ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY                           TV HITS

BAZZAR                                                            AMERICA ON LINE INTERVIEW

LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN        MARQUEE MAGAZINE

INTERVIEW ABOUT CLUELESS                       2 COOL 2 BE TRUE

VANITY FAIR Sept 1996                                    PEOPLE WEEKLY

PREMIERE MAGAZINE                                     STAR! MAGAZINE

TEEN MAGAZINE                                             TIME MAGAZINE

PAT VERDUCCI ABOUT ALICIA                      TV WEEKLY

VANITY FAIR Aug 1995                                     WEJ MAGAZINE

BECAUSE YOU ARE a young man, you recognize her face in an instant. The elevator doors fly open, and there she stands. You know those eyes, brimming wide as teacups. You know those lips, glistening and upturned like a wedge of tangerine. Alicia Silverstone greets you with knock-kneed exasperation, assuming for a split second that she has wound up on the wrong floor. "Oh, my God!" she says in a whispered flurry. "I'm sorry."

Were you a decade older, you might not know her name, and the thought might pass through your brain without much consequence: "Pretty girl. Probably an actress." You might take the Memory Lane exit back to high school--Alicia Silverstone, after all, is only 18 years old--and recall that cheerleader in your Spanish class, the one you never had the guts to talk to.

But you would be wrong. Here at the posh Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, you are sharing an elevator with power. "Huge," casting director Marci Liroff says of Alicia Silverstone. "She's a huge movie star."

Of course, so far Miss Huge has conquered only a corner of the world--the part known in demographic parlance as guys. Among those males who frequent fraternity houses and video arcades, the name Silverstone carries more weight than Streep, thanks less to two little-seen movies (1993's The Crush and the recent silly slasher film Hideaway) than to Silverstone's kitten-eyed coup de théâtre in what might be the most popular trilogy of videos in the short history of MTV: Aerosmith's "Cryin'," "Amazing," and "Crazy."

In another era, perhaps, popping up in a hard-rock video--even a finely made hard-rock video--might seem like a surefire way to relegate your career to the bimbo file. But in the age of the Buzz Bin, when a three-minute clip can hoist a rock band from obscurity to stardom in a matter of hours, why shouldn't the same principle apply to actors? The rules have changed: In past years, the making of the girl of the year required at least a few hours to let the dough rise; now you just punch a button on the microwave, wait 30 seconds, and serve.

The rest of the world got the news about Alicia Silverstone only last June. That's when the actress, as The Crush's scheming, roller-skating nymphet, took home two MTV Movie awards for Best Breakthrough Performance and Best Villain, leaving thespians like Ralph Fiennes and John Malkovich in her flaxen-haired wake.

Suddenly, Silverstone was more than a video soubrette. "I truly loved doing the videos," she says with a practiced air, "but it has been hard hearing all the time that you're just the Aerosmith chick." Fear not. If all goes as planned, the coming months will witness Silverstone's transformation from gym-locker pinup to household name. En route to theaters are Silverstone's True Crime, a thriller in which a Catholic schoolgirl turns gumshoe; Le Nouveau Monde, a Gallic coming-of-age story directed by Alain Corneau; and, most notably, Clueless, a teen comedy due this July that's described by its creators as a Rodeo Drive version of Jane Austen's Emma.

The thing is, Alicia Silverstone is still a teenager, and from time to time, she acts like one. Even in the hotel lobby, she carries her belongings--everything from a bottle of fruit juice to a leather-bound datebook--in a beige plastic bag, the kind you get at the grocery store. Over a late lunch, she encounters a stray piece of ligament between the slices of her chicken sandwich. She scrunches up her face. She reaches a thumb and a forefinger into her mouth, retrieves the meat from the cavern around her molars, and flicks it on a bread plate.

"They're like morsels or something," she says.

Morsels of what?

"Probably like chicken muscle or something."

Thus it's breathtaking, moments later, when you ask her what directors she would like to work with and she mentions the imposing Italian responsible for the psychosexual manifestos Last Tango in Paris and The Conformist.

"Well, I just met Bernardo"--she stumbles a bit with the surname. "How do you say his name?"

Bernardo Bertolucci?

"Yeah, him," she says. "Bernardo Bertolucci."

You just met him?

"Upstairs," she says with a coy laugh. "That would be very nice to work with him. He's obviously very brilliant."

AS FOR ALICIA 'S name, you would be unwise to pronounce it poorly. Utter the syllables as if she's a mere mall rat--A-lish-a-- and prepare to be corrected. No! Her name, like her career, is far more luxuriant: A-lee-cee-a. Similarly, it might come as a surprise to hear that the pouty golden girl is taking meetings with Italian auteurs, but for the Silverstone camp--namely, the actress, her agent, and her publicist--it's all part of the plan.

"I'd like to see her do some serious dramatic projects with an A-list director, like Peter Weir or Martin Scorsese," says Liroff, who cast Silverstone as the obsessively smitten teen in The Crush. "And I believe that she can do that."

"I consider Alicia like a really good character actor, like a Dustin Hoffman," says Crush director Alan Shapiro.

"Alicia plays the Scarlett O'Hara of the '90s," says Clueless director Amy Heckerling, who more than a decade ago propelled Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a cast of youngbloods to fame with Fast Times at Ridgemont High. "She can carry across that innocence yet foxy intelligence of somebody who not only doesn't know what's going on but who really doesn't care because they are so into their own business. It takes a certain intelligent type of woman to carry that off."

If Silverstone has art-house ambitions, perhaps it's because her parents are English. Her father, Monty, a real estate investor, and mother, Didi, a former airline stewardess, raised Alicia and one of her two older siblings in the suburbs of San Francisco; they summered in Britain. And despite her image as the naughty parochial-school lass in "Crazy," Silverstone grew up Jewish. "I loved my bas mitzvah," she recalls. "I used to go to temple like four or five times a week when I was growing up." Not long after her bas mitzvah she joined her Bay Area acting troupe on a trip to Los Angeles for a talent showcase. Carolyn Kessler, now Alicia's agent, was the first to spot her. "She has a very genuine quality," Kessler explains, "and a soul that comes out at you."

The microwave began to hum; it was the first in a series of discoveries that would catapult Silverstone into starring roles in a matter of months, without the traditional boost of box office tallies. After gobbling pepperoni in a Domino's Pizza ad and primping as Fred Savage's dream date in an episode of The Wonder Years, Silverstone miraculously landed in The Crush. This time it was Liroff, a talent seeker who'd cast Drew Barrymore in E.T. 10 years earlier, who saw the light. "She had to be a very sweet and seductive Lolita type--a young girl on the brink of being a young woman," says Liroff. "Alicia was right at that point. She was 151/2. It's very young, but she's an old soul." (Of course, that's a line as old as the Hollywood Hills.)

There was one hitch. "She'd done virtually nothing," says director Shapiro, "and my big fear was `If I don't find the most incredible girl, like Sue Lyon was in Lolita, I'm gonna really look stupid.' " Fortunately for him, Silverstone "just went for it. It was constantly mind-boggling on the set. There was this one moment when we were doing the scene of her on the swing. My jaw was on the floor. I was just saying `She's amazing.' And my assistant director, Joel Segal, leaned over and whispered in my ear, `You are one lucky Jew.' " The Crush became the prototype for Silverstone's career: barely a blip on the cultural radar, but a niche-market bonanza.

Meanwhile, a veteran video director named Marty Callner was hunting for the perfect woman for Aerosmith's next video. While staying at a hotel in Atlanta, he got a call from a friend with a tip: See The Crush. Callner went across the street to the multiplex. "After about 20 minutes," he says, "I knew that was the girl I wanted to use." He did, and not only as the bungee-jumping runaway in "Cryin' " but also as the fantasy cyberbabe in "Amazing" and the tartan-skirted giggler in "Crazy," a video that had her romping in a hotel room with Liv Tyler, the daughter of Aerosmith frontman Steve Tyler.

"As you can see from the videos, I was enamored with her," Callner says. "I mean, professionally."

The rest is history, but history tinged with a thoroughly postmodern paradox. Because even while Alicia Silverstone sends the media into a tizzy, it's hard to ignore the fact that her curriculum vitae adds up to three music videos, one play, a TV pilot (Me and Nick), and a handful of not-so-successful movies. "Is she a fantastic dramatic actress?" says Marnie Waxman, a casting director who worked on Clueless. "I don't think she has the range Winona Ryder has, but I think she's definitely going to take off. It's so much about her outward appearance and embodying the culture, and not about her acting. People know how to package her."

TRUTH IS, Silverstone is lucky enough to live in a unique era in the history of fame, a time when you can become a star without that tedious process of actually creating anything. Want proof? How about Puck, the San Francisco bike messenger best known for sticking his mucus-encrusted finger into a jar of peanut butter on MTV's The Real World. Or Vendela and her cohorts, who wear other people's clothes for a living. Or Lucky Vanous, the guy who flashed his pecs in the Diet Coke ad. All are gossip column fixtures; all are virtually free of real achievement.

The secret: Plug into new short-attention-span avenues to fame--places like MTV, the Internet, R-rated commercials, and supermodeling. The result: a strange, lopsided brand of celebrity, one in which joystick-happy teens think you're a superstar, but anyone a few years past the Oxy-5 phase doesn't know you from Eve.

"I'd never heard of her," says Wallace Shawn, 51, the eggshell-domed playwright and actor who plays Silverstone's debate teacher in Clueless. "I don't have MTV and don't know who Aerosmith is. I figured she was so young, how could she be famous?"

He soon learned otherwise. During a shoot at a Los Angeles high school, scads of teens--guys Amy Heckerling described as "semiconscious"--clung to the fences outside the trailers, yammering "Can we see her? Can we see her?" At the recent Hard Rock Hotel opening in Las Vegas, Silverstone was besieged. "I had to pee so bad," the actress says. "And I had to yell this out to people--like, charmingly, not mean--`Come on! I gotta go pee, you guys!' And they didn't get it. It wasn't funny, because they wanted that autograph."

DRESSED IN A banana-colored blouse, Silverstone gazes across the table at you, slowly turning her torso from side to side to loosen a kink in her back. She wraps the black wrist strap of your tape recorder around her finger. She insists that she is not beautiful. "This is very weird for me, that people would even think of me as being pretty," she says. "When I look in the mirror, sometimes it's very sad because I feel like this ugly, fat blimp, you know? And then I have to go be this beautiful girl."

Talking to Silverstone's colleagues can be a maddening experience, as they will go to great lengths to stress that Alicia's rise has nothing to do with her body and everything to do with her body of work. Listen to Jeff Goldblum, who plays her back-from-the-dead father in Hideaway: "I was impressed with her authenticity and purity and sweetness. I focused on her spirit and soul.... She's so rich inside." Or Shapiro: "She's not like the sex machine. That's what they're trying to tap into in the videos, but she's a very smart young woman. It would be really foolish to dismiss her as just limited to that thing."

But talk to her armies of young male fans and you'll get no disquisitions on the contours of her spirit. They like her for one reason and one reason only: She's such a hot babe! In cyberspace, you can fairly hear the heavy breathing through your monitor as these real-life Beavises and Butt-heads share their collective fantasies: "I will die the day she and Drew Barrymore make a movie together. Awwwwwww yeahhhhhhh!" "She's the only reason I tune in to MTV." "You know where I can get naked pictures of Alicia Silverstone?"

With that in mind, Silverstone's spin doctors have their work cut out for them. In a letter to ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, her publicist, Elizabeth Much, wrote: "Though Alicia is thrilled that her Aerosmith videos were so popular, we hope that you can focus this interview on her upcoming films."

Clearly, though, Silverstone plays much more than a cameo role in decision making. By all accounts, her parents act as cheering bystanders, while Kessler and Silverstone cut the deals. "She knows what she wants to do and she knows what she won't do," Liroff says. "She's not one of these little bimbettes that gets pointed in a direction and told what to do." Indeed, Silverstone often breaks through the teen babble and reveals a blunt bottom-liner. "The insider people who actually make the films--the producers and directors--they obviously know I'm a very talented actress," she says. "They wouldn't give you a lead in a studio film if you can't carry it. They're not gonna put their money into that."

Even at 18, Silverstone has been on her own longer than many college grads. When The Crush beckoned in 1993, she skipped out of high school, took an equivalency test for her diploma, stood before a judge to win status as an emancipated minor so that she could work longer hours, and immediately moved into an apartment near the set in Vancouver. These days Silverstone has her own place in Los Angeles, which she shares with a dog named Samson, and denies reports that she's romancing a 28-year-old French hairdresser named Moize Chabbouh.

And Silverstone is dead serious about building a reputation for her work alone. "Like, the way Shannen Doherty got famous," she offers in contrast. "She's famous because of all the bad things people read about her, right? I would die if that was me." (Coincidentally, Silverstone turned down a spot on Beverly Hills, 90210, on the grounds that "there's no reason to get locked into a television show when you might be able to do a movie with somebody like Al Pacino.") Silverstone doesn't even watch MTV--"I don't have time! I've been working so hard"--and admits that her burgeoning career has left her removed from pals from the Bay Area. "I still talk to those people, but when I talk to them I realize we have nothing in common," she confesses. "It's so frustrating to have a conversation with them, because they really don't understand what I'm going through. They don't start working 'til they're like 24."

Still, while her friends back home head off to college, Silverstone wouldn't mind a highbrow challenge herself--perhaps a Freaky Friday-style switcheroo with the moonfaced mainstay of the Merchant-Ivory flicks. "I want to do more classic things," she announces. "I would love to do period pieces. I would love to do Helena Bonham Carter's roles. I've heard her say in articles--and I don't know if they're real, because I don't believe articles anymore--but I've heard her say that she would like to do contemporary things.

"So, maybe we could swap."

Q : Are you pleased with Clueless?
A : Yeah, I love the movie but I have a hard time watching it as a real film. It looks more like a home movie to me because I worked so closely with these people for three months!
Q : What was the best bit about making the movie?
A : I love the last scene when all the girls were fighting over the bouquet. We all kept falling over each other and Amy Heckerling was fighting in the scene too!
Q : Did you get on with your co-stars?
A : Stacey Dash, who played Dionne, was so cool. We are probably the only actors in the whole film who are nothing like our characters, so we had really interesting conversations between scenes.
Q : How were you discovered?
A : I wasn't. I just worked really hard. You have to work hard to get anywhere in life.
Q : Are you surprised how successful the film was all around the world?
A : Nothing surprises me anymore!
Q : What do you miss the most now you life has changed - you're so famous now!
A : I really miss the peace and quiet.
Q : What do you do in your spare time?
A : Eat, sleep, read, listen to music and play with my dog Samson and my friends. Samson's gorgeous! He's the best-looking male I know! He's part Rottweiler, plus Pit Bull and Doberman. I found him on the street so I don't know his birthday, but he's so spoiled, so he doesn't miss out on gifts!
Q : What are your favorite films?
A : I'm not a big movie-goer but I love Bette Davis, Marlon Brando and James Dean. Actually, The dead zone with Christopher Walken is amazing! I also really liked In the name of the father
Q : How do you feel about being a role model?
A : I don't really like being in the public eye, but I love acting and it goes hand in hand with publicity. I believe it's important that young people have real, normal people to relate to.
Q : What have you done apart from Clueless?
A : I've done a few plays - I did a play in Los Angeles called Carol's eve. I played a lost young girl who claims she's a lesbian and is hooked on cocaine. Theater's not really my first love, though - I'm sort of going from film to stage at the moment. But I do look forward to going back.
Q : You went to a school like the one in clueless for one term...
A : I was a total loser. I didn't fit in. But I guess that's good!

