“She received a complete bunch of nothing in there,” Frank Zappa sings in “Valley Lady,” his 1982 novelty tune and the unique supply for a sure Southern Californian, well-to-do, teen-bimbo stereotype. Zappa, recognized for his satirical, experimental compositions, had been impressed to report the track together with his child, who imitated her private-school classmates on the recording. Referring to the area most related to this vacuous determine, Zappa instructed David Letterman, “It’s maybe one of the disgusting locations on the face of the Earth, and I wrote this track concerning the values of the individuals within the San Fernando Valley.” Such scorn stays a typical response to the Valley-girl archetype. She now not has to stay in California and even be an adolescent, however she nonetheless represents a selected type of frivolous suburbanite inspired by a shopper society to do little greater than store, occasion, and tan. Different examples embody Cher from Clueless, Elle from Legally Blonde, the Kardashians, and any variety of Actual Housewives. But the Valley woman has all the time been an excessively straightforward goal—and one movie, launched shortly after the Zappa single, understood that.
The 1983 romantic comedy Valley Lady, 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 manner of making the most of “what at this time you’ll name a ‘viral’ factor,” Lane instructed me. But even because the movie drew on teen-girl tropes, it handled its characters with care somewhat than ire, taking its children severely. Valley Lady has all the time been recognized amongst its admirers for going deeper than it was anticipated to. It’s why this yr—the movie’s fortieth anniversary—noticed a string of screenings supported by filmmakers akin to Karyn Kusama and Kevin Smith. It must also be acknowledged for refocusing the fundamental critique of youth materialism to a wider touch upon societal materialism.
Valley Lady’s writers initially pitched it, in Lane’s phrases, as much like Shakespeare’s basic tragedy however “with out the loss of life,” taking part in 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 mild and $350,000. The considerably slapdash manufacturing values of Valley Lady are little question all the way down to the comparatively low finances (Coolidge was paid $5,000) and the truth that the film was written in about 10 days, based on Lane. The staff was in preproduction inside mere weeks, and filming happened over a single month.
Lane had thought-about making Valley Lady his directorial debut, however he knew Coolidge by way of a mutual buddy. “Placing my producer’s hat on, I kind of thought it may not be a foul thought to rent a lady,” Lane instructed 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 youngster, and was recognized for being good with actors. Underneath her route, there was restricted flesh and fornication in Valley Lady, in contrast to a slew of different teen comedies on the time. “It isn’t truly the getting of the individual that is scorching on the display,” Coolidge says within the movie’s commentary observe. “It’s the wanting.” As Lane put it, “We wished ours to be extra of a love story than a narrative of lust and overheated hormones.” Regardless of being named after an archetype, Valley Lady’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 forged 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 instructed The New York Instances, “so we tried to get to the supply.”
The movie actually embraces Valleyspeak. “He’s received the bod, however his brains are unhealthy information,” is likely one of the first traces spoken by Julie (Valley Lady’s model of Shakespeare’s Juliet, performed by Deborah Foreman). But the road additionally means that this sun-kissed babe buying together with her associates isn’t as superficial as one may assume. Her hippie mother and father personal a health-food retailer and encourage her individuality, so when she will get bored of her boyfriend, Tommy—regardless of her associates lauding him as “bitchin’”—it’s not a whole 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, together with his galumphing gait and spiky pink hair. “You’ll see issues that you just’ve solely examine in books,” considered one of Randy’s associates 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 Lady is purportedly about its titular heroine, Randy instructions each house. His outsize presence serves a goal: 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 slender bathe stall at a home occasion, 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 car for Valley Lady’s class commentary: Julie and her rich friends sport crisp pastels and assume Randy and his buddy 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 maintain her disapproving associates), Randy mocks her speech—“Fuck off, for positive, like, completely,” Cage ad-libbed—as a manner of mocking her social circle somewhat 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 Lady, wherein Randy disrupts Julie’s promenade and persuades her to decide on him in any case. In a callback to The Graduate, the couple sit aspect by aspect 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 at least one who’s free to outline herself.
Valley Lady rapidly recouped its cash on opening weekend and went nationwide, in the end incomes greater than $17 million. It met a beneficiant vital reception too. “Coolidge hasn’t made a campy, condescending comedy, however a satiric romance, wherein the background gags and caricatures contribute to a way of great conflicts and stable feelings,” Dave Kehr wrote at the Chicago Reader. “It’s irresistible.” The writers and director of Valley Lady selected authenticity over artifice, traded in a sneer for sensitivity, and the viewers purchased it. Viewers knew the issue was not the Valley woman however the world wherein 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.
