How Amy Heckerling’s Babysitter Helped Create “Clueless,” Now in the National Film Registry

When writer and director Amy Heckerling’s  “Clueless” came out in 1995, she didn’t have any inkling it was about to be a hit, much less a cult classic, a musical and, 30 years later, an inductee into the National Film Registry.

“It did well at first,” she said in an interview with the Library, with a slight shrug. But “it wasn’t like ‘Jaws’ or anything. I didn’t feel like, ‘Oh wow, now I can do whatever I want’ … it didn’t feel like (a major hit) at the time.”

And she certainly had no serious statement in mind: “We weren’t saying ‘Here’s the whole decade and what it’s going to be.’ We wanted to create a world where everything was beautifully colored and people were looking really good in the outfits that they wore and they were being creative in the way that they used what they liked and made it their style.”

Heckerling, 71, has been around Hollywood for nearly half a century now. She’s a native New Yorker with a high-end film-school education who went to the West Coast and broke out as the director of 1982’s massive hit, “Fast Times and Ridgemont High.”

She was 28 at the time. Life was good but things didn’t change all that much over the next decade. She married, had a kid, divorced. She directed comedy hits such as the “Look Who’s Talking” movies and “National Lampoon’s European Vacation.” That she was a woman, a working director and writer in Hollywood was a feat unto itself.

“I remember my agent talking to me when I had a script, and he’s thinking about where we could go, and he’s saying, ‘Well, Disney already has their female movie this year.’ That kind of stuff that was not uncommon.”

She loved fictional creations like Jeff Spicoli, the Sean Penn character in “Fast Times,” who is relentlessly upbeat, regardless of the feedback or the situation. She had read Jane Austen’s 1815 novel “Emma” while in college, a comic story about a young woman who is perhaps unreasonably confident. She reread the story and found it resonated with a script she had in mind.

What emerged was a story about a rich Hollywood teen who had a ton of good-hearted self-confidence, if not backed by the same level of competence.

The title came from her babysitter: “ ‘Clueless’ was floating around in my family for a while because I had a toddler and there was a babysitter, and whenever she would come over, she’d be watching ‘Moonlighting’ and she would just laugh and laugh and say, ‘Oh, he’s so clueless. She’s so clueless.’ Everybody was clueless and I just liked the word.”

Her working title was “Clueless in California,” a nod to “Sleepless in Seattle,” the 1993 Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks rom-com that she thought featured a similar plot line. But in pre-production meetings, she noticed everyone just referred to it as ‘Clueless.’ It stuck.

The result, and what has resonated with millions of fans over the decades, is a not-quite-real place where good things happen and real troubles are far away.

“I was creating what I thought was like, ‘What if everybody had enough money to express themselves and to live comfortably, all races and creeds, just all enjoying what there was, and it would be Beverly Hills.” She laughs. “But it’s not really Beverly Hills. It’s just a fantasy, like Neverland or something.”

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