“She obtained a complete bunch of nothing in there,” Frank Zappa sings in “Valley Woman,” his 1982 novelty tune and the unique supply for a sure Southern Californian, well-to-do, teen-bimbo stereotype. Zappa, identified for his satirical, experimental compositions, had been impressed to document the track along with his child, who imitated her private-school classmates on the recording. Referring to the area most related to this vacuous determine, Zappa advised David Letterman, “It’s maybe probably the most disgusting locations on the face of the Earth, and I wrote this track in regards to the values of the individuals within the San Fernando Valley.” Such scorn stays a standard response to the Valley-girl archetype. She not has to stay in California and even be an adolescent, however she nonetheless represents a specific sort of frivolous suburbanite inspired by a shopper society to do little greater than store, celebration, and tan. Different examples embody Cher from Clueless, Elle from Legally Blonde, the Kardashians, and any variety of Actual Housewives. But the Valley lady has at all times been an excessively simple goal—and one movie, launched shortly after the Zappa single, understood that.
The 1983 romantic comedy Valley Woman, directed by Martha Coolidge, is a contemporary reimagining of Romeo and Juliet written by the movie producers Andrew Lane and the late Wayne Crawford. Initially, they noticed the movie as a approach of making the most of “what right now you’d name a ‘viral’ factor,” Lane advised me. But even because the movie drew on teen-girl tropes, it handled its characters with care slightly than ire, taking its youngsters significantly. Valley Woman has at all times been identified amongst its admirers for going deeper than it was anticipated to. It’s why this 12 months—the movie’s fortieth anniversary—noticed a string of screenings supported by filmmakers similar to Karyn Kusama and Kevin Smith. It must also be acknowledged for refocusing the essential critique of youth materialism to a wider touch upon societal materialism.
Valley Woman’s writers initially pitched it, in Lane’s phrases, as much like Shakespeare’s basic tragedy however “with out the demise,” enjoying off long-standing tensions between surfers in L.A. and Valley interlopers. On the time, Lane mentioned, the film studio Atlantic Leisure was getting squeezed out of the art-house market by greater gamers and wanted a brand new indie; it gave Lane and Crawford the inexperienced gentle and $350,000. The considerably slapdash manufacturing values of Valley Woman are little question all the way down to the comparatively low price range (Coolidge was paid $5,000) and the truth that the film was written in about 10 days, in line with Lane. The group was in preproduction inside mere weeks, and filming happened over a single month.
Lane had thought of making Valley Woman his directorial debut, however he knew Coolidge by means of a mutual pal. “Placing my producer’s hat on, I form of thought it may not be a nasty thought to rent a lady,” Lane advised me, including, “clearly, it’s a lady’s story.” Coolidge had already directed 1976’s Not a Fairly Image, primarily based on a sexual assault she skilled as a young person, and was identified for being good with actors. Underneath her route, there was restricted flesh and fornication in Valley Woman, not like a slew of different teen comedies on the time. “It isn’t truly the getting of the person who is sizzling on the display screen,” Coolidge says within the movie’s commentary observe. “It’s the wanting.” As Lane put it, “We needed ours to be extra of a love story than a narrative of lust and overheated hormones.” Regardless of being named after an archetype, Valley Woman’s story was pushed by people, not caricatures. The unique script had neither a falling-in-love nor a breakup scene—these have been Coolidge’s concepts, and he or she helped with the rewrites. Zappa used his daughter’s playful mockery of her friends to disparage their vacuity, however Coolidge and the solid frolicked at excessive faculties to be able to actually perceive ladies like them. “I don’t like motion pictures which are snooty towards their topics,” she advised The New York Instances, “so we tried to get to the supply.”
The movie actually embraces Valleyspeak. “He’s obtained the bod, however his brains are dangerous information,” is among the first traces spoken by Julie (Valley Woman’s model of Shakespeare’s Juliet, performed by Deborah Foreman). But the road additionally means that this sun-kissed babe procuring along with her mates is just not as superficial as one may suppose. Her hippie dad and mom personal a health-food retailer and encourage her individuality, so when she will get bored of her boyfriend, Tommy—regardless of her mates lauding him as “bitchin’”—it’s not an entire shock. Julie needs one thing new—as Valley ladies typically do—and, as if the gods have heard her name, Randy (her Romeo, performed by Nicolas Cage) emerges from the surf like a janky Poseidon, along with his galumphing gait and spiky pink hair. “You’ll see issues that you simply’ve solely examine in books,” considered one of Randy’s mates tells her when the 2 go on a primary date. Simply as within the movie’s supply materials, the primary characters find yourself collectively regardless of each demand to not.
Though Valley Woman is purportedly about its titular heroine, Randy instructions each house. His outsize presence serves a objective: It exhibits, time and again, that he and Julie aren’t so totally different; the film refuses to outline them solely by their milieus. Randy’s humor surfaces in Cage’s personal comedic timing, as within the scene of him ready for Julie in a slim bathe stall at a home celebration, his tall physique folding in on itself, or within the montage of him popping up in numerous disguises round her after she has dumped him. However he additionally turns into a automobile for Valley Woman’s class commentary: Julie and her rich friends sport crisp pastels and suppose Randy and his pal Fred, of their ratty, nightclub-ready somber colours, are “slumming it.” Because the movie progresses, the lovers’ outfits converge—Julie wears black leather-based; Randy wears powder blue—and the divide between them turns into much less distinct. They’ve invaded one another’s lives and diluted the distinction.
So when Julie dumps Randy for Tommy (actually dumping him to be able to preserve her disapproving mates), Randy mocks her speech—“Fuck off, for positive, like, completely,” Cage ad-libbed—as a approach of mocking her social circle slightly than her particularly. Their breakup exhibits how materialistic class pressures can supplant individuals’s actual wishes. These calls for overshadow even the ostensibly completely satisfied ending of Valley Woman, during which Randy disrupts Julie’s promenade and persuades her to decide on him in spite of everything. In a callback to The Graduate, the couple sit facet by facet in a limo, the load of getting chosen one another over everybody else lastly dawning on them. Nonetheless, by sacrificing her friendships—the teenager model of household—the movie legitimizes Julie’s evolution from a younger lady outlined by society to 1 who’s free to outline herself.
Valley Woman rapidly recouped its cash on opening weekend and went nationwide, finally incomes greater than $17 million. It met a beneficiant vital reception too. “Coolidge hasn’t made a campy, condescending comedy, however a satiric romance, during which the background gags and caricatures contribute to a way of great conflicts and strong feelings,” Dave Kehr wrote at the Chicago Reader. “It’s irresistible.” The writers and director of Valley Woman selected authenticity over artifice, traded in a sneer for sensitivity, and the viewers purchased it. Viewers knew the issue was not the Valley lady however the world during which she discovered herself. And although even the movie’s writers might have seen it as a lady’s story, it proved to be for everybody.
