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.

Mind Bending Among the High-School Cheerleaders

Being a reader of lots of classics and most recently a somber tale of laborious life in North Korea, it's necessary to break it up with some good old-fashioned trash every once in a while.

Dare Me by Megan Abbott is actually relatively high-minded writing and in many ways a psychological tour de force. Because it's billed as "Lord of the Flies cheerleader-style," it also qualifies as a trashy novel about high-school life.

The common-sense-stoked person in the video above describes the story well. I particularly like how she notes that Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl-fame recommends the book and that fans of the classic 80s movie "The Heathers" (ha) will approve.

I'll contribute: Addy and Beth are leaders of the cheerleading squad and their BFF status comes under pressure when Beth becomes jealous of Addy's relationship with their young new coach named Colette. A very bad thing happens (actually, lots of bad things happen, soccer and tennis were never this interesting) that nearly unravels the team and certainly unravels the ties between Addy and Beth. The tables get turned again and again and Abbott (pictured) does a good job of keeping the reader on edge, uncomfortable, and in suspense of what will happen next throughout the nearly 300 pages of the novel.

There is a lot of cheerleading lingo and action that could be trimmed from the story, although Abbott is clearly using it to metaphorical effect and to describe the shifting mindset of the squad girls over the course of the novel. I'm not sure if this book would have been as brilliant without that lingo, but either way, this one is a keeper that will be tough to beat for "best cheerleader book, like, evah."

On a rating, I agree with the reviewer above: **** out of ***** stars