You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation

by Susannah Gora

  Because practically all the action took place in one room, Hughes was able to shoot Breakfast in sequence. This is incredibly rare in filmmaking, when factors such as location, budget, and actors’ availability usually determine which scenes get shot in which order. Filming in sequence gave Breakfast’s performances an extra measure of emotional authenticity. Says the film’s cinematographer, Thomas Del Ruth, “It allowed the actors to have a continuum from scene to scene, without having to refer to footage or their own memories in terms of where their character was at this particular point. So there’s a lot to be said for shooting in continuity.” As the characters’ memories grow, so do the memories of the actors portraying them. “When you shoot in sequence,” says Nelson, “it directs you toward something. We were working on this piece all day, every day, and we could refer back to something we really did remember—like the scene we shot last week.” He adds thoughtfully, “It’s the characters’ truth, it’s the audience’s truth, and it’s our truth—because we went through it.”

  Just as Bender, Claire, Brian, Allison, and Andy grow more comfortable with one another over the course of the day together in detention, so, too, did Judd, Molly, Michael, Ally, and Emilio grow closer over the course of the shoot. John Kapelos remembers observing the five young stars, and thinking that there was “a lot of bonding” happening among them. The young cast, says Sheedy, were “really good friends. I felt for the first time ever—and it’s funny, because this is what the movie is about—but I really did feel like part of a group. It was a lot of laughing. It really was.” And being in suburban Chicago, far from where any of them lived, helped the cast only get closer, because as entertainment exec Bruce Berman says, “they were isolated out there.” Hughes, the cast, and select members of the crew “were like one big happy family,” says Manning. “We’d go to John’s house and just hang out and eat.”

  Manning and some of the actors had an Academy Awards party, watching the Oscars in her hotel suite. (“We had a little pool going,” she remembers.) Ringwald recalls fondly that Hughes, a devoted lover of music, “took us to see [blues musician] Junior Wells,” which was a particularly meaningful experience for Ringwald, herself a lifelong fan of blues. R. P. Cohen remembers, “I would take everybody out on weekends to the Chicago Art Museum. And I took Ally to her first baseball game, to see the Cubs.”

  Although the entire group was growing close, Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald spent the most time together of any cast members, not only because they had already worked together, but because they were the only actual teens in the cast and were required to spend many hours together with their on-set tutor. The age difference created “a sort of division,” says Manning, between “the babies that had to go get tutored, and the adults.” Hughes protected them, coddled them, even. “Michael and I were sort of like the teacher’s pets, in a way,” Ringwald admits.

  Soon enough, Ringwald and Hall were involved romantically—the feelings Hall had for her on the set of Sixteen Candles were being reciprocated. Hall’s mother, Mercedes (who played his mother in the film, dropping him off at detention in the morning, along with his kid sister, played by Hall’s sister, Mary) remembers being on the Breakfast set “and Molly coming up to me and saying, ‘I think I’m falling in love with your son.’ I said, ‘That’s so sweet—you’re a girl, he’s a guy, why don’t you tell him?’ The next day, they were walking around holding hands.”

  “Yeah,” says Ringwald, “we got together at the end of The Breakfast Club, and we were together for a few months, I think mostly because we were the only people that we knew—practically, in the world—that were the same age, that were doing the same thing.” (They indeed had a lot in common, both being precocious ginger-haired actors with jazz musician parents.) Although they kept their puppy love romance a secret at first, “toward the end,” says Manning, “they were open about it.”

  While Ringwald and Hall’s romance blossomed, Estevez and Nelson were becoming particularly close, as guy friends who delighted in each other’s company and shared sense of humor. There wasn’t much doing at the Westin O’Hare, an airport hotel—“The only thing we had to do at the hotel was flirt with the waitresses,” said Estevez at the time—so frequent trips into the city were in order. “Saturday nights, we would head into Chicago,” says Nelson of Estevez and himself. When asked what they would do there, Nelson replies jovially, “Who knows?! Come back Sunday morning and get ready for the next week.” (Paul Gleason once said of Estevez and Nelson, “I’d get back late and see them in the hotel lounge with two or three chicks. They were doing real well.”)

