“It isn’t actually the getting of the person that is hot on the screen,” Coolidge says in the film’s commentary track. Under her direction, there was limited flesh and fornication in Valley Girl, unlike a slew of other teen comedies at the time. “Putting my producer’s hat on, I sort of thought it might not be a bad idea to hire a woman,” Lane told me, adding, “clearly, it’s a woman’s story.” Coolidge had already directed 1976’s Not a Pretty Picture, based on a sexual assault she experienced as a teenager, and was known for being good with actors. Lane had considered making Valley Girl his directorial debut, but he knew Coolidge through a mutual friend. The team was in preproduction within mere weeks, and filming took place over a single month.
#Black and white romantic photo movie#
The somewhat slapdash production values of Valley Girl are no doubt down to the relatively low budget (Coolidge was paid $5,000) and the fact that the movie was written in about 10 days, according to Lane. At the time, Lane said, the movie studio Atlantic Entertainment was getting squeezed out of the art-house market by bigger players and needed a new indie it gave Lane and Crawford the green light and $350,000. Valley Girl’s writers originally pitched it, in Lane’s words, as similar to Shakespeare’s classic tragedy but “without the death,” playing off long-standing tensions between surfers in L.A. It should also be recognized for refocusing the basic critique of youth materialism to a wider comment on societal materialism.
It’s why this year-the film’s 40th anniversary-saw a string of screenings supported by filmmakers such as Karyn Kusama and Kevin Smith. Valley Girl has always been known among its admirers for going deeper than it was expected to. Yet even as the film drew on teen-girl tropes, it treated its characters with care rather than ire, taking its kids seriously. Initially, they saw the film as a way of taking advantage of “what today you would call a ‘viral’ thing,” Lane told me. The 1983 romantic comedy Valley Girl, directed by Martha Coolidge, is a modern reimagining of Romeo and Juliet written by the film producers Andrew Lane and the late Wayne Crawford. Yet the Valley girl has always been an overly easy target-and one film, released shortly after the Zappa single, understood that. Other examples include Cher from Clueless, Elle from Legally Blonde, the Kardashians, and any number of Real Housewives. She no longer has to live in California or even be an adolescent, but she still represents a particular kind of frivolous suburbanite encouraged by a consumer society to do little more than shop, party, and tan. Referring to the region most associated with this vacuous figure, Zappa told David Letterman, “It’s perhaps one of the most disgusting places on the face of the Earth, and I wrote this song about the values of the people in the San Fernando Valley.” Such scorn remains a common reaction to the Valley-girl archetype. Zappa, known for his satirical, experimental compositions, had been inspired to record the song with his kid, who imitated her private-school classmates on the recording.
“She got a whole bunch of nothing in there,” Frank Zappa sings in “Valley Girl,” his 1982 novelty tune and the original source for a certain Southern Californian, well-to-do, teen-bimbo stereotype.
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