Karen Kilimnik, an artist with a passion, draws her favorite beauties for "Harper's Bazaar."

Karen Kilimnik is standing by the side of a street in Coney Island, taking pictures of the Mermaid Parade as it passes. It's an odd procession, a ragtag column of old cars, men walking poodles, Girl Scouts, and members of the Polar Bear Club; but all Kilimnik is really interested in are the mermaids--women wearing satin fishtails and body paint who glide by on convertibles, waving to the crowd. "Oh," she says, "this is really nice."

Kilimnik is that most pleasing of cultural personae, the fan who became a star merely by manifesting her passions. They are, in no particular order: beautiful women, scandalous celebrities, horses, and dogs, which she renders amid a welter of breathless tabloid headlines and fragments from her own devoted imagination. At the age of 39 she's retained the guileless fascinations of an adolescent, which she turns into art for adults; if you can imagine the spirit of Joseph Cornell reincarnated as a somewhat messy teenage girl, you'll have some idea of the effect.

Its causes are a little harder to come by. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Kilimnik took art classes as a child; but when it came time for college, no art school accepted her, so she honed her enthusiasms and made her work at home. As soon as she was ready, she sent more than 100 sets of slides to various galleries in New York. As is usually the case, most of them were immediately returned, but a few dealers asked her to keep in touch. Their files bulge with the results: She wrote letters, notes, postcards; sent envelopes filled with sequins; came up to New York to say hello. She's nothing if not persistent, and by 1991 she'd landed her first solo show at the 303 Gallery.

It was a time when the crisp conceptualism of the '80s had lost its hold on artists' imaginations. In its place a generation of eccentrics had appeared, artists whose work was based more in experience than in theory, and strange experiences at that; it felt as if the lunatics had taken over the asylum and were busily turning their madness into policy. Kilimnik showed assemblages made of pills, fake blood, paper targets, toy soldiers, glitter and tinsel, and a tape of the Boomtown Rats singing "I Don't Like Mondays." Like some suburban voodoo gamine, she'd made fetishes in honor of magazine stories about true crime and gossip, and the term "scatter piece," now common in art criticism, was invented to describe them.

A year or two later she began making drawings of the women who had charmed her since childhood and posting them on gallery walls as if they were pages torn from a girl's diary. Twiggy is one of her favorites. So is Kate Moss, because "she reminds me of Diana Rigg on The Avengers." And lately she's become fixated on Alicia Silverstone, nymphet star of The Crush and a trio of Aerosmith rock videos. "I love the stuff she does in the videos," she says. "But I saw an interview with her, and she's not like that at all. It's really, really nice."

They have yet to invent the typography that will perfectly capture the way Kilimnik speaks: She ums and ohs, she sucks her breath in, she laughs suddenly, she stops and starts, she interrupts herself, she wrings her hands. Asked about her influences, she lists the television show Bewitched, the 18th-century English painters Sir Henry Raeburn and Sir Thomas Lawrence, and her sister, "because she listened to the Beatles, and she's really pretty, and she's got a great sense of humor. I always wished I could be like her." At another point she says that if she weren't an artist, she'd like to be "a race car driver, or a jockey, I wish I could be an actress, a fashion photographer, or run a restaurant or a modeling agency, or just live in the country with lots of animals." Interviewing her is like riding in a cartoon jalopy: The thing lurches and loses parts, but eventually it gets where it's supposed to go.

Her work makes the same kind of sidelong sense, and it clearly strikes some wanted chord. In the past few years she's had gallery shows all through the United States and Europe, and a 1992 solo show at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art (where her work appears again this month in a group show of contemporary portraiture). She was also included in the last Whitney Biennial. Now she's in the process of putting together a collection of her own haute couture and ready-to-wear fashion--including footed pajamas--for a show at Galerie Jennifer Flay in Paris in January. "I've been wanting to do this for years and years," she says. In all, it reminds one that the art world can be a kind of free zone, embracing every kind, promoting them and protecting them from harm, so they can live out their wishes--much like the mermaids at Coney Island, gliding delightedly down the rundown streets in their homemade costumes.

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OnlineHost: The auditorium consists of two major areas: the audience, where you are right now, and the stage, where the speakers appear. Text which you type onscreen shows only to those in your row, prefaced by the row number in parentheses, such as (2) if you are in row 2. To interact with the speaker, use the Interact icon on your screen.

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OnlineHost: Alicia Silverstone made her film debut starring in "The Crush" with Carey Elwes. Her films include "Hideaway," "The Babysitter," "True Crime" and the French "Le Nouveau Monde."

OnlineHost: Silverstone's performance in "The Crush" was seen by the rock group Aerosmith and it inspired them to cast her in three videos. The first one, "Cryin'," in which she bungee jumps off a bridge, was honored as the Best Video of All Time on MTV. She went on to win two MTV Awards for "The Crush."

OnlineHost: Eighteen years old, Silverstone was born and raised outside of San Francisco and spent her summers in England, the native country of her parents. While visiting relatives in England, she became interested in theatre and eventually made her stage debut in Los Angeles with the Met Theater production of "Carol's Eve."

OnlineHost: Before "The Crush," Silverstone guest-starred on "The Wonder Years" as the dream girl of the character played by Fred Savage. She also co-starred in the telefilms "Torch Song" with Raquel Welch and "Shattered Dreams" with Tyne Daly. Also for television, Silverstone co-starred in "The Cool and the Crazy," part of Showtime's Rebel Highway anthology. Please welcome Alicia to America Online!

CelebCrcle: Alicia, welcome! Glad you could be with us tonight!

ASlvrstne: Hi! Thank you for having me. I've never done this before.

CelebCrcle: The first question is from EMPLOYEE9.

Question: What kind of music do you like?

ASlvrstne: Alanis Morasette, Sinead O'Connor, and David Gray.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from ICookEggs.

Question: I'm absolutely your #1 fan -- I've got posters and seen all your movies over and over. Is there a fan club that I can join or something?

ASlvrstne: We're working on that!

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Dmingo.

Question: How old are you?

ASlvrstne: 18.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from LI pix.

Question: Alicia, are you tired or afraid of being typecast, or do you want the kinds of roles you are getting?

ASlvrstne: I'm very happy and proud of each role, and I want to continue doing a variety of different roles.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from TarLeo.

Question: How do you select a project?

ASlvrstne: I look for exciting characters and interesting directors, and most importantly, a good script.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from ROCK725.

Question: Alicia, are you dating anybody right now?

ASlvrstne: Well, not really.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Ajay34.

Question: So Alicia, how old were you when you got into show business?

ASlvrstne: 14. I did a Domino's Pizza commercial.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Lisa SG.

Question: What do you like to do in your spare time?

ASlvrstne: Eat, sleep, read, listen to music, and play with Samson and my friends. (Samson's my dog.)

CelebCrcle: The next question is from SwoopBacO.

Question: How was it working on this movie? I haven't seen it yet, but I heard that it's great!

ASlvrstne: You better go see it! It was really hard being in every scene of the film, but it was so fun being Cher.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Frosty 81.

Question: Can you ask her what it was like to work with Jeremy Sisto in "Hideaway?"

ASlvrstne: Really, really fun. He's also in "Clueless," and very cute in "Clueless!" I had a great time on "Hideaway" with Laura Dern, Jeremy, and Jeff Goldblum. They're very nice people.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from User12842.

Question: What's the movie about?

ASlvrstne: You should go see it! It's about young people in the 90's. Everyone can relate to it. It has great music, great clothes, really talented young people, and there's no way you'll walk out of the theater without a smile on your face!

CelebCrcle: The next question is from J STEP 3.

Question: Can you anticipate a move to the serious melodrama as opposed to the sexy comedy satire?

ASlvrstne: I don't know what you're talking about.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from TwoPac629.

Question: First of all Alicia, I want to say I loved you in "The Crush." Next I wanted to know if there was any actor that you would want to work with?

ASlvrstne: I would love to work with Christopher Walken.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from DcHldy.

Question: Hey Alicia, what live plays have you done?

ASlvrstne: I did a play at the Los Angeles Met Theater called Carol's Eve, and in it I play a lost young girl who claims she's a lesbian and is doing coke throughout the whole play. And I overdose on stage. When I was little I did a lot of ballet on stage.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Neuberts.

Question: Alicia, I saw you in "Clueless," "The Crush," on David Letterman, Regis and Kathie Lee, etc. I think you are a wonderful actress and role model. How important is your status as a role model for young women to you?

ASlvrstne: I don't really like being in the public eye. But, because I love acting, and they go hand in hand I suppose, I believe it's important that young people have real, tangible, normal people to relate to.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Mojoman1.

Question: Do you plan on doing any more action type movies like "The Crush?"

ASlvrstne: I would love to do any interesting character in any type of film.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Marin52.

Question: What's your next movie about? When will it be out?

ASlvrstne: I have three films you can look out for. One is "The Babysitter," with Joel Schumacher's company. It's a very interesting, artistic dark character study. The next is "True Crime" with Kevin Dillon, where I play a Catholic girl who is obsessed with being a cop and solves a murder mystery. I'm a real dork in that one! The other is a French film, directed by Alain Corneau. It's called "Le Nouveau Monde." I don't know when they are coming out, but probably by the end of this year.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Lady Rond.

Question: Hi Alicia! Personally, what are some of your all-time favorite films? >^..^<

ASlvrstne: Thank you for the kitty! Here's a rose: @---->----- I am not a big movie goer. But I love movies with Bette Davis, Marlon Brando, James Dean. Actually, "Dead Zone" with Christopher Walken is amazing! I also really liked "In the Name of the Father."

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Chronic34.

Question: Alicia, what was it like when you attended school in Beverly Hills for a semester?

ASlvrstne: I was a total loser. I did not fit in at all. But I guess that's a good thing!

CelebCrcle: The next question is from DEZ MAN69.

Question: Do you plan on going to college?

ASlvrstne: I don't think I would need to go to college. But I am very interested in taking a few classes here and there. I just got back from Shakespeare and Company's one month workshop of training.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from JS17NYK.

Question: What first got you interested in acting?

ASlvrstne: I think I knew the second I plopped out of my Mommy!

CelebCrcle: The next question is from SHmAtie2X.

Question: Hello, Alicia. What was it like filming a movie with Stacey Dash, and did you become good friends with her?

ASlvrstne: Stacey Dash was so cool. We are probably the only actors in the film who are nothing like our characters. So we were able to have very interesting conversations between scenes.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Tim3167.

Question: Are you surprised with the success of "Clueless?"

ASlvrstne: Nothing surprises me anymore.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from J P S 004.

Question: Hi, Alicia! Being a fellow actor, I wonder, is the stage your first love? Also, how did you deal with the change from stage to screen -- was the transition difficult?

ASlvrstne: I didn't go from stage to film. I'm sort of going film to stage. I love the idea of the theater, and I look forward to doing much more of it!

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Lady Rond.

Question: Hi, Alicia! What does your dog Samson look like? (I hope I spelled his name right!) How old is he? What is his birthday? >^..^<

ASlvrstne: He's gorgeous! Best looking male I know! He has part Rottweiler, Pitbull, and Doberman. I found him on the street, so I don't know his birthday. He's so spoiled, he won't miss out on gifts!

CelebCrcle: The next question is from DEZ MAN69.

Question: Which actor or actress have you enjoyed working with the most?

ASlvrstne: I don't know. I like them all for different reasons. I learn from every experience.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Shivan RK.

Question: What was her favorite movie between "The Crush" and "Clueless?"

ASlvrstne: I enjoyed every project and I hope I am lucky enough to keep on enjoying every project from here on out.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Bob Hate.

Question: Hi, Alicia. Could you comment on what it was like working with Carey Elwes?

ASlvrstne: He was very kind to me. I loved working on that film, probably the most because it was my first film and I couldn't stop smiling the whole time. I really couldn't believe I was there.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Kendra 24.

Question: Other than the Shakespeare workshop, what other acting training have you had?

ASlvrstne: From age 12 to 15 I studied under Judi O'Neil's workshop with teachers such as Courtney Gaines and Virgil Frye in intense workshops.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from JAM12.

Question: Have you thought about doing a TV series like "Melrose Place" or "90210," or you just going to be a big movie star?

ASlvrstne: I don't think TV's for me right now.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from F FLEX 97.

Question: What was your favorite part in making "Clueless?"

ASlvrstne: I love the scene in the end when all the girls fight for the bouquet, because we all kept falling all over each other and Amy Heckerling (director) was fighting in the scene, too.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Wankawoo.

Question: What do you think of Amy Heckerling's directing?

ASlvrstne: I think she's an amazing writer and came up with something so unique. She knows exactly what she wants with her casting and gets it. She's a really laid-back, cool lady.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Stonemork.

Question: Has all this fame affected your personal life in a negative way? (or maybe positive?)

ASlvrstne: I don't really pay attention.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from JAMF.

Question: Do you plan to become politically active?

ASlvrstne: I don't really know anything about politics. But I'm very active with animal rights.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from REWIND 96.

Question: What was it like working with Julie Brown? Is she fun?

ASlvrstne: She's wacky and a very nice woman.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from BUZZERUX.

Question: Would you let Kato Kaelin stay at your house?

ASlvrstne: I don't know anything about him, and no man other than Samson can stay at my house.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Virtuo83.

Question: What are you plans for the near future?

ASlvrstne: I have a lot of traveling to do regarding international publicity for "Clueless." In any spare time I have, I want to try to get everything in order, including my head!

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Bobino10.

Question: I would like to get Alicia's feelings about how "Clueless" is being marketed and promoted. A lot of people will miss this film because it is being advertised in a shallow and teenybopper way. I am 32 and liked the movie because it was fun while also having depth and a STORY!

ASlvrstne: I'm so happy you said that! I agree, and I hope that you will tell all of your adult friends to see it, because I think it's a film for adults more so than kids. It's for everyone!

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Mcdbri.

Question: What is your all-time favorite book?

ASlvrstne: I don't know. But my Mommy used to read me Ballet Shoes when I was a little girl. I'd like to read that again.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from JohnGG123.

Question: Do a lot of people recognize you when you go places?

ASlvrstne: Yes. More so in New York and Dallas than in LA.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from MakiWolf.

Question: Alicia, where did you go to high school?

ASlvrstne: I went to San Mateo High School. It was so fun! I had great teachers.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Wankawoo.

Question: What do you miss the most now since your life has changed due to popularity?

ASlvrstne: Peace and quiet. And not being judged so closely.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Erinbauer.

