What’s Fair Is Fair: Why ‘The Legend of Billie Jean’ Is Still Invincible, 40 Years Later

In July 1985, the biggest movie in the country was “Back to the Future.” The number one song was “A View to a Kill” by Duran Duran, from the James Bond movie of the same name. A large number of the movies listed in the top 10 the weekend of July 19, even beyond the obvious “Back to the Future,” offer a murderer’s row of movies we still talk about today: “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” “Cocoon,” “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” “St. Elmo’s Fire.” Just for good measure, “E.T.” was re-released into theaters that weekend.

Do you know what’s difficult? It’s difficult to have a brand-new, wide release film and have it finish 14th at the box office. Want to know what’s even more difficult? To have a brand-new, wide release film finish 14th at the box office, and then, 40 years later, for it to still be culturally important enough to warrant a gigantic retrospective piece with the cast and crew of that film, which is what you are currently reading.

But this all seems appropriate for “The Legend of Billie Jean,” a story of a young woman with no agency, completely ignored and discarded, who slowly develops an underground cult following, while becoming an inspiration to young people (and especially women) across the country.

Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner’s original script for the film was inspired by the story of Phoolan Devi, an Indian icon and eventual member of parliament who defied authority and developed an underground following. (Her story is pretty fascinating and, ultimately, tragic.) For “The Legend of Billie Jean” (originally titled “Legend” until the Ridley Scott, Tom Cruise movie came out), Phoolan Devi of India became Billie Jean Davy of Corpus Christi, Texas.

This is the story of how “The Legend of Billie Jean” became (as Pat Benatar would sing), invincible. (Though, as I learned the hard way, not everyone involved is thrilled about this anniversary.)

“I was attracted to the screenplay because I hadn’t seen anything like it, the empowerment of a female. And everybody in the movie was young and powerless. And everybody in the movie was young and powerless,” said director Matthew Robbins in a recent interview with IndieWire. “The assumptions are being made by all the adult males. It’s kind of a forcefield the kids are up against.”

In “The Legend of Billie Jean,” Binx Davy (Christian Slater, in his very first film role) gets beaten up by some local bullies and has his prized red Honda Elite scooter vandalized. His older sister, Billie Jean (Helen Slater, “Supergirl,” which came out while “Billie Jean” was filming), confronts Mr. Pyatt (Richard Bradford), the father of the head bully, demanding the precise amount of $608, the cash necessary to repair Binx’s scooter.

Mr. Pyatt agrees to pay but, in the process of this apparent negotiation, sexually assaults Billie Jean. An enraged Binx picks up Mr. Pyatt’s gun, which he believes to be unloaded, and accidentally shoots Mr. Pyatt in the shoulder. Suddenly, the siblings, along with their friends Putter (Yeardley Smith) and Ophelia (Martha Gehman), become outlaws, going on the run while simply demanding the $608 they are owed for the scooter repairs, because “fair is fair.”

“As a mythologist now, I don’t think you can underestimate that female empowerment,” Helen Slater, who, yes, recently finished her doctorate degree in mythology, told IndieWire. “I usually don’t use that language, but for the sake of this, this idea of you don’t feel you have much agency in your life, and the movie says, well, maybe not so much.”

“It’s unusual in a film to see a big sister stick up for a little brother,” added Yeardley Smith. “Because I came up in the ‘80s, I was so used to all the female characters being secretaries, wives, much more incidental.”

Robbins was coming off directing “Dragonslayer” (a very different movie), but the script reminded him of themes he explored in one of his previous screenplays. “I was fascinated with notoriety getting confused with fame,” said Robbins, “which was exactly the same issue in “The Sugarland Express.’”

Robbins co-wrote “The Sugarland Express,” a 1974 film that Steven Spielberg directed just before he exploded with “Jaws” the next year. It stars Goldie Hawn and William Atherton, who become outlaws over a child custody battle. It’s a much grittier film than “The Legend of Billie Jean” (it was the ‘70s, after all), but with the themes of fugitives on the run gaining notoriety, the seeds are very much planted here.

