MovieChat Forums > Adventureland (2009) Discussion > Elizabeth Wurtzel is the Same Age as Em

Elizabeth Wurtzel is the Same Age as Em

posted 12 years ago by dramaclub01
6 replies | jump to latest

Elizabeth Wurtzel, best known for writing Prozac Nation, entered Harvard in the fall of 1985. If she started college in 1985, she's the same age as Em, who in the summer of 1987 stated that she was about to go into her junior year at Columbia. They would both be the class of 1989.

Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote an award-winning Rolling Stone article about Lou Reed in 1985. So if someone who is real and the exact same-age as Em would be is aware of who Lou Reed was, why can't a fictional character who goes to school in the largest metropolitan area be?

The harping on the Lou Reed thing is ridiculous. I thought it was pretty obvious in that last scene with Mike Connell that the teenaged girls weren't impressed with him because he jammed with Lou Reed, but because Connell was hot. The girls didn't even know the right song title. I bet they had no clue who Lou Reed was, but pretended to because it kept a hot guy talking to them.

I mean, I could see the bitching if if were 80's pop queen teen Lisa P who was worshipping Lou(she strikes me more as a Jon Bon Jovi girl), but James and Em are both supposed to be quirky college students. That kind tend to frown on typical Top 40 stuff.

[–] axp64 12 years ago

Yes of course they'd know who Lou Reed is. They grew up with "Walk On The Wild Side" playing on the radio. It reached #16 on the charts in early 1973, when James was about 8 or 9 years old. He'd have to have been living under a rock not to have heard that song. This is around the same time you had such hits as "Stuck In The Middle With You" (Stealers Wheel), "Daniel" (Elton John), "Frankenstein" (Edgar Winter Group), "Little Willy" (The Sweet), "You Are The Sunshine of My Life" (Stevie Wonder).

"Walk On The Wild Side" was still getting air play when I was in college, from 1984 to 1988 (which puts me right between James and Em). I know because I heard it coming from my fellow students' stereos, along with all those other aforementioned songs. In fact, a lot of the music we listened to was from even earlier than that: The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Supremes, Jefferson Airplane, The Moody Blues, The Who, The Doors, Cream, Yes, Led Zeppelin, etc.

While a lot of people seem to assume that young people never know/like anything from before their middle school years (this is a hotly discussed topic over on the Juno board as well), the truth is that my classmates and I listened to all kinds of music from the 60s, 70s and the then-current 80s.

Also, Lou Reed was still releasing new material in the 80s. "New Sensations" came out in 1984 and was eighth out of the ten most frequently borrowed items from my college radio station's DJ music library Fall Term 1984.

I think the reason for Mike using Lou Reed in his fake story is that he needed somebody famous but not TOO famous. If he'd said he jammed with, say, Eddie Van Halen, people might simply not believe him, or they'd believe him until some hardcore fan would notice some little detail of his story that was off.

And I wouldn't call James and Em particularly quirky in terms of fashion or music. In fact, I'd almost call them prime examples of the elite liberal arts college student trope.

[–] acb132 12 years ago

If by elite liberal arts college you mean, say, Oberlin then maybe so. But if you mean like what it was like at the vast majority of elite liberal arts colleges or private universities in the late 80s then I'd have to say hells no. I visited a bunch in '87 and '88 and the only one of the bunch where James and Em would've been remotely mainstream was Oberlin (cool school, but definitely rocking a different style than most other schools of the day including, for sure, most of the elite New England colleges and universities). OK, granted, I guess James was already out of college by Spring '87 but Em was still in college and the cheerleaders seemed to be in HS.

(James, between going to Oberlin and having already graduated from college by '87, made sense but I didn't think it made so much sense how they then made it seem like he'd have been mainstream for any school and even for kids still in college or HS and how Lisa P was almost made to seem to be the style outsider; not to mention ALL of the cars were old, no CDs? no walkman? nothing but record players etc. etc.)

Sure people listened to some older stuff back then too (I'd say HS kids back then were less familiar with pop music/movies from the past than HS kids today though) and you'd hear SOME Beatles or Don McLean's Apple Pie or The Who and such no doubt (I have to say I never once heard the Beach Boys or Lou Reed coming out of any dorm room though) but by some I do mean some- you'd hear 80s pop 50x more often at least. (Heck, I'd dare say that at a few of the schools you'd even hear classical music coming out from dorm rooms a bit more often.) And yet the movie tried to make it seem as if the whole Lou Reed thing and the clothing/hair of Em were mainstream for late 80s HS/college and that CDs didn't exist.

[–] acb132 12 years ago

Yeah but the whole college students frowning at Top 40 stuff wasn't really like that much of a particularly big thing in the late 80s.

If you walked around dorms at most of the top private universities/liberal arts colleges in the very late 80s you'd have heard a LOT of top 40 stuff coming out of dorm rooms, a REAL lot and the average girl would've looked closer to Lisa P than Em (most girls in college and HS in the late 80s had big hair, really big hair, nothing at all like Em- in fact, for all the ways that movies set back in the 80s often overdo things, with wild clothing on 99% of people 99% of the time and all, the one thing they almost all underplay is the hair, especially on the leads). If you were to walk across, say, Harvard Yard in '88, you'd hear Debbie Gibson long before you ever heard Lou Reed.

And it would've been the same for most colleges/universities back then (although you'd have heard nearly zero classical music and more hard rock/heavy metal in the mix once you got away from the top schools- of course this is all a generalization).

Listen, James as an '87 Oberlin grad, wasn't portrayed in a far fetched manner at all and OK maybe Em is just a quirky girl at Columbia but I think the problem was that the movie appeared to try to make it seem as if they were mainstream for smart late 80s kids and I believe it was supposed to be based on typical NY area summer boardwalk life for HS and college students in the late 80s and it really didn't seem like that. Even the people involved in it later said stuff like and of course we had to have them in all the typical Lou Reed t-shirts that everyone wore back then and of course we couldn't leave out the weed since all the smart college kids smoked up all the time back then, it was the 80s duh. And umm what?? and nooo (it was the burnout crowd that sat around all summer smoking up- this was supposed to be '87 not the 70s or early 80s).

SONY walkman? CDs? Toyota Camrys? Honda Accords? Trans-Ams/Camaros? How can it be '87 and not a single one of any of those appears? Why were all the girls in the background running around a sweltering hot amusement park in the middle of summer in long jeans (or perhaps at best long mom shorts) instead of go-go shorts and daisy dukes?

Anyway, listen, it was a pretty nice film so I don't mean to rag on it, but I don't buy the claims that some critics made about how it nailed the late 80s so much better than other films when it seemed to me to be more like a late 70s/earliest 80s/current day hipster culture mash-up with a few bits of '87 sprinkled in here and there on the side.

[–] axp64 12 years ago

The the sorts of liberal arts colleges I had in mind were places such as Reed, Oberlin, Carleton, Macalester, Grinnell, Pomona, Occidental, Middlebury, Amherst, Smith etc. As you've observed with Oberlin, these places really are worlds unto themselves.

I don't know where you are getting this impression that the filmmakers are portraying Lisa P as some unpopular outsider. In fact, Lisa P is presented as some sort of ideal 80s dream girl. They even have her wearing the hot pink "RIDES RIDES RIDES" T-shirt, just in case the audience is too thick to get it. James and Em, on the other hand, are relegated to wearing the sucky blue T-shirts.