Question: I want to become an actress -- how can I get started?

ASlvrstne: Take acting classes. And work your butt off, and go find an agent. Maybe try theater.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from JS17NYK.

Question: Are you pleased with your work as an actress in the film "Clueless?"

ASlvrstne: I love the movie. But I have a hard time watching it like a real film. It looks more like a home video to me because I worked so closely with these people for 3 months.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Lady Rond.

Question: Hi, Alicia! Personally, what part of the world is your favorite? >^..^<

ASlvrstne: @---->----- I don't know. I haven't been in enough places yet.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from AlexNY102.

Question: What is the most interesting/exciting thing you ever did?

ASlvrstne: I have no idea.

CelebCrcle: The next question is from N C m23.

Question: Alicia, who do you consider your role models?

ASlvrstne: My mom, my friend Carolyn, on a personal level, and I really like following Laura Dern and Jodi Foster's careers, and Amanda Plummer.

CelebCrcle: Just time for a few more questions, folks! The next question is from Mcdbri.

Question: Are you a feminist?

ASlvrstne: I don't know, are you?

CelebCrcle: The next question is from Costacomm.

Question: Who is your publicist? Are you happy with him/her?

ASlvrstne: Why, are you a publicist?

CelebCrcle: The next question is from JAMF.

Question: What is your favorite article of clothing that you own?

ASlvrstne: My green T-shirt with a hole in it that I've been wearing for about five years now. When I first started auditioning, I wore it everyday to every audition because I didn't have very many clothes, and I loved it. CelebCrcle: The next question is from Kriss2U.

Question: How were you discovered?

ASlvrstne: There's no discovery. I worked really hard. You have to work hard to get anything in life.

CelebCrcle: Well, we're just about out of time...any closing comments for us tonight?

ASlvrstne: Thank you for talking to me. Please go see "Clueless." I know you'll love it! Bye! : )

CelebCrcle: Thanks for joining us, and congrats on "Clueless!"

OnlineHost: Thanks Alicia, for joining us this evening for an informative session. Members, if you missed any portion of tonight's event, be sure to check back within 24 hours for an edited transcript of this event. Thank you and good night!

OnlineHost: Copyright 1995 Oldsmobile; licensed to America Online, Inc.

Copyright 1995, World Wide Pants Inc.

Dave: Our next guest won two MTV movie awards for her performance in The Crush.
Dave: (to Pam the guest host) Do you know what that is?
Pam: Its a movie, yeah.
Dave: I believe she's also got a special academy award for that Aerosmith video. (audience laughes)
Dave: Her latest film is called Clueless and it opens on Friday; here she is ladies and gentlemen, Alicia Silverstone. (Band plays Aerosmith's Crazy)
Dave: How are ya?
Alicia: Good.
Dave: Welcome to the show, this is Pam Cox; she's from Oklahoma - ever been to Oklahoma?
Alicia: No (smiles)
Dave: Oh its a beautiful state, you oughta go down there; ever been to Texas? (audience laughes)
Dave: Ever been to Texas?
Alicia: No. (smiles)
Dave: You're born, uh, you're originally from San Francisco, is that correct?
Alicia: Yes.
Dave: Now tell people a little bit about yourself, how did you get into show business you're very young, how old are ya? 18 or so?
Alicia: 18.
Dave: Well you've had a pretty nice career so far dont you think?
Alicia: Yes. (smiles)
Dave: Yeah well how did it begin?
Alicia: Um I was like 3 or 4 and I would dance to Olivia Newton John on my coffee table.
Dave: Me too.. (chuckles) (Audience laugs)
ALICIA: You did? (joking)
Dave: Yeah - (Audience keeps laughing)
Dave: and the next thing you know, CBS gave me a show. (Audience laughs)
Alicia: I used to think that my mom was Olivia Newton John.
Dave: You, now wait a minute, this is interesting - this sounds like a deep seeded psychological disorder.
Alicia: Yes. (smiling)
Dave: You thought your mother was Olivia Newton John.
Alicia: Yeah..
Dave: But she's not is she?
Alicia: No, she's a stewardess so she was always away flying and I think when she left she was going to do a concert...
Dave: Yeah -
Alicia: and I also thought that they were aliens and that they were all gonna kill me one day.
Dave: Really, so it was an unpleasant childhood then?
Alicia: Just a very.. creative mind I guess..
Dave: So from dancing around the house on the coffee table and beleving that your parents are aliens and Olivia Newton John, which could be one in the same I guess (laugh) uh, then how did you go from that - I mean because kids do that, that's what kids do you know; they just goof around and stuff. How did you go from that to being like in bigtime showbusiness?
Alicia: Um I just came out to LA and started auditioning.
Dave: Right, what was your first audition?
Alicia: Oh I did, well, not - the first was Dominoes pizza.
Dave: Dominoes pizza, yeah.
Alicia: and I did Wonder Years, where I met Fred Savage..
Dave: Oh yeah, now that was a pretty good show, wasnt it?
Alicia: Yeah, real good show - and I was so, I turned bright red when I met him and I was dying for Fred Savage and actually he got my phone number but there was this big accident because I had a fax machine on my phone, for my father, and he never got my number so - I mean he had my number,and he called, but he never got me..
Dave: Wow, another mix up - now tell us about Clueless; you play the part of a young girl who attends Beverly Hills High.
Alicia: Yes.
Dave: and, I understand you also went there yourself.
Alicia: Yes I went there.. I was a total looser though, nothing like Cher.
Dave: Really?
Alicia: I just...
Dave: What was it like, what is Beverly Hills High like?
Alicia: Its.. nutty, everyone dresses very fashionable to school and they're very.. you know like that.
Dave: Well they're like that, yeah.
Alicia: And I'm used to just wearing sweats; and it was *not* appropriate.
Dave: Uh huh, so did you graduate - do you have a high school diploma?
Alicia: I took my GED, got emancipated - so I'm.. done with school. (smiles)
Dave: Congradulations.
Alicia: Thank you. (Audience cheers) (Dave chuckles)
Dave: Alright so anyway in the movie Clueless, you play the part of Cher named for the actress/singer Cher?
Alicia: Yeah, my best friend in the film Dionne, we're both named after singers of the past who now do infomercials. (A few people in the audience laugh)
Alicia: So we both totally understand each other cause everyone's jealous of us, we understand how it feels to have.. you know.. that pressure.. (Audience laughs)
Dave: I have no idea what you're talking about. (Audience laughs)
Alicia: Its hard to relate..
Dave: And the videos, they gave you quite a bit of recognition didnt they, the Aerosmith videos?
Alicia: Yeah.
Dave: Yes and how did those come to be?
Alicia: Um Marty Cauldner saw The Crush and wanted me to do their videos.
Dave: And there you go, will you do other videos do you think?
Alicia: Maybe. (smile)
Dave: Yeah, do you like being in those kinda videos?
Alicia: They're so much fun, its just.. getting paid to run around and punch people; punch Steven Dorf, its great... that kinda stuff.
Dave: Yeah, and uh - lemme see your fingers this is a very unusual shade of.. well perhaps its not unusual its uh - how would you describe that? (Dave is referring to her fingernail polish)
Alicia: Sky blue. (smiles)
Dave: Uh huh, well it looks like it could be a circulatory problem! (Audience laughing drowns out her response)
Dave: Pam, did you have any questions?
PAM(the guest host): Did you get to meet the band?
Alicia: Yes I met them once.
Pam: Just once??
Dave: Yeah you know she got to meet your husband as well. (to Pam) (Audience laughs)
Pam: Yeah I noticed. (Audience cheers)
Dave: Uh are are you married, do you have a family?
Alicia: Yeah, married, 5 kids.
Dave: REALLY? (joking) (Audience laughs)
Alicia: Yeah.. (laughs) Uhm, no.
Dave: Do you have a boyfriend?
Alicia: I have a dog, who is my boyfriend - Samson.
Dave: But you must, guys must be all around, sleeping in your yard at your place huh?
Alicia: No, I dunno what it is - everybody thinks that, but I don't have dates, don't have guys.. looser..
Dave: I guess its because you're homely. (chuckling) (Audience laughs)
Alicia: Yeah. (laughing) (Audience cheers again)
Dave: Uh so you must be very excited about things, huh?
Alicia: Yes.
Dave: Um, the movie is doing well, has it opened yet?
Alicia: It opens wednesday, everyone's very excited about it, its a very funny movie.
Dave: Amy Heckerling directed uh, of course I think best known for Fast Times at Ridgemont High - which is also a very entertaining show.
Alicia: Yeah; wrote that and directed..
Dave: So what are you gonna do for the rest of the summer?
Alicia: Hang out with Samson.
Dave: And Samson is your..
Alicia: Dog. Dave: What kinda dog do you have?
Alicia: He's a Rotweiller-pitbull-doverman.
Dave: Oh I'm sorry to hear that. (Audience laughs)
Dave: Sounds like an affectionate little thing, doesn't it? (Audience laughs again)
Dave: Ah, well Alicia it was very nice to meet you and good luck with your career - I'm very happy you could come out here this evening. Did you have a nice time?
Alicia: Yes, thank you.
Dave: Alicia Silverstone Ladies and Gentlemen.

HOLLYWOOD -Alicia Silverstone's pouty mouth and come-hither poses have made her the girl Hollywood is most eager to corrupt. In her movie and music video roles, she has played girls who grow up too fast, don't listen to their parents, and get in as much trouble as they possibly can.

She follows the horror flick Hideaway, in which she flirted with the devil's spawn against her parents' express orders, with an Amy Heckerling comedy called Clueless, playing Cher, a been-there, done-that teen in Beverly Hills. She gives fashion makeovers to friends and teachers alike in this upscale riff on another Heckerling film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

In real life, the 18-year-old Silverstone looks the look but doesn't act the act. She's still close to her parents. She seems shy and balanced. She actually did go to Beverly Hills High School, but was far from being the Coolest Chick on Campus. "I didn't have the right clothes. I was such a misfit," she recalls. Silverstone grew up in the San Francisco area, where her English parents had settled several years before her birth. "I come from a very British family, where everything is suppressed --- although I was always yelling my head off." She spent youthful summers in England, went to the theatre a lot, and came back aspiring to be an actress. "At first I was a model, but I haaaated it! So I stopped that at twelve -- no way! I went to live in Los Angeles in the summer of ninth grade and flew back and forth to San Francisco but basically lived with my agent. I can't believe my parents let me."

Although she appeared as Fred Savage's dream girl on The Wonder Years, she became best known as "that girl in the Aerosmith videos." This success drew her parents to L.A. "It was a downer when they showed up," she recalls. "That was a depressing period. But then I got The Crush." The Crush made Silverstone the dream girl of every pubescent male in North America, and two MTV Movie awards, for Best Breakthrough Performance and Best Villain, ensured her that she would be remembered for more than being "just the Aerosmith chick."

Following Clueless, Silverstone will appear in True Crime, The Babysitter, and the made-in-France Le Nouveau Monde. "It all happened very fast," she says. "It's time to say,'Whoa!' I'm too young for my life. My life is older but my heart is young. Sometimes I just want to curl up and be a little girl again. I'm glad my mom is always there for a hug. I'm scared of burning out and at the same time I'm scared of never getting another job."

It may indeed be time for another makeover. As her best friend in Clueless, Dionne, sees it, "Cher's main thrill in life is makeovers. It gives her a sense of control in a world of chaos."

ALICIA SILVERSTONE was kicked off her freshman cheerleading squad for refusing to wear "that stupid outfit."

In spite of that potentially tragic real-life decision, she has become the top teen babe in the land.

In "Clueless," the surprisingly satirical treatise of rich kids at the mall, she gets top billing. The movies naughty treatise on wealthy teens unveils Alicia, the star -- so appealing that she even gains sympathy for her character, Cher, a Beverly Hills mall brat who spends most of her time accessorizing her outfits and talking on her cellular phone. Cher is the kind of girl who has a snazzy sports car, even though she sees no point in learning to drive because "after all, they have valet parking everywhere you go."

In the opening scene of "Clueless," opening today, Cher announces that she has "a way normal life, for a teenage girl."

The real-life Alicia cant really say the same. Her long blond hair frames a perfect face with blue eyes as she takes a surprisingly serious attitude toward the interview. "I mock Cher in a way, but I really liked her," she said. "Shes a stuck-up mall rat, but I dont think shes dumb. She doesnt know what she wants in life yet, but she knows how to manipulate people. I dont really think shes a bad role model but shes not like me. Really?

"Well, NO. Shes loud and Im quiet."

She may be quiet, but Silverstone gets noticed. Esquire magazine, in the current issue, proclaimed her as "the woman were most willing to wait for."

She won two MTV Awards for her movie debut in The Crush, for most promising newcomer and best villain. She was manipulative jail bait in the film -- a pouting Lolita who gave no rest to the older guy (Cary Elwes) who was the object of her attention.

Im not aware of all that talk about teenage boys, she said, at an interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. "I never ACTED sexy in a movie. I'm not trying to be sexy, andI don't think Cher is either. It's not Cher's fault that she looks good in theclothes.

``I'm just a little girl. I think I have a good head on my shoulders and I'm not going to act like a fool, but, after all, I AM just a little girl. I don't claim to have any sophisticated ideas about sex. What can I do about what `they' think anyway? I mean my image is something someone else sees -- not me.''

Silverstone, now 18, rose to fame when she bungee-jumped off a bridge for the Aerosmith video ``Cryin,'' a work that the ever-diligent MTV subsequently named as ``The Best Video of All Time.'' She appeared in two other videos with the rock group but, demurely says ``I never met Aerosmith and I didn't get rich from it.''

She claims that she's not terribly ambitious and ``never really aspired to become a movie star. Things just happened. When I was growing up, I didn't go to the movies a lot. I saw `16 Candles' and `Fast Times at Ridgemont High.' Being in movies was not really a goal.''

She's made nine movies in the past two years and says ``I just feel lonely. I mean, it seems I work all the time.''

She claims that ``I don't drink, swear or do drugs and I won't do a nude scene. No way. They know that.''

For ``The Crush,'' the brief shots of nudity were done by a double. She subsequently turned down several big movies because they had nude scenes and only agreed to do the upcoming ``The Babysitter'' after it was rewritten to cut such scenes. ``Nudity is not necessary -- pure and simply.''

Of her personal life she states, ``I've kissed a few boys -- not much.''

Silverstone grew up in an upscale community south of San Francisco. Her mom was an ex-airline stewardess, and her dad is a real estate developer. She spent summers in England, the native home of her parents.

She performed a routine to the theme song from ``Flashdance'' in a local talent show in San Francisco and promptly got a modeling agent. She hated modeling (``too dumb'') and subsequently hired an acting agent. The family moved south from San Francisco and enrolled her in Beverly Hills High School for her sophomore year. (Tori Spelling of ``Beverly Hills 90210'' is a good friend.) She was cast as the dream girl of the character played by Fred Savage in the TV series ``The Wonder Years'' as well as Raquel Welch's daughter in a TV movie. ``The Crush'' was the surprise breakthrough.

