#2: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

Hello! My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films, for reasons discussed here!

So far in trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films, I have watched 1 Nicolas Cage film, and won the lottery 0 times. But maybe failed TV pilot The Best of Times doesn’t really count.

IMDB claims that Cage’s first big screen appearance was as an extra in the 1980 Robert Redford prison movie, Brubaker. Because I am dedicated to my cause, I have actually watched it to check, and as far as I can tell, IMDB is a liar. Nor is it mentioned in any of the three (not very good) biographies of Nicolas Cage that I have read. Brubaker is alright as these things go, but if you want to see Cage’s actual feature film debut, you’ll have to watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Which he is in. For about 30 seconds. Though he’s still going by his original human name, Nicolas Coppola.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High is supposedly considered something of a cult classic of the ’80s teen movie genre, although it’s a “cult classic” that I can’t recall ever hearing anyone say they particularly like. Loosely based on screenwriter Cameron Crowe’s observations of life in a South California High School (as 22-year-old journalist, he enrolled undercover to report on typical teenage goings, a bit like Never Been Kissed except real and so an even weirder thing to do), the film follows six teenagers through a school year.

They do typical such teenage things such as doing sex, working in fast food restaurants, and going on a class outing to the local morgue to look at corpses (I mean the nude swimming thing in The Best of Times turned out to be true, so who knows?).

Phoebe Cates pretends to have a boyfriend. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a 15-year-old girl who loses her virginity while looking up at some graffiti that reads ‘Surf Nazis’. The Woody Allen-ish nerd is Woody Allen-ish. His best friend has the single character trait of ‘ticket tout’. Sean Penn plays an aggressively unpleasant stoner whose only redeeming act in the entire film is hitting himself in the head with a shoe. Judge Reinhold off of Beverly Hills Cop wanks off in a toilet while thinking about Phoebe Cates, who then walks in on him. And on it goes, to no particular end.

While the problems the characters deal with are mostly #relatable enough, there’s something rather cynical about all this. The film doesn’t show much warmth towards its characters, and relies more on shock value (BOOBS! WANKING! AN ABORTION!) than it does on such boring things as a ‘narrative’ or ‘emotional engagement’. Maybe this could be defended as not sugar-coating the essentially meaningless realities of life, but to me it just feels gratuitous and mean.

I warmed to it very slightly in the last half hour, but only because after watching Judge Reinhold off of Beverly Hills Cop wanking off in a toilet, it’s possible to find joy in almost anything else that isn’t Judge Reinhold off of Beverly Hills Cop wanking off in a toilet.

The 17-year-old Nicolas Coppola had auditioned for Brad, the Reinhold part, but instead got the thankfully wankfree consolation role of ‘Brad’s Bud’, a background character in a handful of scenes whose sole line is his description of Brad’s car as “The cruising vessel!”, which adds a whole level of presumably unintentional homoerotic subtext.

Coppola has said that his time on the film was fairly miserable — but it did influence his future in one important way. Certain cast-members, thinking they could smell a bit of nepotism in his casting, decided that it would be Top Banter to stand outside his trailer quoting lines from his Uncle Francis’ Vietnam War epic ‘Apocalypse Now’. (In fairness the cast also apparently ripped the piss out of Sean Penn for refusing to answer to anything but his character’s name.)

Now firmly convinced his family connections to the industry were going to hinder more than they helped, Nicolas Coppola decided it was time to become Nicolas Cage (taking the surname of Luke Cage, a Marvel Comics character who is probably getting a boring TV show on Netflix any day now [2020 note: He did! It was!]). But will Fast Times at Ridgemont High prove to be an early turning point in my quest to win the lottery?

THE NUMBERS

3 — The number of cast members who would go on to win the Oscar for Best Actor — Cage, Penn and Forest Whitaker.

4 — The nerd character is advised by his friend that Side One of Led Zeppelin IV is good making out music. The hard cut to him driving his date to a restaurant with “Kashmir” blasting out of the stereo was one of the few times I actually laughed whilst watching this.

8 — The number of hours of teacher Mr Hand’s time that has been wasted by Sean Penn. The world sympathises, Mr Hand.

19 — The age Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character pretends to be while she is seduced by a 26-year-old stereo salesman.

20 —Awful teenage ticket scalper Mike Damone tries to flog some Van Halen tickets for $20. Actually, in fairness to the fictional twat, he does have quite a good scarf. It looks like the keys of a piano.

33 — The number on the jacket of the school’s footballing hero Charles Jefferson (aforementioned Oscar winner Forrest Whitaker). He’s got my actual surname, that’s got to mean something.

THE RESULT

What a load of shit. Not a single number. A lesser man would start to wonder if watching Nicolas Cage films was actually a good way to win the lottery.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE

After changing his name so people would stop associating him with his uncle Francis Ford Coppola, Nicolas Cage accepts a role in Rumble Fish, the new film by his uncle Francis Ford Coppola.