  Some of the fun Judd and Emilio had during the shoot was relatively innocent. “It was as hard as I have perhaps ever laughed in my life,” says Nelson of the night that he and Estevez went around changing the breakfast orders on the cards that guests left hanging outside their rooms. “We changed maybe a hundred breakfasts,” says Nelson, laughing even now at the memory. “It was exorbitant. There was not a single card that went untouched.” The challenge, of course, was for them “to find the time when you could do it—when everyone was asleep,” but when hotel staff “hadn’t yet come to collect the cards. You couldn’t make any noise.” Which proved difficult, since, as Nelson remembers, he and Estevez were “laughing so hard—and then you can’t stop laughing…We would change ‘ones’ to ‘sevens,’ and we’d write special instructions. Certainly, everyone wanted egg whites. Extra sugar, extra salt on some things. Or we would order enough food for four people, and the special instructions would ask for just one place setting.” Unfortunately, says Nelson, “we discovered that there was no real payoff to the joke. Because we would have to be there to see the faces of both the server and the occupant, over and over, a hundred times. There was no way to find out—to find out was to implicate yourself. So we were looking for signs. What I wanted to see was someone going, ‘Can you fucking believe what happened with all the breakfast orders?’” Unfortunately, says Nelson, “we couldn’t exactly go to the kitchen and ask, ‘So, how was breakfast this morning?’”

  Nelson and Estevez would sometimes kid around on set, particularly on lengthy shooting days. One such time was when Kapelos was filming his close-ups as Carl the Janitor. “Judd and Emilio were sort of goofing off,” Kapelos remembers, “and I was really trying to concentrate on my close-up. They were making all these faces at me. I said, ‘You guys would’ve been great working with Martin Sheen on Apocalypse Now when he was having his heart attack—the poor guy would have been having his heart attack and you would have just left him there, not realizing what was really happening.’ I used that as a witty little way of saying, ‘Hey, come on, give me some help here.’ But instead,” Kapelos recalls, still shaken at the memory, “Emilio’s face went ashen. And Judd looked at me incredulously, like, ‘What the fuck did you just say?’ And John [Hughes] came up to me and whispered in my ear, ‘Emilio Estevez is Martin Sheen’s son.’ Mortified, Kapelos remembers turning to Estevez and saying, ‘I didn’t know, man. I didn’t know, I’m so sorry.’ Emilio looks at me—and he wouldn’t cut me any [slack]. He thought I had said it deliberately. He thought I had known. [But] I’m the Chicago actor,” says Kapelos. “I’m not, you know, Hollywood royalty or whatever, and I didn’t know that Emilio Estevez was Martin Sheen’s son. How would I have known that?” He remembers trying to appease Estevez: “I bent over backward to apologize to him, and I don’t know whether it ever took.” Years later, when Kapelos was working on The West Wing, he told Martin Sheen the story, “and he bellowed with laughter,” says Kapelos. “That made me feel at least a little bit better.”

  When it came time for the cast to film a now infamous scene in which Claire gives Allison a makeover, Sheedy wasn’t too thrilled. In the first version of the scene, Claire puts a lot of makeup on Allison, “like putting a lot of stuff on her is making it all better,” says Sheedy. Uncomfortable with this hypocrisy, Sheedy took the matter in hand. She suggested a small change that made a big difference, at
least to her, and to any viewers paying very close attention. “I asked John [Hughes], ‘Can we make it more that they are taking this shell off of her?’” says Sheedy. Hughes saw the logic in her suggestion, and so the resulting scene features Ringwald actually removing makeup from Sheedy’s face, in particular the dark eyeliner her character has been hiding behind. When removing the makeup, says Sheedy, Ringwald’s character “uncovers the beautiful purity that is in Allison that isn’t so scary and dark—and she got my hair out of my face, took my sweater off of me.”

