Check Book: Backstage Check

Another Live Show in the Books!

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IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

Friends - I’m exhausted. Let’s just say I spent most of this past Saturday in bed, save for a three hour window in which I went to see The Phoenician Scheme (good movie!). Live shows really take it out of you! I don’t know how newly-minted Tony Winner Nicole Scherzinger does 8 a week!

The fun really started on Thursday night, as we had our first ever all-team gathering at Han Dynasty in Brooklyn. JJ came in from Madison. AJ came in from Austin. David in from his full house of small children. We all (well, all of us who drink) ordered the “Da Nasty Frozen Punch,” which was NOT nasty and was unfortunately TOO good (I had three). David ordered a feast of Chinese food for the table via a very thorough and organized notes app list. Griffin - whose love language is giving gifts - gave JJ an ET Reese’s Pieces tube from 2002 that no longer seemed edible. It was truly beautiful to have everyone together under one roof.

Multiple people responded to this photo on IG with “is that his severance??”

On Friday, we arrived at Town Hall hours ahead of showtime to set the stage. Our Live Events Manager Paul Sabourin (an icon in his own right) had arranged with Town Hall a gigantic rental order of gold props for our “throne room.” Just imagine Ben Hosley on stage assembling candelabras for two hours. Pretty amusing. We were going to rent actual thrones, but we ended up ordering these silly cardboard throne chairs that felt like Bar Mitzvah props. I feel like that was the correct decision for us. We shouldn’t take ourselves TOO seriously.

Setting the scene

Microplastic wine goblet / “You chose pooooorly”

Speaking of seriousness, I do want to call attention to our costumes for the event. Ben had custom King Ralph “Las Vegas” shirts made for everyone (although David was the only one to wear it on stage). I scoured the internet for the best “old lady church clothes” outfit I could find that would approximate the Queen’s classic pastel wardrobe. Ben spent a good amount of time ironing on patches to his custom Congratyoulations Packers-colored varsity jacket. And Griffin’s regal (unlimited) costume was festooned with all kinds of insignia.

Viva LV, Baby!

Some pre-show “drama” - we were so worried that our live rendition of “Pod Save The Cast” would go awry, as our first practice of it was a trainwreck. It ended up being fine. We also weren’t sure of when exactly to fire JJ within the run of show, because we truly could have fired him at any time. I think we landed on the right moment.

All that being said - King Ralph Live on Friday was a fabulous time. Our VOD experience will go on sale this Thursday (6/12) for a streaming premiere on Thursday, June 26th. Griffin will be live-chatting with viewers for the initial 8:00PM screening, and then it’ll be available for rewatch through the end of August. Look for the link on our social channels and website!

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

• While it was Aerosmith—or the project’s initial casting director Carrie Frazier, if you ask initial casting director Carrie Frazier—who first put Alicia Silverstone on Clueless writer/director Amy Heckerling’s radar, it was a small behavioral trait that really convinced Heckerling that the young Silverstone was the right person to play Cher Horowitz. During an early meeting at a “little café in Beverly Hills,” Silverstone recalled that her future writer/director was “really taken with the fact that I was drinking a drink with a straw and I wouldn’t bring the drink up to me. … She loved that for some reason.”¹ In writer Jen Chaney’s comprehensive 2015 oral history of the production of Clueless—As If!—Heckerling’s longtime star/creative partner Twink Caplan laid out the reason: “[Y]ou know when you’re older, how you bring the glass to you, and when you’re younger you bend down to where the straw and the glass are? That was like this little moment where Amy thought, Oh my God, is this kid the part? Alicia just, she really did have a—she still does—she’s got this purity of spirit, you know?”² It’s that eye for behavior, I think, that distinguishes Heckerling’s best films from, well, all of the other ones.

• According to Heckerling, the most difficult role to cast was Josh. While writing the screenplay, she had the Beastie Boy/future star of Alex Ross Perry’s 2017 film Golden Exits Adam Horovitz as a model for the character, but none of the actors who auditioned for the role—including, famously, Ben Affleck—quite had the combination of humor and intelligence for which she was looking. Enter Paul Rudd. Though Rudd was interested in a number of parts—including Elton, Christian, and Murray, the last of whom Rudd had mistakenly read as a white guy who was really into rap music—Heckerling encouraged him to audition for Josh. Though she and Caplan quickly eyed Rudd as an early favorite for the role, the search for the absolute best possible Josh nonetheless continued. Rudd—who had only acted in one film (Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers) at that point—erroneously believed that he had not landed the role in Clueless, and, in a brash decision, decided to radically alter his look. As he told Chaney, “I cut my hair for the sake of cutting my hair. I remember really vividly where I was, just kind of walking down the street, and I was like, ‘Man. I don’t know. Why don’t I just cut off all my hair?’ And I just walked into a barber shop and they just buzzed my head.” When Rudd and Heckerling bumped into each other at a restaurant a week later, Heckerling was horrified: “I went, ‘What the fuck did you do?’ He said, ‘I didn’t think I had the part.’ I said, ‘Oh my God, hardly any time went by, I didn’t finish seeing everybody. Yeah, I want you. You cut your hair?’ I knew I wanted him and we hadn’t finished seeing the people we were going to be seeing. And in that time, he assumed that it was over.”³ Thankfully, Rudd’s glorious head of hair—pictures of which (though not from Clueless) I have used as a model for my own hair at barber shops in the past lol—was restored by the time the film began shooting.

