Amy Heckerling's Daughter, Mollie, Responds to Chris Kattan's Allegations

Yesterday, I wrote about the revelation in Chris Kattan’s memoir, Baby Don’t Hurt Me, that Lorne Michaels pressured Chris Kattan into sleeping with director Amy Heckerling in an effort to “keep her happy” so that Heckerling would direct A Night at the Roxbury. I f**ked up, I stepped in it big time, and I apologized, and yet I’m dumb enough this morning to return to the scene of my shame.

I will, however, refrain from editorializing, and I’ll let the words of Mollie Heckerling — the daughter of the very private Amy Heckerling — speak for themselves. She took to Twitter yesterday to share her mother’s side of the story. Here’s the Tweet:

I would like the chance to weigh in on the situation regarding @ChrisKattan and my mother.
Here’s what I remember: pic.twitter.com/3D3BVrPgx7

— Mollie Heckerling (@mollieschmollie) May 29, 2019

I’ll write it out here, in case you can’t see it on your smartphones:

My mother was engaged to Bronson Pinchot before they started making A Night at the Roxbury. I saw no evidence of her seeing, or even talking to Chris Kattan during pre-production; rather, she was working vigorously with Steve Koren every day to help improve the script. My mother has never in her life threatened or tried to sabotage anything she was working on. Why would she do that? During the actual shoot, she and Chris became close and he would call our house EVERY NIGHT to talk to her for hours about how he felt like he wasn’t getting the best sketches on SNL. She and Chris started having an affair but, as far as I know, it wasn’t until shooting was well under way.

Was it inappropriate considering the power dynamic? YES. But was it consensual and fully his choice to get with her? Also, YES. My mother broke off her engagement with Bronson and started dating Chris. Chris told her that when he informed Lorne Michaels that they were seeing each other, Lorne said, “What do you want to date her for? She’s so old.” My mom spiraled into a massive eating disorder while dating Chris because she was insecure about their age difference and then Chris went and cheated on her with Elisa Donovan who played Amber on Clueless and also had a role on A Night at Roxbury. I feel for Chris’ other struggles and certainly do not want to delegitimize the importance of the #MeToo movement, but what Chris is saying sounds libelous. I would be VERY interested to hear what Lorne Michaels has to say about all this.

There’s so much I want to say here, mostly about SNL history/gossip, because it is a huge area of fascination for me, but I’ll leave it be, and allow our readership to draw their own conclusions solely from the tweet. I will say, however, that Mollie Heckerling did agree — when someone took issue with her characterizing the relationship as consensual in spite of the inappropriate power dynamic — tweeting that it was “clearly a bad call on her part. But, the fact is people date on set all the time, and the picture Chris is painting seems to be a stilted one. I wish Lorne Michaels would come forward and weigh in on this because he is clearly an integral part of this story.”

Michaels has not weighed in. However, SNL denied Kattan’s initial allegations to Page Six. Heckerling also further clarified her tweets to Vulture, writing “This is all kind of a mess and I feel bad for multiple reasons about it — especially since I am a die hard supporter of MeToo and definitely don’t want to seem insensitive to so many people’s accounts of sexual misconduct,” adding that her mother is an “extraordinarily private person” and didn’t want to add fuel to the fire by commenting on the story.