Sean Penn Refused To Audition And Still Landed Fast Times At Ridgemont High
Amy Heckerling's 1982 film "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," written by Cameron Crowe, is a coming-of-age film that contains far more embarrassment and ambivalence about the teen experience than any expected notes of wistful nostalgia. The Ridgemont High students don't always make good decisions and find themselves stumbling toward sexual liberation and an adult sense of agency. They are trying to achieve some sense of dignity, which is difficult when your sexual encounters are mortifying and you have to wear stupid costumes to your minimum-wage job. They're not good kids or bad kids. They're complete people. It's the film's sense of emotional honesty that likely has it firmly ensconced in the pop consciousness. Its comedic moments are but icing on the cake.
"Fast Times" is set in California's San Fernando Valley, and the character played by Sean Penn, Jeff Spicoli, is a somewhat spaced-out, stoned surfer dude who has massive ambitions to win surfing contests and date multiple beach bunnies simultaneously. These ambitions are dismissed by Ridgemont High's cruel teachers, notably the stern Mr. Hand (Ray Walston) who gets into something of a rivalry with his student. When Spicoli attempts to disrupt class by ordering a pizza delivery in the middle of it, Mr. Hand logically argues that the pizza should go to the entire class. Spicoli is humiliated.
In 2020, Penn's charity, the Community Organized Relief Effort, or CORE, staged a charity table read of Crowe's script to raise money for the organization. Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Julia Roberts, Matthew McConaughey, Shia LaBeouf, Henry Golding, John Legend, Ray Liotta, Jimmy Kimmel, and Morgan Freeman participated. After the reading, Crowe and Heckerling appeared to talk about the making of the film, and how the part of Spicoli should perhaps have been some hapless nonprofessional off the beach.
Someone off the beach
As Cameron Crowe tells it, it was his idea to simply go to the local surfers and ask one of them to appear in the film, saying:
"We knew we needed someone to play this surfer-stoner character, but I always thought, 'Let's just get somebody off the beach,' y'know? Like somebody that would never get the joke, y'know, and just be that guy. But sure enough, we were casting the movie, and Amy was on her way up to the office where we were casting, and I was walking down the street here and this guy screams by in a Trans-Am. A blonde guy. Doesn't stop. I barely see the side of his face. He turns the corner and I'm like, 'Jesus! What a day, y'know?'"
As a savvy reader might guess, Amy Heckerling and Crowe were about to see that blonde guy again. Of course, that blonde guy was Sean Penn. At the time, Penn had only appeared on a few episodes of television, and in two films: "Taps," and the documentary anthology "The Beaver Kid 2." Despite a short filmography, Penn was stridently confident. Crowe said that shortly after convening at the office after the Trans-Am incident, Penn came in with less of an audition as an ultimatum.
"10 minutes later I'm sitting in the office, the guy walks in. Same blonde guy. [He] comes in, sits down, and says, 'I grew up with characters like this. I know how to play this guy.' We're like, 'Great, great. Show us.' [He said] 'No, you hire me and I'll show you what it's like but I'm not going to audition.'"
Penn did not grow up in the Valley, but he was born in Santa Monica, which is right by the beach.
The sheer force of his Sean-ness
At the time, Sean Penn had also been working on his 1983 film "Bad Boys," which hadn't been released yet. "Bad Boys," directed by Rick Rosenthal ("Halloween II") was a prison drama about hard life in juvenile hall in Chicago. According to Penn, that film was perhaps too intense for Crowe and Heckerling. Crowe recalls Penn's bluster, and how his staunch refusal to act in an audition scene or produce an audition reel made him strangely more appealing for the part of Spicoli. Crowe said:
"We're like, 'Well, we don't know you so maybe you should tell us if there's something we can see.' He said, 'Well, I was in this movie called 'Bad Boys' but you can't see it. It's not ready for you. Hire me and I'll show you.' Amy, I still don't know how we did this. We hired him without hearing a word. We didn't even hear him say, 'You d***.' He was like, 'I'll show it to you on the day.' Sure enough, he got that job on the sheer force of his Sean-ness."
"You d***," incidentally, is a notable line of dialogue from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."
After the film was released, Penn immediately became recognized as one of the more striking actors in his age group. Crowe would go on to write and direct other notable young-people-struggling movies like "Say Anything..." and "Singles," and Heckerling would go on to make enormous hit comedies like "National Lampoon's European Vacation," "Johnny Dangerously," two "Look Who's Talking" movies, and "Clueless."
Looking over the roster of actors who also worked on "Fast Times," one can see the flashpoint for a new wave of young talent.