Perhaps because of his emotional connection to the storyline, it was exceedingly hard for Hughes to sift through the scenes and choose which ones to leave on the cutting room floor. “I think it was an agonizing process,” says Sean Daniel, “very, very difficult for him.” Hughes had no choice but to slash whole sequences out of his film to get it down to an appropriate length. This was a drama, but no teen film could be close to three hours long, as Hughes’s original edit was.
The scenes that weren’t included in the final cut of Breakfast range from comedic to fantastical, and would have made the tapestry of the film even more richly detailed. Among the lost scenes was one Ally Sheedy devised, in which her character sings a heartbreaking song by the late folk singer Phil Ochs to herself in a soundproof room within the library, wrapping her arms around her shoulders, a child unloved by her own parents, finding a way to comfort herself. Sheedy says gratefully, “[Hughes] let me do it without even knowing if he could get the rights to [the song].” Ultimately, though, Sheedy remembers Hughes telling her “that the studio thought it was too weird to put in.” Nevertheless, says the actress, “I needed it, for myself. So I am really happy that we shot it.” Another lost scene was a monologue of Carl the Janitor’s in which, as Kapelos remembers, “I told them where they’re all gonna be fifteen years from now. I told Brian he’s gonna be a big stockbroker, die of a heart attack at thirty-five. Claire’s gonna drive a Suburban and be a housewife. John Bender, if and when they let you out of prison…’” Things got a little bizarre in a lost dream sequence imagining hidden truths in the characters’ inner selves. “Allison ended up as this crazy, angry witch child,” Sheedy recalls, “with serious makeup and long fingernails and hair. It was her moment to blow herself out of proportion.” “Yeah,” says Ringwald, a touch wistfully, “there’s actually a lot of stuff that didn’t make it into the movie, and apparently it’s in John Hughes’s director’s cut.” (The movie was rereleased as a special edition DVD in 2007, but, alas, not with the deleted footage.)
The editing process was made more difficult by yet another factor: Hughes was juggling overseeing the editing of Breakfast while beginning work directing Weird Science. “It was terrible,” he told Premiere, “going between something I really loved and this dopey-assed comedy.” This meant that much of the hands-on editing of Breakfast was left up to Allen, sans Hughes, with assistance from Michelle Manning—a somewhat unorthodox arrangement for a director. “John was very involved in the editing process,” says Manning, “in that nothing happened without him seeing and approving it…But yes, there were times it was just Dede Allen and me in the editing room, because John was directing Weird Science and Ned [Tanen] was at Paramount,” where he had become the president of production.
Hughes was passionately devoted to defending his artistic vision of Breakfast in the face of corporate naysayers. During the filming, there had been a change in power at Universal: Frank Price and Marvin Antonowsky were now in charge, and they were less than enamored of Hughes’s detention drama. “We saw a rough cut of it,” says exec Bruce Berman. “Those of us who had championed the movie loved it, thought it was great.” But, says Berman, “Marvin Antonowsky and Frank walk out and go, ‘Why would anyone make a movie about group therapy for kids?’ The new administration just didn’t understand what it was,” says Berman, “and didn’t understand John.”
