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She's made some of your favorite movies.
By Amy Lamare — Written on May 31, 2019
Former Saturday Night Live cast member Chris Kattan has released a memoir and in it he claims that during the filming of Night At The Roxbury Lorne Michaels coerced him into having sex with Amy Heckerling, so that she would direct the movie. Who is Amy Heckerling? Well, she's the director of a number of films including Fast Times At Ridgemont High, National Lampoon's European Vacation and Clueless. Oh, and she also wrote Clueless. She is a national treasure and Chris Kattan is... best known for playing a monkey on SNL. As If! Kattan is definitely not Fetch. Who is Amy Heckerling? Let's look at her awesome life and career.
1. Early years
Amy Heckerling was born on May 7, 1954 in the Bronx. Her mother was a bookkeeper and her father was an accountant (and later CPA). She's Jewish and grew up in an apartment building that was full of Holocaust survivors. Heckerling said: "Most of them had tattoos on their arms and for me there was a feeling that all of these people had a story to tell. These were interesting formative experiences." She attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. On her first day of high school Heckerling realized she wanted to be a film director. She graduated in 1970 and enrolled at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts to study film and directing. After graduating from NYU Heckerling and her friend Martin Brest moved to Los Angeles to attend the American Film Institute for her MFA as she felt LA would give her more opportunities to break into the entertainment industry.
2. Fast Times At Ridgemont High
Amy Heckerling's first feature film was Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Wow. What a way to open a career! The film was based on Cameron Crowe's year undercover at a California high school for Rolling Stone. The film launched the careers of a number of actors and actresses including Phoebe Cates, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Judge Reinhold. It also featured early appearances by a few actors who would go on to become huge stars inclding Nicholas Cage (who went by his real name, Nicholas Coppola then), Sean Penn, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards and Forest Whitaker. It was his role as Jeff Spicoli that made Sean Penn a superstar. After Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Heckerling directed a number of comedies in the 1980s and 1990s including Johnny Dangerously, National Lampoon's European Vacation, Look Who's Talking and Look Who's Talking Too.
3. Clueless
In 1995 Heckerling wrote and directed Clueless — a reworking of Jane Austen's Emma set in a high school in Beverly Hills. To research for the script, she sat in on classes at Beverly Hills High School and observed how teenagers acted. The film became a huge hit and launched the career of most of the cast including Alicia Silverstone, Paul Rudd, Donald Faison, Brittany Murphy, Breckin Meyer and Stacey Dash.
4. What is Chris Kattan claiming?
In his new memoir Baby Don't Hurt Me, Chris Kattan claims that Lorne Michael, SNL's legendary producer, encouraged him to have sex with Amy Heckerling so that she would stay attached as director of the film A Night at the Roxbury. Kattan wrote that he gave into that demand, though at the time he was dating actresss Jennifer Coolidge and his sexual relationship with Heckerling damaged that relationship. He claims that Heckerling put the moves on him first and he rebuffed them but then Michaels called him and was furious, saying that she might back out of the project. Kattan did say the one time he had sex with Heckerling was consensual, but also that he was "afraid" of the power Lorne Michaels and Amy Heckerling had over him. In the end, Heckerling did not direct the movie. She remained on the project as a producer, however.
5. Amy's daughter speaks out
Amy Heckerling is fiercely private about her life and has not yet responded to the explosive claims in Kattan's memoir. However, her daughter Mollie has. She said her mother is an "extraordinarily private person" and didn't want to comment on the situation as she felt that would just add fuel to the fire, according to a statement given to New York Magazine. Mollie took to Twitter to clear things up. She said that her mom and Chris Kattan did have an affair, but only once filming for the 1998 comedy was already in progress. She "saw no evidence of the mother seeing of even talking to" Kattan until then.
She also denied that Lorne Michaels had pressured then 27-year-old Kattan into sleeping with then 43-year-old Heckerling. In fact, she claims Michaels so disapproved of the relationship that he made rude comments that negatively impacted her mother's health. “Chris told her that when he informed Lorne Michaels that they were seeing each other, Lorne said, ‘What do you want to date her for? She’s so old,'” Heckerling’s daughter wrote. “My mom spiraled into a massive eating disorder while dating Chris because she was insecure about their age difference, and then Chris ultimately went and cheated on her with Elisa Donovan who played Amber in Clueless and also had a role in A Night at the Roxbury.”