  But even with the idea of removing makeup as opposed to adding it, the scene wouldn’t exactly have Betty Friedan jumping for joy. “It is very much like Grease at the end there,” says Sheedy. “Like suddenly the jock sees her [as if she’s] come out singing ‘You’re the One That I Want.’ The thing I love about it,” says Sheedy frankly, “is that she doesn’t quite pull it off.” Sporting a frilly headband with an awful bow on it, Allison looks a bit like an unhappy poodle. “It doesn’t work. It’s just so stupid-looking. That bow completely came off of Madonna.” As part of Allison’s make-under, she removes many layers of her dark, goth/bag lady attire, to reveal a girly blouse. But if Allison’s true nature was represented in the clothes, says Sheedy, “that should’ve been a boy tank top, a muscle tee. It should’ve been. But they wanted feminine. I don’t know—I always felt like John was on the fence about the transformation. But it was part of the ending written into the script. Everybody shifted positions into something else, and there was nowhere to go with Allison except into something like that.”

  “How could that have been allowed to happen?” Juno star Ellen Page lamented to New York magazine. Page argued that the scene leads women to “start judging ourselves, just because…you’d rather climb trees than give blow jobs.” Indeed, says sociologist Robert Bulman, “the movie would have been so much stronger had it stuck to its original theme, which was, these are important characters who have something to bring to the experience of these friendships. To have her character go through a transformation to be accepted—that goes against the theme. That scene always kind of breaks my heart.”

  Toward the end of the shoot, the cast and crew settled in to film the sequence that would become the emotional crux of the story, and that would make for the most intense days in the entire filming process. Here, Ringwald’s Claire and Nelson’s Bender come to a hurtful détente that underscores their class difference (“You just stick to the things that you know—shopping, nail polish, your father’s BMW, and your poor, rich, drunk mother in the Caribbean,” Bender snarls at Claire as she weeps); Estevez’s Andy breaks down while imagining “the humiliation, the sheer humiliation” that Larry Lester must have felt while explaining to his own father the degrading attack he suffered at Andy’s hands; Sheedy’s Allison reveals tearfully that her parents ignore her; and Hall’s brainy Brian, in the film’s most spellbinding moment, confesses his failed suicide attempt. (Roger Ebert visited the set the day Hall shot his monologue. Watching the filming of the scene brought the critic to tears.)

  Understandably, thanks to its demanding material and inherently difficult themes, this was “the scene where [we] felt any kind of pressure,” says Sheedy. In the sequence, Sheedy says her character’s most hauntingly sorrowful line, now her character’s most iconic phrase: “When you grow up, your heart dies.” She gives a line reading that is devoid of melodrama, that is somehow at once both deflated and hopeful, and breathtakingly honest. Remembering what she was feeling while filming that line, Sheedy says plainly, “It was just a progression of Allison. I felt like it was truly her. I had been there for so many weeks; it just kind of came out as simply as it could have possibly come out. I don’t think we did it more than once,” she says, “maybe twice.” When asked where an actor goes within herself in order to deliver a line like that, Sheedy replies solemnly, “Right to your heart.”

  Hughes stayed close to the emotions of the scene by staying close to his actors while filming it—quite literally. The actors were all sitting together on the floor in a semicircle, and Hughes was sitting there, on the floor, with them. His physical proximity allowed him to get stunningly powerful performances out of his young actors. “I remember doing those movies and John was always just like, right under the camera,” says Ringwald. Hughes’s favored directing position, says Thomas Del Ruth, was lying “on the floor, with his arm propped up, holding his head. I remember looking down below the camera and I’d see just a pair of legs sticking out with untied laces.”

  In the years since then, the “video village” has become commonplace on film sets—this is an area featuring a cluster of video monitors where the director sits, removed from the actors, watching the action play out on-screen rather than in person. “I feel like it was really hard for me to get used to working with directors who only wanted to watch everything from the monitor,” says Ringwald. “You miss a lot. I can understand looking at the monitors, wanting to see the framing, but you just see so much when you are right there.” Hall looks back wistfully on the pre-video-village era, and on Hughes’s hands-on approach to directing. “He stayed connected to his actors in a way that made them want to give their best.”

