cher character. It was all the characters that are in the story but it wasn’t Emma, surprisingly. So, she writes, “It was about this girl that was completely happy no matter what happened. And I was really getting into that kind of character but nothing happened with it. Fox passed on it. They didn’t get it. And things were falling through. I got very frustrated.”
And so she started thinking about the larger context of rose-colored glasses that nothing could go wrong and she went back to Emma which she had read in college. She took it out, reread it, and she said, “Unconsciously I’ve been writing an Emma-like character.” And then she took basically what she had already sort of planned out for this No Worries and sort of really made Cher an Emma character and sort of built Emma around it and it worked just so brilliantly.
Craig: Yeah. And this would become the first of a long series of such adaptations. This kind of kicked off a craze that led to lots of Shakespeare for instance being–
John: Yeah. Ten Things I Hate About You.
Craig: Correct. Lots of things being turned into teenage comedies. But this was the first and I would argue the best. And again there’s this stroke of genius here where Heckerling, she has a vision of something. And I love that nobody else saw it. This is one of these movies where as we get into the specifics of it we’ll see this come up over and over. It’s such a great example of what I call a movie consistent to itself. It does not follow rules all the time. In fact, lots of times it seems to break a lot of rules. It can be episodic as hell. It doesn’t matter. It is true to itself. It’s such a thing unto itself.
And so I’m not surprised that for a while people were looking at this character or this kind of story even and thinking what is this. But she knew. I mean, again, hat’s off to Amy Heckerling. Unbelievable.
John: Absolutely. So the movie opened at $10 million its opening weekend. It went on to make $56 million at the box office, which is good. It did really well. But I think it’s had a much longer life since that time because you watch the movie now and it doesn’t feel dated in the way you’d expect a movie from that era to feel dated. Other than the phones being wrong it really reads as a very contemporary movie.
Craig: Yeah. It’s actually remarkable how you can look at this movie through the lens of woke 2020. And you know what? Hey, here’s a big shock. Because it was written and directed by a woman. [laughs] And so remarkably it is not soaking in any kind of misogynistic horseshit.
John: Yeah. And it’s also based on a Jane Austen novel written by a woman. So it has a sensibility that is both timeless and timely. It works really, really well.
Craig: Yeah.
John: So let’s quickly go through how this movie maps up to Emma. And there’s also a new adaptation of Emma that people can check out as well which I have not seen. I’m really going to be curious to see how Clueless influences that adaptation of Emma. The Cher Horowitz character matches to Emma Woodhouse. She’s the central character. She’s charming, she’s beautiful, she’s popular. She can read as selfish which becomes a thing. But she is able to grow. And as we were talking about with Glinda she’s a character that starts with a – she sort of seems to have everything and then she recognizes what she doesn’t have and that is sort of the crisis that she faces over the course of the story.
Craig: Yeah. I mean, this is a great example of a character that’s like a coiled spring. And the coiled spring of Emma or Cher is that she is beautiful, and she is a good person at her core, and clearly is deserving of love, and yet spends all of her time getting other people together in love, which is in its own way an interesting kind of defense mechanism. I’m going to work on making you happy and this way I don’t have to have any vulnerability for myself. But that’s a wonderful coiled spring.
We all know from the beginning how that will end. It doesn’t matter. See, people get confused. They think that predictability is bad. Predictability isn’t the problem. The problem is that sometimes something is predictable and also we have no interest in watching the coil uncoil. But in this we want to see it uncoil. We want to see that pop open and of course we get to.
John: Yeah. Now, next up we have Josh who matches up to Mr. Knightly. So this is the love interest who has to seem like it’s not a possible love interest at the start. And so in Emma it’s like he’s a brother-like character, he’s like a close family friend, so therefore would not be appropriate. In this movie he is her step-brother from a marriage that was over five years ago.
It’s interesting that my daughter as I said we were going to record this she’s like, “Yeah, but she falls for her step-brother. That’s just weird.” But that’s actually one of the most daring things about this movie and also in rewatching it you recognize how carefully Heckerling planted the seeds for this so that you weren’t ahead of it but you were actually fine with it when it happened. And also how smartly written and how smartly played Josh’s character is. It tracks well in terms of where he’s at. You can sort of see the story from his point of view even though he doesn’t have point of view scenes. The whole movie is from Cher’s point of view essentially, but in the scenes we get with him we can see what his progress is.
Craig: Yeah. She’ll give us glimpses from his point of view. And the glimpses are usually him noticing – essentially he catches Cher being good. He notices – I mean, there’s a great moment where Cher outwits the college girl and/or out-knows the college girl. And that’s a moment where Amy shifts her camera over to Paul Rudd to see him noticing and letting that in, which is smart. By the way, Paul Rudd, I mean, people have talked about the fact that he doesn’t age. But legitimately, what the hell?
John: Yeah.
Craig: It’s actually kind of terrifying.
John: Yeah. I mean, looking at this movie again today it looks like he’s smoothed a bit. As you look at Clueless it looks like he had a little bit of a gauzy filter put on him, but otherwise it is exactly the same person.
Craig: [laughs] It’s terrifying. And I think actually one of the things that’s interesting is I don’t know how old he was when he was in Clueless, but he seems older looking than he should. I think what happened was Paul Rudd was born at the age of 35 but will always be 35. Terrifying.
John: It’s a good choice to make, I think.
Craig: It’s wonderful to watch the two of them together. Look, there is a very strange premise that’s put forth and Amy does something that a lot of movies do where she essentially – these are not the droids you’re looking for to the audience. So, Dan Hedaya plays Cher’s dad. Cher’s mother died many, many years ago before Cher even knew her. And then apparently Cher’s dad gets married to some lady and that marriage ends five years before this movie even starts. But for some reason he still likes having his stepson come over because as he says, “You divorce the woman, not the child.”
Sure. But like really? I mean, I’m sure that happens, but it goes by very quickly to the point where honestly I was a little – I had to piece it together exactly to see what was going on. But once you kind of buy it, which is not a huge buy, you’re good. Everything is fine.
John: Absolutely. Characters who are also brought through from Emma. There is the woman who she sets up in a love relationship, so that’s Ms. Geist who is Miss Taylor/Mrs. Weston in Emma. There’s the object of her makeover, so that’s Tai or Harriot Smith played by Brittany Murphy who is just phenomenal in this part.
There’s the Travis character, Breckin Meyer’s character – Breckin is fantastic in this.
Craig: Yeah.
John: And this was before we cast him in Go and he’s so different and so great in both the parts. There’s an equivalent character in Emma which was Robert Martin. There’s Elton whose character’s name is Philip Elton in Emma. This is actually one of the characters that actually feels the most like aristocracy snobbery. It’s one of the characters who most comes across like, oh, you’re just an asshole from the start.
Craig: Yeah. He’s clearly a bad guy.
