Kurlander spent the last semester of his senior year at Duke living in L.A, for although he hadn’t won Lynn Snyderman’s heart, he had won an internship at MCA/Universal (one of the writing samples he submitted to Universal was that short story). His duties at the studio included getting lunch for various execs and filmmakers. One day, Joel Schumacher was having lunch with Kurlander’s bosses, Thom Mount and Bruce Berman, and Schumacher requested a very specifically prepared bowl of gazpacho, which Kurlander then dutifully produced. A few months later, Kurlander, who by this point had turned his autobiographical short story into a feature script called St. Elmo’s Fire, which focused on a college guy’s obsessive love for a girl, was invited by a friend to watch dailies of D.C. Cab. “I went to the dailies, the lights came off, Joel turned around and saw me, and said, ‘Who the hell is that?’ I said, ‘I’m Carl. I got you gazpacho with no croutons, no sour cream, and chopped egg on the side, about a year ago?’ And he said, ‘Okay, get me a Perrier, lemon, no ice.’” Thus Kurlander became Schumacher’s assistant ad hoc, working for him on D.C. Cab.
On the set of the comedy about a ragtag group of Washington cabbies, Kurlander and Schumacher would have animated discussions about the paucity of films about Kurlander’s generation. Shortly after D.C. Cab was released, Schumacher asked to read the script. “I think there’s something here about young people and all the stories you’re telling me,” Kurlander remembers Schumacher saying to him. For three days, the two drove around Los Angeles discussing their life experiences. “And that became the basis for St. Elmo’s Fire,” says Kurlander, “which we wrote together very quickly, in a month.”
In those marathon writing sessions in Schumacher’s office at Universal, which was bigger than Kurlander’s apartment, the two men blended their strengths—Schumacher as the experienced screenwriter with a knack for ensemble narratives and a penchant for navigating multiple storylines, Kurlander as the kid just out of college with countless stories of life after graduation. As Schumacher remembers it, “I think that I provided some of the characters and a lot of the structure, and Carl provided a lot of his experiences. It was a good combination.” Suddenly, the character that Kurlander’s original script had centered on, the young man obsessively in love, was just one in a group of seven friends on a bittersweet journey together as they faced the struggles of “real life” after college.
Schumacher had plenty of struggles to face when it came time to get St. Elmo’s greenlit: “A lot of people turned down the script,” he reveals; “it got tons of rejections.” In fact, Schumacher recalls that the head of a major studio said these seven characters “were the most loathsome human beings he had ever read on the page.” Luckily, Ned Tanen did not share those sentiments. “I believed in Schumacher,” Tanen said. “He did Car Wash for me [at Universal], and it was brilliant. I liked him enormously and thought he was really gifted.” Unfortunately, Tanen was no longer at Universal, having decamped to Paramount. Still, Schumacher wanted to work with Tanen again.
Tanen took the project and offered it to the new team at Universal, “knowing they were going to reject it.” They did. Recalled Tanen, “I make one phone call to the guy who was running Columbia, Guy McElwaine, who was an old pal of mine.” Soon enough, said Tanen, “it was a go.” Tanen would exec-produce St. Elmo’s Fire, and Lauren Shuler was brought in as producer, to oversee the day-to-day making of the $10 million film. Shuler had produced one of Schumacher’s earliest directorial efforts, the 1979 TV movie Amateur Night at the Dixie Bar and Grill, while still in her twenties. At the time she joined the St. Elmo’s production, she was also producing the latest film from director Richard Donner, Ladyhawke. They started dating after filming wrapped, and later married.
Lauren Shuler Donner recalls what aspects of the St. Elmo’s script she first connected with: “It spoke to me, because it presented the problem of going through four years of college, with all these friends, and then you’re moving on. What happens to them? It is a very emotional subject, and it will always be topical. It’s about moving on with your life, and how you keep those connections.”