  The cast did indeed want to give their best, and as such, it was an emotionally draining time for them all, particularly Ringwald, whose monologue was the last one to be shot. “I believe you have to act as well when you’re off-camera as when you’re on-camera,” she says, “so I was just crying and emoting and carrying on, like, the whole time,” while the other actors filmed their dramatic monologues. “And then,” she says, “when it finally got around to me, I was so burnt out, and everybody else was really burnt out, and they couldn’t stop laughing. And it was really hard to film my part because it was that thing where somebody starts laughing, and you just can’t stop. It was sort of a miracle that it actually got done.”

  But get done it did, and in a matter of days, Hughes and crew found themselves shooting the last sequence of the film—the one in which the five characters leave the school together at the end of the day, knowing that they may not be friends on Monday, but that somehow, inside, they’ve all been changed, forever and for the better. The last shot of the movie, the one in which Judd Nelson walks away from the school, was the very last shot filmed.

  Even though Hughes acted like another kid on the set of The Breakfast Club, when the camera stopped rolling, he got a tough lesson in grown-up politics. Universal, he said, was pressuring him to wrap up Breakfast as quickly as possible, and to move to Los Angeles to do the editing of the film. “I was really bothered that I had to move my children to California and put them in new schools, uproot my wife,” Hughes told Premiere magazine’s Sean M. Smith. “I had this terrible feeling that if we went out there, I didn’t know how we would get back. Everything changes.” After successfully filming two movies in his comfort zone of suburban Chicago, Hughes did indeed move himself and his family to L.A. for the editing of Breakfast. “He rented Donald Sutherland’s house in Brentwood,” says Manning. “I remember videotaping a walk-through of it to send it to him.”

  When Hughes got to L.A., he couldn’t have been further from the new species of suave-filmmaker-as-celebrity that was taking over Hollywood in the eighties, when the entertainment media took some of their attention away from actors to celebrate the sexy power plays of studio heads, directors, and producers. “I don’t think he ever felt comfortable in L.A., says Ringwald. An anecdote Hughes once told a reporter captured well the un-hip, grown-up geek he truly felt like there. Uncharacteristically, he had agreed to go to a swanky party, and had a suit tailored for the occasion, which he ordered through the mail. Unfortunately, it got crumpled during shipping, but Hughes had heard that wrinkles could be steamed out. So he hung the suit up in his hotel bathroom, with the shower turned on. He then dozed off while watching TV. “When I woke up I thought, ‘Am I in Burma?’” he recalled. “It was steamy hot. I went into the bathroom to check the suit and discovered I had steamed al
l the wallpaper off the wall.”

  Hughes would get serious cravings, both cultural and gastronomic, for the Midwest. When he and his family learned that their supermarket in L.A. had started carrying the kind of Midwestern honey-cured ham they liked from back home, they all squealed, “Ham! Ham!” in the middle of the store. It was of the utmost importance to Hughes that his children remember where they came from. Frequently, he’d take his family on trips back home to Chicago, where they’d stay in their suburban tract house in Northbrook “so they keep a sense of their Midwestern roots,” he once told a reporter. Of his life in L.A., Hughes insisted, “I do not go to Spago and schmooze with big stars, and I still say ‘please and thank you.’ … How often can you polish a BMW?”

  The mixing of Breakfast would prove enormously difficult, but luckily, said Ned Tanen, “I did a smart thing on The Breakfast Club. I called an editor I knew very well,” Dede Allen, “and said, I’m going to send you a script and I want you to do this movie.’ She called back and said, ‘What am I supposed to do with a bunch of kids in a library?’ I said, ‘What you always do.’” Tanen knew it: If anyone could turn countless hours of footage of kids sitting in one room into a captivating film, it was Allen.

  Hughes’s love of improvisation and his tendency to let the camera roll until the film ran out while his actors tried different things was praiseworthy, from an artistic point of view. But it also caused the shoot to go over schedule, and resulted in a frighteningly massive amount of footage to dig through during the editing process. “The Breakfast Club is famous for the hours and hours and thousands of feet of film that was shot,” says producer Sean Daniel, who worked on the film as a young man. “Thank God for Dede Allen,” says Burch. “She created a masterpiece.” As it turned out, the fact that the footage was shot all in one room, featuring actors in the same wardrobe throughout, allowed for greater flexibility in terms of editing.