The movie Clueless was released in 1995, and in it was the first positive ‘passing reference’ to Iranians I noticed in a major Hollywood picture. I was 10 years old when I saw this movie, and I still remember watching the scene where Cher, the glamorous popular high school girl, points to a group of cool-looking teenagers and says, 'That's the Persian Mafia- you can't hang out with them unless you own a BMW.' There wasn't a large Persian population in the town I was living in Texas, so just imagining these too-cool-for-school "Persians" being noticed and commented on by the most popular girl in school was astounding to me.