The lack of understanding was perhaps best demonstrated in a now-infamous marketing meeting in which Universal execs showed the Breakfast filmmakers the trailer they had in mind for the film. The trailer, featuring upbeat Chuck Berry music, tried to make Breakfast seem like just another teen comedy, completely sidestepping the film’s dark, dramatic nature. Says producer Sean Daniel, “It was quite clear that there was no understanding of what the heart of the movie was. We all looked at each other like, ‘Holy shit, they don’t get it.’” Universal was handed a brilliant piece of genre-defying filmmaking, and was planning on marketing it as if it were Porky’s 4. Tanen, who was respected throughout Hollywood for his steadfast loyalty to the artistic integrity of the projects he believed in, was not going to stand for this. “Ned was famous for his temper,” says Daniel, “and he had had it. He believed in this movie fervently and wasn’t going to see it fucked up. And so Ned just got famously furious—I’ll never forget it,” says Daniel. “It was absolutely wonderful.” According to people who were at the meeting, Tanen furiously and brilliantly highlighted the necessity of embracing Breakfast’s true nature, getting so angry that he grabbed the table and looked as if he would have thrown it across the room had it not been bolted to the floor. Remembered Tanen, “I said, ‘This is ridiculous. I don’t know what movie you saw, but this has nothing to do with the movie. What are you doing? Holy Jesus, are you not getting it!’” Tanen’s passion was admirable. “It was just one of the great defenses of a movie and displays of belief,” says Sean Daniel of the outburst. “John [Hughes] was a soft-spoken guy, and so he was thrilled that he had Ned by his side.” Then, says Daniel, warmly, “I’d come to know that Ned’s temper was both real and strategic. I remember after the meeting Ned smiling with complete delight, going, ‘That was good, huh?’” For Tanen, all that mattered was making sure the film was treated in a way that respected Hughes’s vision. (The film’s final trailer did still include some Chuck Berry music, but adequately captured the dramatic undercurrent of the story.)
In addition to a film’s trailer, the other essential component in a marketing campaign is, of course, its poster. The Breakfast Club’s “one-sheet” captured, in one forceful, expectations-defying image, the movie’s true soul. The poster, shot by world-renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz when she was just beginning her ascent to superstardom, is simple in its design, yet stunningly original. Leibovitz positioned Ringwald, Estevez, Nelson, Hall, and Sheedy against a lavender-hued backdrop, arranging the forms of their bodies together in a visually arresting way, resulting in a beautiful geometry of arms and hands, faces and hips and shoulders. Each character’s individual personality shone through, yet, the group also seemed somehow intertwined, and dependent upon one another. The actors glared out from the poster—steely, young, beautiful, daring you to look at them. For all intents and purposes, the poster looked—just as the music-obsessed Hughes had wished it would—like an album cover.
The photo shoot was done toward the end of the Breakfast Club shoot, in a hallway of the school where the movie was being filmed. “She put up a backdrop,” remembers Manning, who picked Leibovitz up at the airport and drove her to the shoot, “and she just kept moving [the actors]. She had John in some of them. It was great.” Recalls Anthony Michael Hall, “Annie had designed the shot, and everybody was placed into position, and it was really kind of awkward. We were all laughing because we were all kind of sitting on top of each other.” Ally Sheedy remembers her first impressions of Leibovitz: “Edgy, funky, artistic. I think she showed up in her sneakers and her jeans, and she was just very cool.” The main direction during the shoot, recalls Sheedy, “was just, ‘Get closer together, get closer together.’ We were all dying to get away from each other because it was so uncomfortable. You’re smushed together against a wall with these people,” says Sheedy, “and it’s sort of like, ‘Okay, when do we get to move?’” For many of the young actors, this experience of posing for the shot that would become the one-sheet of a movie was a new one. “I hadn’t had my picture taken all that much,” says Sheedy, “and [Leibovitz] knew what she was doing.” Did she ever. She “put that group of kids together,” says exec Sean Daniel, “and the heart of the movie shone through; this warm, melancholy angst, smoldering and conflicted.”
On February 15, 1985, The Breakfast Club was released in theaters across North America. Some of the filmmakers went to go see it in a theater in Westwood, near UCLA. That night, remembers Manning, “the whole cast went—we sneaked them in after the lights went down.” Within moments, everyone could tell they had something very special on their hands. “You could feel
the electricity in the audience when that movie came on,” says Jackie Burch.
“These kids were just going wild for the movie,” Manning remembers, with pride. “That was the first time we got to watch it with a real audience as opposed to a test audience. And I just went, ‘Oh my God, they get the movie.’ What we were saying in that marketing meeting was true—these kids could totally relate.” Ally Sheedy, in many ways just a kid herself at the time, recalls how she felt the first time she saw The Breakfast Club: “I couldn’t believe how good it was.”
