Director Research: Amy Heckerling.
Amy Heckerling who was born on the 7th of may in 1954 is a director based in America, who has
graduated from New York University and The American film institute. She has directed the super
successful films such as Fast times at Ridgemont high, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, Look
who’s talking and my personal favorite Clueless
Early life and education:
She was born in the born in the Bronx in New York city, her mother was a bookkeeper and her father was an
accountant, she had a Jewish upbringing and she remembers that the apartment she lived in during her
childhood years was full of holocaust survivors, "Most of them had tattoos on their arms and for me there
was a feeling that all of these people had a story to tell. These were interesting formative experiences." Her
parents worked a full time job so she switched back and forth the Bronx and Brooklyn where her Grandma
lived and often spent her time watching television she also stated that she liked spending time at her grand
mums place much better, during this time period se had developed a particular fondness for James Cagney...
After her father passed his cpa exam, the family became more financially became more stable financially and
moved to Queens where she felt out of place and she didn’t get along with other kids in her school theatre so
she enrolled at the high school of art and design in Manhattan. On her first day of school there, she realized
she wanted to be a film director, where she found out that another one of her classmate wanted to e a film
director nut it didn’t seem like a job that would be open to girls
She graduated from high school in 1970, focused on directing and studying film at Newyork university..
Classics of the Foreign Film: A Pictoral Legacy. Heckerling pored over the book, marking off films that she had
seen until she had eventually watched most of them. She claims that by the time she got to NYU, because of
this book, she had seen almost all of the films that they had to watch her classes
During her time at NYU, Heckerling was making mostly musicals. "I was the only one doing them and they
were weird. It was the mid-70s and it was a bizarre combination of long hair with bell botoms, but they GOT
HER INTO AFI
Career: After graduating from NYU, Heckerling decided that she wanted to follow her friend Martin to
the American film institute in los Angeles where she felt she would have more opportunities where she faced
extreme culture shock her fir studio job was lip syncing dailies for a television show where she started making
connections in the business During her second year at AFI, Heckerling made her first short film, Getting it
Over With, about a girl that wants to lose her virginity before she turns twenty and the adventures she has
before midnight of her twentieth birthday. Heckerling continued to work on the film after she graduated
from AFI with her MFA using the editing studios at night to finish the project after work as soon as she
finished the edit she sent it to be processed she was fired from her editing job because she had an accident
which caused her to have mild amnesia and could not remember what she had done about the edits.
In an interview with Michael Singer who asked Amy about the films ability to grant a form of immortality Amy
describes the experience during the accident as there was a thing with the yellow light and all that suff went
through my mind right then was atleast I got to the film to the lab Eventually she finished the film and held a
screening that gained a very positive response which caused amy to say that these where the very best days
of her life. Her next step was to use this film to get a job. Thom Mount, who is the president of the universal
pictures displayed a lot of interest in Amy but because she was not backed by an agent they could not hire
her. Amy struggled for months to find an agent Mount straight up called her and asked her to make a film.
Feature films
1980s[edit]
Heckerling's first feature was Fast times at Ridgemont high in 1982 based on the non fiction account of a year
in the life of California high school students as observed by undercover rolling stone journalist, when she first
signed on to do a feature for universal she read a lot of scripts and even though she loved them she felt
something was missing and that there was too much studio interference so she read the novel and decided
on the strongest parts for the film.
After doing Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Heckerling was bombarded with similar but lesser scripts. It was
hard for her to find anything that wasn't about high school, preppy kids, or story about a girl losing her
virginity. Eventually she found her next film, which was Johnny Dangerously in 1984 it was an Airplane style
gangster movie but it failed to catch fire at the box office upon release.
The following year, she directed National Lampoon’s European vacation in 85 Amy scored a second hit but it
recived exemely poor reviews but still managed to be really popular.
In 1989, Heckerling had her biggest success with Look who’s talking tarring John , Krisie and a baby voicedby
Bruce, she got the idea for the film wheshe egnant ith her daughter and the further deveoped it into a
feature.
1990s[edit]
Two Look Who's Talking sequels would follow—1990's also called look whos calling too which was directed
by her but written by her then husband. The film added another baby to the storyline and it was kind of a
moderate success the third sequel was produced by amy but not directed In 1995, she wrote and directed
clueless, reworking and updating jane’s Emma as 1990 teen comedy about wealthy teenagers living in
Beverly hills. She first though to do a tv show because she loved to write the character Cher.Clueless,
reworking and updating Jane Austen's Emma as a 1990s teen comedy about wealthy teenagers living in
Beverly Hills. Heckerling originally thought of Clueless as a television show because she loved to write the
character of Cher who she described as a "happy, optimistic, California girl", and wanted to explore all of her
adventures, but after she pitched it to her agent she was told that it would make a great feature. To research
for the script, Heckerling sat in on classes at Beverly hills high school where she observed teenagers