Amy Heckerling, who wrote and directed ``Clueless,'' spotted her in an Aerosmith video.

``I saw a sexy and pretty girl on the verge of womanhood,'' the director said, ``but I also saw something childlike. Alicia has a real vulnerability. Then, I saw `The Crush' and I said, `She's great, but can she be funny?'''

After tests, Heckerling, who rose to fame directing ``Fast Times at Ridgemont High,'' was sold on Silverstone's comic timing.

Audiences like Cher, Silverstone said, in spite of the fact that she is the most material of all material girls. ``She really means well,'' Silverstone said. ``She thinks she's helping girls by giving them a makeover and by making matches and manipulating people. Cher has a lot of imagination, although she doesn't know yet what she wants to do with her own life. I like her a lot. I make fun of her, but I'm not really mocking her.''

As for her own career, Silverstone claims that ``I don't think I have a sexpot image at all. I feel pretty normal. It's only when I do interviews that people want me to evaluate my life in five minutes. It's too early to evaluate it. All I can say is that I'm not crazy. In this business, that's saying something. Actually, it's saying a lot.''

by David Lyman

When Amy Heckerling made "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," she was raw and audacious, a 27-year-old director making her feature film debut. The resulting movie was as hilarious as it was coarse and impertinent.

Now, 14 years later, Heckerling has returned to high school to make "Clueless." But things have changed. For one thing, her new movie takes place in that privileged corner of the world known as Beverly Hills High School, not the rough-and-tumble climes of Ridgemont High.

Here, kids strut the halls with cell phones and litigate grades with their teachers. Glamour - the more outrageous, the better - is in ascendance, as is cosmetic surgery, judging by the number of bandaged noses and chins that fill the halls. But sex and drugs have taken a nose-dive. They exist, of course, but in the age of AIDS and dope-smoking parents, these kids find it easier for pleasures of the senses to be largely confined to being spectator sports, as background for music videos.

But for all their outlandish affectations, these are still teen-agers. The ever-so-hip lingo is different and costumes have changed from previous generations. How else to anger parents? But as with every generation of teens, attitude rules, along with a sense of absolute supremacy over anyone much beyond the age of 30.

Cher (Alicia Silverstone) and Dionne (Stacey Dash) - both named for former singing stars who have become infomercial hosts - are at the center of the social universe at BHHS. Their level of coolness, in their eyes, at least, is what every person aspires to.

Heckerling, who also wrote the sometimes witty script, hasn't really given the movie much of a plot. It's more like an agglomeration of related vignettes. Cher plays matchmaker to a couple of unwitting teachers. Cher does a total make-over - make-up, wardrobe and attitude - for a hopelessly uncool new student (Brittany Murphy of TV's "Sister, Sister"). Cher finds a boyfriend (Justin Walker), but he turns out to be gay. Cher manipulates her dad Dan Hedaya). Cher battles with her stepbrother (Paul Rudd). And on and on and on, until nearly everyone finds redemption from his or her personal shortcomings.

But in the end, Heckerling and her likeable cast - especially Rudd, Walker and Silverstone, who makes a virtue of overacting - have to work so hard for what turns out to be a paltry payoff that it hardly seems worth the effort. Oh, there is a fair amount of cleverness. But Heckerling's over-written script would probably be funnier on the page than on the screen, where the movie is rarely really funny. Or pithy. Or poignant or revelatory or even, for that matter, especially observant. In fact, the movie's most pointed commentary about young people regularly comes from costume designer Mona May, not Heckerling.

Just as high school has changed, so too has Heckerling. She is now 41 years old, a parent and, since 1985, has a directed "National Lampoon's European Vacation" and a pair of the "Look Who's Talking" movies. Heckerling, who was so memorable when she was an brash Hollywood outsider, has now become the quintessential Hollywood insider.

Indeed, despite the similarity in location, "Clueless" has a lot more in common with "Look Who's Talking Too" than it does with "Fast Times." It's a studio version of high school life, a movie that never dares to wander far from the middle of the road. Maybe that's what high school has become. But more likely, it is what an out-of-touch, middle-aged Hollywood thinks it has become.

At 19, Alicia Silverstone is both cold-eyed player and wide-eyed
kid-reflefting the dazzling performance in Clueless that made her a
certified star. In Vancouver, Matt Tyrnauer(interviewer) finds the chatty
ingenue in the thrall of her perhaps too-powerful manager, Carolyn
Kessler, producing and staring in Excess Baggage, and training for her
next role, as batgirl.

'Sooooo yummy! Want some?' Alicia Silverstone is sitting at a
frozen-yogurt shop on a bustling Vancouver corner, chewing on a
coconut/peanut butter trail bar. Activity abounds-Rollerbladers, tourists,
rumbled Canadians in Tevas. Yet silverstone, one of hollywoods's newest
Most Sacred Personages, is able to sit unrecognized at our sidewalk table.
In fron of us are 3 huge cappuchinos in polystyrene cups: one for her, one
for me, and one for Carolyn Kessler, the woman she introduces as her 'best
friend in the whole eintire world.' Kessler, also Silverstone's manager,
has joined us to monitor our every word. But considering that this is a
world of stalkers and paparazzi and that Silverstone is only 19-a girl
given to bursting into the theme song from The Wonder Years during
conversations and rhaposdizing about rocky-road brownies and the
'awesomeness' of brown sugar-maybe caution is justified.

Rounding out our party is Silverstone's 'baby', a black Labrador/pit bull
named Samson who is clumsily nuzzling my blueberry muffin. "Samson is a
big-chested man!" Silverstone exclaims at one point, somewhat out of the
blue. Neither Kessler nor I is in any position to dispute this. Manager,
in fact, seems rarely to disagree with star.

Momentarilly, perhaps due to the strangeness of all this, I think I am
seeing double:Silverstone and Kessler-10 years apart in age- have clearly
styled themselves as twins, the older taking cues from the younger. Most
striking is the way Silverstone's straight blind hair repeats inself on
Kessler. Silverstone has perfect, milky skin; Kessler has achieved a
similar whiteness with foundation. Silverstone's huge, kittenish green
eyes look weary abter a week of night shoots; Kessler masks her catlike
orbs with dark glasses. It's enough to prompt memories of Brian Wilson's
guru, Macaulay Culkin's father-or Single White Female.
This is the third time in 6 years that Alicia Silverstone has decamped
from California to Vancouver to film a movie. But, on this project-her
10th, including little movies as the Crush, The hideaway, the Babysitter,
and TV features-things are different. The current productionm tentatively
titled Excess Baggage, is a full-blown Alicia vehicle in which she plays a
troubled heiress who arranges her own kidnapping to get attention. Her
character is a darker variant of her Clueless heroine, Cher Horowitz, an
Azzedine Alaia-addicted Beverly Hills teen whose heart is as golden as her
daddy's Amex card.
Though she sped the hearts of many as Cher, Silverstone is clearly
conderned that she will be typecast in the clueless-girl parts untill she
hits Sunset Boulevard tettitory., "She always uses what she did in
Clueless as a reference of what not to do in this movie," says Marco
Brambilla, the director of Excess Baggage. "What's really important to her
is to become an actor and not really to become a star."
Silverstone in hair-trigger defensive on that matter. ON more than one
occasion she is moved to emphasize, "I am not(emphasis) Cher !" No one, at
least no noe in her retinue, disagrees-for not only does Silverstone have
the lead in this film, she is also the producer. (Kessler doubles as her
producing partner.) She had script approval and veto power over the choice
of Brambilla. (He won praise for helping Sandra Bullock avoid the shards
of the otherwise disastrous Demolition Man.) As far as anyone can
remember, Silverstone is the youngest actress-producer in hollywood
history. She hust can't do interviews alone. But this girl's life, a
hybrid of adolescence and adulthood, pet ownership and percentage points,
has it's contradictions.

Alicia Silverstone takes her craft as seriously as a Redgrave. She may, on
occasion, slip into Vally Girl vernacular, but-dertermined to establish a
feature-film career-she declined when Aaron Spelling came calling with a
role one Beverly Hills 90210. It would be hard to find a 19-year old -even
in Harvard Yard-so professionally determined.
"When I first started working with the studio (on Excess Baggage)
Silverstone says, 'the script was this broad, fantastic comedy kind of
thinkg. And I said, I'm not making this movie! I like the concept here,
but let's make it really dark, really wierd, really sick.' (What she said
to Brambilla, he recalls, was "I'm not crazy about the script-I'd like to
be able to fuck with it.")
"Would you call youself a film noir?" I ask.
"I don't know what that is," she admits. "I have suck a bad movie
vocabulary, I'm suck a geek!"
Not really, says Barry Josephson, the man who orchestrated Silverstone's
two-picture, $7million, 'first look' production deal with the studio- a
package deal reported to be bringing the young actess adistincly ungeeky
$10 million fee. Sony, beleaguered by criticism for upping the star-salary
ante, has implied that Silverstone's camp inflated the figure. In any
event, the actress will recieve $3million for her duties on Excess Baggage
and $4million for a second, yet-to-be chosen project.
But Alicia Silverstone doesn't behave like a girl star who keeps track,
between trips to the implant surgeon, of the millions her agents are
throwing around. "After you pay everyone, you're really left with
nothing," she notes, with no particular regret. She is a cheerful realist,
rambling Annie Hall-style in conversation, bridging awkward silences with
a great deal of charm. While she talks about the past, there is no
child-star angst. If the situations she's describing sound a little
lonely, she doesn't seem to want you to notice. Maybe she(emphasis)
doesn't want to notice.
"When I was filming The Crush (In Vancouver), I lived in that apartment
building right over ther," she muses, pointeing to a 70's high-rise that
casts it's shadow over the frozen-yougurt shop. "So I, like, lived at this
yougurt place."

A riff of music from a club upstairs brings back another memory. "Oh I was
there," she says, gesturing toward the rock 'n' roll joint.
"Do you recognize the music?" Kesler asks, enormously curious. "No, I just
remember not being old enough to get in, so I was turned away."
Suddenly, as if on cue, a red Volkswagen convertible containing a couple
of Ray-Banned guys roars up to a traffic light and stops short.
Silverstone is spotted."Hey, Alicia Silverstone!" they guys yell. She
smiles shyly, tilts her head down. "They recognized you from quite a
distance," I note. "Yeah, I know!" says Silverstone, neither apologetic
nor particularly impressed. "Sometimes, however, she gets a little
freaked. "We were just shooting in, like, the boondocks and there were 50
kids out there waiting, watching, and it was sort of scary, but... what I
really want to do is go talk to them like a normal kid. But I'm not," she
says matter-of-factly. "You can't go over to 50 kids, because it would be
really weird... And this one girl screams out, 'Hey Alicia Silverstone,
can I have your autograph?" And I say 'Later ok?' And she goes 'Well I
have to go to work at six in the morning.' And I yelled back, 'Well I'm
working now!" And she goes 'Thanks a lot for nothing, bitch!'"(emphasis)
Even before Clueless, which has grossed almost 100 million worldwide,
Alicia Silverstone was an icon to the MTV/benzoyl-peroxide crowd, thanks
to her sexed-up performances in a trilogy of Aerosmith music videos
(Cryin,Amazing, and Crazy, which co-starred Liv Tyler) directed by Marty
Callner. "I knew the second I met her," says Callner. "Certain people have
a presence; there is sort of an aura around them. She walked into my
office and I knew. I met Madonna at Warner Bros. before she had really
broken, but you just knew(emphasis) when you were with her. Alicia was
very naive at the time, but there was something in her eyes."
"She's an amazing talent," affirms Amy Heckerling, who directed Clueless.
"I mean, you don't have to tell her how to seduce a lens; it's just part
of who she is...There is some sensual and knowing quality that just lights
up." Another director who greatly admires Silverstone is Joel Schumacher,
who has signed her, for a reported 1.5 million, to play Batgirl opposite
George Clooney's Caped Crusader in Batman and Robin. "She plays an English
borading-school girl who is not all she appears to be," says Schumacher,
clearly elated to have her in latex.

Many people-Herckling and Schumacher among them-are quick to note the
disparity between what Silverstone, as a seasoned camera object, can
project(particularly sexually) in a controlled performance and what she,
as a very young woman, is actually capable of doing and understanding.
There is, as Hollywood professionals know, a gulf between what an actor
can be coached to do and what he or she, through experience, has grown to
truly understand. Silverstone is, at least for the moment, caught between
the two.
"Most teen girls, even if they are extravagantly and overtly sexual, are
very, very not in touch with it and afraid of it," says Schumacher.
"Taking responsibility for your own sexuality is a very big task and it
seometimes takes people a lifetime. So it is not unusual for even girls
who have done a lot of nudity in front of the camera, or even porn, to
have a certain blind side to what the whole power of it is. There is the
whole dichotomy." Amy Heckerling, hopeful that the child alicia will have
time to catch up to the professional, notes, "There is a duality to her:
on the one hand she is sort of, like, you know, playing with her dog. And
I fell she is probably a lot more comfortable with the childlike persona."
Today in Vancouver, Silverstone is suffering under an overloaded
movie-star producer's schedule. This afternoon she has an appointment to
critique rushes; then she has to prepare for tomorrow's big scene with her
handpicked co-star, Benicio Del Toro, who attracted attention last year in
The Usual Suspects. ("I don't know if you can compare Alicia to one of the
great producers of all time or anything like that," he tells me, "but I
wouldn't say she's said anything stupid."
Originally, I had been invited to the set to view the star in action, but
Kessler has vetoed that. So she and Silverstone propose a walk in
Vancouver's vast Stanley Park instead. Samson is also in attendance.
At the entrance to the heavily forested grounds, with the sky an ominous
gray, Kessler shows sudden signs of chill. "Are you freezing your brains
out?" Silverstone asks protectively, rushing up behind her friend and
administering a gib hug. Meanwhile, Samson charges down a path ahead of
us, free of his leash, virtually a hanging offense in prim Vancouver.
As we trail behind the dog, Silverstone free-associates merrrily, musing
on the subject of Manischewitz wine and her own Jewishness. "I do love
Manischewitz wine at Shabbat time!" she says. As we pass a couple on a
blanket holding hands, Silverstone scrutinizes them carefully. "This is a
nice day to be out here with your partner, lover, whatever, watching the
sailboats go by," she says.

I ask her if she has anyone to watch the sailboats with. She says no. "I
don't really date. It's not that I don't want to, it's just that no one
asks me." Several years ago, after moving to Hollywood from San Francisco,
the then 15-year old alicia became involved with a 28-year old French
hairdresser named Moize Chabbouh("I was a very good girl"-she has been
quoted as saying-"we didn't kiss until 6 months after we met"), but she
denies that she was ever anything more than social with Adam Sandler of
Saturday Night Live, even though they were identified in the press as a
couple. It has also been suggested that she was briefly involved with
young actor Leonardo DiCaprio, whom she met at the Forum(an intensive
three-day self-help seminar which has been compared to est). On that
subject her voice goes hollow: "I will not say anything about him."
As the breeze blows through her hair and Kessler chills, silverstone
chatters excitedly about her recent activities. "On Wednesday, I hiked up
Grouse Mountain with Marc," she says. Who's Marc? "Batman trainer, I told
him I wanted to do things that were fun, but I'm not kidding this was
hard!(emphasis) It takes one and a half hours, and it's, like, straight
up, and my heart rate was 160-that's high! there's a team of people that
train George Clooney and Uma [Thurman] and me." Silverstone, beautiful
today without a dab of makeup, is admirably undefensive about her recent
weight gain-a topic that has become an obsession among celebrity
fetishists worldwide.