• Though Clueless’s biggest inspirations are well-trodden territory—like Anita Loos’s 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and, of course, Jane Austen’s timeless 1816 novel Emma—one somewhat unlikely creative influence on the film was Ed Wood, both the historical figure and the 1994 Tim Burton movie that bore his name. As Heckerling told Hillary Weston in 2016, Wood served as a real-life example of the kind of happy bubble in which Cher lived: “[T]he idea that he went out and did all this creative stuff, and he stunk, but it didn’t occur to him that it wasn’t good, because he was enjoying it so much. And who says that he’s wrong and other people are right? We all live in our own heads, and if I go out and go, ‘Gee, I look great today,’ who’s to say I don’t? I have the choice. I can see things one way or another. So I said, ‘What if you just went around seeing things the other way?’”⁴ But Heckerling wasn’t the only one influenced by Ed Wood; according to cinematographer Bill Pope, the film’s producer Barry Berg consistently cited Wood/Wood as the impetus for keeping Clueless’s budget as low as possible: “When I first went to meet Barry Berg, in his office, on a pedestal, was a television set playing on a loop the movie Ed Wood. I’d say, ‘Can I have some more money to do this?’ And he’d say: ‘How would Ed Wood do this?’ That was his token response. I’d say: ‘You mean no, right?’ He’d say: ‘Yes. No is my answer. You don’t get any more money for this. You can’t have a crane, you can’t have this. Just don’t ask.’ How would Ed Wood do it? [Laughs] That was always what his response was.”⁵

• Though the cast and crew had to fight through exhaustion-related illnesses and terrible weather to eventually wrap on Clueless, the film was mostly free of any interventions from studio executives. In fact, when Paramount chairwoman Sherry Lansing finally saw the film, she immediately took to it: “I laughed my head off through the whole thing. I probably had no notes. I said, ‘I love it, I love it.’ So I thought everyone else would, too.” Heckerling, however, claims that, while Lansing did truly embrace the film, she also had just one very funny note for her: “[In the original cut,] Alicia is looking all daydreamy and she says, ‘Looking for love in high school is like looking for meaning in a Chevy Chase movie.’ And Sherry Lansing was like, ‘Oh, no, he’s a nice guy. I see him socially at some charity things and stuff. So can we change that from Chevy to somebody else?’ So I put in Pauly Shore and it didn’t seem to hurt anything. I mean, maybe it hurt Pauly Shore’s feelings, which I’m sorry for. . . . That was the only note I got.”⁶ Though Heckerling agreed to Lansing’s note, I’m pretty sure she did not agree with Lansing’s characterization of her European Vacation star. (Also, if it’s not clear by now, go grab Jen’s book if you want many more stories like this!!)

• In the years since Clueless’s release—and since the 1999 series finale of the television series of the same name—a number of spin-offs and revivals have been mounted—or, more routinely, attempted to be mounted. In 2017, Boom! Box published a graphic novel follow-up titled Clueless: Senior Year. Another graphic novel—Clueless: One Last Summer—followed the next year; you can read a preview of it at The Hollywood Reporter. In 2018, Paramount announced that Glow writer Marquita Robinson had been hired to write a Clueless remake set to be produced by Girls Trip writer Tracy Oliver.⁷ A year later, however, the Reporter divulged that CBS TV was instead looking to launch a “mystery” show set in the world of Clueless from from writers Jordan Reddout and Gus Hickey. The plot, according to THR, “would center on Dionne (played by Stacey Dash in both previous iterations), Cher’s best friend and lifelong right-hand woman. When Cher disappears, Dionne must take on the pressures of being the new most popular girl in school while also unraveling the mystery of what happened to her friend.”⁸ In 2020, the project moved over to Peacock, which released this cursed description of the show in a statement to THR: “[The series is] a baby pink and bisexual blue-tinted, tiny sunglasses-wearing, oat milk latte and Adderall-fueled look at what happens when queen bee Cher disappears and her lifelong No. 2 Dionne steps into Cher’s vacant Air Jordans. How does Dionne deal with the pressures of being the new most popular girl in school, while also unraveling the mystery of what happened to her best friend?”⁹ In May 2021, though, the Reporter revealed that Peacock had ultimately passed on the project, though CBS was still looking to redevelop it elsewhere.¹⁰ And just one day after SNL’s Heidi Gardner was in studio to record this week’s episode, Deadline broke the news that Peacock was taking a second stab at a Clueless television project, this time with original star Alicia Silverstone back in the fold. The plot for the new series—which will be written and produced by the trio of The O.C./Gossip Girl’s Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage and Dollface’s Jordan Weiss—has yet to be unveiled.¹¹