John: And then Christian’s character is probably closest matched up to Frank Churchill. Again, it is the subject of infatuation and love and the person she’s going after who is not going to be available. And is a frustration to the Emma/Cher character. But someone who seems like, again, it’s the person who seems like the appropriate love interest so that we aren’t aware of who she should really be going for.
Craig: Yeah. And that’s a very smart kind of updating because the kernel of that is, again, exploring why somebody is opting for unavailable people, or is opting to put other people in love together, like for instance in this story the wonderful couple of teachers. And it just keeps tensioning that coil. It’s hard for her to make herself available to somebody that is available to her. So, it’s all very smart updating. Because in the book, and I’m cheating off of your notes here because I haven’t read it in forever, the character that Christian is taken from was engaged. So that’s why he was not available. I think gay is a much better choice for a film in 1995.
John: Yes. So, before we get into a sequence breakdown of Clueless, let’s talk about how the movie works overall sort of on a macro level. And let’s talk about Cher as our point of view character and especially her voiceover, here narration. Because to try to imagine this movie without the narration is just a completely different experience. If you don’t have the insight into what the character is actually thinking she seems like a monster.
But when you see what’s actually going on inside you realize like, oh, she’s not mean at all. She’s actually so generous. She’s trying so hard. What I noticed this last time watching through it is the narration is all told in the past. These are things that did happen. So she’s in the past tense. Except that as she’s narrating she’s aware of things that are right in front of her. So she might say, “Oh, I wonder if they have that in my size.”
Craig: Right. So funny.
John: So it’s a really interesting choice that kind of shouldn’t work and yet it works great. And so it’s like she’s kind of watching the story with you. She’s in the moment with you as she’s narrating.
Craig: Yeah. So her voiceover typically will explain why a scene you’re about to see is happening. So she’ll say, “I decided I would go to the mall to make myself feel better.” Then we’re at the mall. Or she will be talking about something after it happened. “After the experiment with so-and-so failed I felt that blah-blah-blah.” So it’s like she’s kind of bookending these moments.
The breaking of the fourth wall with “Oh, I wonder if they have that in my size” will be no surprise to anybody who is a Heckerling fan and who has seen Johnny Dangerously, because she’s so good at that sort of thing. And it’s very easy to overdo it or to do it wrongly. And she did it beautifully there. I loved it.
John: Absolutely. So, even as the camera is pushing through a place she might linger on a Snickers bar because Cher is hungry. So the whole movie is her point of view and so even if the camera is moving through a space it’s essentially Cher’s point of view which is nice.
Craig: Yeah. It’s kind of a Lord and Miller meta style, except 20 years earlier.
John: Yep. Now, what’s important to know about Cher is that she’s naïve but she’s not dumb. And I think that’s one of the most important things that carries through from Emma to this update is that she has a very sophisticated vocabulary. She will occasionally use words incorrectly, but overall she has an unrealistically really robust command of language both in her voiceover and in how she’s actually speaking.
But she’s also good at reading people. Like she’ll miss some things. She’ll obviously miss Christian being gay, but she does have a sense of interpersonal dynamics. When she’s trying to set up Ms. Geist with Mr. Hall she really does have a sense of what’s going to work with people. So she has an emotional intelligence for other people that she doesn’t have for herself.
Craig: Yeah. And that is an interesting line that Amy walks with Cher. Because at times she does show that Cher is ignorant, which is different than dumb. It’s pretty clear that as the daughter of this hard-charging Beverly Hills attorney that she’s inherited quite a bit of this negotiation wisdom. She’s got kind of a steel trap mind. I mean, when she gets up and does her little oral reports in class they’re not – so what they are is they’re ignorant. She has not done the reading, right? She hasn’t. But the arguments themselves are actually quite clever. They’re quite interesting.
So she may not know that Bosnia, for instance, is not in the Middle East, but she does know quite a bit. And it seems that a lot of the lessons that she’s learned in the past, they’re coming forth. And she is learning. She expresses a desire to learn.
It’s very interesting. In the beginning of the movie Heckerling does a really smart thing with the distribution of report cards. So Cher has gotten a C in Mr. Hall’s class. But that’s the C that she’s gotten. The implication is the other grades are great and she’s going to argue about that grade and get it up. But she’s already getting an A in geometry for instance. She is a smart person. That’s a really clever choice on Amy’s part. Because what we don’t like is somebody that is superficial and literally dumb in the sense that they don’t have the capacity to get better or to blossom into somebody wonderful. That is a limp spring to watch uncoil.
John: Indeed. Now, we talked about this a little bit at the start, but what is so different about this character versus a classic character in a high school comedy is that she is an extrovert. She is completely forward outward facing. She is not this misunderstood kid who is overlooked by others. She is not pretty when she takes her glasses off. She’s beautiful from frame one and she’s popular from frame one. And even starting with all those advantages she still struggles. And that’s a very different choice than you see in most high school comedies before this point.
So, we always have to remember even from the inception how different this character is than what we usually would find this kind of story.
Craig: And what you continue to find after it came out. That’s kind of the story of Amy Heckerling’s career. I mean, she always seemed to be ahead of the ball.
John: Yeah. Let’s talk about setting up the conflicts and establishing the world. As we get into sequences we’ll talk about how quickly she’s able to establish this world. But it’s important we understand that Cher sees herself in a certain place in the hierarchy of the school. She defines herself in relationship to Dionne and Murray’s relationship. She sees herself above all these other boys. She has this fascination with Christian. She’s very much aware of her social standing in her milieu. But she aspires to something higher. She wants a college boy. She perceives herself as being above these other things. And so that’s a crucial thing to understand about her. And Heckerling does a great job setting it up right from the get go.
Craig: Yeah. And she’s also letting us into a world that in theory we’re not familiar with. So, she recognizes that Cher has to be an ambassador for Beverly Hills 1995 where all the students have had nose jobs or are driving ridiculously fancy cars. And life is different there. So part of the comedy is just the fact that we’re in this strange place. In that regard it’s kind of continuing what you saw in Beverly Hills Cop. Like take a guy from Detroit, put him in Beverly Hills, he’s going to look around and go “what the hell is the crap?”
So she’s doing that but she’s doing that with somebody that’s part of it. And that’s interesting. It’s not a fish out of water. It’s a fish in water and the fish in water is showing us what the water is like.
John: Absolutely. So I always like to imagine what if this were a musical. What would the songs be? And so it’s very easy to imagine the Welcome to the World song. The first song in most movie musicals is the let’s set up the world. And Heckerling does a great job of setting up this is Beverly Hills. This is the high school. This is the world and her friends.
The next song would generally be her I Want song. And Cher’s I Want song isn’t that she wants love, isn’t that she wants popularity. It’s that she wants to fix everything and fix everybody. She wants to make everything happy. And so she just has this desire to bring joy to all the people around her. So her father. Tai when she meets her. That’s sort of her thing. And the realization that she’s going to get to is that she actually needs to direct some of that fixing towards herself rather than always outside.
