Topic: Amy Heckerling

Amy Heckerling (born May 7, 1954) is an American film director, one of the few female directors to have produced multiple box-office hits.

Heckerling was born in The Bronx to a bookkeeper mother and a certified public accountant father. The family moved to Queens. She attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, graduating in 1970, and studied film at New York University, where one of her teachers was noted screenwriter and satirist Terry Southern. She received her master's degree from the AFI Conservatory.

Heckerling's first feature film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), was about Los Angeles teenagers and also led to a short-lived series on CBS in the 1985-1986 season called Fast Times, which Heckerling produced. Heckerling's next film was a parody of gangster films, Johnny Dangerously (1984), starring Michael Keaton, Marilu Henner and Joe Piscopo, with fast talking characters familiar from 1930s screwball comedy. Heckerling also directed the second of the Vacation films, National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985) with Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo.