Valley Girl
Novelty pop hit inspires New Wave love story for the ages
VALLEY GIRL (1983) is not only a wonderful preservation of youth culture at a specific time and place, it’s one of the best movies set in Los Angeles, in terms of how the city is woven into a story and put on film. This might have been a basic requirement given the hit pop single that inspired the movie. The filmmakers were tasked with giving the viewer valley girls in a film in which L.A. would play itself, but rather than go about their job lazily or with derision, they love their characters, and we fall a little bit in love with them too.
Moon Unit Zappa was the oldest of avant garde rock musician and composer Frank Zappa’s four children, growing up in the Los Angeles bohemian enclave of Laurel Canyon. Her father was touring as many as eight months a year and when he was home, slept days and stayed up nights writing or recording. At the age of fourteen, Moon figured the best way to spend time with her dad was to work with him, which she requested in writing. Moon’s impersonations of the dopey San Fernando Valley teenagers she attended private school in North Hollywood with–speaking in what she dubbed “Valspeak”--greatly amused Zappa, and one school night, he woke his daughter to join him in the recording booth. They put together a Valspoken word monologue to a bass line Zappa had laid down. In May 1982, Moon’s mother was driving her to school when KROQ, L.A.’s alternative rock radio station, played a track by her husband titled “Valley Girl” featuring Moon’s vocal. Clearly spoofing suburban teenage girls (in the bridge, Zappa states, “Tosses her head and flips her hair/ She got a whole bunch of nothing in there”), the single went through the roof and into outer space. It reached #32 in the U.S. Billboard charts, the only Top 40 hit Zappa would enjoy in his career, but felt bigger. Even as a novelty, the song was relatable, each town with its hicks in the sticks. It introduced catchy slang: “Barf me out!’, “I’m so sure!”, “Totally!” Newspapers and magazines all over the world published stories about the song and its popularity.
In August 1982, Tom Coleman, co-founder of Atlantic Releasing Corporation, arrived at his office with a Newsweek magazine profiling the “Valley Girl” phenomenon. He also had an idea. Launched in 1974, Atlantic acquired its niche acquiring and distributing foreign films, culminating with Madame Rosa (1977), a French movie starring Simone Signoret that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Looking to expand to production, Coleman contacted a writer/ producer he was working with named Wayne Crawford, who’d co-written and co-produced Cheering Section (1977) and co-written, co-produced and starred in Barracuda (1978), their titles giving away their derivative storylines. Crawford was developing a teen comedy for Atlantic titled Miami Beach that Coleman told him to drop, showing him the Newsweek piece and proposing a Romeo and Juliet tale about a valley girl, a project to be produced quickly, while the fad was hot. Crawford and his writing/ producing partner Andrew Lane, who’d teamed up on a Death Wish rip-off titled Tomcats (1976), carried their assignment through to a T, dashing off a rough draft in ten days. Titled Vals, Crawford & Lane set their first scene at the Sherman Oaks Galleria establishing Valspeak among their female characters, but in an unusually precipitous development, quickly moved on to a story, in which a suburban princess from Sherman Oaks falls for a punk rocker from Hollywood. To direct, Andrew Lane called a friend in Los Angeles.
Martha Coolidge had attended Rhode Island School of Design, planning on studying illustration, but making an animated short, majored in film, becoming the first student at RISD to do so. She completed two documentaries in grad school at New York University. David: Off and On (1972) concerned her brother’s struggles with drug addiction, and Old-Fashioned Woman (1974) was about her grandmother. On a grant from the American Film Institute, Coolidge directed a hybrid documentary/ narrative film titled Not A Pretty Picture (1975), a re-enactment of the date rape she’d survived. After a year in Los Angeles interning at the AFI, Not A Pretty Picture came to the attention of Francis Coppola, who invited Cooldige to join the artists he was assembling at Zoetrope Studios. Coolidge spent two and a half years in L.A. developing a rock ‘n roll romance titled Photoplay until Coppola’s financial woes completing Apocalypse Now (1979) left her without financing. She headed to Toronto, where an investor looking for a tax shelter fronted some money for Coolidge to start production on a psychosexual drama titled Anne & Joey, but the financier disappeared before shooting could be completed. One of Coolidge’s contacts from Zoetrope–actor Colleen Camp–came aboard as producer and convinced director Peter Bogdanovich to give them the money to finish the picture. He did and they almost did, but Bogdanovich’s financial problems stranded Anne & Joey without money to license music. It was never released in North America.