Craig: That’s a really good way of thinking about this. That’s exactly how the musical would go. There would be a song called Beverly Hills, which would be all about the insanity of it. And then she would sing a song about all the things that she wants to make better. Because that’s what she does. Because she’s a happy, wonderful person. She’s like a Mary Poppins looking for a family.
And, yes, one of those things is that she does not want to see. And if I were to write the lyrics to this song she would talk about how she wanted to make her dad happy and she wanted to bring these two teachers together. And she wanted to make this new girl as popular as she is. And she wants to fix her, see. And she would keep coming back to “and I want to fix my see.” Because she’s also got this self-interest. It’s there. And it is admirable. I like it. So she’s not as simple as just I’m Joan of Arc or something. It’s all wrapped up in a kind of very real will to power.
And, of course, and Nietzsche shows up later which makes me so happy.
John: Honestly her I Want song could as well be Popular from Wicked. I mean, essentially that’s what she’s trying to do. She’s trying to elevate the status of someone around her and transform somebody else rather than transforming herself.
Craig: Exactly.
John: All right. So let’s take a look at how Clueless works on sort of a sequence level. Because watching the movie again I was really struck by how you can take a look at Clueless as chunks of movie, chunks of sequences. And really there’s a very clear goal for what Cher is trying to do in each of these sequences.
So at moments it can feel like, oh, it’s episodic, but there really is a very careful plan behind what’s going here. So, start with the first ten minutes. So much gets set up in the first ten minutes. It’s just a masterclass in getting information out there.
We start in Cher’s house. We see her fashion sense. We meet her dad. We set up the idea of Josh, even though Josh is not around. She says, “But you were hardly even married to his mother and that was five years ago.” We set up her housekeeper.
From there we are driving. We set up her jeep. We set up Dionne, her best friend. “She’s my friend because we both know what it’s like to have people be jealous of us.”
We get to school. At school we meet Murray. We meet Wallace Shawn playing Mr. Hall. We meet Elton, Travis, Amber. We establish that Christian is a student there, even though Christian is not going to show up yet.
Craig: Right.
John: So smartly done.
Craig: Really smart.
John: So it’s not just out of the blue. We come back to the house. We set up her dead mom. We set up Josh. We meet Josh for the first time. We really establish that she has no idea what’s going on in the world overall. And at the end of that first ten minutes we have her first mission statement which is to improve her grades. And that’s how it’s going to set up our first montage of her trying to get her grades up when she gets her report card.
Craig: It’s a great first ten minutes. It doesn’t stop. There’s no sense of confusion or wondering where you are. For all of the brilliant screenwriting gurus out there who are charging you money for their dumb books and their stupid advice, let us point out that one of the things that they say over and over is “don’t use voiceover.” Well, how about this voiceover is constant. This movie is wall-to-wall voiceover and when done well as in this case not only is voiceover entertaining but it is such a good way to compress information quickly.
You can learn so much from these ten minutes because she’s literally telling it to you. And doing so in a fun way. You also get a hint from this first ten minutes that she has a problem. She doesn’t know she has a problem. But you know she has a problem. Her life as far as she’s concerned is perfect. So this is the acceptable imperfection I like to talk about. She’s in stasis. Everything is fine.
But we know she has a problem. The problem that she has is that she is not necessarily seeing the world as it actually is. Her eyes are a little closed and willfully so.
John: Absolutely. Her voiceover as you set up the start of the podcast, a lot of times it is to set up where we’re going or where we came from, or what the next action will be. But there’s a moment at the school early on where she’s walking with Dionne and Dionne’s audio fades and we go into her voiceover. We sort of hear her thoughts about stuff, which is so important. That two things can be happening at once. We can be seeing a scene in front of us, but also be hearing her perspective on things. And that becomes an important tool that Heckerling uses throughout this movie. But she has to do it early on so that it’s not weird when it happens later on.
Craig: Yeah. And there’s a kind of an iconic moment where she’s talking about, and kind of delivering to you at home or in the theater, what her problem is. She’s saying I don’t want to date any of these boys here. They’re not good enough for me. Which is probably more about her just not – just being scared. There’s something off with that. But then of course one of the [doofy] boys comes in to try to put her arm around her and she pushes him away, out of frame, and says, “As if.”
So there is one of the great cinema moments. I mean, it’s just burned in all of our brains.
John: Yeah. So, an incredibly great first ten minutes getting stuff set up. Then her first real mission is to get her grades up. So this is the first problem that has been presented to our character. This is a mission she has to undertake. Her quest is to get her grades improved. And not to actually doing extra work, but just to argue her way up. And so we start a montage where she’s talking to her teachers about what’s going on in her life. So she’s talking to Julie Brown playing her PE teacher. She’s talking to Ms. Geist. She’s trying to convince Mr. Hall that she deserves better grades. And she’s looking for a way to get Mr. Hall to budge who seems to be the most difficult person. And that’s where they have the idea of, OK, how do we get Mr. Hall to be overwhelmingly happy so that his mood will improve and therefore I can raise my grades.
So it is what seems like a noble goal is to make this person fall in love has a selfish motive underneath it which is so that my grades will improve.
Craig: Correct. There’s almost something cynical about her approach to love. It’s the way she matches clothes together in the morning in her curiously visionary touchscreen. So there is something a little cynical. It’s easy for her, right? The world actually is very easy for her. She’s got it all figured out. And in a very smart dramatic way what Amy does here is give Cher another easy victory.
John: Yeah.
Craig: Because the easier the victory seems the more shocking and distressing it will be when she doesn’t get a victory.
John: Absolutely. When her normal tricks stop working.
Craig: Right.
John: That will be devastating. So, yes, if this were a superhero movie this would be where you would see the superhero easily defeat an early villain. It’s where you see them just being incredibly competent at their job so that when things fall apart later on you understand, oh, this is really remarkable that this thing that should work does not work anymore.
Craig: Exactly.
John: Now, next we get into driving lessons and Josh. So this is starting about 15 minutes into the movie. He says, he actually articulates a key theme here, “I’ve never seen you do anything that isn’t 90% selfish.” And then that resonates with her. And then she asks Dionne the next day at school, “Would you call me selfish?” “Not to your face.”
Craig: [laughs]
John: And so while she’s starting to question like why she’s doing what she’s doing, she actually does have success. And she’s hailed as a hero at her school. This was a pretty easy thing for her to do. Her grades improved. Her father is proud of her that she was able to get her grades up without doing extra work, strictly through the merits of her arguing.
