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’’Fast Times at Ridgemont High cover
Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a 1982 American teen film directed by Amy Heckerling and written by Cameron Crowe (who wrote both the screenplay and a book of the same name which inspired the movie).
The story is loosely inspired by Cameron Crowe's time at a Southern California public high school when, in his early 20s, he spent a year pretending to be a high-school student - and then wrote a book called Fast Times at Ridgemont High about his experiences in the high school and the students he befriended there.
Freshman students Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Mark Ratner (Brian Backer) are both looking for love, and they are helped along by their older classmates, Linda Barrett (Phoebe Cates) and Mike Damone (Robert Romanus), respectively. Another character in the film is Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn in an early film role and one for which he is still often remembered), a perpetually stoned surfer dude who faces off with history teacher Mr. Hand (Ray Walston), who is convinced that all the students are on "dope."
The film is most memorable to some for the nude scene by Phoebe Cates, in which she emerges from a swimming pool topless as Judge Reinhold, who plays Stacy Hamilton's brother Brad, masturbates to the sight until Cates walks in on him.
Although it is never explicitly mentioned as such in the film, Fast Times was filmed in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles and many people identify the film with that area and the teen culture that existed there, or was perceived to exist there, in the early 1980s. "Ridgemont" is a fictional name, however; there is no California community by that name.
The movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High inspired a short-lived 1986 television series called Fast Times.
