My current obsession
Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl (1983)
Hi, friends,
I wrote the following last week, and am EXTREMELY proud that I had the self-control to not send it out immediately—I’ve been trying very very hard to not overwhelm you with emails, heh. Feel free to praise me for my will power, I need all the positive reinforcement I can get.
I hope you had a restful and/or lovely weekend.
I’m just launching in, because holy cow, I don’t even know what to do with myself.
I watched Valley Girl last night and it made me smile so hard and for so long that my face ACTIVELY HURT before the movie was even close to over. And I watched a couple of clips just now, and I’m grinning all over again.
Like, even just watching little clips gave me some absurd surge of whichever chemicals are the happy ones.
At first I was going to say that my current obsession was the music in this movie, then the slang, then Nic Cage, then Deborah Foreman, then the chemistry between Nic Cage and Deborah Foreman. But the truth is, my current obsession is all of those things.
It’s the whole movie, start to finish.
I don’t know how I haven’t seen it until now, but I’m so grateful that I finally discovered it.
Valley Girl is funny, weird, earnest, amazing to look at and listen to. It’s a mood movie and a comedy and a teen romance and an ‘80s Californian Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending.
The two leads are cute and winning and dorky; they’re both weirdly cool in their own ways. It’s sweet at moments and salty at moments, and warm and funny and rad. The performances and music and visuals give you whoosh after whoosh after whoosh of feeling and understanding Julie and Randy’s immediate and powerful attraction, but the movie never comes close to entering saccharine territory.
The scene where they break up is genuinely gutting.
And even with the moments of utter, heightened weirdness—usually involving the adults—it’s a movie that feels very, very emotionally REAL. Never slick, never overly polished. Genuine and sincere, even to a degree that sometimes feels almost uncomfortable.
After offering the role of Randy to Judd Nelson, who turned out to be unavailable and would go on to play the rebellious John Bender in “The Breakfast Club,” Coolidge found 18-year-old Cage’s headshot in the discard pile. She grabbed it, telling the casting director they needed to find someone like him. Someone who wasn’t a conventional “pretty boy.”
It’s an ‘80s movie, so I wouldn’t say that Randy’s behavior after Julie breaks up with him is something you’d want to model—in real life, someone breaking up with you is someone breaking up with you, and even if you think they’re wrong and maybe secretly still love you, you have to take the L—but as the viewer, you root for them to work it all out anyway.
Even I, a middle-aged harpy in the year of our Lord 2022, gave Randy a pass for stalking Julie and STILL wanted them to work it all out. I feel like I should surrender my Harpy Card™.
I’d blame the absolutely fabulous music, but it wasn’t just that—like I said, their chemistry is phenomenal.
Just some random thoughts:
The visuals!! The Valley kids are almost always in brights and pastels; Randy and the punk kids are almost always in red and black, harder colors. The lighting is noticeably different depending on if they’re in the Valley or in the city. The club vs the prom, the mall vs driving the Strip.
The interiors in the Valley are all brightly lit (also, what I noticed of the decor was amazing, I feel like I missed a ton of details and I can’t wait to go back and look more closely). I’ll have to go back and rewatch—and you’d better believe I will—but I think the scenes in the city are all at night?
The slang!! These girls fling Valley Speak around entirely unselfconsciously, and the movie doesn’t mock them for it, doesn’t treat them like they’re the butt of the joke, doesn’t suggest that the audience should feel superior. I’ve only seen a couple of other movies do that, and both of them—Clueless and Legally Blonde—encourage the audience to smirk at the heroines as bubble-headed stereotypes at first, and then introduce a growth arc for the character. In Valley Girl, our heroine is shown as three-dimensional from the start.
All of this is really really impressive—both in terms of the performances and the direction—when you have characters saying things like:
God, he's such a total pukeoid.
Man, he's just like trippin'-dicular, you know?
I'm humiliated to the max.