Craig: Yeah. I mean, simple kind of dramatic stuff here. This is somebody who only does good things for purposes that accrue to her own benefit. It’s not that she’s mean about it. I mean, the things that she does are good. She does a beautiful thing for Mr. Hall and Ms. Geist. But just so that, you know, their grades will improve. It’s about her. And there is this other notion that maybe you could do good things when it doesn’t accrue to your benefit at all.
John: Which is when we introduce Tai. So Tai is the new project. Cher gets nothing out of helping Tai. She doesn’t set out to help Tai because it’s going to improve her social standing. She sort of pities her and wants to improve her social standing.
So, this is the Brittany Murphy character arriving. An interesting moment that happens with Brittany Murphy’s character is that she has a scene with Travis, Breckin Meyer, it’s one of the few sort of breaking POV scenes. Where they have this little brief moment together in the cafeteria line and we establish, oh OK, they actually probably do belong together. And we as an audience are told this and Cher does not see it.
Craig: Yeah. And I think that this is still – I would argue this is still in the general area of not totally charitable charity. Because it is a project. It is fun. The idea here is a little Pygmalion esque. I’m going to rescue you and make you wonderful because that’s what I can do. And Josh does essentially say, says exactly to her, that Cher is treating Tai like she was a Barbie doll. And I think that’s right. But at the same time Cher also is the one person willing to do that as opposed to the meaner girls like Amber who just want to reject her.
So, again, this fascinating line that Amy walks with Cher. She’s not bad, but she’s not yet totally good. And it’s really smartly done.
John: Yeah. So when she says, “No respectable girl actually dates them,” talking about stoners like Travis, Dionne says, “It gives her a sense of control in a world filled with chaos.” So that’s why she’s trying to do the makeover is for that sense of control. And it is Josh who says, you know, “You’ve never had a mother so you’re acting out on that poor girl like she was your Barbie doll.” So I think, again, so smart to tie it to the mother who is not a character but establishes like an ideal, a paragon that Cher aspires to be like.
She’s taking care of her father the way she imagines her mother would be taking care of the dad. So, again, she’s aspiring to something but kind of falling short.
Craig: She’s aspiring to something and yet also there is a kernel of fear there. And you see it come up again, well, no respectable girl dates them. Well, OK, well who does the respectable girl date in this school? Because, Cher, you’re not dating any of them. And you’ve written all of them off as idiots and that there must be better guys that aren’t high school guys but you’re not necessarily looking for them either. It’s more like you’re not quite ready to bear your heart to someone.
John: Exactly. So, they conspire to try to set up Tai with Elton. We as an audience see that Elton really has no interest in Tai at all. That he’s just playing along because he’s really interested in Cher. We don’t know at the start how big of a creep he is. He’s really quite a creep.
This sequence takes us to the house party, so this is where we establish what again normal life is like for these kids at a Valley party. Watching this now it strikes me that, again, I’m looking at this as a dad, but the drinking and the pot use would be harder things I think to get through in a PG-13 movie now than they were for Heckerling back in 1995.
Craig: Yeah. I’m not sure how that works exactly now, but it did strike me again that Heckerling who was always such a great anthropologist, she sat in classes at Beverly Hills High School to immerse herself in that. The way that she had the benefit of Cameron Crow and Ridgemont High. So, she’s presented this and it seems honestly that if you changed the music and the clothes the party is not far off from what it would be now. There is a vaguely casual pot use. No one really is like, “Oh my god, pot!” And people are drinking. And no one is like, “Oh my god, drinking!” It’s fascinating how good she is at that.
John: Agreed. So what’s important about the party is that again we’re seeing stuff get out of her control. And so Elton outsmarts her in terms of figuring out who is going to ride with who. And he makes moves on her. She rejects him. Gets out of the car. Gets robbed at gunpoint. So, she has little victories and then some big defeats. She ultimately has to call Josh to pick her up. In the car she is annoyed by this girl that Josh is dating. She gets to make her Hamlet reference and prove this girl wrong.
From the car she watches Josh kiss the girlfriend and feels weird about it. And so we’re establishing that there’s a lot of things happening in that sequence.
Craig: Well, so it’s fascinating when – and it’s a really smart choice – when the chips are down, because Cher’s life is wonderful. Nothing ever goes wrong. Even the fact that she’s driving around without a license and smashing into fire hydrants, nobody ever pulls her over. I mean, she gets away with everything.
John: She has white privilege.
Craig: Literally she is the embodiment of privilege. If you made the movie now you could call it Privilege because that’s what she is. She’s rich and white and everything – and beautiful. And everything goes great for her.
And here something has gone terribly wrong. And what does she do? She instinctively goes for Josh. And that’s a sign already. Now, if anybody at that moment watching this movie doesn’t know that these two are going to end up together they need to go home. Right? Because it’s obvious.
What happens in the car and that little moment where Amy shifts the POV to Paul Rudd and he appreciates that Cher has corrected his girlfriend on the Hamlet reference you know what’s going to happen. The fact that Cher is looking at them as they kiss and having this weird feeling that she doesn’t understand, you know what’s going to happen. And this is the sign of really good movies, and particularly really good romances. It doesn’t matter that we know. What matters is how bad we want to see it happen.
And Amy Heckerling is doing such a brilliant job of slowly increasing our desire to want to see it happen. If it happened here we’d be like, oh, OK, not good enough. But we want it to happen later.
John: We’re establishing that Cher may ultimately have romantic feelings. But before she has romantic feelings she also has sexual feelings. And this is the sequence starting at page 45, 45 to 65, where we’re actually talking about sex. And we establish that Cher is a virgin. We have the arrival of Christian who becomes, well, this is obviously who she should be in love with because he is fascinating and unusual and doesn’t feel like a high school boy at all.
Again, we’re sort of doing limited breaks of POV. We see Josh watching Cher come down and it’s recognizing that she is a sexual character within this story. That she’s not just this sort of fairy tale princess. She’s actually a sexual character who wants to have sex. And that is, again, a ground-breaking thing for a young woman to be the one who is trying to initiate sexual activity. And not because she’s desperate or because she’s ugly or that there’s obstacles in the way of her having that. She could at any point have done this, but now she suddenly wants it.
Craig: Yeah. There was a storyline in the television show Beverly Hills, 90210, and I’m going to assume it pre-dates this movie, where there was a whole discussion about prom night and sex. And it was really interesting because it wasn’t in the usual format of guy wants sex, girl is like yeah. So it was happening. There’s that certain refreshing frankness about how it happens here. It’s a really interesting choice to have Tai not be a virgin at all.
John: Yeah.
Craig: And have Cher be the virgin. And also Cher is like, “What’s so bad about being a virgin?” She’s not hugely defensive about it. It just veers off of the normal path of how all of those scenes go. There are a thousand bad scenes there and Amy didn’t write one. She wrote a really good scene. I mean, look, the girl walks down the stairs in the dress, I’m not sure in that moment why Paul Rudd suddenly goes, “Oh wow, look at her.” Alicia Silverstone is so beautiful, she’s so mind-numbingly beautiful in this movie. And she’s always hot. Like every outfit is out. Every single one.
