There was a time when Hollywood wasn’t producing very many movies about or starring young people. From the mid-50s (with films like Rebel Without a Cause and The Blackboard Jungle) all the way through the 1970s, only a handful of pictures were being made featuring teenagers (or early twentysomethings) in starring roles. Typically, rather than offering an examination of young people’s lives (in either a real or imagined way) these films were quick, lightweight attempts to cash in on a young star’s presumably limited fame and box office appeal. This was most evident during the 1970s when Jodie Foster, after her strong performance as a 12-year-old prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, went on to appear in the saccharine Disney family-comedy Freaky Friday, and the gimmicky Bugsy Malone, a gangster movie spoof featuring an all children’s cast.
In other instances, teenagers appearing in feature films were mainly there to support established adult box office stars. Tatum O’Neal, for example, gained fame after her Academy Award-winning performance alongside her father Ryan in Peter Bogdonavich’s Paper Moon. Moreover, through the remainder of the decade Tatum's best roles were in The Bad News Bears with Walter Matthau, International Velvet, opposite heavyweights Christopher Plummer and Anthony Hopkins, and the disappointing Nickelodeon (1976), once again starring Tatum’s father (along with the country’s number one leading man at the time, Burt Reynolds.)
Most of the aforementioned films from Foster, O’Neal and other young actors judged worthy of "above title" billing -- e.g., Kristy McNichol (Little Darlings, The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia), Scott Baio (Bugsy Malone, Skatetown, USA), and Brooke Shields (Tilt, Just You and Me Kid) -- were box office and/or critical failures. As a result, Hollywood remained hesitant to script and produce films that explored the world of teenagers in a meaningful way. In an era where most of the top production executives were holdovers from the Hollywood’s old studio system, “star power” was still something of a prerequisite for getting pictures green-lighted and “kid actors” were viewed as not having enough of it to be anything more than risky box office draws. Case in point, even when casting the (what would prove to be wildly successful) frat comedy Animal House, the filmmakers turned to 30-year-olds Tim Matheson and Peter Riegert, and the established 29-year old star of Saturday Night Live, John Belushi, to portray the college-age protagonists.
But as the 1980s rolled in, Hollywood’s attitude towards writing and producing films about young people (and examining their lives and experiences using real teen actors) was about to change -- and the film that would initiate this change would prove be a most unlikely entry.
Porky’s was a low-budget high school comedy written and directed by Bob Clark, a 40-year-old Hollywood veteran whose best known work had been as a writer for The Dukes of Hazzard TV series. Porky’s was produced for a meager $4 million, but would prove to be groundbreaking in a number of ways, including its subject matter. Unabashedly raunchy, even by today’s standards, Porky’s follows a group of high school boys as they play practical jokes on each other, spy on the cheerleaders in the shower, and torment the girls phys ed teacher, Miss Ballbricker. The story centers on the boys’ attempts to gain entry to a local strip bar and their subsequent confrontation with the bar’s owner (the eponymous "Porky".) Some of the film’s more hilarious scenes involve the guys enlisting the services of a prostitute, two gym teachers having loud sex in a laundry room, and one of the boys teasing the girls with his penis before having it nearly yanked clean off by Ballbricker. Interestingly, even amidst all this highly-charged sexual humor, Clark manages to work in a redeeming social message, as one of the boys learns a lesson about racial tolerance.
Make no mistake however, Porky’s is first and foremost a riotous, rude comedy about a bunch of guys trying to… well… get laid -- a plot that would be repeated ad nauseum in teen films throughout the 80s, 90s, and into the next millennium. Porky’s however, was one of the very first to tread this ground, and in doing so, became a huge hit.
Another significant aspect about the movie was the fact that it featured a cast of unknowns. Porky's box office success flew in the face of conventional wisdom by proving that when it came to the teen movie genre, star power was of little importance. On the strength of the teen and twentysomething dollar, Porky’s grossed nearly $60 million at the box office. Hollywood took notice and a fundamental philosophical shift occurred, as the already few and far between “coming of age” stories like Breaking Away (1979), Foxes (1980), and Endless Love (1981), that sought to honestly explore all sides of the teen experience, both serious and comedic, were quickly passed over (by both producers and consumers) in favor of bawdy teen sex romps. Indeed, the success of Porky’s triggered a frenzied race among production companies and major studios to cash in by duplicating the film's formula. As a result, the next two years brought a slew of Porky’s clones, most of which featured similar casts of unknowns and offered little more plot-wise than a bunch of pubescent boys out for sex. The Last American Virgin (1982), Goin’ All the Way (1982), My Tutor (1983), Private School (1983), Spring Fever (1983), Spring Break (1983) and Losin’ It (1983) are prime examples. All of these, however, failed to match the success of Bob Clark's film.
Despite this, the new genre of the teen movie would not be short-lived, as the film industry pleasantly realized it had two additional sources of revenue for their movies—cable television and home video. These two new outlets would prove pivotal to the success of teen movies, and would fuel Hollywood’s continued exploration, expansion, and diversification of the genre through the remainder of the decade.
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