Coolidge was sofa-surfing in Los Angeles in 1982 when Andrew Lane asked to meet about what was now titled Valley Girl. An hour into their conversation, she realized he wanted her to direct it, the producers realizing their film needed a director who understood teenage girls. Getting past the title, Coolidge was pleasurably surprised to find their script was not only funny, but that Crawford & Lane had taken their characters seriously. Coolidge saw they were missing two crucial scenes: the couple falling in love and the couple breaking up. Though it was essentially a revised first draft, the three dialed in a script (the WGA would award writing credit to Wayne Crawford & Andrew Lane). Seeing that Coolidge’s work consisted of a documentary about date rape and film she never finished, Tom Coleman resisted hiring her, relenting after Peter Bogdanovich phoned to vouch for Coolidge. Approving a budget of $350,000 and a 22-day shooting schedule in Los Angeles, Coleman remembers his only directive to Coolidge was that she stay on schedule as opposed to trying to direct. Coolidge maintains that Coleman also told her to get at least four shots of a topless woman or women, but he didn’t specify how long the nude shots had to be, a loophole Coolidge would exploit.
In order for Valley Girl to finish shooting before winter arrived for what qualified as a Southern California beach movie, as well as to take advantage of the “Valley Girl” craze, Crawford & Lane and Coolidge were given two weeks to prep and cast the picture. The director drew on her Zoetrope connections, casting Colleen Camp and Frederic Forrest (Chef in Apocalypse Now) as the parents of their title character, Julie. Camp convinced her friend Lee Purcell to take the part of a woman who plays out a Mrs. Robinson scenario with the boy her daughter has a crush on. To play Julie, twenty-year-old Deborah Foreman–who grew up in Richardson, Texas and to overcome her shyness had been enrolled in modeling school by her parents–was cast. To play her star-crossed lover, Randy, Judd Nelson was offered the part, but he’d booked a starring role in the comedy Making the Grade (1984) shooting in Memphis at the same time as Valley Girl. Seeking someone quirky, attractive but also smart, Coolidge produced a headshot from a pile of rejects and told casting director Annette Benson that she was looking for someone like that. The headshots belonged to an actor named Nicolas Cage.
After meeting with Cage and calling him back to read with Foreman, the filmmakers recognized they had found their couple. Cage told them he’d finished work on a Francis Coppola movie titled Rumble Fish (1983) and when Coolidge called producer Fred Roos, he informed her that he’d never heard of anyone named Nicolas Cage, but she might be inquiring about Nicolas Coppola, the filmmaker’s nephew, a minor detail the actor had withheld from everyone. After a brief role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) cut to a non-speaking part and working for his uncle, Nicolas Coppola had settled on the professional name of Nicolas Cage. Coleman disliked him, feeling Cage looked thirty and was weird, but Crawford & Lane and Coolidge stood their ground. In preparation for Photoplay, Coolidge had spent three or four nights a week at the L.A. music venues central to the city’s emerging punk rock scene: Club 88, Madame Wong’s, the Starwood. She applied that research to Valley Girl, settling on filming the Sunset Strip club scenes at the Central, renamed the Viper Room in 1993.
Valley Girl commenced shooting in late October 1982. The picture had only one of nearly everything: one makeup artist, one hairstylist. Most of the wardrobe was loaned (specifically the tuxedos and gowns for the prom scene) or came from the actors’ own closets. Coolidge had to lobby Atlantic to give her a second camera, but to make her schedule, often had to get a shot in one take. She also fought to fill the soundtrack with the alternative rock or New Wave music that KROQ was playing at that moment, a campaign that Amy Heckerling had surrendered ground on when directing Fast Times at Ridgemont High. To appear as the house band, Coolidge approached one of L.A.’s biggest acts, X, fronted by Exene Cervenka, but based on their familiarity with Frank Zappa’s song, the band was worried their fans in the valley might think they were being mocked. The Plimsouls, a power pop quartet, filled in superbly, lip synching “Everywhere At Once,” “A Million Miles Away” and “Oldest Story in the World” and giving the film a gentler sound. To serenade the prom, Coolidge landed Josie Cotton, who performs “He Could Be the One” and “Johnny Are You Queer?”