Schumacher frequently went back to the idea of “self-created drama” in the St. Elmo’s Fire script, and thus, he and Kurlander felt the myth of the St. Elmo’s fire phenomenon was a natural theme to borrow from, “because it is all a fantasy, it’s this made-up thing,” Schumacher says. “St Elmos’ fire, it happens, like electricity—and sailors used to think it was something supernatural.” Kurlander remembers that “Joel would always say, ‘This is your self-created drama, don’t you realize that?’ That’s actually the movie that we were writing—it was the idea that when you’re in your twenties, everything is life or death. Getting an apartment, trying to have that first relationship that works, trying to get through life, and see if you’re ever going to have a life.”
But the drama wasn’t just on the page—there was plenty of it in the casting process as well. Almost every young star in Hollywood wanted a role in the film, but “a lot of people came in and read for it and were just wrong,” says Schumacher. The filmmakers mused about the likes of Tom Cruise, Matthew Broderick, and Charlie Sheen, but those actors did not actually read for any part. They were the exceptions. “We saw hundreds of people,” says Kurlander. “I know Anthony Edwards came in. I remember having a crush on Lea Thompson, and she came in.” And then, of course, there were those actors from that high school drama John Hughes had shot in Chicago. “We would hear about how well Breakfast Club was going,” says Kurlander, “so we brought them in. We looked at everybody for every role.” Hughes, who had a relationship with Shuler Donner from when she produced Mr. Mom, recommended his Breakfast cast members Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, and Emilio Estevez to Donner, as “a smitten director,” she recalls.
The first character to be cast was that of Billy Hicks. The aspiring musician, though immensely endearing and well loved by the gang, is a rakish womanizer who never outgrew the frat house. Hicks’s longing for his bygone glory days, and subsequent realization that his adult life may never live up to the highs of college, brings the script one of its truest notes of despair. On the surface, Billy is, as Schumacher says, “the charming rascal that women fall in love with but never marry,” but the dramatic subtext was rich: The actor portraying Billy would have plenty of emotional territory to cover in a storyline that ranges from hedonistic to tragic.
By this point in time, actor Rob Lowe was known mainly as a teen idol whose beautiful, sharply angled face was plastered all over the bedrooms of teenage girls across America. Born March 17, 1964, in Charlottesville, Virginia, Robert Hepler Lowe moved with his family to Dayton, Ohio, and later to Los Angeles, where, as a teenager, he modeled, acted, and became close friends with fellow young thesps like Emilio Estevez. Lowe’s upbringing would be well represented in his irresistible blend of “aw, shucks” Midwestern boyishness and stylized Hollywood sex appeal. In 1983, Lowe was seen in both Coppola’s The Outsiders and in the Jacqueline Bisset romantic comedy Class.
Nevertheless, Schumacher admits, when casting St. Elmo’s Fire’s Billy Hicks, “I didn’t think Rob Lowe was right for the part. He wanted it desperately. I had three meetings with him, and his agent drove me insane. And it wasn’t that I disliked Rob, but he was only nineteen, and that’s also a very complicated role,” says Schumacher. “The third time he came in was a Saturday. I was not going to give him the job, I was just giving him the third meeting as a courtesy.”
But eventually Lowe’s charm and persistence paid off. “He was going on and on about why he should play the part,” Schumacher remembers, “and I just had this little moment where I thought, ‘Why don’t I just say yes? He’s so passionate about it, he wants it so desperately.’” Schumacher had Bruce Springsteen’s recently released Born in the USA album playing in his office during that third fateful meeting. After getting the role, Lowe, a diehard Springsteen fan, learned to play the saxophone—to add to the authenticity of his rocker character for scenes where he performs wit
h his band, and also because of his great love for Clarence Clemons, the rock saxophonist for The E Street Band.
“I loved that part,” says Lowe of Billy Hicks. “It was a chance to let my hair down, both literally and figuratively. I think I had more flammable hair products on my hair than any human being in film history. I practically had my own hazmat van.”
