The film stars Jodie Foster, Scott Baio, Sally Kellerman, Randy Quaid, and Cherie Currie, in her acting debut.

It revolves around a group of teenage girls coming of age in suburban Los Angeles toward the end of the disco era.

Jeanie feels she has to take care of them all, is fighting with her divorced mother, who cycles through different boyfriends and is yearning for a closer relationship with her distant father, a tour manager for the rock band Angel.

Madge marries Jay, an older man with whom she first has sex; Deirdre no longer acts boy crazy; and Jeanie graduates from high school and is about to head off to college.

[3] Ayers says he started with the question, "What would happen if you dropped Louisa May Alcott into the San Fernando Valley today?

Fox passed on the script and the project wound up with producer David Puttnam, who had a deal with Casablanca Pictures, for whom he had made Midnight Express.

Producer David Puttnam had enjoyed success hiring debutant directors with a background in TV commercials (Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson) and that is where Lyne came from.

It's a loosely structured film, deliberately episodic to suggest the shapeless form of these teenagers' typical days and nights.

Kids stay out all night, run away, get drunk, or get involved in what's supposed to be a civilized dinner party until it's crashed by a mob of greasers.

And at the heart of the movie is one particular, wonderful, and complicated parent-child relationship, between Jodie Foster and Sally Kellerman.