So I wasn’t quite sure what was going on there exactly, other than say, yeah, you know, OK fine.
John: I think the argument would be that it caught him by surprise in that it was a more grown up beauty than sort of the cute beauty that she is normally wearing. So she’s always wearing short skirts, but this is in the white Calvin Klein dress, it’s a look that he had not seen before. If I’m being generous. But it’s also movie logic.
Craig: That is not how straight men work. Oh, oh, oh, a Calvin Klein dress? Oh, well now. [laughs] I mean, she’s so, again, literally mind-boggling beautiful in this movie. It’s just a remarkable thing.
John: And so here is his raptors testing the fences line. “How much fun would it be to have a brother type tagging along?” “Josh, you are not my brother.”
Craig: Right. Right.
John: Again, so this couplet does two things. One, it establishes that while it’s a little problematic for them to be together, it’s not technically wrong for them to be together. But more importantly we see that Josh actually is interested. And she can’t read that at all. And so it’s smart.
Craig: It is smart. And when he says, “How much fun would it be to have a brother type tag along,” what he’s really saying is, “you don’t see me as a brother only, right? I’m not technically a brother to you, am I? Because if I am then, uh-oh.” And so he gets the answer he wants. The fact that he’s even asking the question means that he doesn’t feel about her like she’s a sister.
John: Yep. This sequence I will call “an overwhelming sense of ickiness,” which is the line she says.
Craig: Yes.
John: But it’s such a crucial point. And this is what Aline would describe as like the rocky shoals. This is sometimes a very difficult sequence in the movie because you’re not at the end of the second act yet, but there’s a lot of stuff going on. This movie does this all so, so well.
So there’s a sequence which is often – a clip that often gets out there which is Dionne and Murray and Cher in the car and Dionne is driving and they accidentally get on the freeway. And you remember it as like, ah, we’re on the freeway by accident! And it is sort of like a very natural panic for these people. But that scene is actually really important completely independent of the driving which is Murray is like, “Oh no, Christian is gay. How can you not see this?” And basically pointing out that Cher has missed a crucial fundamental thing about this. And the lightbulb going off, oh that’s right, it does make a lot of sense.
That scene could have happened anywhere, but by staging it in this driving scene there’s just a lot more going on. So it’s taking a conversation that could take place in a high school hallway and giving it a great space to happen in.
Craig: I think it’s the best scene in the movie. I think it’s the best scene in the movie because as you say, A, this interesting revelation comes out which unlocks a certain thing in Cher’s mind. But it flows into a legitimately laugh-out-loud set piece. And then the laugh-out-loud set piece proves why it deserved to be there. That it wasn’t just random noise to make you laugh. The point of it was that her friends are actually in love.
John: Yeah.
Craig: And that’s a huge deal. Then she understands now what love really looks like and what it means which is basically I take care of you. When you are scared and when you’re freaked out I calm you down and I tell you you did a really great job. These two goofs who are, look, it seems like they’re just comic relief side characters. But Dionne and Murray are not just side relief comic characters. They are exemplars because once you strip away all the baloney arguing with each other about who cheated on who or him shaving his head or any of that nonsense they love each other. And that is such a great way to do that. To use comedy to create madness and then use the madness to create feelings. And then have the feelings impact the hero.
John: Yeah. But what Cher is feeling here is jealousy. She’s jealous of their relationship. She envies what they have. And then she envies Tai. Because when Tai has her near death experience where these unrealistically old men are dangling her off the edge of the West Side Pavilion and then she rescues her, she becomes the hero of the school. And Cher suddenly finds herself being shoved aside.
Now, that being shoved aside is sort of a Brady Bunch moment. We’ve seen that moment before. But it’s so specific to what Cher is feeling. So that plus Dionne and Murray and the relationship, she’s suddenly not the queen anymore. She’s not on top. And not only that, she wants things she doesn’t have or she doesn’t know how to get. And that’s a very new place for Cher Horowitz to be at.
Craig: Yeah. Her eyes are opening to what it’s like to not win without even trying. For the first time in the movie she’s walking out the door and there is a guy that she fell for and now not only can she not get him but she feels like an idiot for not realizing it. Her best friends are in love in a way that she’s never known and might never will know. Her little Barbie doll has outstripped her. The pupil has become the master. And she in general feels lost.
She is no longer the person she was. This is sort of the how to make a movie podcast lesson here. She’s not who she was. But she’s not yet ready to be who she is supposed to be. She’s lost. Literally to the point of doing that classic cliché thing of walking around and moping and going what happened to me? You know?
John: Exactly. Well, and crucially right before then the driving test which we established as an important thing that’s going to be coming up, she fails the driving test spectacularly. And she’s failed at something that she couldn’t talk her way out of, too. So her normal skills just don’t work anymore. She comes back home. She sees Tai hanging out with Josh and Tai says like, “Oh, I really like Josh. I think I’m going to start dating Josh.” And that’s just the knife in her. But the actual words given to it are, “You’re a virgin who can’t drive.” And it’s just the most brutal thing a person could say to her at that moment.
Craig: Yeah. And that driving instructor is an important character because he is reality. He might as well be called Mr. Reality. Because she starts in on her thing and he’s like, “Oh, no, no, no, you don’t understand. I’m facts and reality. And you’re not getting what you want. There’s literally nothing in the world that’s going to make that happen.”
By the way, why are there so many New Yorkers just showing up this movie?
John: [laughs]
Craig: Why is this super New Yorky guy doing DMV tests in Beverly Hills? I don’t know.
John: I don’t know.
Craig: I like the choice though. By the way, I forgot to mention, also, just sometimes I pick out weird things that we have changed in terms of the way movies are made. This is just off the topic of the writing. There’s a party scene at the concert. You know, when she’s still trying to seduce Christian and all the rest of it. And it opens on a band and they’re playing. And the classic sort of techno crane pullback to reveal the crowd dancing. And you hear footsteps. They Foley’d in like weird shuffle-y footsteps as if anyone could hear footsteps in the middle of a concert. And it just reminded me like, yeah, they used to do stuff like that because I guess the Foley people were out of their minds and nobody was paying attention. [laughs] It’s amazing. I love stuff like that.
John: And then we get to our last big sequence which is the realization. So, this is now Cher walking through Beverly Hills and suddenly realizing, oh my god, I love Josh. And so this is a moment where the voiceover and reality sort of merge. And what her thoughts in her head actually give voice to that she actually does love Josh. But what does she do with that information? She goes to her father asking for advice, not specifically about Josh but sort of in general, this theoretical guy.
Watching the movie again I was struck by sort of how much the father is aware of the Josh romance from the very, very start.
