Counter-clockwise from top: Johnny Whitworth (A.J.), Robin Tunney (Deb), Liv Tyler (Corey), Anthony LaPaglia (Joe), Rory Cochrane (Lucas), Coyote Shivers (Berko), Debi Mazar (Jane), Ethan Embry (Mark), Maxwell Caulfield (Rex Manning), Brendan Sexton (Warren), Kimo Wills (Eddie), Renee Zelweger (Gina).
Regency Entertainment / Warner Brothers / Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed
I remember watching Empire Records for the 12th time on the floor of my best friend’s basement, complete with green shag carpeting and wood paneling, and then watching it again as we fought sleep, somewhere around 2 a.m., with piles of candy. I watched it for the 20th time by myself, when I should’ve been at some cool-kids dance, and instead found myself at home, lights out, pretending I wasn’t sad or anxious or worried what this night might predict about the rest of my life.
The 27th time was with my group of three best friends, learning the “Say No More” dance the same way that Corey, Mark, and Gina do halfway through the movie. And I remember some night, halfway through college, all the friends back in our small town, bored, not old enough to buy beer and too good to sneak it from our parents, and amidst our ennui it became abundantly clear that all we really wanted to do with the rest of our night was acquire two pints of Ben & Jerry’s and watch Empire Records the way we always had and, to our minds, always would.
For our generation — a shoulder demographic between Generation X and the millennials — this was one of our movies, a film that managed, however oddly, to capture the ineffable feeling of being a (white, straight) quasi-alienated teenager in a very specific time. But Empire Records was no hit: It grossed a mere $250,000 in its two weeks in release in 1995. With a budget that topped $10 million, it’s not difficult to do the math: Empire Records was an unmitigated, unequivocal flop.
Yet like so many artistic disasters that go on to become cult classics, Empire Records flourished when it was ignored. Kids like me saw it in the video store, watched it on cable, found a random VHS copy, and thought the charm was their secret.
By the time I taught high school in 2011, the students knew the movie as well as I did. Their attraction to Empire Records (like their fixation on My So-Called Life and Clueless) had more to do with fetishizing an era before many of them were born, but it’s clear: The Empire lives on. In a vinyl reissue of the soundtrack released on Record Store Day; in internet celebrations of Rex Manning Day; in special screenings, quote-alongs, Facebook pages, endless GIFs, and truly spectacular Etsy creations.
The Empire Records plot is fairly straightforward: An employee of an independent record store, tasked with closing up the store for the night, discovers plans for a corporate takeover — a fate, as anyone familiar with ‘90s cultural politics knows, akin to capitalist colonialism. The employee thus takes the day’s earnings to Atlantic City, hoping to win enough to save the store. He fails, and the rest of the movie is ostensibly spent figuring out how to protect the store from encroaching Music Town overlords.
That’s just the scaffolding, though, on which the real charm of Empire Records is hung: For those who loved the movie, its indie versus corporate plot was always secondary. It was the movie's depiction of misfit teens — and the interactions between them, all of which seemed so pregnant with exceptional meaning — that resonated. These characters — a good girl, a slutty girl, a gothy girl, an artist boy, an adorable weirdo, a beatnik, a too-cool rocker, a hippy stoner, a wannabe — with whom nearly any high schooler could identify or toward whom they could direct their desire. It was, as one crew member pointed out, Breakfast Club at the record store — but even weirder.
Today, most think it was a little movie that slipped through the cracks before several of the leads went on to major careers. Yet the real story of Empire Records is much more complex — and, ironically, mirrors the very struggle that the Empire Records store faced in its battle against corporate takeover. And nearly 20 years after the film’s release, just as a new generation of high school students fall in love with the film for entirely different reasons, here’s that story for the first time.
Regency Entertainment / Warner Brothers
IT’S REX MANNING DAY!
When Carol Heikkinen reached working age in her hometown of Phoenix, she got a job at the coolest possible place for a high school kid: Tower Records. When she was in college, she spent a summer working at another Tower Records, this one on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. It was through these experiences that Heikkinen wrote the script for Empire Records, then titled simply Empire. As she told me over email, she tried to write a story like the Richard Pryor classic Car Wash , which took place over one day at a car wash — only at a record store.
“I wanted to show how the employees were a family, and how, for some of them, this minimum-wage job would be the best job they ever had,” she explained. “I was interested in how some employees like Corey (Liv Tyler) were working for extra spending money before going off to college, while others like A.J. (Johnny Whitworth) were paying rent and supporting themselves and close to broke.”
With a premise in mind, Heikkinen began filling in the details from her own experience. At Tower, like Empire, employees chose the store music; each would put their CD in a stack that would make its way through the carousel. “One guy was putting the same Dio album in every shift,” Heikkinen added, “and not everyone loves Dio as much as this guy did, so someone finally scratched it up.” (In Empire, A.J. takes a lighter to one of Mark’s metal CDs.)
As for the main plot of the story — Lucas (Cochrane) takes the $9,000 he’s supposed to deposit after closing up the store and gambles it away at Atlantic City — that came from an apocryphal legend of a Tower employee taking the count-out money and showing up the next day with no explanation. The manager didn’t press charges; the employee didn’t even get fired. In the Tower world, getting fired was, according to Heikkinen, a “rarely used last resort” — which explains why, in Empire Records, Lucas isn’t fired for losing $9,000, Corey (Liv Tyler) isn’t fired for having a meltdown in the middle of the store, Gina (Renée Zellweger) just gets asked to go home after sleeping with Rex Manning, and no one bats an eye when Mark (Ethan Embry) gets high on the weed brownies Eddie (Kimo Wills) brings to the store.
