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August 26^th, 2012

Fast Times at Ridgemont High, (1982)

Nicolas Cage is Brad's Bud

What can I say about Fast Times at Ridgemont High that hasn't been said before? Unlike The Best of Times, Fast Times is a well-known and -regarded classic. It's the movie that effectively kick-started the careers of Amy Heckerling, Cameron Crowe, Sean Penn and Forest Whitaker not to mention Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold and Phoebe Cates. 

I'm realizing now that I had a crush on Cates as a prepubescent boy but not because of her famous stripping scene here but from her girl-next-door charmz in Gremlins and Drop Dead Fred. Along with Winona Ryder in Edward Scissorhands and Christina Ricci in Addams Family Values Cates seemed like a girl I could actually approach and have things in common with. That may sound ridiculous given the sex-bomb mantle she was given thanks to Brad's masturbation fantasy in this movie but such is the world when you grow up watching TV. Famous, imaginary people are your friends. Re-watching the film now I'm amazed at how real and lived-in the characters all seem. Cates isn't a goddess (outside of Brad's mind); she's just a girl. Even Jeff Spicoli, who lives in our collective cultural memory as a sort of stoner version of a Tex Avery character, living to make mischief and torture Mr. Hand, is given a surprising amount of sympathy and dimension.

It's funny that when I was a teenager – ostensibly the perfect age to appreciate Fast Times – I didn't. It seemed too aimless and ambling. Who was the main character? What was the story? Where were all the fast times I was promised? Only in hindsight do I see how well it captured the experience of being in high school. It's a beautiful hang-out movie. Amy Heckerling reportedly wanted to make Fast Times casually unstructured, saying “if you woke up and found yourself living in the movie, you'd be happy.” Whether she accurately captured what it meant to be a high school senior in Reagan-era SoCal I don't know, but I wouldn't mind waking up in her movie. Some scenes I'm pretty sure I did live in.

But Nic Cage, where the fuck is he? I knew he had a small part in Fast Times but I couldn't remember what he was doing. Something relating to Jennifer Jason-Leigh's abortion? Naw, as it turns out he's in the movie for, like, three seconds as a fry cook, cracking eggs and looking sheepish while Judge Reinhold threatens to kick “100% of [a customer's] ass.” The filming was an important experience for Cage, though, according to a 2012 interview with Lauren Schutte of the Hollywood Reporter:

"I must have auditioned for the Judge Reinhold part 10 or 11 times," [Cage] says, calling the film a "terrible experience." "I was underage, so I couldn't get it because I couldn't work as many hours. And I was surrounded by actors, whose names I won't mention, who were not very open to the idea of a young guy named "Coppola" being an actor. So that movie was instrumental in me changing my name because of the kind of unfortunate responses to my last name."

In fact, Cage says he was harassed on set. "They would congregate outside my trailer and say things, like quoting lines from Apocalypse Now, and it made it very hard for me to believe in myself."

Wow that's... mean? Weird? Was a young Sean Penn leaning outside Nic Cage's trailer, mockingly quoting “The Hollow Men” for his benefit? In between takes as Mr. Hand was Ray Walston saying things like “I love the smell of nepotism in the morning?” [EDIT: A little digging and I find that I wasn't far off. Apparently cast members would say "I love the smell of Nicolas in the morning." Clever, dudes.] It's interesting in light of what I wrote earlier about Cage's aura of self-assurance to think of him as an insecure seventeen-year-old kid with something to prove. I'd rather spend time talking about the movies themselves and gazing at my own navel but the armchair psychology fodder is there for anyone to scoop it up. The interview continues:

"It wasn't until I auditioned for Valley Girl -- where Martha Coolidge did not know who I was. I had already changed my name to Cage and I had this weight come off my body and I went, "Wow, I really can do this." And I felt liberated by that experience. And you can see it in Valley Girl that I'm free. Whereas in Fast Times, or even Rumble Fish, I'm somewhat stuck.