• But perhaps the most notable follow-up Clueless project has been its musical adaptation, which is the only one of these follow-ups that’s featured Heckerling in a principal creative position. Heckerling first attempted to adapt her signature movie into a musical with the producers Barry and Fran Weissler, who had successfully revived Chicago in 1996. Though the Weisslers had claimed that they wanted Heckerling to be a part of the production, her only real involvement came during readings of the workshopped version of the show, and once it became clear that she and the Weisslers had different visions for the adaptation, that iteration of the show ended. (The Weisslers apparently wanted the show to be told through the eyes of the story’s less privileged characters, but Heckerling felt that detracted from the fantasy allure at the center of the story.) Once the Weisslers’ option passed, Heckerling teamed up with one of the Dodgers, the producers of shows like Jersey Boys and Matilda. The director (Kristin Hanggi) and choreographer (Kelly Devine) from Rock of Ages were brought in to oversee a jukebox musical adaptation of Clueless, with a book from Heckerling herself, which flipped songs like “Torn” and “Kids in America” into plot delivery vehicles. With help from The New Group, the play premiered off-Broadway at The Pershing Square Signature Center on November 20, 2018, and ran until January 12, 2019.¹² This version of the show received mixed reviews, with Variety writing that “its lightweight narrative keeps it at the enjoyable-fluff level, even if its two-hour-plus length wears out its welcome just a tad, and the once-freshness of its comedy of ‘90s modes and manners is lessened by what have since become stereotypes.”¹³ The show was relaunched in February 2024 at the Bromley Theater in London, before making its debut on the West End in February 2025. This new iteration dropped the jukebox musical angle and instead featured original music from KT Turnstall and lyrics from Glenn Slater. Though The Guardian’s 2-star review spotlighted the cast’s “strong” performances, it also claimed that their characters were “peculiarly flat” and their songs were, aside from “two belters accompanied by comically energised choreography,” “disappointingly flat-footed.”¹⁴

• And here’s a fun little note to end on: over the course of its life, Clueless carried a number of different titles. When the project was initially in development as a television show for Fox, it was called No Worries. Once it became a film, Clueless first bore the funny but cumbersome title I Was A Teenage Teenager. Then it became Clueless in California before, I assume, Sean Parker stepped in and encouraged Heckerling to drop the “in California”—just Clueless, it’s cleaner.¹⁵

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

David Sims, Host: “I recommend playing Wind Waker on the Switch 2 because why would I want to play a new modern fancy game when I could play something that was released when I was a teenager?? I also kind recommend the last hour of Ballerina. Just show up ~80 mins after your showtime began”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “I saw the new restoration of the 1996 Japanese film Shall We Dance yesterday - had no idea the Richard Gere / JLo movie was a foreign remake! Incredibly delightful. I want to start a new hobby.”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “I’ll recommend this series of books I found for Hayes while walking around Forbidden Planet. It’s called Make yourself a…. They are illustrated activity books for kids of all ages—think MadLibs meets Bob Ross meets Dungeons and Dragons, written and illustrated by artist Nicholas Forker. The basic mechanic is simple: using a random number generator—preferably a D20 die—you roll a number on each page to get a different character trait. After ten pages of prompts, you have a unique character. You can create and draw as many characters as you'd like, and stories, villains etc.””

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “I recommend flying to New York City and meeting your co-workers of four-plus years for the first time and discovering that they are as lovely and kind and funny and smart and beautiful as you ever hoped they could be.”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “All the things I can think to recommend make me feel a little bit like a douchebag, but fuck it, here goes. Infinite Jest is, in my estimation, a very good book. But it is so very, really, extremely, really, really long that it would make total sense that you’d never actually sit down and read it. So, I recommend the podcast Infinite Cast, which is a show in which Molly O’Brien reads Infinite Jest out loud to her husband, Chris Wade. Episodes are usually like 30-40 minutes long, Chris and Molly are smart and funny (their podcast And Introducing is also very good). And they finished the book like a year ago, so you can… binge it? If that’s the right word… It’s a good way to get into the book. So… double recommend, I guess?”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

SNL’s Heidi Gardner joins us to figure out if two friends do equal a podcast as we discuss Amy Heckerling’s masterpiece Clueless.

And over on Patreon, we’re trudging through the Superman series. Behold - Superman III:

COMING SOON:

1. Entertainment Weekly, October 5, 2012.

2. Jen Chaney, As If!: The Oral History of Clueless as told by Amy Heckerling and the Cast and Crew, 35.

3. Jen Chaney, As If!, 42-46.

4. Criterion, May 12, 2016.

5. Jen Chaney, As If!, 75.

6. Jen Chaney, As If!, 214.

7. The Hollywood Reporter, October 25, 2018.

8. The Hollywood Reporter, October 17, 2019.

9. The Hollywood Reporter, August 14, 2020.

10. The Hollywood Reporter, May 14, 2021.

11. Deadline, April 17, 2025.

12. New York Times, December 5, 2018.

13. Variety, December 11, 2018.

14. The Guardian, March 13, 2025.

15. Entertainment Weekly, October 5, 2012.