Still, Robbins felt the original script needed a rewrite in order to get the tone and humanity he was looking for. Robbins explained, “When I was offered the job of ‘The Legend of Billie Jean,’ I said, I’d like to make some changes to the screenplay and I’d like to work with Walter Bernstein. Jon Peters, at the time said, ‘Work with whoever you want.’ Walter Bernstein was hired and the two of us reworked it.” (Don’t worry, there are plenty of Jon Peters stories still coming.)

(Though, Robbins did try to get the title and name of the character changed because of the, you know, still extremely popular Michael Jackson song that came out a couple of years earlier. The studio wasn’t having it.) 

Bernstein, who was Robbins’ longtime mentor, had previously written “The Front” and Marilyn Monroe’s unfinished last film, “Something’s Got to Give.” And, notably, he was also one of the writers blacklisted during the McCarthy era.

Helen Slater sees a lot of Bernstein’s point of view in the finished film: “It’s not about a blacklisted screenwriter, but it had those seeds of when the culture, when the conditioning [is in a certain place], you get locked out. How do you navigate that?”

Robbins added, “I would have to attribute to him some of the understanding of the female side of this: the way she confronts the world; the way she steps into a leadership Pied Piper in a way. Helen shares a lovely scene with Keith Gordon where she’s really wondering, Who am I? And he says, ‘You’re Billie Jean.’ That is really Walter Bernstein territory.”

As Billie Jean and the group go on the run across a steamy Texas summer, they eventually find refuge in what they think is an empty mansion. They don’t realize that a somewhat eccentric young man (when we first meet him, he’s wearing an elaborate Wolfman costume) named Lloyd (Gordon) is still at home.

Matthew Robbins: “Keith Gordon was wonderful. He just had the right high IQ and intelligence and eccentricity to play that role.”

Helen Slater: “He’s just so smart! Did you know this about him? I have such admiration for actors who become directors and have that brain thing going. He was lovely, just sweet as pie.”

Keith Gordon: “It’s better than being remembered as dumb. I’m sure I’ve met people in my life who would say, he’s not that smart. But if a doctor in mythology says I’m smart, I feel like I’ve been validated. There you go.”

Of course, Lloyd immediately falls in love with Billie Jean, but he’s not the typical ‘80s boyfriend we usually saw in films of this era. But that doesn’t mean Gordon (who had previously starred in “Christine” and “Dressed to Kill”) didn’t have to convince producer Peters he was “sexy” enough for the role.

Gordon recalled, “I remember Matthew and them prepping me, ‘This is what they’re looking for and this is what they’re afraid of’. So, I remember just going in as the ‘Jon Peters version of the character.’ Which was less having fun and more being cool. It felt so goofy, but I wanted to get the part.”

What’s it like having to convince Jon Peters that you are “sexy”?

“It was weird. I went to his house, this gigantic mansion. We sat and had iced tea, or whatever. And he’s like, ‘Do you really think you can be really sexy in a movie?,'” Gordon said. “And it’s not really my personality to go, ‘Oh, yeah.’  Whatever Gordon did, however, ultimately worked.

A “Gigantic” Haircut

Meeting Lloyd doesn’t just add a love story subplot to the film, it also leads directly into one of the film’s most enduring sequences. While at the mansion, Billie Jean watches “Joan of Arc” on television and decides to chop of all of her hair, providing her iconic look from the film and also providing one of the biggest headaches of Matthew Robbins’ career.

Matthew Robbins: “Jon Peters was from the world of hairdressing. So, the issue of Helen and her haircut assumed enormous proportions. It was a gigantic issue for him.”

Helen Slater: “That was a whole thing!”

Yeardley Smith: “I remember that night she cut her hair.”

Matthew Robbins: “He wanted to — and a matter of fact, did — send his own choice of hairdresser to Corpus Christi. Only the ‘very best’ could be responsible for cutting her hair.”

Helen Slater: “Our wonderful hairdresser, Lynn Del Kail, it probably was not great she couldn’t do that moment.”

Keith Gordon: “At the time, I felt like it was a Hollywood sellout. And now I don’t know that I was right. I was very idealistic. I remember I was like, ‘Yeah, they should just give Helen a pair of scissors and [let her] cut her own hair.’ In the grand scheme, it ultimately was a Hollywood movie and it struck a chord [that] Hollywood movies strike in people that lasts in a different way. So, it was probably the right call.”