CLUELESS TEEN ALICIA ORDERED:TRIM THAT FLAB BEFORE
YOU START BATMAN MOVIE, screamed one tabloid, going on to assert that
Silverstone was subject to secret beingeing fits involving M&M's, Godiva
chocholates, and Nutella. Columnist Liz Smith rose to Silverstone's
defense. "I mean really," Smith wrote, "this child was never past the
point of pleasingly plump. Women-real women-do not have the sinewy,
hipless, flat-bellied bodies of 14 year-old boys."
"I do my best," Silverstone says, very evenly, about the weight issue.
"But it's much more important to me that my brain be working in the
morning than getting up early and doing excersise...The most important
thing for me is that I eat and that I sleep and that I get the work done,
but unfortunatley...it's the perception that women in film should look a
certain way."
The most eloquent defender of Silverston is her dad, Monty: "Alicia's too
skinny!" he declares on me in a phone interview. "she needs to gain a
couple of pounds. My God! She's only 19!...I mean, gee, at 19, have you
seen these girls? You know what Joel Schumacher said? He said it's Clooney
who has got to get sme weight off his belly! What can they say about
Alicia? She's been so successful, all they can say is 'Well she's putting
on weight.' Big deal!
Perhaps eager to change the subject, Silverstone again brings up how much
she prizes her producing responsibilities and the creative control she
wields under the terms of her Columbia deal. "Barry Josephson has always
been on our side," she says, "and he introduced us to [Columbia production
executive] Kevin Jones, who is really amazing-I mean he's amazing because
he does everything we say."
Kessler, walking a few steps behind us, interuppts: "I think what alicia
means to say is that he very much shares the same vision-you know what I
mean?" "Yeah," Silverstone concurs. "I mean, he's not a producer-at least
he doesn't act like a normal producer." And then, in one of her quirky non
swquiturs, Silverstone turns very serious.
"It's been strange," she says, reflecting on her rise "because this really
isn't a welcoming business. People don't reach out and say, 'I know you
can do it! I really think you can do it!'" For that reason, "I never hang
out with people in the industry, thank God."
As we are speaking, she climbs over a low stone wall onto a beach so that
she can play with Samson. The girl and the dog dig a hole together. Then
she lies down and builds a little berm of sand around herself as she
continues her monologue, with Kessler and me at rapt attention: "I mean, a
lot of times I wonder, What drugs are these people taking that allow them
to stay alive?" Silverstone says as her manager looks stricken. "My
perception of [Hollywood] is that it is very cold and very dry and very
dark. But the people, they always have a smile on their face, though I
always wonder, How deep in that smile is the knife? I just don't
understand how jobs could rule people's lives. I don't really understand
how you could think, I'm going to backstab, cheat, harm, just to get ahead
in a business. I mean, I guess in caveman world it happened, but it
happened to survive!" Silverstone has clearly chosen Kessler and her
husband, Michael Packenham-who serves as her agent(she takes a studio
salary, he takes a commission)-to help her deal with it all. Attempting to
explain their importance to her, she starts to talk about a point where
she had make 5 movies back-to-back and found herself on the set yet again.
"It was on Hideaway," she says, "that I realized that Carolyn was my best
friend in the entire world... I started to go through a crisis because I
was a kid and I was dealing with being an adult in a kid's body and in an
environment where I was learning so much but had nobody to share it
with-woth lots of obstacles about being a teenage and growning up that you
can't have on a set of a film. You know, you can't cry on the set and I
was very professional. I was very good about closing it off, but i started
calling Carolyn and saying, 'I have nobody. I have no friends. I have no
life. All I do is work.'"
She claims that everything is different now. But there are more than a few
people who know Alicia Silverstone who worry that she is too dependant on
her small circle of professional advisers. "She's too young and she has
too few influences," says a concerned observer. "Anyone who meets her and
realizes how sweet she is, you know, you can't help but care for her."
Alicia herself has complete faith in her protectors, particularly Kessler.
"Before I met Carolyn," she tells me, "I thought I was an alien. But she
has the same brain as me-like, sometimes we can be in a really important
conversation and suddenly we'll jsut fall asleep together and it's like
sisters, like soul mates."
"I think that the relationship is sometimes wierd," says a studio source.
"I'm sure what would be better is if she had other friends that were her
age...[Kessler] insulates Alicia more than she needs to, I think, to keep
her from input that would potentially put [Kessler] in jeopardy."
Even Silverstone's parents express reservations. "She's the best person on
the planet," Didi Silverstone says, mocking her daughter's defense of her
manager. "Yes, yes, she's Alicia's friend and you cna't say anything, not
a word,(emphasis)...but I do think somehow...the only thing I can go so
far as to say is that maybe the influence is a bit too much."
Life in frone of the camera began for Alicia Silverstone when she was
eight years old during a photo shoot in suburban San Francisco. The
photographer was her father, who thought she could be a model. Monty
Silverstone is a real-estate developer and an investment consultant who
always aspired to be an actor. He is english (as is Alicia's mother, a
former Pam Am flight attendant) and speaks with a theatrical accent
reminiscent of Cary Grant's. Recently he starred in a San Mateo County
community-theater production of The Real Inspector Hound. Didi, who
specializes in accents, helped with the dialects. (Alicia's older brother,
David, is a propman in L.A.)
Mony remembers how "extra-ordinarily pretty Alicia [properly pronounced
Uh-liss-ee-uh] was as a child. Ah, a pretty little girl-quiet,
unassuming," he recalls nostalgically, like a character out of Chekhov.
"Oh, we'd love to have a pretty little girl like that again!" he says,
telling me how it all began. "I took a series of nice little snapshots of
her lying on a sheepskin rug in a bathing suit, lying with her head up on
her chin, if you can picture it, looking up at me-very sensual for a
little girl-with a lovely mouth drooping down. And then I said, "You know
what didi?" I said. "I'm going to shop Alicia around for an agent for
modeling and print.'" Almost instantly, Silverstone got work-modeling for
YSL, Levi's Dockers, and the chain store Marshalls. But Alicia says she
hated modeling. "I felt so stupid. Standing there looking pretty was not
something that was interesting to me at all."
Acting classes begun at 12, suited her much better. "I loved it, I just
worked and worked and worked, and I think it was the best thing that I
have ever done in my life," she says, "because I was at the stage where I
was turning into a little person, and I needed somewhere to think. I was
just such a little thinker!"(emphasis)
By the time she was 14 she had decided-unilaterally-to leave her high
school and her parents' house and move to L.A. to live with acting coach
Judi O'Neil. Rather quickly, she attracted the attention of Carolyn
Kessler, who spotted her at an actors' showcase.
Within a year, she landed The Crush, but in order for her to take the hob
it was necessary for Silverstone bo be legally emancipated from the
custody of her parents to avoid child-labor restrictrions. At first Monty
Silverstone was reluctant. "At the time of The Crush, I was brainwashed by
Carolyn Kessler," he recalls, "and I said [to Alicia], "If you promise to
be the same girl you used to be, I'll let you get emancipated, because
you're our little girl, not some girl like Drew Barrymore or whatever.'"
By all accounts Silverstone has kept her promise-avoiding tattoos, the
Viper Room, and gun-crazy-girl roles.(She is often sighted-once with a
hood over her head-at the New Beverly Cinema, a revival movie house.) She
currently rents a little Tudor guesthouse behind the Chateau Marmont hotel
in West Hollywood and is in the process of buying a house of her own, "a
little cabin-it reminds me of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," farther up
in the Hollywood HIlls. The house has a garden into whihc Silverstone can
retreat from the pressure which is building.
Some hope to keep and eye on her. Says Amy Heckerling, "I saw a headline
that said, CAN ALICIA SAVE SONY? And then, with The tabloids recording
everthing she eats, I mean I thought, Let's not Judy Garland this girl!"
But Silverstone doesn't seem to be groping for the painkillers just yet.
"I care about what I do, but my career is so second in my life," she
declares. "I love creating, but I don't know if I want to be an actor
forever. I don't know if I want to do anything forever...I could take all
this and say 'Shove it up your ass,' because I don't really care. I really
love what I'm doing on this movie, but, at the same time, I'd rather be
married and have beautiful babies and millions of animals and eat
delicious food and get as fat as I want...Live! You know?"
Our walk in Stanley Park, which is growing increasingly crowded, is
drawing to a close. Kessler, who is keeping an eye on the clock, has
compelled us to trun around, because Silverston'e assistant is picking
them up at 4:30. Meanwhile, Samson, still without leash, has run off to
attack a quivering spaniel.
"He's really very friendly!" Kessler calls out, attempting to placate the
citim's distressed owner.
"Where's his leash?" the spaniel lady snaps. Samson then forcefully bounds
ahead, executing a flying leap right into the path of a speeding
Rollerblader and sending hte man high into the air.
"Samson!"(ephasis)Silverstone yells. The blader is now crumpled on a patch
of grass, with no idea what has just hit him. Silverstone runs over. "I'm
so sorry! He didn't mean it!" she says, picking grass off the shirt of the
blader, who is too dazed and furious to recognize that Alicia Silverstone
is personally brushing dirt off his gym shorts. But as he begins to
comprehend who is carefully tweezing sod from his damp Canadian skin, he
suddenly softens. Rolling away, he looks over his shoulder and concedes,
"In retrospect that was really funny."
"Thanks for your understanding," Kessler calls out. "Thank you!" says
Silverstone, who still seems like a little girl, shaken and fearful for
her pet.
Then with the man out of earshot, Kessler turns to her client. "You know
what?" she says conspiratorially. "That guy was going real(emphasis)
fast."
Silverstone brightens, and within a few moments, the sun breaks through
the clouds. Samson takes his place on his owners's left, Kessler on her
right. Alicia Silverston seems very content.

BY Kim Cunningham
People Weekly, March 20, 1995

Alicia Silverstone, 18, doesn't want to be known as the new babe on the block. "I don't just want to be the girl boys get excited about," says Silverstone. This, despite playing a killer nymphet in 1993's thriller The Crush, a femme fatale in three Aerosmith videos and being stalked by a psychotic maniac in the current chiller Hideaway. "I have no desire for people to see me in a sexy way. I won't do nudity ever." She rolls her eyes at the mention of Drew Barrymore's January Playboy layout. "I'm never going to do anything like that!" she says. "That's selling yourself. I think sex is overrated anyway."

People Weekly, Dec 26, 1994

Alicia Silverstone

Hollywood's newest femme fatale won two MTV Movie Awards last June for Best Breakthrough Performance and Best Villain in the film The Crush. But Alicia (that's A-lee-see-a) is perhaps more recognizable as the bad girl in Aerosmith's Crazy, Amazing and Cryin' videos (in which she successively shoplifts, hitchhikes and bungee-jumps off a bridge). Following in the spiked heels of Sharon Stone and Heather Locklear, the emerald-eyed 18-year-old has five films due out next year. But Alicia's not content to be a babe. "I'd rather be seen as an actress," she says, "than as a pretty little body."

By Kaufman, Joanne People Weekly, March 13, 1995

In this sci-fi thriller based on a Dean Koontz best-seller, Goldblum is miraculously brought back to life after a car accident. But, as attending physician Alfred Molina warns Golblum's wife (Lahti), "He may seem different to you."

Now here's a doctor who can make a diagnosis. Goldblum's brief journey to the other side has inexplicably given him a psychic connection to a mad killer (Jeremy Sisto). He frequently can see and feel what Sisto sees and feels. Moreover, Sisto can see through Goldblum's eyes.

What the killer sees is a fresh victim: Goldblum's beloved teenage daughter (Alicia Silverstone). Consumed by terrifying visions and nightmares made palpable by ludicrous special effects, Goldblum becomes more and more convinced that Silverstone is in imminent mortal danger. Everyone else, meanwhile, is becoming more and more convinced that Goldblum is rowing with only one oar.

Even in the most bizarre, twisted tales, there must be a seedbed of logic. No such thing here. More delicate direction would have been appreciated. Hideaway begins on such a feverishly portentious note that it has no place to go but out of control, and the pervasive soundtrack, which sounds like a migraine, is no aid to the cause. Goldblum, all wild eyes and unkempt hair, has the look of a man about to turn into a werewolf, and Lahti is stuck playing the unrewarding role of supportive-skeptical-scared wife. (R)

Love Me So Naughty

*Do they ever - but wholesome naif Alicia Silverstone is getting out of jailbait with 'Clueless'.

Alicia Silverstone is cooing: "Baby, where are you going?"

On a crisp weekday morning in the winding Hollywood foothills above the famed Chateau Marmont, Silverstone half trots alongside her companion of nearly a year. They met in East L.A., where she discovered him, cut and bleeding, while shooting the as-yet-unreleased indie detective thriller "True Crime". Silverstone, then just 17, took him home, nursed him back to health, and the two have been inseparable ever since. She even scored him a cameo in "Clueless", a chaste teen comedy in which Silverstone headlines as a spoiled, matchmaking Beverly Hills mall rat. But none of that togetherness can keep Silverstone's favorite male from dashing off to explore an unruly hedge that juts out over the narrow road. He is Silverstone's dog, Samson - the first of many dogs the actress hopes to rescue by forming a foundation to protect and limit the canine population vie sterilization. Planning her first foundation at an age when most young women are applying theirs - stardom does have its upside, though Silverstone's success doesn't seem to be the product of ambition. "I'm not driven," insists the girl who, between the ages of four and six, secretly believed her mother was a pop queen Olivia Newton-John and once danced to "Physical" atop her family's coffee table. "I didn't want to be a star, ever."

That assertion was blown to hell the instant Silverstone Rollerbladed into a screeching close-up as Darian, the jailbait from hell in "The Crush", a low-budget, Lolita-ish thriller that landed her a starring, albeit wordless, gig in a trilogy of sultry Aerosmith music videos. Heavy rotation fanned the heat, burning the image of Silverstone - suspended by a bungee cord from a freeway overpass, triumphantly flipping her digitally obscured middle finger at her no-good boyfriend - into the brains of every red-blooded American with basic cable. A supporting turn in the throwaway thriller "Hideaway" didn't hurt her career, but it did little to dispel the notion of Silverstone-as-sexpot.

"I truly appreciate the response I've gotten, because in my heart I know that it hasn't come from me exuding [sex]," Silverstone says. "I never once, in any of my work, never am I trying to be sexy. It's just being."