Tom Coleman was bullish enough on Valley Girl to kick in $250,000 for music licenses. As clearances were in flux, Bananarama, The Clash, Culture Club and The Jam would be credited for songs that didn’t make the movie, credits never corrected in post-production (“Love My Way” by The Psychedelic Furs and “Who Could It Be Now?” by Men At Work made it in). The soundtrack album fell through, reaching retailers in 1994 when Rhino Records utilized the film’s nostalgia to put together a 15-track CD of songs heard in the film, as well as a second CD of vintage songs that aren’t. The most blatant sign of neglect was the poster, in which instead of Deborah Foreman’s likeness next to Cage’s, a model whose fee was cheaper was used. With Atlantic Releasing Corporation handling distribution, Valley Girl opened in late April 1983–six months after filming got underway–in 442 theaters in the U.S. It spent four weekends among the top ten grossing films in the country, hanging around at #11 for another three weekends, a significant hit considering its budget and release. Critics were surprised that Valley Girl was a real film and most reviews were positive. On an episode of At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert dedicated to teenage sex movies, Siskel credited the film’s character depth, and Ebert its thoughtfulness and female intelligence.
Valley Girl runs 99 minutes and its biggest flaw is a subplot doled out over three scenes featuring Lee Purcell character’s interest in a doofy teenage bicycle delivery boy that her daughter (Michelle Meyrink) has a crush on. It feels ordered by the studio, the obligatory horny teenager sex scene deemed necessary for an exploitation movie. What’s interesting is that even if the producers felt their movie required teenagers getting naked–for realism–their subplot isn’t boring, and among horny teenager movies, it’s an anomaly, focusing not on a dad’s infatuation with the babysitter, but on a housewife who feels more drawn to her daughter’s peers and is tempted to do something about it. The subplot sets up a reference to The Graduate (1967) which is called back to in the final shot, in which instead of fleeing her wedding, Julie flees her prom, not in the back of a bus but in the back seat of a limo, Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman wearing the same look of disillusionment (or maybe it’s exhaustion) that Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross share in The Graduate. It’s not a subtle reference, and how it ended up in an exploitation movie rushed into production–before Frank Zappa had a chance to make a “Valley Girl” movie his way–is one of the era’s most unexpected delights in film.
The departure Valley Girl made from the song “Valley Girl” is that Wayne Crawford & Andrew Lane and Martha Coolidge love their title character and those orbiting her. As played by Colleen Camp and Frederic Forrest, Julie’s parents–who run a vegan diner in the valley–have compassion, clean consciences, and want their daughter to explore, questioning whether this is proper parenting. They’re funny, and their daughter is a chip off the block, so excited to tell her friends about Randy that she can’t be bothered with her driver’s ed instructor (Richard Sanders from the sitcom WKRP In Cincinnati) or the road. In his debut as a leading man, Nicolas Cage plays Randy as sensitive and hyper focused. Without a screenwriter of Cameron Crowe’s caliber available to write dialogue like John Cusack had in Say Anything … (1989), Cage performs with his face and body. Two words – “Anywhere” and “Anything”--are all his character has to say to get Julie to leave the party with him. Coolidge understood her princess’s attraction to her punk, as well as what makes a downtown different from the suburbs, something John Hughes didn’t have a handle on in Pretty In Pink (1986). Coolidge’s finesse with documentary filmmaking and familiarity with the Sunset Strip make the distinctions between her star-crossed lovers more vivid. Valley Girl also boasts the superlative alt-rock and New Wave movie soundtrack, which in addition to The Plimsouls and Josie Cotton, turned “Electric Avenue” by Eddy Grant and “Melt With You” by Modern English into hits.
Video rental category: Romantic Comedy
Special interest: School Days