Helen Slater: “That was actually my hair. I was all in with the part, where I was and being so young and getting the lead in a movie. It’s such a dazzling thing at such a young age, ‘Supergirl’ then ‘The Legend of Billie Jean.’ I just couldn’t believe I was getting to do this. There was this feeling of, let’s jump in and do this.”

Keith Gordon: “I remember at the time being like, this is silly! This is bullshit! Who would cut their own hair and have it be so perfect?!”

Yeardley Smith: “It was a cool haircut! I mean, Helen is one of those people who could wear any length of hair.”

Matthew Robbins: “It wasn’t a good thing. It led to so much tension and chaos. It was an issue that should not have led to so much paranoia and expense.”

Helen Slater: “That haircut … it wasn’t wrong, exactly. Because so many people have come up to me and told me, ‘I got that haircut.’”

Yeardley Smith: “I remember they wanted me to cut my hair. I said, ‘You know that’s not happening.’ They were sort of put out. The solution was — I had long hair and my hair was thick — so if I wore that cheesy blazer with the collar flipped up, put the wig on, my hair was down my back in that scene on the beach.”

Keith Gordon: “It does look cool. That’s the thing that happens when our youthful idealism isn’t always right.”

A Heroine for All Time

“It felt different from a lot of movies I saw as a kid, in that it made kid problems feel very adult, but somehow mythical,” said Oscar-nominated screenwriter and noted “Billie Jean” fan, Emily V. Gordon. Like most of us who love this movie, the “Big Sick” writer first discovered Robbins’ film on a seemingly never-ending loop on HBO.

“These were kids dealing with sexual assault, poverty, physical abuse, being wrongly accused, and going viral before that was a thing,” she told IndieWire. “And though all those stakes felt intensely real, they also felt like problems you could overcome by the very nature of being a kid. A rebellious kid.”

What also makes “The Legend of Billie Jean” unique is its portrayal of something that we hear a lot about today: “strong female characters.” Back then, outside of notable exceptions like “Alien” and “The Terminator,” these kinds of mainstream action movies did not really attempt to do this, let alone feature multiple women as part of the main group. Even today, the male interpretation of “strong female character” just means she can beat up a bunch of guys.

“Through the whole movie there’s a female sensibility,” said Keith Gordon. “That would have been the other cliche Hollywood construction: it would have been Helen, a boyfriend, maybe the younger brother. There wouldn’t have been any other women in there. That’s the movie that was more likely: one woman and all guys.”

There are a couple of scenes in “Billie Jean” that really illustrate this. In one, Billie Jean is recognized by some neighborhood kids who ask for her help in confronting a local resident who is abusing his young son. In a bad movie, Billie Jean would kick the father’s ass. What actually happens in the film is much more nuanced: she simply steps into his house and makes it clear she (and everyone else) know what he’s doing.

“That’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie actually,” said Robbins. “She is compelled to do something, but she doesn’t know what’s going to happen. And that kid was a local kid and he just nailed it. He came through so well.”

“That’s a lovely scene,” said Smith. “I ended up working with that actor several times, John Jackson, lovely guy. But she does it with a quiet, ‘I see you. It’s wrong and you know it.’ Today, he would be bloody on the floor in a heap.”

In another scene after an intense shootout, Smith’s character, Putter, is bleeding. At first, the group thinks she may have been shot. Instead, it turns out she’s just had her first period. Putter says, “It’s about time.” Binx says, “Gross.” Billie Jean immediately scolds her bother and says, “It’s wonderful.”

It probably really doesn’t need to be said there’s really nothing else like this scene, in this kind of movie, at that time or now. “I remember people asking me, are we really going to shoot that?,” said Robbins. “I said, of course! In the middle of all this action, what is the most unexpected? Where do we go that no one can anticipate?”

Slater added, “When we’re there as the actors just shooting it, it just feels like, ‘Well, this is what this scene is,’ as if we’re doing a play. I don’t think we had the brainpower or the insight to be like, ‘Whoa, I don’t see this very often.’ Somewhere we knew, we had a hunch, this is kind of cool, because it’s touching on something real, and how great it is to have that wrapped up in this fable about someone not having agency, to having agency over something and inspiring other people when that happens. This scene feels like one of the ingredients that helps that along because it seems real.”

Smith feels a little differently, even now.

“I actually don’t like that scene,” said the actress. “Just, to me, look, it’s fine that she gets her period. Although, the way she discovers she gets her period is they’re being shot at and she thinks, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve been shot.’ The bullet would have come into her head! But now she gets her period? And then, I’m being washed off in the ocean with a towel around me, and the first thing I say is, ‘When can I get a diaphragm?’ Who says that?! Nobody! Nobody in the history of the world who gets their period would, first thing they say, be, ‘When can I get a diaphragm?’ I was like, this is so embarrassing. But, I’m glad I’m alone in my camp.”

“I can’t go with Yeardley on that one,” said Keith Gordon. “Teen girls would watch this and go, ‘That’s so cool.’ It didn’t talk down to young women and it celebrates them. It was treated as something totally positive. And the idea of, ‘When can I get a diaphragm?’ That a girl would be interested in getting a diaphragm and interested in sex? Again, that was something you never saw. Sex in mainstream movies, men initiated or boys initiated. There wasn’t a lot of treating girls the way boys were treated.”

I presented the question of this scene to, again, noted “Billie Jean” fan Emily V. Gordon. “Everyone is entitled to feel however they want about it,” she said. “But I gotta tell you, I love it. I mean, movies still shy away from putting menstruation in our entertainment. Treat something like a shameful secret, it stays one! Thematically and emotionally, I love that it’s a reflection of how young these children are, and also of how they care for each other. This experience is growing them all up very quickly, and that’s true of getting your period, too. But it’s also just an audacious beat to put in a shoot-out scene. In another movie it’d be treated just as a joke, but the care the movie shows with the beach scene that follows makes it iconic.”

“Write What You Want”

I mentioned earlier that not everyone is thrilled about this anniversary of “The Legend of Billie Jean.” In the course of my prep work, I reached out to the reps for both of the film’s credited screenwriters Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner. I knew the script had been rewritten, but I was genuinely curious what the original version of the script was like.

Keith Gordon even mentioned, “When I first read the script, it felt like in spots it was a little more satiric and a little more double-edged. That the whole thing was about a scooter. It was a movie for teens, but there’s also a grown-up way to look at this movie. There was more dark humor, which I loved. And when we made it, that wasn’t there as much.”

Eventually, I heard from Mark Rosenthal via text message (for the life of me, I don’t know how he got my number, but that’s beside the point). He told me whatever I had heard about the movie so far was “distorted,” that Matthew Robbins fired him and was “clueless,” and then directed me to his website, where he had just written a long essay about his experience on the film.

He then texted me, “You do what you gotta do– but Billie was my creation. Would’ve been a much better film with me on it. (I’m actually in talks for a possible stage version.) The fact that you went to Walter and were not intending to talk to me till Walter said something — despite he has no credit!!!–confirms again the media press disrespects writers and does not understand how movies get made. Sorry to be snarky but it’s my story.”

The “Walter” he is referring to is the aforementioned Walter Bernstein, who was born in 1919 and is no longer alive. If I had talked to him recently, I’m really burying the lede here about my supernatural abilities.

It seems Rosenthal mistook an unidentified “he” earlier in the text thread as meaning Walter Bernstein, not Matthew Robbins, as I had intended. The last I heard from him was, “Then your noun pronoun agreement needs work. Write what you want. You guys don’t get the business. Good night.” Touché.

Youthful High Jinks (High Binx?)

“Helen Slater… I mean, that was… I thought she and I were meant to be together. I mean, I thought, ‘We wouldn’t have to change our last name. We’d just get married.’ And she was Supergirl! I was very excited.”

These are the words of Christian Slater when I interviewed him a couple of years ago as he was promoting the Disney+ show, “Willow.” I brought up “The Legend of Billie Jean,” both because I love the film and, I like to think, I had a premonition I’d one day work on a piece like this very one and it might be tough to get to talk to him again.

I followed up by asking if he had a crush on Helen. “Oh, God. Dude. Yeah,” Christian Slater said. After I joked about them being just being close siblings in the film, he continued, “No, no, just brother and sister hanging out, playing and splashing, and having a great time. Yeah, it was unbelievable. Oh, my God. No, I had nothing but love for her.”

This kind of encapsulates the behind-the-scenes antics on “The Legend of Billie Jean” as — besides veteran actors like Peter Coyote and Dean Stockwell — most of the cast really was made up of young people. Kids, really.

When I recently relayed what Christian Slater said about Helen Slater to Helen Slater, she laughed, “Awww. I loved him! He was four years younger than me! Then that’s a huge age gap then,” she said. “That’s really funny. If it ever comes on I need to take a look at that. What’s he playing in this? I just thought we were a very close brother and sister!”

Smith added, “She really thought of him like a little brother. But I am actually not at all surprised to find out he had a crush on her.”

And Keith Gordon agreed, “I don’t remember that at all! It’s not surprising. That’s so interesting. And I can’t say that I knew. That is really cool. I love it. And it makes perfect sense.”

“I thought he was great,” said Robbins, “he had just the edge and the unpredictability that the character needed. He was a young loose cannon. That hot temper. What can you say, the camera likes him. He was really growing up fast on that movie. He was kind of on his own as a young guy in a movie. His mother was a quite well-established casting director out of New York, but he was there without a parent or guardian. There were a lot of temptations and freedoms of staying up all night and that kind of stuff.”

Keith Gordon recalled what it was like to see that in action. “He’s a teenager and all these girls are like, ‘Hi, you’re in a movie and I want to hang out with you.’ He was like 15 or 16 and all these girls were in love with him. He was very much enjoying it in a very sweet way,” he said. “I was a little older than everybody and he was younger than everybody. So, there was a certain amount of him coming to me, ‘What do I do about this girl? I like her but I’m not sure how much I like her.’ I did a little bit of older brother stuff.”

And then there was the whole issue of, as Christian Slater alluded to, that he and Helen shared a last name and played siblings in the film, but were not related in real life.  

Robbins remembered, “It was almost impossible to persuade journalists that this was purely by chance. When we were doing prep on this I had to constantly explain, no, no, we didn’t plan this.”

Keith Gordon was also (briefly) fooled. “I thought that when I got the job. They both looked enough alike and they had the same last name,” he said. “But once you start talking [to them], it became very evident in like three minutes that they are not related.”

While Christian Slater and Keith Gordon were bonding, Helen Slater, Yeardley Smith, and Martha Gehman were also becoming fast friends. “Helen was the only one who had a car. It was a Jeep,” Smith said. “Christian didn’t really want to hang out with the girls. He was like, ‘Oh, God, why am I here?’ But the girls, we’d pile into the Jeep and go to the mall.”

Gordon remembers this dynamic, too. “Those three, Helen and Yeardley and Martha, they had that connection,” he said. “They seemed super tight.”

“We loved each other,” said Helen Slater. “Martha and Yeardley and Christian and Keith. To be a teenager with those people? I’ll just say this, there was no potato in the group. There’s no potato where you’re like, ‘Oh, no, that person?’ We were shooting all day and there wasn’t much downtime. There were dinners and hanging out. Hanging out at the pool! I don’t know if Matthew said this, but we had to get more tan because we were ‘New York City tan.’” (“’NYC tans,’ that does sound like me,” said Robbins.)

“Every night we’d go to this fish restaurant and have blackened red fish,” said Smith. “That was my first introduction to blackened anything! Actually, I remember, ‘Supergirl’ came out while we were shooting, so we all went to a matinee to see it. The theater, I think we were the only ones in it. Of course, we were so proud of Helen. We loved it. It didn’t do well.”

“[Yeardley] not only has that voice, but she is a natural, physical comedian,” Robbins said. “She’s a real, physical, inventive comedian. She could have done a lot more had she been on film in other projects like that. She had a lot to offer in that area. She’s got that natural freedom and [can] be in the moment and be completely not self-conscious and adorable. She’s just wonderful.”

Recently, Helen Slater found herself back near Corpus Christi. “I don’t remember what I was working on, but I went back to the Sunrise Mall,” she said. “It’s still there, but it’s been abandoned. It was like walking into a ghost town.”

What’s Fair Is Fair

Why do so many people today still love this movie that, almost literally, no one saw in theaters? The most successful aspect of the movie at the time of its release was a Pat Benatar song on the soundtrack, “Invincible,” which hit number 10 on the Billboard charts and was one of the themes of the summer of 1985.

What is the legacy of “The Legend of Billie Jean,” 40 years later? What makes this movie so special? How did this movie predict the internet, with a woman going viral with her own hashtag (“What’s fair is fair”)? And what made Matthew Robbins so equipped to tell such a feminine story?

For the record, Robbins balks at this notion a bit, that a man can’t tell a story about women. My counter was that of course men can (and do), it’s just so many are bad at it and he was good at it.

Helen Slater tried to put this in context: “If I just take a stab at it, without disagreeing with what Matthew is saying, he was a relational guy. He might balk at this, but he was connected to that inner-feminine. The ability to create an environment on the set where people feel comfortable and relaxed. That comes from the top and that came from him.”

Yeardley Smith agreed, “I think that’s true. There was nothing slick about him. He wasn’t interested in playing the game, he was interested in telling the story. He was sort of like a dad to us. He obviously wasn’t old enough to be our dad, but he had a grounded-ness about him that had not been infected by the Hollywood grind.”

Keith Gordon, now obviously an accomplished director himself, had this to add: “He shows, throughout [his career], a sensitivity to women characters, and also a sensitivity to complexity. I mean, ‘The Sugarland Express’ has that, Goldie Hawn’s character was really complicated and really interesting and really rich. Lots of men have not directed women well. Obviously, I don’t think men shouldn’t be able to direct women, because that would be a difficult world, but I do think female characters in Hollywood films have often been afterthoughts. I don’t think that’s ever been part of Matthew’s writing, and he treated his male and female characters as equally as valuable. There weren’t a lot of other movies that did that. There weren’t a lot of other movies that had a young woman who was strong and smart and somebody that if you were 13 or 14 or 15, you’d see in a movie and go, ‘I want to be like her. She’s cool.’ Boys had that all over the place.” 

“I’m glad to hear of everyone’s fond memories, which tells me I was able to shield them from the intense pressure I was under,” said Robbins. (An example: There’s a scene near the end of the film in which Christian Slater’s character, Binx, gets shot. As they were getting ready to shoot this scene, Robbins heard from the studio that he was not allowed to film this scene. He was told the most he can do is have Binx be shot with “a bean bag gun.” Anyway, assuming you’ve seen the film, Robbins won this argument.)

Yeardley Smith: “People accost me with the line, ‘When can I get a diaphragm?’ It’s great to be accosted with that line in the produce aisle.”

Keith Gordon: “The film was a huge disaster when it came out. And the reviews were terrible, which didn’t help. We didn’t have any kind of major star and I don’t think they had any idea how to market it. I think its fate was sealed literally before it even opened.”

Yeardley Smith: “I really thought this movie is going to make me a star. And then it didn’t. Though, I had quite a few movies at the beginning of my career that I thought would make me a star and didn’t. Like ‘Maximum Overdrive.’ It’s terrible! At least ‘The Legend of Billie Jean’ is enormously charming.”

Helen Slater: “I don’t want to put down any classic 1980s male directors, but if you think of some of those more bombastic ‘80s movies, if they had been at the helm, it probably would have gone a direction where you don’t get that relational quality. But why a film about a teenage girl would be so popular is kind of interesting.”

Yeardley Smith: “It happens with ‘The Simpsons’ daily. The show means so much to people, Lisa Simpson in particular. People are like, ‘She got me through so many hard times,’ or, ‘I took up an instrument because of her,’ or, ‘I became a writer,’ or whatever the thing is. I never take that stuff for granted. With ‘Billie Jean,’ I’m always delighted when something I was a part of was meaningful to other people. You do it because you love it, but the fact it can have a positive impact and mean something to somebody else who you’ve never met is icing on icing. How is anything better than that?”