Sofia Coppola has always lived in the kind of cool girl universe where popular culture records your youth for you. Her “awkward” years were captured when she appeared in Sonic Youth’s 1991 music video Mildred Pierce. Her early interest in fashion was immortalised through her cult clothing line Milk Fed. Her ideas about girlhood were explored in films like Lick the Star and The Virgin Suicides. Even the demise of her young marriage to Spike Jonze resulted in the Oscar-winning Lost in Translation.
Or take Hi Octane, her short-lived, star-studded Comedy Central series created with her pal Zoe Cassavetes in 1994. In the arms of any other early twentysomething, that description could sound nightmarish. But like so much of the director’s later work, subjects that should be gnawing (the inner lives of the rich, beautiful and bored) are totally hypnotic.
To be fair, the show’s watchability is hugely inflated by Coppola’s network of 90s alternative-It Girls. The hosts, Coppola and Cassavetes, get in trouble for goofing off at Monster Truck school before pulling over to offer Keanu Reeves roadside assistance. The model Jenny Shimizu provides mechanic tips (and hints at a previous three-way with Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista). Andre Leon Talley and Beck ponder the mechanics of sex in a car. In another backseat, Good Will Hunting and My Private Idaho director Gus Van Sant predicts the rise of mobile phone cameras.
Off road – and in an alley behind his apartment – Thurston Moore hosts an appropriately named regular segment called “Thurston’s Alley”, where he interviews the likes of Johnny Ramone, Sylvia Miles and Anna Wintour (although she makes him come to her office). Rumour has it Liv Tyler’s appearance was cut. It all feels like a gen X fever dream.
Occasionally, Hi Octane does falter. Watching someone else’s cool friends goof off can get old – even when the cool friends are the Beastie Boys. But most of the time, the format is addictive.
A cynic might say any rich, pretty, popular girl in a 1960s Pontiac could make something similarly appealing – Coppola’s dad did produce it. But amid the chaos there are glimmers of Coppola’s talents and signatures. Her impeccable taste is signalled with a cameo from a pre-Kids Chloë Sevigny at an X-Girl fashion show she produces. Hyper-femme aesthetics are explored and teased through Chanel-clad alter egos. At one point, Karl Lagerfeld tells her to enunciate.
At the time of production she was five years away from her directorial debut with The Virgin Suicides but her preoccupation with nostalgia, sex and fame are already clear – as is her unique view into the intimate and casual lives of famous people. It’s not hard to see the warped perspective of The Bling Ring or Marie Antoinette as Debbie Harry gazes at a portrait of herself escaping a (real-life) brush with Ted Bundy.
And despite her infamous early foray into acting, Coppola herself shines. Watching her awkwardly attempt to play bass or mug for a fisheye lens, there’s little confusion as to how she became a mainstay of Pinterest boards the world over.
Last year Coppola took back the role of record keeper from her many admirers with the publication of her book, Archive. After a career fascinated with other people’s pasts, the book offered an intimate glimpse into her own. Hopefully the trip down memory lane was rewarding enough to inspire plans for Hi Octane season two.
Hi Octane is available to watch on YouTube. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
