Heckerling was working in an era before Time’s Up, before a woman won the Oscar for Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow, 2010), before a woman would direct a big budget, blockbuster superhero movie. She was making movies, and she was making the kinds of movies that men usually made, “slobby” comedies like National Lampoon and Fast Times. Plus she was making them well, and they made money. And yet it’s been almost a decade since her last solo project.

Today, Heckerling is working on the Broadway adaptation of Clueless, opening for previews next week. Like the musical adaptations of Pretty Woman and Legally Blonde, it has the potential to become a massive hit.

The time couldn’t be more ripe for a Heckerling resurgence. The institutionalised sexism of the film industry is finally starting to be dismantled. Mimi Leder, another female director and Heckerling’s contemporary in the eighties and nineties, is making her comeback this year with the Ruth Bader Ginsberg biopic On the Basis of Sex. This, after Leder was put in director jail when, after a series of hits, she made one flop (Pay It Forward) in 2000.

“The experience of going to Movie Jail was deafening and painful,” Leder told The Ringer last year. “But I remained in television. I didn’t stop working. I directed nine pilots, and six of them went to series. They’re not on the air anymore, but I didn’t stop working. I just stopped making films.”

Why isn’t the female director of Clueless a bigger Hollywood success story?