On the set of the film some months earlier, Hughes had told his young cast, as he later relayed to Gene Siskel, “We have made a movie that will be around for a long time. Even if it doesn’t do any business, we have documented a slice of life that normally doesn’t get documented in the movies.” Hughes was, of course, prescient in his assertion that the film would be around for a long time. But happily, his fiscal concerns were unwarranted: The Breakfast Club, which was rated R, pulled in a very respectable amount of money, over $45 million, at the North American box office. (It was a huge sum relative to its cost, and the film would later make a fortune through VHS, Beta, and DVD rentals and purchases, and television broadcasts.) The film’s impressive performance at the box office ensured that Hughes would be able to go on making movies.
Although some critics snubbed The Breakfast Club when it was released (there were those who referred to it snarkily as The Little Chill), the film ended up on many critic’s “10 Best” lists in 1985. Gene Siskel, for one, wrote in his review for the Chicago Tribune that “The Breakfast Club is a breath of cinematic fresh air.” Ironically, the film’s dark tone, which had frightened the execs, may have played a key role in the film’s popularity. Breakfast was truly a drama, an intensely compelling, sexually charged, emotionally forceful drama—and that struck a true chord with that most dramatic of all demographics: teenagers.
The Breakfast Club was, all in all, a great success for everyone involved. Universal was seen as the studio willing to make interesting, cutting-edge fare for teenagers, and got to make a hefty sum of money in the process. Upon its release, the stars of film became just that, stars, and two of them, Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall, would quickly go on to work in more Hughesian projects. As for Hughes, The Breakfast Club made him a celebrity in his own right, but even more meaningfully, the film allowed him to prove for once and for all that he, more than any director before, could connect with young America. His film’s theme song was “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” and fittingly, he was a man who hadn’t forgotten a thing about adolescence. He remembered it all—everything about that strange and inimitably powerful experience called growing up.
“That movie,” said Ned Tanen, “spoke to a generation more than any other movie in that decade.” The film, in the words of Judd Nelson, was “watershed, seminal. It meant something. And,” says Nelson, earnestly, “I am glad to be a part of it.” The Breakfast Club, says Leonard Maltin, “was daring—I don’t know that there was any precedent for it. And it played out so effectively, because of a good script and perfect casting, that it had an immediate and enormous impact.” Indeed, the story of a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse spending a day together in detention would go on to become the gold standard in teen cinema, the film to which all other serious movies about young people would be compared.
But as much as the film meant to the viewers who sat watching it, mesmerized in the dark, there were those for whom The Breakfast Club meant even more. “It’s an experience I only share with them,” says Ally Sheedy of herself, Ringwald, Estevez, Nelson, Hall, and Hughes. “I feel like there was nobody except the other four and John who knew exactly what it was like to make a movie like that,” says Sheedy, “and to have it change your life forever.”
chapter four
NOT JUST FOR BREAKFAST ANYMORE
Inside the Heat of St. Elmo’s Fire
In Burbank, California, thousands of physical, and cultural, miles away from his comfort zone in Chicago, where he’d recently finished shooting The Breakfast Club, John Hughes had an office in a bungalow on the Universal lot. Downstairs from him, Cameron Crowe had an office as well. And just down the hall from Hughes, on his same floor, was the office of another filmmaker. His name was Joel Schumacher. Though they couldn’t have known it at the time, and though they presented their subject matter in distinctly different ways, these three men, Hughes, Crowe, and Schumacher, were the filmmakers who most understood young people in 1980s American cinema, and were greatly skilled at finding the young actors who would best tell these stories. “Joel was very good at casting young people, just like Cameron and John were,” says Warner Bros. exec Bruce Berman. “In fact, they’re sort of the troika. And they were all good friends.” And for a moment in time, they were all under one roof. It was under that very roof that Joel Schumacher would begin working on a script called St. Elmo’s Fire that in many ways would do for young adulthood what The Breakfast Club had done for high school.
Schumacher grew up poor in Queens, the son of a Jewish immigrant mother from Sweden and a Baptist father from Tennessee, who died before Schumacher turned five. Schumacher established himself early on as someone with a keen eye: as a very young man he was the window dresser at the chic New York fashion boutique Henri Bendel and was busy decorating homes for creative power players like Stephen Sondheim. In the early 1970s, Schumacher convinced Dominick Dunne to let him work as a costume designer on a project the then–film executive was producing, and decamped for Hollywood.
