Although new waves of teenagers keep discovering and falling in love with the films, there is one generation who was particularly, and permanently, affected by these movies: the post–Baby Boom cohort born in the late 1960s and 1970s, labeled Generation X. For these people who came of age in the 1980s, this cinematic world and its players made an indelible mark upon their formative years.
The movies were created by a handful of distinct filmmakers: Cameron Crowe, Joel Schumacher, Howard Deutch, and particularly the late John Hughes (considered the godfather of the genre). When Hughes died suddenly of a heart attack in August of 2009, newspapers and websites ran obituaries, and television news networks took a fond look back at his movies. But the remembrances ran deeper than that. Film critics around the world crafted glowing appraisals of his work. A. O. Scott wrote that to those who grew up in the eighties, “John Hughes was our Godard, the filmmaker who crystallized our attitudes and anxieties with just the right blend of teasing and sympathy.” Roger Ebert noted that “few directors have left a more distinctive or influential body of work than John Hughes.” The New York Times ran a moving valediction by Molly Ringwald on its op-ed page. Website message boards were filled with thousands of reminiscences from shocked fans (“I feel like my ’80s childhood went with him,” one commentator wrote). It is no oversight that Hughes’s most successful film, Home Alone, was given relatively little attention upon his passing. Yes, that was the one that made the most money, but its impact was comparatively ephemeral. Starting in 1984 with Sixteen Candles, and ending in 1987 with Some Kind of Wonderful, John Hughes remade American teenhood in his own image. And for that epoch, he was the bard of youth.
Hughes, Deutch, Schumacher, and Crowe brought different voices and cinematic contours to their stories of young people finding their place in the world. Their backgrounds were different, to be sure—Schumacher had been a costume designer, Crowe a teenage rock journalist for Rolling Stone, Deutch made movie trailers, and Hughes worked for a Chicago advertising agency. But the films that these men would make shared common narrative threads in which middle- and upper-middle-class American teenagers wrestled with questions of identity and conformity, while trying to find love and embrace hope. All four filmmakers also often worked with one legendary producer, Ned Tanen, who ran Universal and Paramount during the 1980s, and had a hand in making virtually every important youth film of that era.
And as cinematic fate would have it, at one point in the early 1980s, the three filmmakers who would most change the genre all literally worked under the same roof. Schumacher, who would go on to cowrite and direct St. Elmo’s Fire; Crowe, who would go on to write and direct Say Anything; and Hughes, who would go on to write and direct Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and write and produce Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful—all shared a bungalow on the Universal lot.
Through interviews with the actors, filmmakers, and other insiders from that time, a picture emerges of a group of people who loved their craft, their movies, and each other. The relatively low budgets of their films allowed them great artistic freedom, and as such, their work comprised what turned out to be the golden age of youth cinema. They had no idea at the time that they were participating in films that, two decades later, would still be so important.
On-screen, the gang was all there—the soulful Molly Ringwald, the intense Judd Nelson, the dreamy Rob Lowe, the funky Ally Sheedy, the energetic Emilio Estevez, the glamorous Demi Moore, the bravely geeky Anthony Michael Hall, and the sensitive Andrew McCarthy. There were also talented young actors such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’s charismatic Matthew Broderick; Some Kind of Wonderful’s solemn Eric Stoltz, strong Mary Stuart Masterson, and charming Lea Thompson; Pretty in Pink’s earnest Jon Cryer; and Say Anything’s passionate John Cusack.
There were other notable teen films of that period, which, for various reasons, aren’t given as much detailed attention in this book. For example, Amy Heckerling’s savvy, critically acclaimed Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) understood teens in ways few films had before, and dealt with societal issues that not even Hughes dared touch. But with its laid-back 1970s feel, Fast Times seems more like an important predecessor to the later eighties teen movies than a true part of that canon. 1985’s Weird Science, though written and directed by John Hughes and starring Anthony Michael Hall, doesn’t get much attention herein because, though it’s still a late-night cable TV fixture, it has virtually no cultural resonance.
This book examines the intriguing makings of the eighties youth movies that most represent a phenomenon described in these pages as cine-sociology: the concrete sociological impact that movies can have on our lives. Of course, the films also made a mark upon the lives of the actors who starred in them. Most of them were new to fame, and had trouble navigating their way under the glare of stardom, especially after finding themselves quickly labeled as a “pack” after a handful of them spent a fateful night on the town with a reporter.
The origins of the term “Brat Pack” and the ramifications the label had upon the careers and personal lives of the actors branded with it are explored in detail in these pages, along with the question of which actors the label stuck to most, and why. Some of these actors are still understandably wounded by the use of this moniker. But for better or worse, it is impossible to talk about this set of movies without talking about “the Brat Pack.” Whatever the term may mean to those actors, the phrase has taken on a positive, romantic tone over the course of the past decades, as the actors, and the phrase itself, have become indelible elements of pop culture history.
