/ 8 January 1999

The future is female

Emma Forrest

First Person

Among the strangest remakes in recent years is Cruel Intentions, a teen reworking of Dangerous Liaisons. Just what the world needs: a just-17 version of one of the great pieces of Western literature. It seems like a pathetic concept, the point being that you simply don’t play those sort of cynical, manipulative games until you have some mileage on you. But Cruel Intentions is reckoned, by Hollywood insiders, to be one of the new year’s surefire successes.

If the film industry learned anything in 1998, it’s that while giant lizards are no guarantee of big box office, cram a medium-budget film with a cast of unknown adolescents and you have a hit. The studios have realised the term “box- office clout” is a misnomer. No, the best way to see profit is to cast female television starlets.

Scream featured Neve Campbell from the TV series Party of Five; I Know What You Did Last Summer starred her Party of Five co-star, Jennifer Love- Hewitt. Cruel Intentions stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, teen heroine of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I Know What You Did Last Summer raked in a surprise $72-million at the box office and held the number one spot for three weeks. Scream made more than $100-million.

Campbell’s other horror venture, The Craft, spawned the hit Aaron Spelling series, Charmed. Coming in the new year are the next instalments of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, as well as Killing Mrs Tingle, the directorial debut of Scream creator Kevin Williamson.

There was a time when the motor of the United States film industry was boys aged 16 to 30. Scream and Titanic changed all that. Half of all US women under the age of 25 have seen Titanic twice and teenagers now account for 27% of all movie tickets sold at adult ticket prices in the US. After years of targeting adolescent males, Hollywood has reacquainted itself with the young, female audience.

Despite what the emotional bullies might tell you, Titanic was the trite piece of fluff that happened to have the right star at the right time. Scream was a masterpiece of good dialogue, good direction and good intentions.

Wes Craven seems to instinctively understand young women. From the time he helmed the Nightmare on Elm Street films, they have always been his heroines. Teenage boys drop like flies, but the girls are suburban goddesses.

With the rise of feminism and the increasing economic power of women, it became politically correct to depict women as strong. So men like Craven and Joss Wheedon, creator of Buffy, can safely indulge the male fantasy of the dominatrix and combine it with the Lolita fixation.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the great television shows of all time. Using the supernatural as an allegory for the inner emotional turmoil of the adolescent female, Buffy’s high school is, literally, a gateway to hell. Luscious, pouting Gellar kickboxes and wisecracks her way through each episode.

At the moment, all the excitement in US pop culture is being generated by young women. Teen People, an offshoot of People magazine, is the magazine sensation of the year.

A source at Teen People explains: “At other times when there’s been a huge adolescent audience, it’s been for one thing: pop or cinema or television. Right now all three things are very strong. A lot of the stars are big in the three different media.”

Hugely popular with young women, 22- year-old singer-songwriter Jewel makes her film debut next year, and her heroically bad poetry has sold more than a million copies.

Aware the future is female, the major US publishing houses are scouting for the literary version of the Buffy effect. Michael Lynton, head of Penguin Books, says: “At the moment, we are the only part of the media yet to be affected, but the minute we have a breakout hit, all of that will change. We have all these figures telling us teenage girls think it’s cool to read and what we’re hoping is someone is going to do for the teen market what Bridget Jones did for 30- something women.”

It has taken the teenager 40 years to reach full power. In the process, they have evolved from the miniature adult of the Fifties. In 1957’s Peyton Place, all the teenagers were 30 and if they had a genuinely young talent, like Judy Garland, they’d strap her breasts down and have her playing a 12-year-old.

Young women of the Nineties are so strong that Hollywood simply can’t behave the way they did to Garland.

The real pity is to ponder which great, lost actresses would have a production deal with Miramax if they were making it today. Tatum O’Neal deserved the kind of career that only Jodie Foster was able to forge. Tuesday Weld was so sexy that, as a Fifties starlet, she could only ever be cult.

It is ironic that the time is finally right for teenage girls, because the US has such an inbred terror of young women. From Amy Fisher to Monica Lewinsky, the perception is that the uncontrollable sexuality of female youth can bring down the walls of Jericho.

But it is the economic swing in favour of young women that gives them their cultural power. While they have long left their male counterparts behind educationally, they are now getting their chance in the workplace too.