From there, he made a name for himself as a costume designer on movies including Sleeper, directed by Woody Allen, who became Schumacher’s supporter and mentor. From there, he made the transition to screenwriting, penning films with predominately African American casts, such as the 1976 hit comedy Car Wash and the screen adaptation of the musical The Wiz (which starred Diana Ross and marked the film debut of Michael Jackson). After two television movies, Ned Tanen enlisted Schumacher to direct a feature, the Lily Tomlin project The Incredible Shrinking Woman. The script had been languishing at Universal for years, and its first director, Animal House’s John Landis, had moved on to other things. The resulting special-effects romp, written by Tomlin’s longtime collaborator, Jane Wagner, was not particularly well received, but it introduced Schumacher’s boldly colorful visual style to Hollywood. “[He made] the whole thing look like Necco wafers,” Tomlin told a reporter at the time. His next film, the Mr. T vehicle D.C. Cab, which he also cowrote, was met with mostly middling reviews. With the casually debonair handsomeness of a male model and an impeccable fashion sense, Schumacher was extremely glamorous, and yet his first two films, Shrinking Woman and D.C. Cab, were anything but.
One day in the spring of 1984, Schumacher and his assistant, a young man named Carl Kurlander, were thinking about which actors might be right for a script that they had recently cowritten. It focused on the lives of seven best friends dealing with the pressures of adult life after graduating from Georgetown.
The door that led from Schumacher’s office to the common hallway happened to be open when a gorgeous young woman left John Hughes’s office after being stood up for a meeting, and stormed past. She was furious. “I just saw a flash of her,” Schumacher remembers, but even one look at this exotic creature—with her long, shiny black hair, her chiseled jaw, and her fierce beauty—was enough for Schumacher and Kurlander to know instantly that this woman was the embodiment of a character named “Jules” in their screenplay. “I literally said to Carl, follow that girl, and see if she is an actress,” Schumacher recalls. Kurlander ran after her and, much to his embarrassment, introduced himself with what seemed like a come-on: “Hey, wait, we’re casting a movie over here!” But nevertheless, he got the pertinent info, and returned to the office out of breath from running up the stairs. “Yes,” Schumacher remembers Kurlander telling him, “she’s an actress. She was on General Hospital, and her name is Demi Moore.”
The script tha
t Carl Kurlander and Joel Schumacher had spent the month of March 1984 feverishly writing was inspired by the personal experiences of both men, and by the desire to fill a void that Schumacher noticed in movies of the time. While John Hughes had the high-school genre covered, Schumacher remembers thinking, “There hadn’t been anything much written about graduating from college since The Graduate. I just thought, there’s a movie here, about a group of friends and what happens when you’re out of college and suddenly now you’re an adult. Now you have a life and you’re not a kid anymore. And most of us are not prepared for life.”
The first sparks of St. Elmo’s Fire had been ignited a few years earlier, when Kurlander was a student at Duke University. He had worked one college summer as a bellhop at the St. Elmo Hotel in the resort community of Chautauqua, New York, where he was infatuated (unrequitedly) with a waitress named Lynn Snyderman. (“We would get grape sodas together,” remembers Kurlander, “and I’d lend her my sweaters during thunderstorms.”) When he returned to Duke in the fall, he asked one of his English professors if it was possible to write a short story so powerful that it could make someone fall in love with him. “Instead of calling the cops,” says Kurlander, “the teacher encouraged me. So I wrote the story. It was all about my infatuation with Lynn.”
Kurlander knew what the essence of the story would be, but he had no idea what to call it. He had told his professor all about that summer, including the name of the resort hotel where he grew so infatuated. “Have you ever heard of St. Elmo’s fire?” his professor asked. St. Elmo’s fire is a meteorological phenomenon that creates a bluish flamelike glow during thunderstorms; sailors have long given it mythical qualities. Kurlander loved the title, and that was the one he used when he sent the short story to Lynn Snyderman.
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 11