There was something in these movies that elevated them, almost, “to become fairy tales,” says sociologist Robert Bulman. And like all good fairy tales, we learned important lessons from these stories. From St. Elmo’s Fire we learned that friendships can be as heady as romantic love, that, as the film’s director Joel Schumacher says, “there is a magic time that all friends have together.” From Ferris Bueller’s Day Off we learned the importance of breaking free, every now and then, from the chains that bind us to our everyday lives. Sixteen Candles taught us that sometimes, even in the face of what seems like impending social doom, our wildest birthday wishes can come true. From Pretty in Pink we learned that a person’s innate worth has nothing to do with her net worth. Say Anything showed us that if you love someone ferociously enough, and hold a boom box high enough over your head, things may just work out. And from Some Kind of Wonderful we learned that we could find true love in the last place we expected it: in the enveloping arms and passionate kiss of our best friend.
But perhaps the film that taught us the most was the one set in a high school library over the course of a long day in detention. As part of their punishment, the kids in The Breakfast Club are asked by the principal, Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason), to write an essay answering the question “Who do you think you are?” Over the course of the day together, the five teens learn to trust one another, and it’s decided that Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), the brain, will write one essay representing the entire group. There, in his green sweatshirt and high-waisted khaki pants, Brian writes:
Dear Mr. Vernon,
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basketcase, a princess, and a criminal—correct? That’s the way we saw each other at seven o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basketcase, a princess, and a criminal.
Does that answer your question?
At the end of the day in detention, Brian kisses the very notebook paper his essay is written on, proud of his work. Then, these disparate characters, who began the story worlds apart, leave the high school together, united—at le
ast until Monday. The jock (Estevez) and the recluse (Sheedy) kiss; she rips a badge off his letterman jacket and grasps it close to her. The rebel (Nelson) and the princess (Ringwald) also kiss, and she places one of her diamond earrings inside his leather-gloved hand. The last shot in the movie (which was actually the movie’s very last shot filmed) is an image that now burns bright in our collective consciousness: Judd Nelson’s Bender walking across the football field of the school, defiantly raising his fist in the air.
Long after that last image of Judd Nelson flickered on the screen, the meaning of it stayed with us. Nelson’s exuberantly raised fist, we thought, meant this: The world may label us: “jock” or “brain” as teenagers, and different but equally limiting labels over the course of our adult lives. But if we are bold enough, we can break through. We can see one another, and ourselves, however we like.
Some people may ask how can a handful of movies about slight teenage problems—what will my sixteenth birthday be like; should I go to the prom with my crush or my best friend; what will happen if I ditch school and take a day off; who are these people in detention with me—make a sociological impact upon a generation? The answer to that question lies in the ways the movies taught us to think about ourselves, about one another, about our own innate, infinite possibilities. Through these movies, we found out that powerful friendships and life-changing love can be ours, if only we are smart enough to look for them in unexpected places. We found out that optimism and bravery are worth being rewarded, and often are. And through these movies, we found out that each one of us is a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse.
Does that answer your question?
chapter one
NOTHING COMPARES TO HUGHES
Teen Cinema and the Man Who Would Change It Forever
Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack. In the quiet Chicago suburb of Northbrook, Illinois, a young writer named John Hughes sat at his desk typing furiously. Staring down at him from the wall was a photograph—a headshot of a young actress he’d never met. This actress had soulful eyes, pouting lips, and red hair, and Hughes had recently seen her subtle, nuanced performance in a film called Tempest, a modern reworking of the Shakespeare play, which had been released in August of 1982. She was lanky and freckled, sort of like a girl in a Norman Rockwell painting, Hughes thought, and she was beautiful—differently, endearingly beautiful. John Hughes banged away at the typewriter, writing a screenplay for this girl, her spirit in every keystroke. He had a story to tell—a story about what it really felt like to be a teenager, that strange combination of joy, humiliation, melodrama, and hope that is the adolescent experience. Hollywood had gotten it all wrong, and so he had to tell it the right way. He had to tell it for himself. He had to tell it for the teens misrepresented onscreen. And he had to tell it for her, the actress whose name was written on the bottom of the headshot that hung above his desk: Molly Ringwald.
The script was called Sixteen Candles, and Ringwald would indeed go on to star in it. The film would mark Hughes’s directorial debut, and with it, he would begin in earnest his life’s work. What would set Hughes apart, in an age when other filmmakers were quick to portray teens as vapid, horny, pimpled caricatures, was that he was wise enough to present the teenage experience with the pain, seriousness, and melodrama that so often imbues that age. Considering this stage of life with such gravitas is what would lead Hughes to be known as “the philosopher of adolescence,” as Roger Ebert would later describe him.
