JUST WHAT IS A 'VALLEY GIRL'? 

In Southern California,  the term "Valley Girl" refers to girls from the San Fernando Valley. In context it is associated with a spoiled "white" girl from an upper class background who socializes with other "valley girls" in  cliques. In nearby regions of the San Fernando Valley people will often call a girl a "valley girl" or tell her to "go back to the valley" if she is showing signs of materialism and/or ditzy behavior.

The Valley in Films

Robert Towne's script for Chinatown oozes with shadowy intrigue. What the film lacks in historic accuracy it made up for with twists and styling more compelling than the truth. Jack Nicholson starred as Jake Gittes, a private eye in 1920s Los Angeles who looks into the homicide of the city' s water czar, Hollis Mulwray, a loose allusion to William Mulholland. Gittes deciphers an elaborate conspiracy by hidden downtown powers to dump water in the ocean in order to create a false shortage, squeezing Valley ranchers to sell off their withering orchards at distress prices.

"Most of the Valley has been sold in the last few months," he tells Mulwray's widow, played by Faye Dunaway. The buyers are counting on the fake drought to pressure voters into paying the tab for a water pipeline and reservoir that will transform Valley orange groves into hugely valuable suburban real estate.

In a 1990 sequel that Nicholson directed, The Two Jakes, the setting is updated to the early postwar boom years. The orange groves are being torn out for suburban culs-de-sac, just as in real life. Gittes is older and mellower but allows himself to become embroiled in a murder case that turns on oil, rather than water, and on the real estate ambitions of the other Jake, the developer of "El Rancho San Fernando," played by Harvey Keitel.

Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction also made a stop in the Valley, and it was a bloody one. Gangsters Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) are driving along a main boulevard when Vega accidentally blows the head off an associate in crime riding in the backseat. They need to get off the street, since as the bad guys observe, cops tend to notice cars with blood-smeared windows. But where to?

Jules: I ain't got no partners in the 818.
Vincent: Take it to a friendly place, that's all.
Jules: We're in the Valley, Vincent! Marcellus ain't got no friendly places in the Valley!

Gratuitous swipes at the Valley never seem out of favor. That was especially so in movies made in the late 1990s.

In the comedy Clueless, Alicia Silverstone's cheerful Beverly Hills ditz Cher Horowitz endured a socially humiliating night deep in the Valley and filled the screen with barb after barb. Silverstone was back again, with Brendan Fraser, in Blast from the Past, a 1999 romantic comedy in which the Valley transforms from a Wonder Bread suburb into a "post-apocalyptic hellspace of dirt, decay and debauchery,'' as one reviewer put it. Also in 1999, a bad year for the Valley's image, a savvy city girl in Go warned her whiny girlfriend, "Don't get 818 on me," and audiences got the area code joke.

The Valley's image used to be associated more with the suburban optimism of The Brady Bunch and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial but it now is more commonly depicted as a soured, even menacing place. In 187 Samuel L. Jackson portrayed a New York school teacher brutalized by his students who moves west, thinking the San Fernando Valley would be a haven from urban insanity. Instead he finds gangs that are even more murderous.

Murder and the Valley worked together as black comedy in the off-beat Two Days in the Valley, in which James Spader played a sociopath-hit man and Paul Mazursky an aging film director. Director John Herzfeld called the Valley an uncredited character in the story about people who need second chances to succeed: an Olympic skier who has yet to win her medal, a detective trying to make the homicide squad, a bumbling killer working at a Domino's Pizza on Ventura Boulevard.

"The movie is about a lot of people who either never achieved their goals, or screwed up their lives, or dropped the football the first time it was thrown to them," Herzfeld said in the Times. The funniest line comes from an older man who hears a violent fight in the upstairs apartment and quips to his wife: "Maybe that's how they make love in Tarzana." The essential Valleyness of the film was too much for French audiences. There, the title was translated as Two Days in Los Angeles.

The frustrations of adolescence in the suburbs showed up in Foxes, a 1980 film directed by Adrian Lyne that follows four bored girls from the Valley who go on night-life adventures in Hollywood. Jodie Foster played the wise one who watched out for her wilder friends. The girl played by Cherie Currie, who was a singer with the band the Runaways, pays dearly for her fascination with seeking out ever higher highs, while the other girls grapple with being overweight or oversexed.

Another take on growing up in the Valley was presented in La Bamba, the 1987 film that told the Ritchie Valens story in part by fictionalizing his family relationships.

Films by two young directors who have spent some or all of their years living in the Valley portrayed the place as both desirable and repulsive. In Safe, Todd Haynes' suburbs are so smothering as to be biologically toxic. Julianne Moore starred as a west Valley stepmother who lives behind closed gates out where the newest suburbs meet the chaparral. After she drives behind a smoking truck on Ventura Boulevard and breathes in fumes, she is besieged by allergies and toxic reactions to the suburban environment.

Moore also starred in Boogie Nights, which takes place almost entirely entirely within the dark clubs, walled-in backyards and otherwise tacky milieu of the Valley's home-brewed pornography industry circa 1980. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the cast included Burt Reynolds as the porn king of Reseda, Valley native Heather Graham as a teen porn actress who never removes her roller skates, and Mark Wahlberg as a pimply dishwasher who becomes the legendarily studly Dirk Diggler, loosely a reference to the late porn star John Holmes.

Moore serves as the mother figure to an extended family of fading porn players, wannabes and hangers-on who pine for better lives while they put on sophisticated airs at the pool and cocktail parties they hold between filming triple XXX footage. Modern-day Sherman Way is the location for several brutal scenes, including a robbery that turns bloody inside a doughnut shop, the stomping of a college boy by Rollergirl, and the pummeling of a destitute Diggler by gay bashers.

Many in the cast, including Moore, returned to the Valley with Anderson in Magnolia, which depicts a place riven with dysfunctional relationships and hit with a plague of frogs from the sky.

The Valley Girl phenomenon which swept the country in the 1980s also set off a new film genre. Valley Girl, directed by Martha Coolidge, sought to cash in on the buzz. Deborah Foreman played a popular high school girl who goes against her Valley friends and dates Nicolas Cage, who portrays a bad news dude from Over the Hill. She takes him on a tour of a few local landmarks: DuPars coffee shop, Casa Vega restaurant, Encino Bowl, Mulholland Drive. The film's advertising tagline was "She's cool. He's hot. She's from the Valley. He's not."

The Valley Girl phenomenon unloosed a torrent of film references that poked fun at the Valley. In Encino Man, Brendan Fraser played an icebound caveman thawed out by nerdy Valley boys and taught how to party. A spin-off, Encino Woman aired on network TV. The comic high point of the genre might have been Earth Girls Are Easy, in which three extra-terrestrial aliens splash to Earth in the pool of an air-headed Valley manicurist, played by Geena Davis. "As if things weren't bad enough, now I've been abducted by aliens," she whines.