I actually heard quite a lot of Beatles during my college years. There was a revival of interest in The Beatles (and 60s music in general) during the middle of the decade. Remember Ferris Bueller's Day Off, for example? Some of their songs actually re-charted during the 80s. In any case, the ratio of "new"-to-"old" was NOT anywhere NEAR a 50-to-1 ratio. Try more like 3-to-1 or even 2-to-1. Basically, I'd say there were perhaps four major (somewhat overlapping) categories of music on campus: you had the current "hot new" stuff; you also had what people nowadays call "alternative" music (Modern English, Husker Du, REM, Kate Bush, Tracy Chapman, The Replacements, The Smiths, Violent Femmes, etc., plus various campus/local/regional bands); you had the perennial 80s stuff (The Police, U2, Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Pointer Sisters, Journey, The Cars, etc., plus all your hard rock/hair metal bands and such, Guns N' Roses, Poison, Dokken, that sort of thing); and you had older stuff mostly from the 60s and 70s (The Beatles, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, Moody Blues, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Thin Lizzy, Steve Miller Band, Fleetwood Mac, Boston, Kansas, Heart, The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Grateful Dead, The Kinks, King Crimson, Yes, Queen, David Bowie, Jethro Tull, War, The Supremes, Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Cream, CSNY, Simon & Garfunkel, The Hollies, Supertramp, Steely Dan just to name a few). The last category includes acts like The Velvet Underground and, yes, Lou Reed. Look, I'm not claiming you heard Lou Reed all the time, like the way you heard Led Zeppelin or The Beatles or Bob Dylan dozens of times every single day, but he definitely, most certainly did get played.

Oh, while people might've been driving Toyotas or Hondas on the Eastern Seaboard or in the South, it was definitely not the case in the Midwest. In the Midwest most students drove 70s/early-80s American cars. My own family's car at the time was a 1981 Chevy Citation, a complete POS (but that's a topic for another day). Point is, you wouldn't dare drive a Japanese car in a Rust Belt union town like Pittsburgh at the height of the Japan Bashing Era!

BTW, having a CD player at this time was still kind of a big deal. You could make yourself rather popular on campus if you had one. People were always wanting to make recordings (transferring to tape) and stuff. And I did witness students occasionally toking up during this period, and some of these people eventually became lawyers, doctors, engineers, CEOs or professors.

[–] acb132 12 years ago

Perhaps at Reed, Grinnell, Carleton, Smith, I could believe that, but I didn't get that impression at places like Amherst, Middlebury, Tufts, Williams, Dartmouth, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, MIT, etc. or Rutgers, SUNY, UConn, BC, BU, etc. Sure there were some like that at every school, but pretty far away from anything like the typical student at most schools. Walking around you'd sooner hear even Debbie Gibson and Paula Abdul than the older stuff and way before you'd ever hear Lou Reed (just talked to some of my friends today and none of them could even recall hearing Lou Reed mentioned a single time throughout all of HS and college). Yeah at Oberlin and some of the top schools out there there did seem to be a sizable more alternative/hippie element in the mix, but that was not the norm for those types of schools in the Northeast which seemed to tend more towards preppy/valley girl talking/mainstream suburban pop-styled to me.

I mean there were people around then like James and Em so it wasn't crazy if you take it all in the right light, but a number of critics went crazy going on and on about how Em and James nailed the late mainstream 80s teen culture perfectly and a movie set back in the 80s finally got it 100% right in every single respect. And then the movie tried to pass itself off as the dead-on take of the late 80s that everything else messes up. It was those two things that got me going (and got my expectations before watching it set all wrong).

Some of the same critics who generally shred every movie set in the 80s when the characters are mainstream 80s pop-styled and pick every little plot point to pieces in those films and going insane if a movie mixes syle from 83 with 85 with 88 and went nuts if some character supposedly didn't behave like a prototypical 80s character was supposed to act and the movie didn't explicitly point that out, etc. then suddenly give every last thing about Adventureland a pass just because the main characters were more hipster/alternative and oddly none of them complained the movie not making it 100% explicitly clear that they were not typical smart kids of the age and overlooked certain things about plot and characterization that they tore into in other films. I got the feeling that they were so gleeful to see a movie where all the smart kids from that time looked and acted like hipsters and worshiped Lou Reed that they gave it a pass on everything. But that is more of an argument against critics the not the movie itself, granted.

