What Happened to The Crush: The Most Uncomfortable Thriller of the ’90s
The nineties were a wild time, and today’s movie is proof of that. A time when a movie about Robert Redford offering a million bucks to naughty-cuddle Woody Harrelson’s fictional wife Demi Moore for the night could garner over $250 million at the box office. When steamy erotic thrillers were all the rage for shameless adults shelling out ticket money to see their favorite movie stars get down with the sickness on screen. Don’t judge. It was all bookended by tasteful drama to ensure the sinning went down smooth. Today we have a movie born from those ideals. One that took them perhaps a bit too far, even without featuring a single sex scene. It involved a writer being almost seduced by a teenage girl before coming to his wits and smartly rejecting her advances (mostly), only to have his entire existence wrecked by her psychotic tendencies regardless. It’s a morally questionable yet entertaining 90s thriller that not only marks the debut of actress Alicia “as if” Silverstone, but may or may not have killed a blooming directorial career. Not because of its sexual subject matter, less-than-desirable quality, or box office performance, but because of a lawsuit from the teenage girl’s parents claiming the movie was based on the alleged exploits of their own daughter. Which… it was. This is the story of what happened to The Crush.
A Personal Story That Probably Should’ve Stayed Personal
At the dawn of the nineties, writer-director Alan Shapiro had been making a living working on various Disney TV movies like The Christmas Star and directing an episode of The Outsiders television show. Desperate to crack into the mainstream with his first feature, his wife gave him the idea to write a script that revolved around an insane personal experience he had once suffered.
A decade prior, the writer had decided to take the Sylvester Stallone Rocky route and hole up somewhere private for a while to focus on his writing. Somewhere a man could think. He rented a guest house on the property of a rich family in Los Angeles and started writing what he hoped would be his breakout script. Allegedly, a young and especially smart girl who lived on the property named Darian took a liking to him. When he refuted her forward attempts at a romantic relationship, she went full Stage-5 clinger and ended up carving some dirty words into his car. He understandably took this as a sign to get the hell away and did so.
But it made for quite the story to tell at dinner parties… or perhaps turn into a feature film script.
Casting a Teenage Stalker
The Crush script ended up becoming the focus of a Hollywood bidding war in a time when erotic thrillers were king. Morgan Creek beat out the likes of Walt Disney Pictures (weird), Universal, and Paramount for the rights to produce the newest erotic-ish thriller. One can only assume the studio figured they may as well let the man direct the project himself, as no one was going to remember those moments better than he. And away we go.
The success of the project entirely hinged on what actress would be chosen for Darian. It’s one thing to automatically cast a big-name actress like Sharon Stone or Demi Moore for a sexy stalker flick. It’s an entirely different situation when the character is supposed to be a fourteen-year-old girl.
Shapiro and crew auditioned many different actresses for the role and found the perfect one. However, producers wanted a bigger name to draw in an audience. Ultimately, the role of Darian was awarded to another unknown actress who would end up having to drop out of the film for reasons also unknown.
When Fangoria magazine later visited the set of The Crush, Shapiro beamed that they had fallen into luck and found the perfect girl. Her name was Alicia Silverstone, and he believed she was going to be a sensation.
Silverstone was ecstatic after having no success landing feature roles despite auditioning almost every day. And what a role for the fifteen-year-old to start her career with.
Her counterpart in the film, Nick Eliot, went to thirty-year-old British actor Cary Elwes, who was enjoying one hell of a career run at the time. The actor was fresh in the middle of a hot streak that included Days of Thunder, Hot Shots!, Dracula, and of course The Princess Bride.
To take on the part of a complete doofus who trips and falls into an inappropriate relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl at this point in his career was… a choice. But there is scarce information on Elwes’ thought process at the time or anything else revolving around his role in the film to this day. We’ll just have to assume it had something to do with the boatload of cash those Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone films were making at the time.
The Adults in the Room
Either way, Elwes and Silverstone were a force of entertainment throughout The Crush and likely made up for the film’s metric buttload of plot holes and “how could someone be that stupid?” character moments. Moments where maybe taking a clearly psychotic and hauntingly smart fourteen-year-old who is infatuated with you to a secluded romantic spot is a bad idea. Not to mention letting her lick your fingers. Most definitely not the way to properly solidify an appropriate platonic relationship with a minor, among the roughly three hundred and seventy other boneheaded decisions made by various characters throughout.
