Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Hand. The original version has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. The movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High inspired a short-lived 1986 television series called Fast Times, featuring Courtney Thorne-Smith as Stacey, Wally Ward as Mark, Claudia Wells as Linda, Patrick Dempsey as Mike, Dean Cameron as Spicoli, James Nardini as Brad, and Ray Walston reprising his role as Mr. Another remake is currently in production, due for release in 2006. The "Ridgemont Mall" shown in the film was actually the Sherman Oaks Galleria, with its exterior shot at Santa Monica Place. It did not receive wide theatrical distribution and was for the most part critically panned. Most of the exteriors of Ridgemont High School were shot at Van Nuys High School, and other scenes were shot at Canoga Park High School. In its structure it plays like a straightforward alien invasion thriller, and does not attempt to create the overriding paranoiac mood of the earlier films.

"Ridgemont" is a fictional name, however; there is no California community by that name. This time the story was set on a military base, and did not attempt to follow the plot of either the original or the 1978 version. Although it is never explicitly mentioned as such in the film, Fast Times was filmed in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles and many people identify the film with that area and the teen culture that existed there, or was perceived to exist there, in the early 1980s. John, and was directed by Abel Ferrara. Upon which, Brad utters the memorable line: "Doesn't anybody ever fucking knock anymore?". It was adapted by Raymond Cistheri, Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli and Nicholas St. Brad masturbates in the bathroom to this mental image until Linda, in real-life, accidentally walks in on him. Disgusted and embarrassed, she flees. A 1993 version, called Body Snatchers, stars Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly and Gabrielle Anwar.

The fantasy ends with Linda embracing Brad and kissing him. There are distinct similarities between the 1978 film and the tone of the "mythology" episodes of the popular 1990s television series The X-Files. The film is most memorable to some for a nude scene fantasized by Stacy's older brother Brad (Judge Reinhold) in which Phoebe Cates' character, Linda Barrett, emerges from a swimming pool wearing a red bikini, and--in slow motion, and with constant eye-contact with the camera-- she removes her bikini top, exposing her breasts. The script could thus be thought to reflect growing anti-government fears that would later manifest themselves among conspiracy theorists. Hand (Ray Walston), who is convinced that all students are on "dope." The film features small parts by many actors who later achieved some degree of fame: Anthony Edwards, Eric Stoltz, Nicholas Cage, and Forest Whitaker. Lacking the Cold War subtext of the original, Kaufman concentrated on a style of paranoia that was more reflective of the mistrust and malaise pervasive in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America. Kaufman's film is set not in a small town but in San Francisco; in one scene, Sutherland's character calls Washington for help, only to find his calls are being intercepted and his name is known to the person on the other line before he gives it. Another character in the film is Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn in an early film role and one for which he is still often remembered), a perpetually stoned surfer dude who faces off with history teacher Mr. Richter and directed by Philip Kaufman, and, unlike many remakes, met with generally favorable critical response.

Sophomore students Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Mark Ratner (Brian Backer) are both looking for love, and they are helped along by their older classmates, Linda Barrett (Phoebe Cates) and Mike Damone (Robert Romanus), respectively. The 1978 version was adapted by W.D. He went undercover to do research for his 1981 book Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, about his observations of the high school and the students he befriended there. The remake ends with Sutherland's character destroying the "pod people's" facility where they grow the pods, but he is found and turned into a pod person, which is revealed in the last second of the film. The story is loosely inspired by the year Cameron Crowe, then in his early 20s, spent impersonating a high school student at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. As with the first film, it does not have a "happy ending". Its title inspired Vernor Vinge's Hugo award-winning short story "Fast Times at Fairmont High". Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia also appears briefly, as does Robert Duvall.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a 1982 American teen film directed by Amy Heckerling and written by Cameron Crowe (who wrote both the screenplay and a book of the same name which inspired the movie). There are a number of interesting cameo appearances in the film, among them the star and director of the original; Kevin McCarthy appears briefly as a man on the street frantically screaming about aliens (in a shot reminiscent of the final shot of the original) and Don Siegel appears as a cab driver. The first of two remakes appeared in 1978, starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum Veronica Cartwright and Jerry Walter. It was directed by Don Siegel. The screenplay was adapted by Richard Collins (uncredited), Daniel Mainwaring and Sam Peckinpah from the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney.

The taking-over of ordinary citizens metaphorically reflected the paranoia in Cold War America of how communism might infiltrate the body politic in such a way that you would have no way of suspecting if your friends and neighbors had been corrupted. The film is frequently cited as an indictment of the hysteria of McCarthyism during the early stages of the Cold War. Once a pod person is fully grown and integrated into society, he works secretly to spread more pods, so that more people will be taken over. The "pod people" are indistinguishable from normal people, except for their utter lack of emotion.

They emerge from plantlike pods, and grow into perfect physical duplications of their human victims, who themselves die and are discarded. An alien race departs their dying world and lands on Earth. It stars Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan and Carolyn Jones. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 science fiction/horror film which tells the story of ordinary small town people whose bodies are taken over by aliens.