Characters talk over each other constantly—again, as in real life—and there are a couple of exchanges so funny and unexpected that they made us full-on BELLOW.
Dottie!! Elizabeth Daily—Dottie from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure—plays one of Julie’s Valley friends, and the second we spotted her, we both yelled, “DOTTIE!!!” because we love her. She was, as always, the cutest.
The music!! Yes, I’m mentioning it again. It rules that much.
I really thought—and this is on me for making assumptions—that because of the Valley girl/Hollywood punk pairing, Julie was going to be sheltered and shy and sweet. I thought this was going to be a Nic Cage Joint.
Within just the first few minutes, Deborah Foreman entirely proved me wrong AND had me for life. I adored her from the start:
ALSO, note Tommy coming down the escalator the wrong way? What a jerk.
ALSO ALSO, I didn’t clock it the first time through, but after watching this clip, I noticed that Julie is wearing that little American flag pin—Randy wears one, too, but this is before they even meet.
This takes place after her jerk ex-boyfriend Tommy has thrown Randy out of the party & he’s climbed back in via the bathroom window and WAITED IN THE SHOWER—it’s a whole thing—until Julie came into the bathroom. As I said, their chemistry is absurd:
Nic Cage’s delivery of the “I forgot my comb” line deserves an Oscar. So fantastic, and again, just remembering it is making me grin.
There was a remake of Valley Girl in 2020, and maybe this makes me an unimaginative snobby jerk, but I have literally negative interest in seeing it.
I just genuinely can’t picture other actors pulling any of this off.
Written by Wayne Crawford and Andrew Lane, Valley Girl was extremely low-budget, and shot in 20 days. Having spent a couple of years immersed in the burgeoning music scene of 1980s Los Angeles, Coolidge used all of that knowledge in the film, especially in the scenes when Julie ventures into a rock club with her new beau. Coolidge suggested two scenes to be added: when Julie and Randy fall in love and when they break up, essential contributions. The original script was a humorous sketch of the culture clash between Hollywood and the Valley. Coolidge, though, sensed something else, the opportunity to get at the feeling of teen desire, the painful sweetness of first love, of what happens between two people drawn to one another like magnets.
But you don’t have to take MY word for it
Interview magazine: Five reasons why Valley Girl remains one of the best teen films ever
NYT: When ‘Valley Girl’ (and Nicolas Cage) Shook Up Hollywood
Mental Floss: 13 For Sure Facts About Valley Girl
Film Comment: Present Tense: Martha Coolidge
PHEW. I am maybe a little winded? And yet the second I hit ‘send’, will inevitably think of 97 other things I wanted to mention?
PLEASE tell me that some of you have seen this?
Or go and watch it and then come back and talk to me about it for a million hours?
I’ll be lying on the floor over here until then. Or, more likely, just watching it again.
Talk soon,
Leila
Once again, it's Who's That Actress, with your host, the Aging Crone of Lost Memory! *applause*
Once again, thank you for reminding me Deborah Foreman exists and was in... everything. My fave memories of her were that she was on MacGyver. I always thought she had the sweetest face, and looked like a Genuine Real Person I Wanted To Know.
I LOVED watching snippets of this film because MALLS. Since I haven't left the house since 2018, it reminds me how they were just this huge part of the American landscape on the West Coast... just ...wandering around in them when it was hot outside, watching everyone else wander around. Like the roving herds of buffalo, now forever gone...
It's HILARIOUS that these kids were supposed to be in JUNIOR HIGH, though. I mean, what!? (Foreman was 21, and she pulls it off, but a lot of other people, including the person playing her original boyfriend REALLY didn't.)
I'm always a little weirded out about movies about the Valley, though; living in the State where it truly exists means you always squint at movie versions of it and say, "Um...what?" but the way the people talk in that scene is a variation on how I *still* talk, like, two English degrees later, and I'm from the NORTHERN end of the State. Meanwhile D - who IS from SoCal and would drive over to the Valley occasionally, still says "grody" unironically. I snicker.