Apparently, "just being" is enough. Consider Silverstone's burgeoning on-line fan club - of which she's also only peripherally aware - where net surfing devotees of Aliciamania trade dish and doctored naked GIFs of their favorite actress. Her reputation has even reached her hometown temple in San Francisco, where Silverstone attends services when visiting her grandfather. "I thought the holiest place could not change, but it can," Silverstone says, a bit bewildered. "The way people respond to you, they all become" - she strikes a cooler-than-thou pose - "different."

With her hair pulled back in a ponytail, sans makeup and sporting her de rigueur uniform of gray sweatpants, worn running shoes, and a faded Georgetown University sweatshirt, Silverstone doesn't look much like a starlet brimming with boy-toy brio. Add to that thte twitch in her right eye (she's supposed to wear glasses, but doesn't), and she comes off as plain and awkward as Sandy, the terminally wholesome character portrayed by childhood idol Newton-John in "Grease", one of Silverstone's favorite films. Were it not for the occasional flashes of her lopsided, Meg-Ryan-ish grin, one would barely recognize the Silverstone whose Darian downshifted from cunning to coy on a dime.

There's such a happy-little-girl quality to her," says director Amy Heckerling, who spotted her in Aerosmith's "Cryin'" video while writing "Clueless" and immediately arranged a meeting. "We were sitting in a restaurant and she was drinking soda out of a straw. Here we were talking deals and careers and she's drinking like my nine-year-old daughter does. You just see her and go, 'Aw, she's so sweet.'"

"She's sophisticated and unsophisticated at the same time," adds Raquel Welch, who played Silverstone's mother in the TV movie "Torch Song". "You want to be nurturing and protective of her. At the same time, I don't think she's anybody's fool. She's a real smart girl. I know a little bit about being a sex queen, so it's kind of amusing."

Like Darian, Silverstone is skating on that delicate edge between girlhood and womanhood, as eager to let fly around the rink as she is reluctant to let got of the side. "I'm only eighteen," Silverstone says, "so no matter how sophisticated or centered I am, I'm still a little girl and I haven't had a lot of experience in anything, really."

At an age when plenty of her peers are reveling in club hopping, pill popping, and all-night keggers, Silverstone's don't drink-swear-rat-my-hair approach stands out. "I have no interest in doing [drugs]," she says. "When I want to relax and have a goot time, I go be with my dog or go eat, because to me that's being bad."

"She's not a promiscuous girl," says Judi O'Neil, Silverstone's acting mentor. "She's not a wild girl. She's not a free spirit."

Yeah, but even Sandy ditched the ponytail and got a perm. Doesn't Silverstone ever want to be bad? She shakes her head, shrinking back from the thought. "I'm so sensitive and emotional that if I give myself five minutes, heaven forbid, and I turn off my phone, I feel, like, Oh my God, what if my parents are trying to reach me? That's my badness."

"I was very upset," says Didi Silverstone, recalling the day her legally emancipated, fifteen-year-old daughter left home - alone - to shoot "The Crush" in Vancouver. "It was the beginning of her journey, this journey. But life's never been quite the same. My little girl is a woman now, and I'm the little girl. The roles are reversed."

Caretaking comes naturally to the daughter of Didi, a retired flight attendant, and Monty Silverstone, a real estate financier. At fourteen, Alicia used to climb behind the wheel when her senior classmates got too drunk to drive home from their high school parties. Raised with an older brother in Hillsborough, an affluent Bay Area suburb twenty minutes south of San Francisco, Silverstone was a perceptive, if not carefree, child. With free air travel earned from Didi's stewardess satus, the Silverstones summered in their native England, where they made frequent trips to the theater with their stagestruck daughter. "I was fascinated," says Silverstone, certainly not the first child to throw up while en route to see "Cats". "I knew I wanted to be an actress, but I didn't know what that meant."

Fortunately, Daddy did. Around the time Alicia picked up the fourth- place prize at a county fair for performing a routine to the theme song of "Flashdance", Monty Silverstone landed his daughter a print agent in San Francisco. But Alicia detested modeling and signed up for an intensive acting workshop run by Judi O'Neil. "I thought she was a very sweet girl," O'Neil says. "She wasn't a hey-look-at-me or aren't-I-special. Alicia's modest."

"I was awful," Silverstone admits. "I would get bright red and be so shy, but I enjoyed [the classes] so much. Your heart is constantly pulsing, pumping, feeling everybody's mind ticking. That energy was just so attractive."

Meanwhile, Silverstone auditioned for plays at her high school. Described by her peers as talkative and popular, Silverstone can recall no adolescent exploit wilder than, on one Halloween, dressing up as Debbie Gibson. By her sophomore year, she landed an agent in Los Angeles, and the family Silverstone packed up their bags, headed south, and signed their daughter up for a semester at Beverly Hills High.

By the time she got the "Crush" cattle call, Silverstone was fed up with auditioning for features - and consistently losing out to such rivals as Reese Witherspoon and Fairuza Balk. "I went to the interview and I was like, All right already," Silverstone says jokingly. "I was as bitter as a fifteen- year-old could be."

And more prepared than most. Just prior to her "Crush" audition, Silverstone turned a corner in her acting technique when she performed idol Laura Dern's part in a scene from "Smooth Talk" for O'Neil's acting class. "Everyone in the room just kind of went,'Whoa,'" O'Neil recalls. "Smooth Talk was where Alicia made that transition to start dealing with her womanhood. When "The Crush" came along, she was really ready."

But the studio wanted a name and offered the role to Fairuza Balk. "It's the first time I ever got sad about anything," says Silverstone. "I sat on the stairs outside of Judi's apartment and had little tears running. I thought there was something in this [role] I really had to do." When Balk passed, Silverstone enthusiastically embraced the studio's request that she legally emancipate herself from her parents, thereby allowing her to work the grown-up hours required by "The Crush"'s shooting schedule. Silverstone refused, however, to appear nude in the film. (A body double was hired for a couple fleeting butt shots.)

Silverstone has since stood firm on her no-nudity policy, turning down the title role in the still-unreleased "The Babysitter" numerous times until the filmmakers axed all nudity from the script. "I'm very uncomfortable with my body, and I'm not interested in people seeing it onscreen," Silverstone says emphatically. "Acting is not about presenting your body to people."

Prime-time kingpin Aaron Spelling, whose movie company produced "The Babysitter" and whose actress daughter, Tori, is a friend of Silverstone's, denies reports that he asked Silverstone to get naked for the film. "I was thrilled that Tori's friend didn't want to do a nude scene," says Spelling. "You would think [she'd say,] 'Oh God, I'll do anything to do this movie.' Bunk. She wasn't gonna do it."

Fully clothed and trudging up the steep pavement behind a panting Samson, Silverstone is pondering the dubious realism of sex scenes. "When I see sex in a film, it really distracts me," says Silverstone, "It always seems like two actors trying to look attractive and get their best angles... I've never done a sex scene. I've kissed a few boys, not much." Really? While hardly graphic, Silverstone's jarring backseater with Kevin Dillon in "True Crime" and her quickie with Jason London in "The Babysitter" definately qualify as cinematic shoop. Just ask Mom. "The Crush, I didn't mind in the slightest. It was nothing compared to what I saw in "Cool and the Crazy"," Didi Silverstone says, referring to a scene in the Ralph Bakshi-directed Showtime movie in which Silverstone stands before her seducer and begs him to have his way with her.

Silverstone didn't care for it either, since she believes the filmmakers tapped another actress to loop additional, more orgasmic moans over the scene. But the truth is, Silverstone has never been comfortable with sex on film. "The way I'd been taught about it from my mom was that it was a pure, beautiful, wonderful thing. And then I would see it onscreen and go, 'Eeeew!'" Silverstone says. "But don't get me wrong. If I found a beautiful script that I thought absolutely needed it, I'd do it in a second."

To combat her coquettish image, Silverstone has turned to Cher - the virginal valley girl Silverstone plays in "Clueless", a tame teen romp with an emphasis on comic timing over choreographed cocktease. "I hated the behavior of this girl," says Silverstone, who was kicked off her freshman cheerleading squad for refusing to show up at games wearing the "stupid outfit. I hated it. So it was hard for me to say,'Okay Alicia, make this you.'"

Inquiries about Moize Chabbouh, a hairdresser and frequent set visitor in his late twenties whom Silverstone has previously identified as her boyfriend, are stopped cold. "He's not my boyfriend. He's just a friend."

"She's very headstrong," says her costar in "The Crush", Cary Elwes. "I think she can fight [her image] all she wants, but ultimately when she reaches full womanhood, I think she'll be quite happy to be called a sex kitten."

Before kissing her cadre of badass video babes good-bye, Silverstone offers a final observation: "It's not a girl trying to be sexy," she says, slipping uphill with Samson. "It's just a girl going through life."

-written by Kristen O'Neill, staff writer for PREMIERE

ALICIA SILVERSTONE - SHE'S CLUED IN!

from Star! Full Text COPYRIGHT Star!. 1995

Woo-hoo! When STAR! caught up with golden Betty Alicia Silverstone in Sydney, we found her to be totally un-clueless. She filled us in on the real Alicia...

"Thats is just ridiculous! It's absurd!" Alicia Silverstone is spewing. Since superstardom claimed the Clueless mega-minxtrel as one of its own, rumour mongers have linked Alicia romantically with nearly every up-and- coming boy star.

"First there was Leonardo DiCaprio," sighs Alicia. "It was so far fetched. I do know him, he was my friend Caitlin's ex-boyfriend - but we don't talk on the phone and I don't ever see him! "Then I heard that I was going out with Chris O'Donnel!" she shrieks. "I've only ever met him once and I can tell you now - there is nothing going on there!"

Fact: In real life, Alicia Silverstone is very small. Fact: In real life, Alicia dresses unlike her try-hard Clueless character in snazzy snoot Armani fashion gear supplied by Mr Armarni himself, no less. Fact: She is nothing, in fact, like Cher from Clueless.

"I'm a totally different person to her," she agrees. "Her whole way of being, her morals, are all way different from me. I do know a lot of girls who are like her - materialistic and shallow. At school I had a hard time fiting in with people because I was nothing like the other girls. Boys, music, and make-up were the most important things and I always thought I was stupid because I didn't know anything about that stuff!"

The more you talk to Alicia the more she comes across as someone infinitely cluey. She doesn't find movie stardom glamorous, her role model is Jodie Foster ("She's intelligent and very sweet," says Alicia), and instead of blowing her big bucks on stupid stuff like, er, well, stuff, she's started her own movie production company and wants to make movies not just act in them. "River Phoenix would have been perfect for the movies I want to make," she reckons. "He was a really, really, good guy."

And while she's planning to become a full-on mover-and-shaker in the business end of Hollywood as well as topping STAR!'s fave actress chart, she's also got her feet firmly on the ground.

"It sickens me how important things like the fashion world are for some people," she says. "It can be exiting but it's also very damaging. So many people are sooo shallow and robotic. I just hope people realise that it's not important how you look on the outside. It's more important what's on the inside."

The girls' club

By Dell, Pamela Teen Magazine, May 1995 v39 n5 p90(4) Full Text COPYRIGHT Petersen Publishing Company 1995

HERE'S THE BIZ ON THE FEMALE TEEN'S WHO ARE LEADING THE PACK IN THE CLAIM-TO-FAME GAME!

...

alicia silverstone

HER TAKE ON THE FEMME FATALE IMAGE: "When I see myself on the "Cryin" video and people are...thinking I'm sexy, it cracks me up because in real life I'm so clumsy."

Suddenly she's a way-hot topic! Nominated last year for three MTV movie awards, Alicia (pronounced a-lees-ea) actually walked away with two of them: Best Breakthrough Performance and Best Villain, for her role as a high-IQ psycho-teen-in-love (with an older guy she can't have), in The Crush. She's also been seen strutting her stuff in three Aerosmith videos, "Crazy," "Amazing" and "Cryin'" to be exact. Now, it seems, the movie scripts are flowing her way like crazy. Besides The Hideaway, which was released just last March, Alicia is already slated for several more movies to come, so the buzz about this girl is bound to be big!

CALLS HOME: San Francisco Bay area, though, because her parents are both British, she's spent a lot of time in England.

KID DREAMS: "Even since I was a little girl, acting was my dream, but I didn't know what that meant. I just knew I wanted to do what those people onstage did."

STEPS TO STARDOM: Began doing modeling, but "I hated that more than anything!" Finally she landed a pizza commercial - "I went insane, I was so happy!" - and it's been straight up ever since.

BEHIND THE SCENES: There's a scene in The Crush in which Alicia takes her shirt off - but it's not Alicia. It's a body double. "It was a big deal for me," she says, "because even though it wasn't my body, I had to act like it was."

WHAT'S UP NEXT: a summer movie release called Clueless

No more smoke and spandex

By Thigpen, David E. Time, June 27, 1994 v143 n26 p79(1) Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1994

In the '90s the best hunting ground for new starlets may be the smoke-and-spandex world of MTV videos. Witness the emergence of ALICIA SILVERSTONE. Her debut movie, The Crush, met a quick box-office demise, but the haughty, bad-girl panache she displayed in three Aerosmith videos -- while bungee jumping and getting a wedgie climbing out a schoolroom window -- caught the eye of studio execs. Silverstone, 17, has three new films in the works, including True Crime, in which she plays a Catholic schoolgirl turned detective.

Ask The Director

Some of Alicia Fans asked Pat Verducci, the writer/director of True Crime questions about Alicia and the movie. The movie is due out sometime in March (release dates range from 19-29).

Here are some Questions & Answers

I would like to know what she thinks about the movies she has been in. For example, has she liked how they turned out or just what she thinks period.

You know, we shot True Crime right after Hideaway. We didn't talk that much about her other projects, but let me try to remember.... She mentioned, in a very good natured way, that when she was making "The Crush" she actually thought it was going to be like "Howards End"-- a highbrow British movie starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. She laughed at her 15 year old self. But at 17 (that's how old she was when we shot TC), she thought the movie was good. She had fun working on Hideaway and became very good friends with the guy who played the psycho. I think they're still good friends now... She told me she loved working on the french film (I don't know the title), although we never discussed how it turned out. She really liked the director who let her do her own thing... She had fun on the Babysitter, although she said they kept trying to get her to run barefoot on cement and it really hurt her feet so they had to make little flesh colored slippers for her... Anyway, that's all she really said about her other projects... As to "what she thinks, period", she's a very smart young woman. Bright, independent, creative. In True Crime she plays a high school senior who is obsessed with crime magazines and becomes embroiled in a murder in her hometown. The character (Mary) is pretty brainy and Alicia really pulled off making this girl smart and at the same time sexy. The story is kind of a Nancy Drew goes-to-hell type thriller. She's pretty great in it. Anyway, I hope that answers your question.

Is the movie definetley coming out on March 12 Also, what is the movie about, is Alicia the (main) character. Why wasn't it played in the movie theatres. Please try to answer these questions Thank you

Trimark Pictures sometimes changes things on the spur of the moment, so it might be March 12. It will definitely be sometime in mid or late March... Alicia is definitely the main character in "True Crime". She plays a Catholic high school girl obsessed with crime magazines who gets embroiled in a murder in her home town. The movie also stars Kevin Dillon (Matt's brother-- he was in Platoon, No Escape) as a police rookie who she joins forces with to track down the killer. Alicia's character (Mary) starts out very innocent. Gradually, as she uncovers what happened to the dead girl she loses her innocence. It's a very very dark version of Nancy Drew-- rated R for violence and language... You would have to ask Trimark (the producers) why there will be no theatrical release. They are the ones who make those types of marketing decisions. Hope that answers your questions!...

