Helen Hunt Reveals Her Thoughts on Her Infamous Afterschool Special Role
Helen Hunt is an award-winning actor known for Mad About You, Twister, As Good as It Gets, and many more film and TV roles. She took home the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1997, and over the past 20 years, has largely pivoted to directing on both the big and small screen. But everyone’s got to start somewhere. And before all those well-received roles — and even before Girls Just Want to Have Fun, the 1985 teenybopper romp that gave her her first major role — Hunt played a teen so affected by the drug PCP a.k.a. “angel dust” that she launches herself from a second-floor window, bounces off the pavement, and starts slashing at her wrist with shards of broken glass.
The TV movie in question is 1982’s Desperate Lives — and while it gets lumped in with afterschool specials of the era, it actually aired in primetime. Desperate Lives certainly has its advocates — one IMDb reviewer called it “the best movie I have ever seen about teenage drug abuse in our schools” — but others found its over-the-top dramatics laughable, including Hunt herself.
Though she hasn’t spoken about it often, she did address this infamous role once, over 30 years ago.
Hunt joked that it was a role “every actress dreams of”
When Hunt made her Saturday Night Live debut in 1994, she used her monologue to point out that she “didn’t just come out of nowhere” with Mad About You. To prove her point, she showed the audience clips from her early roles, including silly moments from Swiss Family Robinson and The Bionic Woman.
And as for playing the drug-experimenting teen Sandy Cameron in Desperate Lives, Hunt declared that with that role, her acting career “reached what I like to think of as a turning point.” “I starred in a hard-hitting after-school special about the dangers of angel dust,” she recalled.
She then screened the window-jumping clip for the audience, noting that the teen who introduces Sandy to PCP is the guy from Hardbodies, a.k.a. Grant Cramer.
After the clip, Hunt quipped, “Now this is the kind of scene every actress dreams of! They just don’t make good roles for women like this anymore! … I could never really tell if that movie was pro-angel dust, or anti-angel dust.”
The film was supposed to convey that “we’re all in trouble”
For a film that has become such a cultural punchline, it has a very serious genesis. Former network programming executive Lew Hunter wrote Desperate Lives at the urging of TV producer Terry Keegan. Both men had sons affected by drug addiction, as Hunter told the Associated Press in 1982.
“This is a story I didn’t have to research. Both Terry and I lived the story,” he added. “Through our children, through my high-school Sunday school class, through my coaching youngsters on various sports teams, and generally working with loving teenagers.”
Even though substance use had impacted their families, Hunter said he and Keegan didn’t want to make the film strictly autobiographical, so the story would seem universal. “I think what makes it different is that most things you see about drugs are about somebody else’s family. ‘It couldn’t happen to us,’” he observed. “What I’m saying is that we’re all in trouble, parents and children.”
Viewers called it “rather absurd” & said it “emphasized hysteria over education”
Time has not treated Desperate Lives well. In a 2002 review, an IMDb user said, “This utterly awful TV movie is pure, 100% hokum. … I wish I’d seen this [in the 1980s] — I could have used the laughs. But at least it’s acquired a thick patina of camp value over the years, what with its beyond-earnest, totally out-of-touch plot and dialogue.”
In a 2017 VICE essay about psychedelics, rock singer Andrew W.K. called Desperate Lives “a rather absurd anti-drug movie in retrospect, but terrifying at the time to a young boy who knew next to nothing.”
And in 2022, Cracked writer Keegan Kelly said the movie was “like if a bunch of ’80s guidance counselors tried to write an episode of Euphoria. … The window-smashing sequence became an iconic moment in the War on Drugs for best exemplifying the inefficacy of over-the-top anti-drug campaigns which emphasized hysteria over education.”
Sandy’s crashing through the widow was indeed iconic, and even Helen Hunt fans might have forgotten Desperate Lives was Hunt’s second TV movie about PCP. As Kelly pointed out, the future Oscar winner appeared in 1981’s Angel Dusted, playing “the younger sister of a PCP-using teen whose wacky hijinks were a headache for his whole family.”
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