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336 pages, Hardcover
First published March 5, 2024
“His sorrows are many, but it’s much cuter to be sad driving around in a Porsche than in a broken-down Chevy.”
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“The squeaky-clean Midwestern twins, Brandon and Brenda (played by Jason Priestley, a Canadian actor cast at the eleventh hour, and Shannen Doherty, a child actress who’d gone edgy with Heathers), needed a dark counterpoint. Enter Dylan McKay, whose antecedents included Judd Nelson, Matt Dillon, and James Dean. And before them, all the tortured poets who’d tried to catch ecstasy through adventure and verse: Rimbaud, Lord Byron, Bukowski. Dylan was a pocket version of those larger-than-life types, scaled down for high school.”
There was “never a diva move” from Luke, Fontana says. “I don’t think he was capable of it.”![]()
“And for God’s sake, don’t peel a banana from the stem. When Ari and her sister Camrey Bagley Fox, who also appeared in the film (plus two of their younger siblings), prepped breakfast in one scene, Luke caught them denuding the fruit in this most upsetting manner. Do as the monkeys do, he told them, and start from the other end with a small pinch. A decade later, Bagley says, “every time I eat a banana, I think, ‘Luke Perry,’ and I can’t open one by the stem anymore.”