I got a few questions, thanks! 1. When will True Crime be released in Australia? 2. Was Alicia fun to work with? 3. Do you think these types of roles suit Alicia? 4. If I was to become a director, how could i lure Alicia into one of my movies? 5. Do you think she is a natural?

1. I don't know. 2. Yes, she was very fun to work with. The shoot was really hard (very low budget), and she was in almost every scene. Alicia was a real trouper. We'd be shooting at like four in the morning, and I'd say "Run faster", "Can you cry?"... and she actually did it. One night we really got behind schedule and the producer was going nuts. He kept shouting "You people are wrapped!" Alicia was literally standing in the shower, trying to cry. I had my foot wedged in the door, trying to keep the producer out... the director of photography was trying to get the shot...the smoke machine was fucking up and there was poor Alicia bawling her eyes out. She was pretty amazing... 3. What "types" of roles do you mean? She's played all different types of characters and done a good job at each of them. 4. Chocolate. Or a really cute dog. 5. She is very much a natural. That's what makes her so magnetic onscreen. You just want to watch her. She's got that wierd thing that movie stars have-- a certain charisma or presence that draws people to her. She's got the most amazing face. In "True Crime" she plays an innocent, and in the beginning of the movie she looks like she's about fifteen. However, at the end, when she's seen real violence, her face looks completely different-- mature, knowing.... it's pretty cool.

It's a little hard to come up with some questions since I have yet to see the film but let's try this one: When making the film, what was your impression of Alicia. Did you feel she had the ability and talent to make it big in the business? How was she to work with? Did she have her own ideas about how her character should be or did she just do what was asked of her?

I think I answered some of these questions in my previous answers, but let me address the last one... whether Alicia had ideas about her character or just did what I wanted. Alicia was VERY active in creating the character of Mary. I think at first she thought the character was not like her at all-- uptight, closed off. But as we worked, it was wierd, Alicia started to emerge in the dailies. Mary Giordano is very smart. Alicia is very smart. She has strong opinions about a lot of things-- men, animals, acting, movies.... and so does the movie character she plays in True Crime. At our first rehearsal she brought in these amazing character notes. She had gone through the script and written down motivations, worked on the character's backstory. I was very impressed. Both she and Kevin brought a lot to their roles and many of their ideas made it into the final cut.

Can you ask Pat to describe what Alicia's personality is like?

How to describe Alicia's personality... fun, emotional, smart, curious, powerful, sexy. She's amazing to be around. Despite all her success, she still really cares about her fans too. One night we were shooting, it was about 2am and some kids in the neighborhood heard we were there. They came on their bikes, and in between takes Alicia hung out with them, chatting.... Also, we were shooting in a really ratty part of L.A. and this dog kind of wandered onto the set. He was pretty messed up-- sores on his legs, an obvious stray. Alicia took him in and fell in love. His name is Samson and now he's her best friend. I would have to describe Alicia as the coolest girl in high school.

Hi there. I just wanted to ask, how did you get attached to "True Crime" and how did Alicia become involved? Future projects for you? Thanks!

I got attached to "True Crime" because I wrote the script. I had just gotten out of UCLA Film school and wanted to direct a project that I was excited about. So I wrote a story about a girl who thinks she knows the way the world is, but comes to discover she knows nothing at all. (By the way, if you're interested in directing, the best way to get in is to write)... During preproduction we auditioned about 100 "Marys". It became obvious very quickly that Alicia was special. I had seen "The Crush" and thought she was great-- smart and sexy. I also thought she had an enormous amount of presence (she didn't need to say a word to grab your attention in the Aerosmith videos). She was in a one-act play during the auditions and I went to see it. She played this lesbian coke addict and was amazing. That was it. She was Mary. Future projects include a new screenplay I'm writing and a book proposal.

Does Alicia like being an acteress? How much did she make in True Crime? Does she still have the dog from L.A. ? How old was Alicia at the time you filmed True Crime? Thank you for your time.

I think Alicia likes being an actress very much. She got out of school early to pursue it and has made it her career... Sorry, how much Alicia made for the film is confidential... Yes, she still has Samson the dog. In fact, he appeared with her on the MTV Clueless special and also in a couple of photo spreads. He's really cute (and looks much healthier since Alicia rescued him from south central L.A. where we were shooting)... Alicia was seventeen when we shot "True Crime".

Pat, what do you know about Alicia's political views. Is she a democrat, republican, independent or does she lean toward a party. Is she liberal, conservative, moderate, or something else. Does she talk about politics. Does she like Gov. Wilson in California, Clinton, or anyone else.

I'm sorry. We never talked politics. Personally, I think she might lean towards the liberal end of the spectrum.

>How tall is Alicia? What do you as a director think of Alicia's acting skills? Did she stand out from other actor/ess etc?

Alicia is between 5 foot 5 and 5 foot 6 inches tall. I think she's a pretty amazing actress, that's why I cast her as the lead in "True Crime". In my other answers I think I talked a little about why she's so good-- she's very instinctual. It's all just bubbling down underneath the surface... she works in a very professional, but creative way. Everything she does is very natural and new. No two takes were ever the same. This gave me a lot of variety in editing the film together.... I can't really compare her to other actors in the movie-- they all had different functions to fill for the story, but I think when you watch the movie you'll see how completely she IS the main character.

Was she always enthusiastic on the set? Did she forget some of her lines on set sometimes? Did she ever say to you, "Sorry, i cant say this on screen?" What type of European chocolates does she like best? For the next movie you direct - will she be your number one choice for leading actess?

She was enthusiastic. It was such a grueling schedule, that sometimes (like at about 4AM) she was exhausted. We all were. But she was always very professional and did a great job with the material (no matter what time it was). She NEVER forgot her lines.... Actually, a couple of times she did ask to change dialogue and she always had some better way to say what needed to be said. She's much closer in age to the character than I, so I depended on her to tell me how 17-year olds talk. During rehearsals, she and Kevin Dillon both came up with a lot of great stuff-- almost all of which made it into the final version of the film... Sorry, I have no idea what kind of European chocolates are her favorites... Although I'd love to work with Alicia again, the lead character in my next screenplay is 37 years old... she might be just a LITTLE young...

WHY THE SMART MONEY IS ON CLUELESS ALICIA

MUCH can be determined about Alicia Silverstone once you hear her laugh. When something cracks her up, the end of her sentence will trail off into a seemingly accidental series of bass notes. There’s no aspect of self-consciousness to this spontaneous rumble- it’s a real-life teenager sweetly unaware of how dorky her laughter is.

The reason this detail is worth noting is that, until recently, few in Alicia’s mighty fan base had any idea what it sounded like. Since 1993, the 19-year-old has made nine films. Cast primarily for her coo and simmer, she played out subtle variations in The Crush, Hideaway and The Babysitter. The origins of her popularity can be traced back to her imperialminx performances in a trio of Aerosmith videos. In them, she acts out the daredevil stunts of teenage dreams, like kissing a boyfriend while riding backwards on a motorcycle, or gazing sleepily at her new bellybutton ring as if such a prank wasn’t going to get her grounded for infinity- all without ever uttering a single word.

Then, along came Clueless, her first big budget film, and Alicia proved what she could do if placed in a top-class production.

The buzz started even before the film became a hit. According to Mark Canton, chairman of Columbia TriStar, his studio executives were already on the case, negotiating Alicia’s three-year, non-exclusive production deal- potentially worth $10 million- while Clueless was still being filmed. She currently spends her days in a two-office suite helping prepare Excess Baggage, a comedic adventure that she’s co-producing and starring in.

On a hot afternoon, Alicia arrives looking pale and apologetic because she’s a half-hour late.

TV WEEK: Let’s start with New Year’s resolutions. What’s foremost on your wish list? SILVERSTONE: Let’s see: Have more time to myself. Read a book a week! Okay, every other week (laughs). I think I should stop swearing. It’s funny- when I swear, it’s never in seriousness. It’s more like I’m with my girlfriends, and we use certain words in fun. Like, "You stupid- !" The thing is, when I step away from the playground and start being in the real world, I’ll find myself swearing like that. I’ll be like (low, tough voice): "Aw, f--- this! F--- that!" And I’ll think to myself: "Why are you doing this? You sound so stupid". But it’s like I’ve gone crazy and I just can’t stop. I’m in character, and that character is an alcoholic person who cannot stop saying the word f--- (laughs). Hey, you know what? I’ve decided that I’m not letting go of that. It’s too much fun.

TV WEEK: Looking back on 1995, what was your peak moment during a year that was filled with high points? SILVERSTONE: This is my problem- my whole last three years have been nothing but extreme excitement or extreme disappointment.

TV WEEK: You cannot recall a single circumstance that inspired unadulterated thrill? SILVERSTONE: Well, I get that way about boys. I’m completely boy crazy. But I don’t ever find one. But I get that excitement! You know, for the past three years, I’ve not been into boys at all. But now suddenly I’m like, I’ve got to find a boy! I’ve been so focused on my work, it’s like I kind of forgot I was a girl. I feel like a man most of the time. And there are very few boys that make me go "ahhh". Maybe it’s from being 19, like my hormones are kicking in or something.

TV WEEK: Finish this sentence: People would be shocked to know that... SILVERSTONE: I have, like a sweat problem. But it’s not sweat like here (touches her forehead). It’s more like sweat where I’ll put on an outfit and, like, two seconds later there’s sweat marks under my arms. It’s from nerves or something. I mean, it doesn’t smell. I know this because I make my agent smell them. I’m like: "Smell! Smell! This is not right!"

TV WEEK: So what was it like when you were 15 years old, living in Vancouver and working on The Crush? SILVERSTONE: I loved it. It was on the 24th floor, so I got to walk up the stairs. And on the weekends, I would walk down the stairs with my backpack, and I would go buy lunch or go to a grocery store and pick out fresh fruits and vegetables. Then I’d go home and cook. I felt like I was, like, a woman.

TV WEEK: And the downside? SILVERSTONE: After a while, it got lonely on a boy level. I was, like, Miss Depressed 15-year-old loser with no boyfriend... I did have a one-week thing. I mean, I kissed him, and I was so excited to kiss a boy in my own apartment! I thought it was so evil.

TV WEEK: It’s dark outside, you’re in your first apartment by yourself and you hear a creepy noise. What do you do? SILVERSTONE: If I got really freaked out, I’d call the director, Alan Shapiro. He was in the building next to mine. Most of the time, though, I built forts. You know, hide under the blankets. I do that still. Lately, I’ve been totally petrified. And every car that drives by, I think to myself, "Is that somebody stopping?"

TV WEEK: What are you looking for when you check people out? SILVERSTONE: I’m constantly looking for friends, for girlfriends. Whenever I see a girl that might be a friend, I just lose it. I’m like (gasp): :She is sooo nice. Look how sweet she is." When I was in Australia recently, I was at this restaurant called Stephanie’s, which is the highest-class restaurant possible, and there was this waitress working there. And I was so fascinated with her. Everyone was talking to me, and I was much more interested in the waitress. She looked like she came out of this old movie, with these pouty little lips, rosy and sweet. I wrote her this letter that said, "You’re the most lovely beautiful waitress I’ve ever experienced, and thank you so much."

TV WEEK: How did she respond? SILVERSTONE: Well, she didn’t read it in front of me. (Laughs) She probably thought: "Oh f---! What does this mean?"

TV WEEK: That act could be left open to interpretation. SILVERSTONE: But you know what? I think so few people get compliments and so few people are valued for what’s really valuable in them. You have to let people know.

TV WEEK: You’ve been living as an adult for a long time- whom do you go to when you don’t want to be grown-up? SILVERSTONE: I ask for help from my mom a lot. I say: "Mommy? Will you come be with me?" When she came to Australia with me, I think I got sick purposely. I think my system just knew it was safe to get sick and let my mom totally take care of me and bring me tea. I can take care of myself. But I really, really love my mother. And I feel like sometimes I just want to crumple up and cry on her."

TV WEEK: Can you give us a media low point in your new life as a full-fledged celebrity? SILVERSTONE: (Village Voice gossip columnist) Michael Munsto- he went on The Gossip Show and implied that I was a lesbian! I mean that’s ridiculous!

TV WEEK: But in Hollywood all successful women are fated to be labelled either stupid, bitchy or gay. SILVERSTONE: I think I’m called all three (laughs).

TV WEEK: Let’s discuss your deal at Columbia. Besides the monetary benefits, how do you think it will make your life easier? SILVERSTONE: There’s a lot of cleaning up and sweeping up to be done. Carolyn, my producing partner- that’s part of her job. Like, on the set of Clueless, she had to go and sweep up the mess. Then she can start with a clean slate.

TV WEEK: True or false: Your $10 million deal could have been even bigger but you held out for the script and director approval. SILVERSTONE: Yeah, my agent could have gotten more money. But what was important to me was creative control. To be a producer, to have a deal where I made real, educated decisions and choices. I’m the one who walks into the meeting, and it’s like I run the meeting.

TV WEEK: And exactly who attends these meetings? SILVERSTONE: The executives at Columbia, myself and my agents. (Pause) I want to take something back. When I said I’m running the meeting, the thing is that I don’t mean that I walk into the room and I’m controlling this group. What I mean is that they care about what I say.

TV WEEK: Has there ever been a time when you felt that your sex appeal has given you an edge? SILVERSTONE: No. I’ve never felt it or been aware of it. Most of the time I am totally self-conscious. I feel like a geek. I don’t know what it’s like in other people’s bodies. But I do know what it feels like to wake up in mine. All I wanted to do was act. I didn’t want to have to tell everybody everything I think and feel. It would be different if I was 40 years old, but I’m 19, for God’s sake. I’m only just discovering half this stuff. And right after I discover it, I have to tell the media. Like, what if one of my discoveries is really stupid? I want to be allowed to be stupid and not have everybody in the world read about it.

TV WEEK: What was it about being a teenager that made you want to skip over that formative stage? SILVERSTONE: What removed me from wanting to be in a group of young girls was that I couldn’t relate. But do you know what I’m discovering now? Boys, make-up, clothes.

TV WEEK: Last question: Can you name one way that fame altered your life? SILVERSTONE: I can’t talk so loudly at restaurants any more. Today I was sitting with my friend and I was, like, eating my little salad, and next to me was this man eating this big, fat, juicy steak. And I was, like, going: "Oh, mannn. Ewww." I mean, he didn’t look like he gave one iota about what I thought. But what if he did? And what if he was a secret reporter? And what if he could hear what I was saying?

This was taken from the August 1995 issue of Vanity Fair Copyright 1995, Conde Nast Publications Inc.