Thankfully, the casting director was not making boneheaded decisions.
Playing Nick’s more appropriate love interest, Amy, is Jennifer Rubin, whom you’ll remember as the beautiful and bad Taryn from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Kurtwood Smith, stepping away from his role as RoboCop’s Clarence J. Boddicker and closer to his eventual role as Red Forman in That ’70s Show, portrays Adrian’s aggressively overprotective father, Cliff Forrester.
The ultra-90s, easy-on-the-eyes look of The Crush can be credited to cinematographer Bruce Surtees, while the music was handled by Graeme Revell, whose resume ranges from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to The Crow and From Dusk Till Dawn.
Filming kicked off in Vancouver, Canada, where the Forrester home was created by re-landscaping and renovating a real family home in the Shaughnessy neighborhood. The interior of the guest house was recreated on a soundstage for additional filming.
Alicia Silverstone has nothing but kind things to say to this day about her experience working with Cary Elwes. She’s stated that he was respectful, helpful, and nothing but professional throughout an admittedly awkward process.
The Name That Started a Lawsuit
While The Crush is pure nineties sleaze entertainment, featuring a climactic moment where Dr. Lawrence Gordon himself punches a Mountain Dew–fueled fourteen-year-old girl off a creepy attic carousel her dad built, this entire premise is obviously morally questionable at best. While the film never fully goes where it hints, the whole “let me flirt with and kiss this teenager for a second before pushing her away” stance is not exactly morally sound. This movie would never be made today, and yet nobody batted an eye in the 90s.
That doesn’t mean it was without controversy, even then. Shapiro’s wife may have been a genius for recommending he write about his own experiences. What someone probably should have told him, however, was that maybe you shouldn’t use the teenager’s real name in the script. In Shapiro’s defense, the girl’s name was Darian, which is pretty close to Damian from The Omen. And honestly, that’s a pretty rad name for a possibly murderous stalker girl. Unfortunately, the girl’s parents found out about the film and sued both Shapiro and the production studios for libel, arguing that the movie portrayed their daughter as homicidal. The case was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, and the parents demanded that the name Darian be removed from all future versions of the movie. That’s why, in all current copies of The Crush, the name Darian has been dubbed out and replaced with Adrian. And I genuinely feel terrible for the poor soul who had to edit all of that.
Not a Disaster, Not a Hit
Pre-lawsuit and voice-dubbing, The Crush was released on April 2, 1993. It held its own, earning five million of its six-million-dollar budget back on opening weekend and eventually doubling that budget with a $13 million total haul. Not bad for a random 90s flick with a weird premise and a debut actress. But when compared to other erotic thrillers of the early nineties, it didn’t come close to what could have been. Basic Instinct pulled in over $350 million, Fatal Attraction raked in $320 million, and Sliver cracked the $100 million mark. By those standards, The Crush fell short.
Was it because those films featured bigger household names and promised steamier content? Possibly. For all its dirty thoughts, The Crush featured exactly zero sex scenes. And if you think that earned it moral brownie points with critics, you’d be wrong.
Stephen Holden of The New York Times called it “an overheated, trashy fantasy that teased the audience with pedophilic implications while pretending to condemn them.”
Even audiences who weren’t offended often dismissed it as a watered-down version of better films like Lolita. At best, it was praised for its entertainment value and the undeniable charisma of Alicia Silverstone, which is about where most viewers landed. All moral conflicts aside, it’s the kind of movie that gets an unfair critical shake. Its weaknesses are obvious, but it remains entertaining throughout. You can’t really call The Crush “good” with a straight face, but you can say you had a good time watching it.
That’s likely why Alicia Silverstone won both Best Breakthrough Performance and Best Villain at the MTV Movie Awards that year. She would go on to dominate MTV with popular Aerosmith music videos and fully break out just two years later in Clueless.
As for Alan Shapiro, he would only write and direct one more film: the 1996 dolphin flick Flipper. Pure speculation, but you have to wonder if Hollywood studios held a grudge over the whole Darian lawsuit situation.
For the rest of us, The Crush stands as a time capsule of a different era in movies. Not always quality-wise, but definitely entertainment-wise. A time when studios made dumb, fun thrillers untethered to IP, driven purely by the love of the game. And money. Lots of dirty, sexy money. And that is what happened to The Crush.
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