Best Magazine Reads: 10 Great Nuggets About Heathers

Heathers is one of my all-time favorite movies. I didn’t include it in my recent 60 Funniest Movies Ever, but it would no doubt be #1 in a similar list of dark comedies. It was released in 1989 to slim audiences but built a huge following through home release.

And the cult still grows. Here are the 10 most interesting nuggets from Entertainment Weekly’s recent oral history entitled The Original Mean Girls.

1. Winona Ryder, whether or not she would have played protagonist Veronica Sawyer, absolutely loves Heathers. She said she’s seen it probably 50 times and can recite every line. She calls it “great literature.”
2. The original ending was that Christian Slater’s J.D. would blow up the school and there would have been a prom with all the students in heaven. Studio execs wouldn’t allow it.
3. A “pimply-faced” Brad Pitt auditioned and was not cast, but he told the writer his script was brilliant.
4. Jennifer Connelly and Justine Bateman both rejected the role of Veronica, even though they were the choices ahead of Ryder.
5. The crew had to retrieve Slater a couple of times because he overslept during filming. He told them he had a sleep disorder.
6. Slater says Shannen Doherty didn’t seem to have any interest in him during filming, so he just stayed away from her.
7. Ryder says she was a virgin during the time the movie was filming.
8. With her conservative upbringing, Doherty had some problems with the acidic language and swearing. Ryder grants her that she had just, after all, come off her role on the 100 percent innocent Little House on the Prairie.
9. After asking “did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?” in the movie, Kim Walker, who played lead Heather Heather Chandler, died of brain cancer at age 32 in 2001.
10. The new TV network Fox was starting up and execs there chose between two scripts – a Heathers TV show or Beverly Hills High. We all know what they choose, and what they renamed it.