ALICIA IN WONDERLAND

At 18, Alicia Silverstone has already gone from Aerosmith video vixen to leading roles in three new films, including this summer's "Clueless", in which she plays a part she was born to play - a material girl from Beverly Hills. Michael Musto discusses career goals and Shakespeare with the teen siren as she ponders whether it is nobler to be Marilyn Monroe or Meryl Streep.

Giving Drew Barrymore a run for her money as queen of the 90's Lolita culture, Alicia Silverstone exudes pure teenage licentiousness in blood-red lips and do-me pumps - on-screen anyway. Often cast as the quintessential pouty, gum-popping Vally babe, the 18-year-old siren is beset with large features - saucer-shaped, pleading eyes, a full, ripe mouth, and fleshy cheeks - and they're all dewy in a way that could easily go from apple- blossom-sweet to unsettingly pretend-rotten at the drop of a fake lash.

In "The Crush", 1993's variation on "Single White Female", Silverstone played a 14-year-old ("almost 15") who fixates on a journalist twice her age (Cary Elwes) and makes his life a crazy hell, probably as a revenge on those who deal in words. She scrawls obscenities on his car, coerces nasty wasps (the bugs, not the people) to descend on his girlfriend through an air vent, and goes as far as to take discharge from his used condom to make it appear as if he raped her, all the while gurgling, "I just wanted you to like me!" Even Sally Field never went to such lengths. Playing up her vamp role to the miniskirted max, Silverstone spit out her lines - such as "Guess what. Got my period!" and "Nick, ever do a virgin?" - with enough barefaced brio to win awards. Well, MTV awards.

As a result of that performance, the San Francisco-born presence was cast in three one-word-titled Aerosmith videos - "Cryin', "Amazing", and "Crazy." Awesome? In a way. In all of them, Silverstone was a yearning, rebellious, mildly insouciant siren apparently designed to help usher young boys into puberty. She was Amy Fisher without a gun, and if video killed the radio star, it only made this new diva more an employable movie dish. Though Silverstone admits "it wasn't about acting, it was about having a really good time for three days," the vids helped put her in major demand by directors, and not just those wearing trench coats with nothing underneath. Perhaps not since Vanna White letter-turned her way to stardom has someone reaped so much hoopla so unexpectedly.

All at once, Silverstone's in producer Joel Schumacher's "The Babysitter", in which she's the object of the crushes; "True Crime", in which she stars opposite Kevin Dillon as a Catholic schoolgirl who fancies herself Nancy Drew-ish; and Amy Heckerling's "Clueless", in which she plays someone named Cher, a materialistic Beverly Hills type who, according to Silverstone, "knows's she's beautiful, knows she's perfect, but when reality shows up she doesn't know what to do with it." Not at all like that other Cher. As a defense against "reality," Silverstone says, the character "speaks like a lawyer, always using hard words and trying to sound smart." Hard words?

Oh well, Silverstone is young and has always strived to find culture; in fact, she studied ballet as a child and became attracted to theater when she visited her parents' native country of England. You see, she's a good girl and would never tamper with someone's used sex protection. Like Marilyn Monroe, who wanted more than anything to star in "The Brothers Karamazov", Alicia longs to be the proverbial serious actress. Would she rather be compared to Monroe or Streep? "I don't think either," she says, "because I don't think you can compare someone. I think Marilyn Monroe was probably pretty brilliant. Probably she was a genius and a really, really wonderful, good person, so someone didn't like what she was doing by creating all this goodness and the bumped her off. As an actress, I'd rather be compared to Meryl Streep because people hold her more in respect and Marilyn is more of a legend. I'd rather be respected."

Alas, silverstone's recent bid for art-house respectability - Alain Corneau's "Le Nouveau Monde" - doesn't seem to be getting distribution here, even though it's a different kind of "period piece" from "The Crush". But that's hardly stopped the nubile one from pursuing damehood. She's even studying Shakespeare this summer with a troupe called Shakespeare & Company, which is headquartered at Edith Wharton's country estate, the Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts. The program was recommended to her by actress Christine Lahti.

"It's just neat, it's great," she declares with a distinctly non- Elizabethan gusto. "Shakespeare is my God now, completely in every way. He is a religion in his own. I think he was a genius!" The only downside, forsooth, is that the lush campus is so ripe for romance and Silverstone could gag herselfbecause she isn't enjoying any right now. "You get lonely," she admits. "Every day we have to walk up this long hill to class. It's so beautiful you want to hold hands with someone." The large, pleading eyes are downcast. "But I can do that with girls," she says, perking up. "[Actress] Jennifer Rubin's my closest friend here. We hold hands all day long." As you like it, my dear.

"There's so much to learn, it's mind-boggling," Silverstone continues, gushing uncontrollably. In fact, boggle-boggle seems a much more comfortable frame of mind for her than jiggle-jiggle. According to director Amy Heckerling, "Alicia's an innocent. She's honest, open, young. There isn't a phony bone in her body. Two seconds after you say 'Cut,' she's like a puppy - goofy and young." Which makes it strange that the girl plays manipulative sexpots so darned well. "That to her is the job of acting," says Heckerling. "It has nothing to do with who she is."

Silverstone's real-life awestruck, teen-y quality is so infectious that one finds oneself - normally a mature adult - asking distinctly "Tiger Beat"-ish questions such as "Is your dog, Samson, your favorite person?" "I think so," she responds, not missing a beat. "He definately is up there. But the most special person to me, besides my mom, is Carolyn, my best friend. As far as I'm concerned, Carolyn could be my boyfriend. We have the best time together!" They probably hold hands. But the image is instantly demystified when she adds, significantly, "She's my agent." That's what the girl does - gets you aroused, then scrawls obscenities on your car.

- interview by Michael Musto, Vanity Fair Magazine

The clued-on Alicia Silverstone

Alicia Silverstone, star of the new film, Clueless, is tipped to be the "next big thing" out of Hollywood. Paul Fischer spoke to her in Los Angeles.

She's hip, young, gorgeous and loads of fun. Alicia Silverstone is also a star in the making as her latest movie, the irreverent and hysterical Clueless, is proving.

In between mouthfuls of cereal, the 18-year-old beauty talks about the many trips she made to the West End in London as a young girl. "I was just fascinated with the stage -- my brother wanted to buy souvenirs while all I wanted to do was see a stage show."

While Alicia admits that she revelled in the world of theatrical make-believe, she insists that she had a very down-to-earth upbringing.

"To me what an actor really is, is somebody who is just dealing with life. I was a really perceptive little girl so I really understood what people were thinking and feeling when I met them. I think that really shocked people because I was, maybe, just a little girl of three or four, and I just found an outlet for all that reality."

I tell her, that with all that insight into the human condition, its surprising she didn't end up a psychologist.

"That's what I think acting is -- dissecting the human brain and the human heart and getting it all out," she says.

Alicia may look like your archetypal Hollywood starlet -- pert, blond and built -- but she certainly doesn't act like it. Perhaps it's because her parents are English. Her father, Monty, a real estate investor, and her mother, Didi, a former airline stewardess, raised Alicia and one of her two older siblings in the suburbs of San Francisco but they "summered" in Britain.

And, despite the image she acquired as a naughty school girl in one of her earlier films, Crazy, Alicia grew up a good Jewish girl. "I had, and loved, my Batmitzvah," she recalls. But it wasn't the presents that made the day so memorable -- "I remember being disappointed when I opened them" -- it was the service that she recalls with much fondness.

"My service was three hours long. It happened to fall on May 6 and I ended up with this long Torah portion so the ceremony ended up being better than the party."

Alicia describes her parents as "they'll-do-their-best Jews, if you know what I mean." When I say "No, not really", she elaborates. "Well, my Dad likes to keep certain holidays and services and tries to do the candles every Friday night. I used to feel very religious when I was growing up and went to Temple like four or five times a week."

And now? "Well, now I tend to go to Temple about three or four times a year and mainly in San Francisco, because that's where I grew up. I mean I love to go and sing the hymns and all that, but I feel my religion in life is just knowing who you are - that's my definition of religion. Knowing who you are, who you believe in and going with that."

Despite the fact that her accent is very definitely Californian, Alicia feels a very close affinity to her British ethnicity. "I'm definitely a product of my family."

Not long after Alicia's batmitzvah, the then San Franciscan joined her Bay Area acting troupe on a trip to Los Angeles to perform in a talent showcase where she was spotted by Carolyn Kessler.

Kessler, who is now Alicia's agent, said in a recent interview: "She has a very genuine quality and a soul that comes out at you."

Although she has been working at her craft from a young age, and working hard, Alicia's approach to the world of movie-making and her new-found stardom is modest. "The truth is, I never had an intention of being a movie star, nor did I have any intention of being famous or successful. What I wanted was to act and that's what I really loved. What happened was, when I started to audition, I realised I had to make a commitment.

"This is the most competitive business there is, and every single mother and father in the world wanted their kid to be a movie star."

Alicia began auditioning for parts when she was 14. After gobbling a pepperoni pizza in a Domino's Pizza advertisement and appearing as Fred Savage's dream date in an episode of the hit TV series The Wonder Years, she landed the lead role in the psycho thriller The Crush. This time it was Liroff, a talent scout who 10 years earlier had cast Drew Barrymore in E.T., who saw the light.

"She had to be a very sweet and seductive Lolita type -- a young girl on the brink of being a young woman," Liroff says. "Alicia was right at that point. She was 15 1/2. Its very young, but she's an old soul."

There was just one hitch. "She'd done virtually nothing," the film's director recalls, "and my big fear was 'If I don't find the most incredible girl, like Sue Lyon was in Lolita, I'm gonna look really stupid.'" Fortunately for him, "[Alicia] just went for it."

This eerie tale about a teenager who hankers after an older guy, leading to murder and mayhem, was never released in Australia, but, nevertheless, The Crush became the prototype for Alicia's career.

Being the star of your first movie would, for most teenagers, be a daunting experience. And to play a nasty version of Lolita on top of that ... how did Alicia handle the pressure?

"I didn't think about all that stuff. The truth was I was 15 and just happy to be there; I didn't know any better. Can you imagine being 15 years old and getting a movie, knowing that they went everywhere around the country to find this girl and I'm the one they got? It's a pretty weird, overwhelming thought, and even now I can't get that out of my head."

Even though her first part was that of a sexy but conniving young woman, Alicia said she had a ball playing her. "I loved being that character; she was awesome. In fact, I'd love to do her again, being older and more conscious of what I was doing."

The Crush was a big success and put the young actor on the map as the new Drew Barrymore. But unlike the former E.T. star, she hasn't had to pose for Playboy or do the obligatory nude scene. "I think sex is incredibly overrated anyway", Alicia says, laughing.

After The Crush, Alicia landed a very different gig. A veteran video director named Marty Callner was hunting for the perfect woman for a new Aerosmith video. While staying at a hotel in Atlanta, he got a call from a friend with a tip: see The Crush. Callner went across the street to the multiplex. "After about 20 minutes," he says, "I knew that was the girl I wanted to use."

Alicia was quickly signed up to appear as the bungee-jumping runaway in Cryin', the fantasy cyberbabe in Amazing and the tartan-skirted giggler in Crazy, a video that had her romping in a hotel room with Liv Tyler, the daughter of Aerosmith front-man Steve Tyler.

She became the darling of the media and a bone fide music video star. And, although the legend of her "hot" appearances in the Aerosmith videos lives on, Alicia simply recalls "that it was a blast doing them, even though I was tagged 'the Aerosmith girl' for a long time after that."

But things are changing. Alicia's latest movie Clueless, an hysterically funny send-up of the Beverly Hills shopping mentality, has established the young actor as a real star.

Cher (played by Alicia) is the film's beautiful but superficial young heroine. She is a spoiled Beverly Hills JAP who lives in a world where every teenager has a charge account and where an alien language is spoken; a language peppered with pop-culture references, most of which date back no further than the late '80s.

In the world according to Cher, Hamlet is that guy played by Mel Gibson, making love in a car is "Jeepin'," a moment of anxious weirdness is summed up by the confession, "I'm having a Twin Peaks experience", and being a female virgin is known as being "hymenically challenged."

Cher strolls through the school halls gossiping on a cellular phone and wearing skirts so short they'd shame Madonna. She and her friends are children of the consumer-media culture. What matters to the kids in Clueless is looking good and hanging out with other kids who are looking good -- in this movie, anorexia has practically been turned into a fashion.

"I'd never heard of her," says Wallace Shawn, the eggshell-domed playwright and actor who plays Alicia's debate teacher in Clueless. "I don't have MTV and I don't know who Aerosmith is. I figured she was so young, how could she be famous?"

He soon learned just how popular she was. During a shoot at a Los Angeles High School, scores of teens -- guys Amy Heckerling described as "semi-conscious" -- clung to the fences outside the trailers, yammering: "Can we see her? Can we see her?" And, when she attended the Hard Rock Hotel opening in Las Vegas, she was mobbed by fans seeking an autograph.

In Clueless, Alicia wears an assortment of dresses that highlight her stunning figure, but when the discussion turns to her looks, she proves to be very modest, insisting she is not beautiful. "This is very weird for me, that people would even think of me as being pretty," she says. "When I look in the mirror, sometimes it's very sad because I feel like this ugly, fat blimp, you know? And then I have to go be this beautiful girl."

So what about this strange teen she plays so effortlessly in this movie about being "clued in". "Cher knows she's the most beautiful, most obviously important person in the world -- her world -- yet she doesn't really know about the rest of the world. She evolves in the film and sees there's more to life than her wardrobe. Cher realises she's beautiful because of who she is inside and not because of her appearance."

In addition to appearing in The Crush and Clueless, Alicia has also had roles in such movies as The Babysitter, True Crime, Le Nouveau Monde and the up-coming Hideaway in which she plays Jeff Goldblum's daughter.

The past four years have been hectic for the young actor. In that time, does she think she has evolved, just like Cher in Clueless? "I'm just taking everything one day at a time. I'm learning every day, like we all do. I'm just doing what I love to do, and not thinking about any of that stuff."

Alicia is determined that any reputation she develops is based on the strength of her work and not anything she does in her personal life. "Like, the way Shannon Doherty got famous," she offers by way of contrast. "She's famous because of all the bad things people read about her, right? I would die if that was me."

Coincidentally, Alicia turned down a spot on Beverly Hills, 90210 on the grounds that: "There's no reason to get locked into a television show when you might be able to do a movie with somebody like Al Pacino."

The one thing Alicia has lost as she catapaults towards stardom is the connection she once had with her childhood pals. "I still talk to those people, but when I talk to them I realise we have nothing in common," she confesses. "It's so frustrating to have a conversation with them because they really don't understand what I'm going through. They don't start working until they're, like, 24."

Yet, as she sees her friends heading off to college, Alicia admits that she wouldn't mind a highbrow challenge herself."I want to do more classic things," she announces. "I would love to do period pieces. I would love to do Helena Bonham Carter's roles. I've heard her say in articles -- and I don't know if they're real, because I don't believe articles anymore -- but I've heard her say that she would like to do contemporary things. So, maybe we could swap."

Maybe this post-teen stunner is not as clueless as some might think.