Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Flying through a year in the life of the senior students from their classes to hanging at the mall to their weekend jobs to the football field and the graduation ball, it’s fast times at Ridgemont High, faster than many of them can handle, about to be thrown into the real world with little to hang onto except their diplomas, the tenuous support of their largely absent parents and their floundering dreams.
The scourge of Mister Hand’s American history class, if perpetually stoned surfer dude Jeff Spicoli spent half as much time working as avoiding work he would probably still flunk his finals; more motivated are siblings Stacy and Brad Hamilton who both work in fast food, she dishing pizza with her best friend Linda Barrett, he on the downward slope from All American Burger to Captain Hook to the Mi-T Mart to pay off his car loan while Mark Ratner works at the multiplex and his best friend Mike Damone is a ticket scalper, offering supply to a steady demand.
Directed by Amy Heckerling from a screenplay by Cameron Crowe, already a journalist for Rolling Stone as a teenager who went “undercover” at San Diego’s Clairemont High School to research his book of the same name which he subsequently adapted, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was released in the summer of 1982, supported by a double album soundtrack with contributions from Don Henley, Jackson Browne, The Go-Gos, Sammy Hagar, Donna Summer and Stevie Nicks.
A pantheon of rock stars serenading the characters, the onscreen ensemble was then unremarkable but is now a startling assembly of soon-to-be-famous actors, Sean Penn, Phoebe Cates, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Judge Reinhold with Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards and Nicolas Cage in supporting roles, the latter still credited under his family name Coppola, while the teachers are represented by Vincent Schiavelli and the gleefully intolerant Ray Walston.
Its appeal broad but blunted, both Heckerling and Crowe would go on to craft better films, she Clueless, he Singles and Almost Famous, all of them taking the same approach of a web of characters interacting but with a stronger underlying story than Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a loose collection of moments which may depict the middle class American high school experience but which now act more as a time capsule of an era when adolescence allowed a level of irresponsibility no longer possible.
Released on Blu-ray as part of the Criterion Collection, the new edition of Fast Times at Ridgemont High contains a forty minute documentary which focuses heavily on the cast and the casting process, an alternative edit made for television broadcast, interviews and a relaxed commentary from Heckerling and Crowe who reveal a surprising proposal for the director’s seat before she was assigned, Mister David Lynch, and the less surprising identity of Crowe’s favourite supporting role, the “beautiful girl in the car” whom he later married, Nancy Wilson.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High is available on Blu-ray from Criterion now
