In its ongoing quest to curry favor with the lucrative teenage audience, Hollywood had consigned itself to a miserable task. For while teens do comprise the demographic that is most likely to attend movies and least likely to care whether they're any good (both pluses in studios' eyes), youth culture changes so frequently and so quickly that it's unsuited to the slow world of film production. Even at its most accelerated, the process from pitch to theatrical release takes several months, and the norm is closer to two years. Think about how many details in trends, fashion, and slang change in that amount of time.

That's why most of the best films about present-day teenagers avoid specifics and stick to generalities. Whatever slang is employed will be the sort that's been around a while and isn't likely to become passé before the movie is finished. Specific pop-culture references are used sparingly, again focusing on enduring figures rather than of-the-moment ones. Clothing and hairstyles are chosen to reflect the fashions of the general era, with nothing too outlandish or fashion-forward. If popular music is used on the soundtrack, the songs are chosen at the very last minute, to ensure freshness.

The failure rate of films that ignore these rules and try to be super-hip is so high that the successes are noteworthy. Among those notable exceptions is Clueless, which was released 14 years ago this week, on July 19, 1995, and which instantly won over its target audience with fresh slang, eye-opening fashions, and an attitude that didn't reek of "trying too hard."

That's pretty amazing, considering how hard the filmmakers actually tried. Amy Heckerling, the writer and director, spent several years examining teen culture to get the language and attitudes right, and producers sat in on classes at Beverly Hills High School to get a feel for it. All of that sounds disastrous -- what could be worse than a bunch of middle-aged people (Heckerling was 41 when the film came out) trying to understand teenagers by studying and analyzing them? The very idea suggests those awful assemblies we'd have in high school where outside groups would come in and use "cool" music and "funny" jokes to teach us that drugs are bad. Ugh.

Heckerling had demonstrated a knack for tapping the teenage mind 13 years earlier, with her first feature, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But she didn't write that one (Cameron Crowe did), and when she made it she'd been, well, 13 years closer to being a teenager herself. (Curiously, Heckerling's own high school experience was quite different from the Southern California lives she depicts in Fast Times and Clueless. She grew up in the Bronx and went to an arts high school in Manhattan.)

Somehow, despite the odds, Heckerling got it right with Clueless. While most audiences couldn't directly relate to the world of privileged Beverly Hills teenagers, the characters felt like approximations of people they could relate to. Young viewers thought: Maybe people at MY high school don't talk and dress like this, but I can believe that they do in Beverly Hills. Soon enough, whatever elements of the movie weren't already accurate were adopted by kids and thus became accurate retroactively. (Clueless is widely credited with moving teen fashion away from grunge, so we can at least be thankful for that.)

Perhaps realizing the futility of trying to duplicate teen-speak verbatim, Heckerling invented some terms to sprinkle in with the ones she'd actually heard teens using. In many cases, it's now hard to tell whether Clueless invented a particular bit of vernacular or merely popularized it. Look at a few: "Whatever!" (with the fingers forming a "W"); "As if!"; "I'm outtie" (meaning "I'm out of here"); a pretty girl being a "betty"; "my bad" -- the list goes on and on. The language of Clueless probably played a larger part of its success than anything else. After all, the story, loosely borrowed from Jane Austen's Emma, doesn't differ much from what you'd see in any other teen comedy.

The main character, Cher, played by Alicia Silverstone, is an interesting case, though. She's blond and superficial, and prone to moments of ditziness (calling the Haitians the "Hay-tee-ans"), yet she's not dumb. Her grades are good -- and when they aren't, she successfully debates her way to better ones. She isn't mean, which separates her from a lot of "most popular girl in school" movie characters, nor is she promiscuous. She has selfish reasons for arranging a love connection between two teachers, but she also derives actual joy from making people happy. In short, she is a complex and contradictory figure, maybe not as much so as Emma, but close.

The Internet, which was just starting to enter regular people's lives in 1995, is not mentioned in the film. Several characters have cell phones (not the giant bricks you'd expect, either!), but they're presented as extravagant, silly toys. Apart from these details, Clueless remains surprisingly fresh 14 years later, much less dated than quite a few other films from its time. In an effort to make something modern, hip, and stylish, Heckerling made something that's almost the opposite, too: timeless.

FROM THE TIME CAPSULE: When Clueless was released, 14 years ago this week, on July 19, 1995...

• It was also the opening of Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home -- but don't worry, Clueless beat it, earning $10 million and second place. Ahead of it was Apollo 13, which had opened three weeks earlier and was still doing big business. (Another examination of teenagers was released the same day as Clueless, though only in a few theaters: Larry Clark's controversial Kids.)

• Disney was two weeks away from announcing it would purchase ABC and ESPN. The deal would be finalized six months later. Love Connection had just ended its 12-year run; Northern Exposure was about to air its last episode.

• TLC's "Waterfalls" was in the middle of a seven-week run as the top song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Bryan Adams' "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?" had preceded it for five weeks; Seal's "Kiss From a Rose" would follow it.

• Two major developments in technology were less than two months from being announced: the DVD, and the founding of eBay.

• A record-setting heat wave a week earlier had killed hundreds of people in the Midwestern U.S., including more than 700 in Chicago alone.

• Recent celebrity deaths included Lana Turner, Wolfman Jack, Eva Gabor, and PBS "happy trees" painter Bob Ross.

* * * * *

Eric's Time Capsule appears every Monday at Film.com. You can visit Eric at his website, or whatever.

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