Craig: From the jump.
John: He sees the whole thing.
Craig: Yeah. He’s like that classic mentor character who has already seen the movie, so he has no problem playing his role. But, I mean, when Josh says, “I’m going to go to that party and make sure she’s OK,” Dan Hedaya gives this little smile after like I know what’s going on. Pretty classic. And also a little weird considering that it’s the stepson but whatever.
John: Whatever. And so Cher’s decision, her resolution, is that this time I’m going to make over my soul, which is kind of – it’s the thing that she needed to realize from the start is that she actually needs to direct that desire to fix and improve people to herself. And to look for the things she can do help other people that have no gain for her own self.
And so it’s still funny because she doesn’t necessarily have a good sense of it. She doesn’t know that these people don’t need her water skis. But she does have a sense of she’s trying to improve herself in ways that we’ve not seen before.
Craig: She is.
John: And she’s trying to make amends as well.
Craig: Right. And she’s not doing it to try and get Josh.
John: Yes.
Craig: She doesn’t expect that she can have Josh. What she considers is that she’s just not been correct. She finally embraces the new way of being and becomes that person. And Travis is doing the same thing. He’s making amends. He’s going to 12 steps. People are growing up and changing. The important thing is that she’s using her powers to fix things that are not going to accrue to her benefit at all. Very much like what Bill Murray is doing in Groundhog Day when he finally accepts it and he just starts taking piano lessons, and helping the elderly. Do you know what I mean? He just starts to do things to help people no matter what, just because.
John: Yep. I think it’s also important the reconciliation with Tai. It’s not all Cher apologizing. Tai recognizes that she messed up, too. And they come to a place in the middle rather than Cher having to go all the way to Tai. Again, smart choices, recognizing these characters are human and are not simply heroes or villains. It’s more complicated between those characters.
And then we finally get to the scene with Josh. So this is the scene on the staircase which is a much longer scene than I remember it being. It’s a long conversation between the two of them, really smartly done, held mostly in close-ups and matching close-ups. Much more naturalistic dialogue than usual.
Craig: Yeah.
John: And finally she like, “Are you saying you care about me?” And they get in for the kiss. And it’s what you’re hoping for. She maintains suspense through it, like you don’t know quite enough how we’re going to get to this kiss. You assume it’s going to happen. And when it finally does happen it is just right.
But then we have our Lindsay Doran moment that it doesn’t just end on the kiss–
Craig: Well, before we go past the kiss I have to say I cried.
John: Aw.
Craig: And the question is why? Why would I cry there? And in thinking about it, it was Alicia Silverstone’s face as she finally understood that she was loved. And that was amazing. And she did such a beautiful job. This is a character who I think appreciated that she was popular. She was liked. Boys were attracted to her. But she was missing love. And she gets it from this guy who she admires so much and who she was not expecting to love her. And it happens after she screws up again.
So there’s this point where – by the way, also, just logically makes no sense. So, they’re helping dad on his lawsuit. He’s not there. So it’s her and it’s Josh and then the world’s worst law associate who yells at her because she’s mislabeled something. Meanwhile I’m like, dude, you work for her dad. Like what are you doing man? You’re calling her an idiot and stupid. You’re not going to have a job tomorrow.
But regardless he’s there to do that so that Josh can defend Cher. But also to bring Cher low. And it’s really important that that happens. Because if not then Josh walks up to her and says, “You know what? I’ve noticed you doing all these wonderful things. You’re great. Let’s kiss.” And then they kiss and you’re like, OK. But he does it when she is at maybe her lowest-lowest. She’s in tears and she’s failed despite trying to do good things. And that’s when he lets her know that he loves her anyway. And to me that’s why I cried.
And her face when she realizes it is so perfect. And her, ah, those big eyes. You just feel for her. It’s such a good scene.
John: It’s really well done. And you’re absolutely right. Without the set up to that stair moment it has a tenth the impact. You don’t see that, oh, the point of a romantic relationship is that person is also there for you when you’re down.
Craig: Right.
John: When you’re Dionne who has just gotten off the freeway. That’s when you need that relationship. And to have somebody who is watching out for you at those moments is so crucial.
Craig: Yeah.
John: So I was going to say the Lindsay Doran moment, her logic is always that it’s not about winning the football game, it’s about the moment after you win the football game where you sort of celebrate the success you’ve had.
Craig: Right. The relationships.
John: So that is this wedding which also ties up other loose ends. So we get to see Mr. Hall and Ms. Geist get married.
Craig: Aw.
John: Yeah. Which is nice. You get to see a normal order restored. So it’s a beautiful party. Everyone looks great. Everyone is dressed up. It’s a quick resolution. She catches the bouquet. It feels like a good kind of dot-dot-dot. It’s not sort of and from this moment forward everything would be perfect. It feels like everyone is where they need to be at the end of this.
Craig: Yeah. I mean, the people who are supposed to be together are together. It’s a very conventional ending.
John: It is.
Craig: It’s not actually adding anything if you think about it. You could have ended the movie on the two of them kissing. But it’s a comedy. And comedies need a little bit of a joke at the end. And so there’s a little bit of a joke. You know, “I’m bugging, too.” Paul Rudd doing his best “I’m a white guy.” And so there’s a little bit of laughter and a kind of way to kind of gently ease you out so that you go out of the theater with a smile and laughing.
Literally I think she gave people a moment to get the hankies out, wipe away the tears, and smile again. And it was a smart choice in that regard. But still end always with the relationship. Final shot the two of them kissing. Perfect. Clueless, written and directed by Amy Heckerling.
John: Such a fantastic movie. So, thank you, Craig, for this nice deep dive on Clueless.
Craig: Thank you.
John: It will remain one of my favorite movies. I suspect when you look at this 10 years, 20 years down the road it will still hold up as just a really great – not even a time capsule. It doesn’t feel so ’95. It just feels like this is this kind of relationship story. And we’ll have the same lessons no matter when you’re listening to this podcast.
Craig: I mean, if it can hold up after 25 years I think it’s a permanent hold up.
John: I agree. I do have a One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing, it’s in the folder Craig so you can take a listen to it. Have you heard of 8D sound? Do you know about 8D sound?
Craig: No.
John: So 8D sound is a way of mixing sound so that it feels like it’s spatially-oriented in a very different way. So the same way that augmented reality will give you a sense of place and space, this does it for sound. So take a listen to the clip I have in there. It’s actually a sample from a Billie Eilish. And we’re going to play a sample of it right now.
[Sample plays]
Craig: OK. Wow.
John: Craig, what did you think?
Craig: I mean, that’s astonishing.
John: Isn’t it?
Craig: Wow.