Regency Entertainment / Warner Brothers
Try to remember what the record store felt like in the ‘90s: This was before MP3s and Napster, before you could listen to all things all the time — when what you bought became declarative of taste. But the record store was also a cultural center: where you went, especially as a teen, to figure out what your tastes were; to have the conversations and embarrassments and thrilling first listens that made you feel adult and alive.
It’s easy to see why a script set in a record store, peopled with characters from various walks of life, ready-made for a blockbuster soundtrack, got picked up off the spec-script pile. According to Alan Riche, one of the co-producers of the movie, the script was first given to Riche’s producing partner, Tony Ludwig, by William Morris agent Rob Carlson. Carlson convinced the pair to give it a look by telling Riche that Heikkinen had attended the same high school, albeit several years apart, as Riche in Phoenix. They brought the script to Michael Nathanson, president of Regency Pictures, a fledgling shingle at Warner Bros. tasked with producing pictures that Warner Bros. would then distribute. During this process, director Alan Moyle — best known for the Christian Slater pirate radio hit Pump Up the Volume — became attached to the project.
According to Nathanson, Moyle’s “street credibility” with teens was part of what convinced him to green-light the project. Empire Records was low budget but high concept — everything Regency Pictures, which was beginning to amp up its production schedule from a few films a year to 10–14, wanted. Plus Nathanson’s boss, Arnon Milchan — a covert Israeli arms dealer turned international film-financing guru — loved music. It seemed, at least to Nathanson, like a surefire, albeit low-stakes hit. Empire Records was a go.
The problem — one that boomers like Nathanson and the other producers involved couldn’t quite understand — is that the film was entering into a much broader cultural skirmish between Gen-X “indie” culture and those who aimed to commodify and exploit it.
When Empire Records began filming in 1994, Kurt Cobain had committed suicide, Marc Jacobs had put grunge on the high-fashion runway, and the major record labels were throwing money at anything that might be the next Nirvana or Pearl Jam. Empire Records, like Reality Bites before it, was the product of a major studio attempting to reach a subculture notoriously resistant to direct address. And just look at the plot of Empire Records: It’s a movie about resisting corporate takeover that’s developed and released by a major media conglomerate, a movie about quirky misfits with the daughter of the massively mainstream Aerosmith as the lead. They were attempting to cater to an imagined idea of its audience, not its actual audience — something that Moyle had somehow managed to avoid with Pump Up the Volume.
Which explains, at least in part, why the movie might not have reached those actually invested in Gen X culture but spread like a juicy rumor amongst the demographic too young to identify as or with Gen X. When I first saw it, as a relatively uncultured 14-year-old, it matched my imagined understanding of how high school, and record stores in cool cities, would work. Once I was old enough to realize that no movie could approximate the layered experience of being a teenager, I had seen it too many times — and so thoroughly incorporated it into my cultural vernacular — to care.
Regency Entertainment / Warner Brothers
WHAT’S WITH TODAY, TODAY?
As Nathanson recalls, he green-lit Empire Records on a Tuesday. Two days later, he received a call from Amy Heckerling’s agent, who told him that Heckerling, already well-known for Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Look Who’s Talking, had an idea for a new screenplay. She came into Nathanson’s office and pitched him the idea of an updated Emma set in a Beverly Hills high school — the script that would eventually become Clueless.
Nathanson loved the idea, but he’d just bought his teen movie; if he took another one, he’d risk pigeonholing the developing production company as a “teen company.” He reluctantly turned Heckerling down, thereby earning the dubious distinction of being the first — and only — production company to pass on Clueless.
When Clueless hit theaters and became a word-of-mouth sensation, earning $10 million its opening weekend and over $56 million overall — an incredible number for a teen movie in the mid-‘90s — Nathanson would find himself on the receiving end of an irate call from Milchan, demanding, “How stupid could you be?” But at the time, it seemed like the logical move: Empire Records was Regency’s teen movie.
And they funded it accordingly: This wasn’t some indie production where the actors work for scale wages, and the filming is guerilla-style, sans permits or permissions. Instead, Empire Records would be shot on a set designed, top to bottom, to resemble an independent record store down to the most minute detail. The scaffolding on the roof, the beautifully arched ceilings, even the 20-foot mural of Gloria Estefan that graces the top of the building (and with which Mark has an extended, unaccountable make-out scene) would be built from scratch on location in Wilmington, North Carolina, where famed producer Dino De Laurentiis had built a facility (which had most recently — and somewhat ominously — hosted the production of The Crow, where Brandon Lee had died on set).
Working with casting director Gail Levinson, Moyle, along with producers Tony Ludwig and Alan Riche, began searching for the patchwork of personalities that would fill the record store. For the role of Corey, Liv Tyler was young, beautiful, and instantly recognizable to the MTV demo, having just starred in the now-iconic video for Aerosmith’s “Crazy” with Alicia Silverstone.
Alan Moyle
Regency Entertainment / Warner Brothers
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