Then again I did see some clips where cast/crew, from what I vaguely recall, were going on about how they had to have people rocking Lou Reed shirts because of course that was what all the kids wore then and how the movie was presented as if it go the late 80s right when everyone else got them wrong, which does put a bit of the onus back on the flick.

Modern English was actually considered mainstream pop where I was from. Tracy Chapman was pretty mainstream too, she got play on top 40 radio. Heart was totally mainstream top 40 pop at that point.

Well all I know is it was hard to avoid Toyotas and Hondas in the late 80s if you lived on the East Coast. While they filmed it in western PA, from what I understand it had been all written to have been set in a NYC region amusement park and was only moved late in the game (with just a few lines then re-written) when they couldn't get an appropriate place to shoot in the region originally planned. Of course there were tons of American cars around too and sure many were from the 70s/early 80s, people didn't toss cars after a couple years of use, but to have like ZERO new America cars, ZERO Japanese cars??, zero Trans-Ams/Camaro even for the head bangers in the entire movie? Not a Corvette or Porsche ever shows up on any street, road, parking lot anywhere in the movie, ever?

I guess it depends where you were but having a CD player on campus by the late 80s wasn't a big deal in the Northeast. It wasn't quite a near universal thing yet, but there were plenty around. The movie showed ZERO CDs and, even worse, it didn't even show a single person with a Walkman. And you didn't see a single CD player in any of the parent's homes either.

Again it wouldn't big a deal other than all the hype made about how this was the movie that got it 100% right and didn't overdo the silly 80s pop stuff (although, ironically, then they play stuff like Amadeus which even the pop kids in many areas thought was ridiculous to begin with and which was maybe popular for about a couple months before nobody would ever dare play that one again and then they had Lisa P dress in stereotypical early mid-80s stuff like EVERY single day when only a very few girls dressed in such totally 80s clothes day after day).

Yeah you saw top students OCCASIONALLY smoking up then, or here and there one who would do that all the time, and yeah I even know one of the latter who is a big deal doctor now but the movie just made it seem like way too big of a deal and commonplace as if all the top students sat around all summer smoking up. I could swear that in some commentary or cast clip they went on about how of course they had to show all the smart kids smoking up all summer long since it was the late 80s and that strikes me as way off-base. If it was '77 or even, to a much lesser extent, '97, I could have bought that but for '87? They had the smart and pop-styled kids all smoking up non-stop and yet I'm not sure if they even showed the burnout crowd doing that at all. If they had the burnout crowd doing that all the time that would've been another matter. Or even if they simply hadn't said stuff like we had to show it since ALL the kids in the top schools back then did it all the time. Or if the critics who picked every other film apart, for the very same things, hadn't then turned around and said this one was perfect.

[–] dramaclub01 12 years ago

I never got the feeling that we were supposed to think James and Em were supposed to be "typical" 1987 people. Lisa P is, and there was nothing more 1987 than her powder blue dress and fake press on nails in the dating scene. I also thought that the racist redhead looked very much like she belonged in 1987, in particular with her hairstyle and the striped white/blue shirt they had her in, as well as her blue jacket. And did we not see Lisa P dancing to 80's Top 40 pop like "Let the Music Play" as well "Obession" and "Amadeus"? Seriously, there was more than one kind of person who lived in 1987, and I thought there was a good range for it. We also got "I Want Action" by Posion, "Here I Go Again" by White Snake, "Just Like Heaven" by The Cure, and "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House, which were all big hits from 1987.

As for the summer thing...they had to film the movie in the fall because Kennywood is an actual working amusement park. They needed to forgeo having all the extras dressed in shorts, because as someone who lived in Greater Pittsburgh for two years, you just can't walk around in shorts in November. It's way too freezing. Listen to the DVD commentary- they commended the guy who chases after James during the fight scene for weaing a tank top because it was freezing the night they filmed it.

Finally...this is a budget movie. It's not like they had millions upon millions to recreate the world of 1987.