John: So, Ryan Knighton who is a frequent Scriptnotes guest sent me that clip. And Ryan is blind and he said like it was a really amazing experience for him because he felt his eyes tracking to sort of follow the sound. So, in a way it feels like cheating because sometimes it is just panning things from one side to another side. But you only have two ears. So you ultimately are doing that all the time and your brain is figuring out where things must be in space based on the timing between when different ears hear things.
So, again, this probably only works in headphones so if people are listening to this in your car it probably isn’t doing quite the same thing.
Craig: Right.
John: But it is just remarkable.
Craig: That is amazing. The panning part is the panning part, but what that does that I’ve never experienced before is create distance.
John: Yes.
Craig: Without reducing volume.
John: Yeah. When I first played it thought like, oh no, I must be playing this through my phone rather than through my headphones because like I could hear it off in the distance. And like, oh wait, no, it’s here in my head.
Craig: Yeah. So it feels like you’re hearing something at full volume but that full volume is halfway across the room. That is weird.
John: Isn’t that wild?
Craig: Like how it places it psychologically far from you. That’s the part that is just kind of mind-blowing. That is cool.
John: Yeah. So obviously we work in Hollywood and we work with some of the greatest sound designers and technicians. So this kind of stuff is not new to them. And if you look at like Alfonso Cuarón’s recent films he does this kind of stuff where he puts things in really interesting places in the room. But I just never heard it in something in my headphones done so remarkably well.
Craig: Wow. Great.
John: Just a great technique.
Craig: Beautiful. Well I have Two Cool Things this week. Not one but Two Cool Things. Which is normally I have zero, so this is a big deal for me.
One of them is something that anyone can get and one of them is something that only a few people can get, so hence Two Cool Things. We’ll start with the easy one that anyone can get. John, how are your hands doing?
John: My hands are dry. I have a hand cream that is in front of me now that I’ll apply while you tell me about your solution.
Craig: OK. So everyone’s hands are getting battered. The backs of my hands – because I’m thinking that over the course of my life I maybe washed the backs of my hands thoroughly about twice. Right? Like never knew that that was part of the whole thing. But now of course we have to. They were getting super itchy and sort of rashy to the point that I was dreading washing my hands which obviously is not an option right now.
So I went poking around looking for good solutions and I landed on a product called O’Keefe’s Working Hands Hand Cream. It is for sale on the Amazon. And that’s O’Keefe’s Working Hands Hand Cream. Here’s why I love this stuff so much. A, it has no smell. None. Zero. It smells like air. That is so important to me. I hate the stuff that smells. I hate it when it smells and I hate it when it doesn’t have added perfume, it just smells like weird goop. No smell.
Two, you use very little of it and it’s not a squirty cream. I am so grossed out by anything that feels oily and kind of lotion-y. This stuff is the texture more of like an Oreo filling kind of. So you take just a little bit and you rub it in and it disappears pretty quickly. It doesn’t leave you all greasy and nasty. It doesn’t have a smell. It literally just disappears. And the next morning, perfect. Like cured.
John: Nice.
Craig: And so I do this once every night. It works so well. I love it so much. So, if you’re having trouble with your hands and you’re looking for a solution, O’Keefe’s Working Hands Hand Cream. It costs $12.33. And given the – oh, and that’s for a two-pack. And given the amount that you use which is tiny I think it should last you a lifetime.
John: So I think I’m going to try yours, but I also want to recommend – this was going to be my One Cool Thing and I forgot to mention it last time. My friends Erin Gibson and Bryan Safi recommended this hand cream months ago, so I already had it before I needed to wash my hands all the time. It’s this fancy French thing. It’s called Creme Mains Hydratante Extra Pur. And it does have some smell to it. It’s Mediterranean, so it has this really slight ocean smell to it, which I actually really like a lot. So, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
Craig: Excellent. Either way your hands will be covered. OK, now for the very few of you that have a VR headset. I mentioned The Quest I think on here, right? The Oculus Quest?
John: Yeah.
Craig: Was that one of my One Cool Things?
John: It was.
Craig: So it’s fun. I like playing Beat Saver. It’s very cool. There’s some cool things like, oh you know, the rollercoaster thing which makes me want to puke and so I turn it off. But it’s pretty cool. But it’s not like the kind of thing where I’ve been like, oh, I can’t wait to get my Oculus Quest on my head.
Until now. Oh my god.
John, do you know who has made a game for the Oculus?
John: I do not. Is it South Park? Who is it?
Craig: Fireproof Games.
John: Oh nice.
Craig: And they make The Room which as everyone knows is my favorite. So, The Room VR A Dark Matter.
John: Great.
Craig: This thing blows me away. I’ve only played two chapters so far. It is mind-bogglingly beautiful. The game play is just classic Room game play. So it’s very clever. It’s puzzles. It’s fun to reach out with your hand and pull a lever as opposed to like pressing a thing to pull a lever. But what blows my mind is how real it is. It is disturbing. And this little touch is the thing that kind of freaks me out the most. You get notes. Little handwritten notes on a piece of paper. And you pick it up with your hand and lift it to your face to read it. Just like a regular note. And it looks so real and the paper flutters as you move it back and forth. And there’s like a water mark in the paper if you look close enough. It’s so mind-blowingly incredibly real and it just – for the first time I go, OK, this is where it will all be.
It’s going to be fits and starts. There’s going to be blind alleys. There’s going to be mistakes. But eventually this is going to be it. We’re going to be inside of things. It’s just too compelling and too remarkable. So, anyway, if you have a VR headset for the love of god download The Room VR Dark Matter immédiatement.
John: Great. Well that is our show for this week. Stick around after the credits because we will be doing a special feature on how we learned to drive or teaching people to drive for our Premium members. But Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Ryan Dunn. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.
You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record.
Craig, thank you for talking about Clueless with me.
Craig: Thank you, John. It was a pleasure.
[Bonus segment]
John: Craig, so a crucial plot point in this movie was learning to drive. And so it took me back to as I learned to drive and also I have a 14-year-old daughter who is going to start learning to drive soon. You’ve already been through driving lessons. So, tell me about your experiences of driving lessons, both yourself and with a kid.
Craig: So, couldn’t be more timely because my daughter is 15 and given the state of things right now it’s never been easier for me to take her out to a parking lot, empty, and let her kind of wheel around a little bit with me. So that’s on the docket for the next week or two.
I learned how to drive pretty much the old fashioned way and it’s kind of the way everybody still learns how to drive. Somebody that shouldn’t be your parent for like the proper lessons gets in a car and puts you behind the seat and says, “OK, let’s talk about how a few of these things work. And now let’s start to drive.” And you do.
I remember very clearly being terrified. I remember that the driver that I had, the driving instructor, had put in his car little tape marks in the rear passenger side window that he taught you to use for parallel parking, which was really smart. And back then you could use that car to do your driving test.
