Trailer
Plot summary
Lelaina Pierce graduated as valedictorian and wants to make documentaries, though she first takes work as a production assistant to Grant Gubler, a rude television host. She shares a home in Houston with Troy Dyer, a coffeehouse guitarist who has lost several minimum-wage jobs, Vickie Miner, who sells at the Gap, and Sammy Gray, who is gay and stays celibate rather than tell his conservative parents. Troy and Lelaina are attracted to each other and have kept it unspoken since one drunken night years earlier. A lit cigarette she throws into a convertible makes the driver, Michael Grates, crash into her car, and they start dating. Michael is an executive at a music channel, and when he sees the documentary she has been assembling, he offers to get it on the air.
Cast
- Susan Norfleetas Helen Anne Pierce
- James Rothenbergas Rick
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Reality Bites (1994)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Lisa Loeb's "Stay (I Missed You)" became a No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hit off the Reality Bites soundtrack, making her the first artist to top the chart before being signed to any record label.
- In 2005 a film financier named Troy Dyer sued writer Helen Childress, producer Danny DeVito and director Ben Stiller, complaining that clients and internet users mistook him for the fictional character of the same name; the suit settled after Childress gave him a document stating he was not the person portrayed.
- Janeane Garofalo was fired from Reality Bites before filming began because director Ben Stiller disliked her attitude during rehearsal, and she was rehired after Winona Ryder stepped in on her behalf.
- Helen Childress spent three years writing and rewriting Reality Bites, generating 70 different drafts, and used her own friends, their personalities and their experiences as the basis for the film.
- When Helen Childress and producer Stacey Sher could not invent a credible third point for the love triangle, Stiller suggested he play it, and the Michael Grates role became a television executive in his twenties instead of a 35-year-old advertising executive marketing Japanese candy bars in America.
- Ethan Hawke's career was in a lull after the buzz from Dead Poets Society faded, and Winona Ryder had a clause written into her contract making her involvement in Reality Bites dependent on Hawke starring opposite her.
