Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Universal, Refugee. Films, 1982)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 15) at 7:15 p.m. I put on Turner Classic Movies for yet another Saturday night marathon of classic and, in some cases, not-so-classic movies. The first film was Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a 1982 production based on Cameron Crowe’s 1981 non-fiction book in which the then-22-year-old author arranged with the principal of Clairemont High School in San Diego to attend high school classes for one year and use the material to write a book, which the Goodreads Web site describes as “the day-by-day journal of horny and wasted semi-blank adults who don't know a thing about their future.” I’d never seen the movie (directed by Amy Heckerling from a script by Crowe) before and I’d always assumed that Cameron Crowe or someone based on him would appear as a character, an adult infiltrator into the sacred precincts of high school. Instead all the principals are genuine high-school students – or, in one case, Ron Johnson (D. W. Brown), a graduate who’s 26 years old and isn’t doing much with his life but holding down a job as usher at the multiplex movie theatre at the local mall and cruising the underage girls who work at the pizza place there. The leading characters include Jeff Spicoli (a very young Sean Penn), who dreams of becoming a champion surfer and hangs out in a Volkswagen van with some of his stoner friends (who offer some quite nice looks of their hairless chests as they go topless at any excuse); Brad Hamilton (Judge Reinhold), an 18-year-old senior who for his last year in high school wants to put his relationship with Lisa (Amanda Wyss) on hold so he can date other girls (and it turns out she wants to be free to date other boys as well – these straight people just can’t stay together!) and whose prize possession is a 1961 Buick LeSabre that will be completely paid for in seven payments; Brad’s sister Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who loses her virginity to Ron Johnson and then has a tryst with Mike Damone (Robert Romanus), which results in her getting pregnant and demanding he pay half the $150 for her abortion (he stiffs her and doesn’t show up when she needs someone to take her home, so brother Brad has to do it); Mike himself, a real piece of work who survives by scalping concert tickets and offering his friend Mark “Rat” Ratner (Brian Backer) tips on how to pick up girls; and Linda Barrett (Phoebe Cates), Stacy’s older, wiser and more experienced (sexually, anyway) friend from the pizza place who tutors her on how to date men.

Aside from Jeff and his stoner friends, no one seems to do drugs in this movie; and even Jeff and his friends doesn’t seem to do anything stronger than marijuana. There are also two teachers who are major characters in this movie. One of them is American history teacher Mr. Hand (Ray Walston, who plays the role so much like the title character in the early-1960’s TV sitcom My Favorite Martian you practically expect him to sprout antennae out of his head at any moment), who develops an instant distaste for Jeff Spicoli after Jeff shows up late to class often and brings a candy bar to class with him. Later Jeff calls a pizza delivery guy to bring a pizza to class for him – though one wonders how he did this in the pre-cell phone era – and Mr. Hand, in one of the film’s most delightful scenes, declares Jeff’s pizza to be community property, offers the other students slices and takes a slice himself so Jeff isn’t left with any. The other is biology teacher Mr. Vargas (Vincent Schiavelli), who grosses the students out by dissecting various animal cadavers in class and waving the internal organs around to show them off – and who brings a hot, sexy-looking wife (Lana Clarkson) to the end-of-the-school-year dance whom I thought would be a far more important character than she was. (Frankly, I was thinking a lot of the male students would be hitting on her!) There’s also a token Black athlete in the school, football star Charles Jefferson (the young Forest Whitaker), whose pride and joy is his Chevrolet Camaro that, like Brad’s Buick, is hugely important to him as a status symbol. When Jeff Spicoli takes Charles’s younger brother out for a ride in Charles’s prize car, Chekhov’s pistol goes off again – Jeff loses control of the car and plows into a construction site, wrecking the car and dumping a load of cinder blocks on top of it. But Jeff has an idea to avoid being blamed: he decides to spray-paint the car to make it look like it was deliberately vandalized by students at Lincoln High, Ridgemont’s hated rival on the gridiron. The ruse works so well that Charles Jefferson ramps up his aggressiveness on the football field and practically wins the game for Ridgemont by himself. I’m guessing the ironies of having the Black player named “Jefferson” after the Founding Father who was also one of America’s largest slaveowners (he owned more than 300 of them when he died), and the opposing team named “Lincoln” (with signs from the Ridgemont faithful emblazoned with slogans like “Kill Lincoln” and “Assassinate Lincoln”), were deliberate on Cameron Crowe’s part. At the same point, for some reason the big Ridgemont/Lincoln football game takes place after Christmas – we know that because we see a sequence in which one of the mall Santas gets peed on in the leg by a kid visiting him – which makes utterly no sense given that high-school football games are played in the fall, before Christmas.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a movie neither my husband Charles nor I had ever seen before – he overheard the Go-Go’s singing the film’s theme song, “We Got the Beat,” over the opening credits and said, “How dare you be listening to the Go-Go’s without me?” – but it turned out to be a delight, with some interesting twists, like the scene in which Brad, having been reduced in his fast-food employment from “All-American Burger” to “Captain Hook’s Fish ‘n’ Chips” to the “Mi-T-Mart” convenience store, is confronted by a robber when Jeff Spicoli stumbles in, distracts the robber and throws a pitcher of hot water in his face; or the ending in which Mr. Hand comes to Jeff’s home, announces that Jeff owes him eight hours of class time or he’ll have to do his senior year of high school all over again, and gives him a private lesson in the American Revolution. Jeff recites the events surrounding the Declaration of Independence in stoner slang, but he gets the basic outlines right and he and Mr. Hand end the scene with a grudging degree of mutual respect. Charles also said he was disappointed by the soundtrack, since it had been highly talked up when the film was released but it mostly sounded like a greatest-hits collection from the early 1980’s – though according to the film’s Wikipedia page, a lot of the songs in it were actually written for the film and then became huge hits. At the same time, the soundtrack album (which the credits note was available on records or tapes; this was in 1982, just a year before CD’s hit the mass market) doesn’t include five songs from the film, including the two best: “We Got the Beat” and Tom Petty’s “American Girl.” Nonetheless, Fast Times at Ridgemont High is quite an entertaining movie and holds up well. Ironically, TCM followed it up with a Sid Davis educational short from the early 1960’s called The Dropout, about the perils of dropping out of high school, and the juxtaposition was interesting mainly for the similarity between the fast-food joint catering to students in Davis’s movie and the one in the Heckerling/Crowe Fast Times at Ridgemont High about 20 years later. And would it be churlish of me to point out that Hollywood’s sexism meant that Cameron Crowe got the big career boost from this movie and Amy Heckerling didn’t? She hasn’t made a theatrical feature since Vamps in 2012 despite her having had major success with the Look Who’s Talking set of films (inspired, she said, by her own pregnancy), and she’s had to subsist on TV work since then.