But I also remember picking up pretty quickly. I mean, I’m a good driver. I love driving. And I just kind of got it. And I loved it. I wanted to drive all the time. It’s not that way anymore. So my son hated it. He hated driving. I went driving with him once and it was a little terrifying for both of us. He did attempt to take his driving test. He passed the written test. He took his road test and it was Cher-like. I mean, he didn’t hit a bicyclist or smash into another car, but he did attempt to make a left turn into oncoming traffic I believe. And so the test ended immediately. And he has not tried since.
He’s living in an area where there’s public transportation and we of course live in a ride share world now. So it’s a little different. But, my daughter is desperate to start driving. I think she’s like me. So, I’m going to be going through it with her pretty soon
John: Yeah. So I grew up in Colorado and I learned to drive at sort of the normal age. So I took my summer driving instructing class, so the thing where they show you faces of death movie where you got the terrible car accidents.
Craig: Oh yeah. Blood on the Pavement.
John: Blood on the Pavement is exactly the movie I saw. And then I had my time with the driving instructor which was fine. Our family only had stick shift cars, and so I had to learn on a stick shift car. And so the instructor’s car was automatic, which was easier. So I was trying to apply the lessons I was learning from that to the stick shift car. But it’s just a lot to handle at once in terms of like not stalling out the car while you’re trying to do things and starting from a stop sign to get to places.
I was lucky to have an older brother. So my brother as we’d come back from Scout meetings I was like 12 or 13 and we had this really long straight road. And he’d pull over and we’d swap places and I could drive the Scout, this international Harvester Scout we had a couple of blocks to get a sense of what that felt like.
Craig: Right.
John: I’ve never loved driving. I’m OK at it. I’ve gotten into very few accidents. I’ve gotten very few tickets. But it’s not a thing I love, love, love. And I remember feeling like when I was 16 or 17 and I had my license like they shouldn’t really be letting me do this. I’m just not quite ready for this. In part because I never paid a lot of attention when I was a passenger in a car. So I never knew where anything was in the small town of Boulder because it wasn’t my responsibility to get there.
And so things like figuring out where do I turn, I just got overwhelmed a little too easily.
Craig: Yeah. So in Clueless they’re trying to find the party and they’re using the Thomas Guide which was this big map book that everybody needed when they moved to Los Angeles because we didn’t have GPS. We didn’t have Waze. We didn’t have any of that stuff. Now you do, and so a lot of the where you’re going problem is just not even a problem. It’s not even something that anyone thinks about. They just go tap-tap-tap and off I go.
So in New Jersey you could get your license at 17. And I wanted my license on my birthday. And so we backed it out from there and on my birthday I went and got my driver’s license. And, by the way, I never learned how to drive stick.
John: Oh, you still can’t?
Craig: Yeah. I never learned. And it doesn’t even come up anymore. Now I drive an electric car. There’s no gears anyway. By the way, this is a whole other topic. What car, if you’re going to get your kid a car, what car do you get?
John: I think you get an electric car. I think you get an inexpensive electric car.
Craig: Yeah. So there’s a balance of inexpensive but then safe. Right? This is the thing we’re always worried about is safety.
John: All cars are pretty damn safe these days.
Craig: Yeah. Most cars are. The biggest issue is rollover. Because if there’s going to be an error in judgment it’s going to be taking a turn too fast and that’s a huge problem. But you and I learned how to drive without antilock brakes, without airbags, without crumble zones. We did have seatbelts. So we had that going for us.
John: But the car that I referenced there, The Scout, which is the first car I learned to drive in, like we had to add seatbelts to it. It didn’t come with seatbelts. That’s how old that car was.
Craig: So John referenced these movies. So we took Driver’s Ed in high school. I don’t know if you did that as well.
John: It wasn’t a high school class. It was a separate class you had to sign up for. So it was outside of school.
Craig: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s a Jersey thing or not, but we had this sort of half-a-year elective sort of thing called Driver’s Ed which would prepare you for the written test. But mostly it was a gym teacher getting an extra period of work in there who would show these movies that I think mostly were made by the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
And they all were made I think in the ‘60s. Some of it was black and white.
John: Yeah. They were old even then.
Craig: They were old even then. So I was seeing this in 1987. And most of the stuff looked like it was made in 1965, so it was color-ish, but very grainy. It looked like 16mm. And what it was was a very stern voiceover narrator who would talk about how important it is to drive properly. But these people decided to have drinks before they went out. And then it’s real footage that the Ohio State Highway Patrol would film of crashes including bodies and blood.
I cannot believe, I cannot believe they showed that stuff to us. I can’t imagine they still are. I mean, it was nightmarish. Nightmarish.
John: Yes. I think a healthy dose of fear going into it is important, sense of responsibility and understanding. But I also suspect it scared some people away from driving who probably should be driving.
One thing I do think about in sort of our modern economy is like I will get into an Uber or a Lyft and just sort of assume they know how to drive.
Craig: [laughs] Right.
John: But sometimes you realize like, oh no, they shouldn’t drive. And so one time I actually asked like, I don’t know how I got to it, but I sort of asked, “So how long have you been driving?” And it’s like, “Oh, this is my second week.” And not second week as a Lyft driver, but second week driving at all.
Craig: Driving ever.
John: And it’s like, no, no.
Craig: No, no, no, no.
John: I don’t want to be in this car.
Craig: Correct. Yeah. Listen, all of it is going to get solved because just as the VR thing is inevitable, I mean, many, many years from now, I think the self-driving cars are inevitable as well. It’s just going to be time. But inevitably.
John: And that will be why Clueless will also become dated. Because like why are they driving themselves? That makes no sense at all.
Craig: Right. Well, that movie and every movie at that point will be dated.
John: Indeed.
Craig: I mean, it’s like there are so many movies with phone booths that I think at some point. Like my daughter – my daughter, it’s so funny by the way. I said to Jessica, “Hey, I’m going to be watching Clueless again for the podcast. Have you seen it?” And she looked at me and it was actually as if Cher Horowitz were with me and she was like, “Uh, I’ve seen it like 40 times.” [laughs] Like, you idiot. And I was like, OK, thank you teenager. A simple “Oh, I’ve seen it already” would have been fine.
John: And when you ask the question there are really only two answers. The answer could have been like, “No, that’s a stupid choice. Why would I ever watch that movie?” Or, “I’ve seen it 40 times.” There’s no middle ground there. It’s complete, you know, one or the other. Extremes.
Craig: The point is you lose, dad. Like, ew, I’m not watching some old gross movie. Or, everyone has seen that movie a million times. Literally a million times. [laughs]
John: Yes.
Craig: Literally.
John: Literally.
Craig: Literally.
John: Craig, thank you.
Craig: Thank you, John.
John: Bye.
Links:
- Clueless
- Clueless Script
- 8D sound example
- Creme Mains hand creme
- O’Keefe’s Working Hands cream
- Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium here.
- John August on Twitter
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Ryan Dunn (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.