Adaptations

5

FROM EMMA TO CLUELESS

Taste, pleasure and the scene of history

Esther Sonnet

 

In 1995, Clueless — Amy Heckerling's high school/shopping mall movie — was a box office and video rental ‘sleeper’ hit, making $54 million for Paramount and later providing the ‘original’ source for an ABC TV spin-off sitcom series more specifically targeted at a teen audience.¹ Pocket Books and Paramount Pictures capitalized on the tremendous success of the film with a book version, written by H.B. Gilmour, author of Clarissa Explains It All: Boys, Ask Me if I Care, as well as the novelization of Pretty in Pink (dir.: John Hughes, 1985) and fifteen other teen fictions. As a portrait of contemporary youth culture, Clueless has its literary and filmic antecedents ...