#4: Valley Girl (1983)

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

A few hundred years ago, a bloke named William Shakespeare wrote a play called Romeo and Juliet about a man and lady from slightly different backgrounds who want to have a kiss. It does not end well at all! This play is of no use to me because it doesn’t have Nicolas Cage in. Nicolas Cage isn’t even in any of the films of it, not even the one by that Australian bloke where it’s sort of modern day so teenagers from the ’90s can relate to it.

What does have Nicolas Cage in it is Valley Girl, a romantic comedy that is supposedly based on Romeo and Juliet, but that isn’t actually based on Romeo and Juliet very much at all. Alright, the main characters are called Randy and Julie — she’s from the valley, he’s from the city. Their friends disapprove of their relationship. And there are a few fights in it. But it certainly doesn’t have what would have been the most miserable ending in ’80s teen comedy canon.

This is the first time Nicolas Cage was actually cast as ‘unknown actor Nicolas Cage’, rather than ‘ Nicolas Coppola, nephew of famous director Francis Ford Coppola’, although the family connection continued to pay off. The story goes that director Martha Coolidge had struggled to find a leading man, eventually in exasperation saying something along the lines of “Stop bringing me these pretty-boys, I want someone who looks like this bloody weirdo,” while holding up a headshot of Cage which just happened to have come to hand.

Cage then immediately turned it down because he’d just accepted a role in his uncle’s film, Rumble Fish (for which see previous instalment). Coolidge was determined to have him, and thought she could work some scheduling magic by pulling in a favour from Francis Coppola – she’d worked for his production company earlier in her career. The resulting phone call was somewhat awkward, as Coolidge didn’t know Nic Cage was Nic Coppola, and at the time no-one working on Rumble Fish knew that Nic Coppola was Nic Cage. With hilarious consequences, I expect!

If you want to overanalyse the plot of Valley Girl like one of those films they overanalyse on the internet nowadays, the romantic arc is, on the face of it, a little creepy. Our male lead gatecrashes a party, is kicked out after having a fight, before gatecrashing the party again to hides in the bathroom for hours until a girl he fancies comes in. He then takes her on their first date and his seduction technique is telling her how much he hates people like her. Despite this, they start going out.

When she ends up breaking up with him, he stalks her everywhere she goes to the point of pretending to be an employee of various businesses, finally turning up at her high school prom and punching her boyfriend in the face. Which is okay, because she’s apparently really into that so they live happily ever after.

Which, on that reading, doesn’t sound great. But watching it, it all kind of works. Despite there being almost no screen time dedicated to explaining why these people might be in love, or even like each other — most of their relationship is told in montage — it’s all just about carried by the leads, who are very believably into each other. Partly because Cage and co-star Deborah Foreman are using the classic actors’ trick of “falling in love in real life while making the film”.

And in the first couple of post-dumping scenes, where Randy inexplicably turns out to be Julie’s cinema usher, and then her waiter at a fast food place, there are the first seeds of the unlikely performance style best described as ‘Full Cage’. He becomes a strange, otherworldly force, apparating into existence at unlikely moments to grin wildly at utter things like, “Oh, well, Peter Piper picked a pepper, I guess I did!” before disappearing again — to Julie’s amusement before he starts sleeping outside her bedroom window, which apparently isn’t as charming.

Now, let’s emphasise, weird men, that very few of you are fictional characters played by Nicolas Cage, so probably don’t take any of this as a lesson in how to win back your girlfriend when she dumps you.

Given that this reasonably perfunctory love story leaves a quite a bit of extra time to fill, there are a couple of minor sub-plots to pad things out. Julie’s “children of the ’60s” parents, worrying that she’s not having enough fun and trying to surreptitiously smoke the wacky baccy behind her pack, are while not roaringly funny, are at least enjoyably unusual teen movie parents. And a sub-plot about a love triangle between a teenage girl, the boy she fancies and her step-mother is resolved in a way that happily fails to prefigure “Stiffler’s mom”-style unpleasantness.

It’s probably far enough that Valley Girl hasn’t really been remembered as a classic of it’s genre, but it’s likeable enough as minor works go. And for something shot extremely quickly and on a relative shoestring, the film did alright — it made almost 30 times the original budget back at the box office. I have so far invested £8 into playing the National Lottery. Will I win back 30 times that amount?

THE NUMBERS

3 — At the cinema Randy’s love rival asks him, “Oh bitching, is this in 3D?” Randy, who’s pretending to be an usher, spits back, “No, but your face is.” Insults that almost sound like they aren’t non-sequiturs, but definitely are, are the best.

6 — The number of “grody” bus rides Julie will take to Hollywood to see Randy before deciding to ditch him, according to her awful mates.

8 — The number of boobs seen in this film. Director Martha Coolidge was contracted to include 4 topless scenes by the producers, who believed that was the only way that Valley Girl would possibly make any money. One pair of breasts on show belong to an actress later best known for voice work, which means I have seen the breasts of the baby from Rugrats and Babe from Babe: Pig In The City. Bazinga!

14 — The age of Julie’s hippy dad’s weird sandals. He bought them to go to Woodstock.

27 — The party where Julie and Randy first meet is at held at 23727 Sierra Vista. Apparently 5-digit house numbers do in fact make some logical sense to Americans.

42 — Around 42% of the film’s $600,000 budget was spent on licensing minor pop hits of the time (although notably the credits include tracks by the Clash, the Jam and Bananarama that don’t appear because the producers couldn’t make an affordable deal in time for release).

THE RESULT

Well, I wrote this while taking a break from filling in an even more depressing than normal tax return, so I was really hoping for better news. Not great, but 2 numbers like last time, so I’ve won another free Lucky Dip — although, as you can see above, the last one didn’t win me anything, as you’d expect from numbers that aren’t even from a film with Nicolas Cage in it.

Still, if this increasing rate of success comes up I’ll be hitting all 6 numbers within a few weeks! That is definitely how probability works!

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Racing With The Moon, the first Nic Cage film to have been released within my lifetime. I HOPE HE GOES TO THE MOON IN IT!