The unforgettable teen characters Hughes would bring to life on-screen throughout the 1980s—from passionate underclassmen who felt invisible, to hoodlums whose tough exteriors hid tender, complicated hearts—had one common thread: all felt truly misunderstood, and on the outside of something that was always just out of their reach. It was a feeling that Hughes had known well since his own adolescence. “He had always sort of felt different,” says Molly Ringwald of Hughes. “I think he always felt like he didn’t belong. I remember him telling me something like, ‘I’m a square peg in a round world.’ It sounded like some kind of mantra.”
Hughes’s own experiences as a teen would be imprinted in all of his youth films; in his characters’ misplaced passions, their desire to distinguish themselves, their desperate need to connect. Looking back on the way the social structure of high school affected him, Hughes once told a reporter, “My father used to say, ‘What are you worried about these people for? In two years, you won’t ever see them again.” But he did worry about those people, and he never stopped. And because John Hughes never forgot what it truly feels like to be young, he possessed a unique and singular gift as a filmmaker, one that would enable him to lead a new age in youth cinema. “He knew the heart and soul of a kid’s angst,” says producer Lauren Shuler Donner. “He stayed a teenager.”
September 1962. Young John Hughes is about to begin seventh grade at a new school, in a new town, in a new state. He has just moved with his family—consisting of his salesman father, homemaker mother, and three younger sisters’from the sleepy upper-middle-class Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, to the sleepy upper-middle-class Chicago suburb of Northbrook, Illinois. Technically, it’s the 1960s, but in Northbrook, the “sixties” haven’t yet begun. The essence of the fifties lingers as the airwaves play bubblegum pop music and doo-wop ballads, and kids still sport poodle skirts and jeans with the cuffs rolled up. The home the Hughes family moves into at 2800 Shannon Road is newly built, and on the higher end of the houses in this all-white neighborhood. Heading to the Grove School for that first day of seventh grade, John Hughes didn’t have much of a commute: his house literally backed onto the school’s playground. In other words, young Hughes could never really escape school. Even when he went home, Grove was so physically close it would’ve been impossible for him to ignore. It makes a strange sort of sense, then, that decades later, Hughes would become a filmmaker seemingly unable to break free from the idea of school.
With its modest but well-kept houses and wide, tree-lined streets, Northbrook was a perfectly pleasant place to grow up in the 1960s, but in terms of urbanity, creativity, humor, and intellect, Hughes was light-years ahead of his surroundings. Jackson Peterson, a childhood friend of Hughes, remembers hanging out at Hughes’s house in eighth grade watching comedian Rodney Dangerfield performing on The Ed Sullivan Show. Suddenly, says Peterson, “John starts to freak out, and he says, ‘Those are my jokes! Those are my jokes! The ones I sent him!’” Hughes’s father, John Hughes, Sr., was in the room as well. He and Peterson were understandably confused, until young John explained to them that he had written a handful of quips and mailed them to Dangerfield. “Yes,” young Hughes told his father and friend, “I wrote those jokes upstairs.”
As Hughes grew older and began high school at Glenbrook North, it became even more clear that he was no ordinary teen. “He was very different than all the other kids,” says Peterson. He was fascinated with Pablo Picasso, so much so that he painted a mural on the basement wall of the Hughes family home that featured “incredible Cubist things in bright colors,” Peterson recalls. Peterson and other kids from school would come over to John’s house to check out the mural in the basement, “and we would actually be in awe,” says Peterson. “These were really impressive paintings.” Years later, when Hughes’s parents moved out of the house, Hughes was devastated—they left before he had a chance to take photographs of his murals.
Fittingly, Hughes also showed a prodigious talent for creative writing. In sophomore year of high school, he and his classmates were asked to write a composition. “We had to read the stories in class,” Peterson remembers. Hughes began to read his composition aloud (it was inspired by the time Peterson tried to catch a bat on his family’s golf course), and the class was enthralled. Says Peterson, “It began—I still remember it—like this: ‘The rain was falling quietly in the cool evening, not disturbing anyone from their quiet reveries…’ It went on and on, it was so gripping, you just got sucked right into the story
by Hughes’s use of metaphor and description. Everybody was just like, ‘Oh my God!’ I had no idea he had this talent.”
As an intellectually curious teen, Hughes “marched to the beat of his own drum,” remembers Ann Lamas (né Kearney), a classmate of Hughes’s from the Glenbrook North High class of ’68. In high school, Hughes had an intimate knowledge of and curiosity about pop culture that was completely foreign to his classmates. “I had a sociology class with him senior year,” says Lamas, “and I remember he was talking about the Rat Pack in Hollywood, and the red handkerchiefs they would wear in their suit pockets. I mean,” says Lamas, “who knew about that stuff? But John Hughes did.” (Ironically, and unintentionally, Hughes would contribute to the creation of Hollywood’s next “pack” a generation later.) As a teen, Hughes was, as he later described himself to Bill Carter of the New York Times, “grimly serious.” He felt that adolescence was “the point in your life where you’re your most serious, yet due to conditions beyond your control, you’re also at your geekiest.”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 2