When it came time to cast the role of Leslie Hunter, a caring, graceful, elegant preppie who faces pressures to marry before she’s ready, Schumacher visited the Chicago set of The Breakfast Club—he was considering Ally Sheedy for the role. Sheedy was eager to work with Ned Tanen again, whom she saw as a mentor. “He was my first anchor in the movie world,” she says. But she didn’t quite understand how anyone who knew about her performance in Breakfast Club could think her right for the role of a Ralph-Lauren-and-pearls-wearing do-gooder. Sheedy was scheduled to meet Schumacher in downtown Chicago, but there was an accident on the highway, and she was stuck in traffic on the way in from the suburbs where Breakfast was filming. The moments ticked by, and in a pre-cell-phone era, there was no way to call Schumacher and let him know why she would be so late. “I was really scared,” Sheedy remembers. But when she belatedly arrived, Schumacher had a surprise for her. “You’re perfect for the role,” he told her. Sheedy was flummoxed. “I was so immersed in Allison—I was wearing black. And I just didn’t understand it. I thought, ‘I’ll never get that part.’ And then he turned around and gave it to me.”
He gave it to her because, in many ways, Sheedy was a slam-dunk. “Ally had been in WarGames, which was a hit,” says Schumacher, “and when I met her I knew that she was Leslie; she was this beautiful, intelligent young woman—you could see the guys having a crush on her and the women wanting her to be their friend. She was very easy because she wanted to do it, and the studio was ecstatic.” An important plus, because, as Schumacher explains, “it wasn’t just about who was right for the part, but also…who the studio would okay. Because even though it was a very inexpensive movie for the studio, they still had a lot to say about casting.”
Columbia’s power in casting would become all too clear to Schumacher when he had to push hard for Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, and Nelson to be cast. “Emilio and Andrew and Judd, I had to really fight for,” says Schumacher. “The studio would have preferred other names.”
Andrew McCarthy could perhaps sense some reluctance on the studio’s part. “I don’t think I was particularly the person that Columbia wanted,” he recalls, “but they flew me out to Los Angeles and they put me up in the Chateau Marmont.” Up to that point, McCarthy was best known for his role as Jacqueline Bisset’s (much) younger lover in Class. McCarthy was born in the New York City bedroom community of Westfield, New Jersey, on November 29, 1962, and attended the tony prep school Pingry, and later NYU. He was up for the St. Elmo’s character of Kevin Dolenz, a cynical young obituary writer who harbors dreams of becoming a serious novelist and also has a painfully intense, secret love for Leslie (Sheedy’s character), whose boyfriend, Alec, is Kevin’s best friend. McCarthy’s meeting with Columbia execs did not go smoothly—or so he thought.
“They sent a limousine to pick me up to go meet whoever the executive was that I was supposed to impress,” he recalls, “but I was so uncomfortable and shy and frightened that I just sort of sat there. I didn’t impress, and I didn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing. So I just sat there on the couch, and then the meeting was over. I knew it didn’t go very well. And then Joel’s assistant drove me home in his Volkswagen Bug,” McCarthy says. He sensed things had gone wrong: “As I was going over the hill up Coldwater Canyon, I realized, ‘I just blew that.’” He tried hurriedly to think of a way to fix the situation: “I then told the assistant how much I loved the movie and wanted to be part of it,” McCarthy recalls. Schumacher called McCarthy the next day, the actor remembers, “and said, ‘You seemed like you didn’t like this at all, or didn’t care.’ I was just so frightened and withdrawn. Then I went back and met again, and they gave me the part. But,” McCarthy says, laughing, “I always remember that I was driven to this opportunity in a stretch limo, and driven back in a Volkswagen bug.”
Even now, McCarthy still feels that the character of Kevin Dolenz is one of the roles he personally identified with the most over the course of his career, “because it just suited me. It had a detachment, it had a sensitivity, with a ‘rotten before it’s ripe’ cynicism that was covering a thinly veiled, massive vulnerability. And it was intelligent. I was that boy at that time,” McCarthy says, emphatically. “I was that. So I knew that would work. And I knew I would pop in that movie if I did what I wanted to do with it.”
Though The Breakfast Club hadn’t come out yet, the St. Elmo’s filmmakers were well aware of Judd Nelson’s electrifying performance as John Bender. Because of it, “you thought Judd could do anything,” says Kurlander. Bender was quite a different character from Alec Newbary, the role Nelson was up for in St. Elmo’s. Alec was the ultimate member of the establishment-to-be, a dapper young politico who’d been the president of Georgetown’s Young Democrats and then, over the course of the movie, switches affiliations to work for a Republican congressman.
Nelson’s character “was supposed to be the leader of the gang,” says Kurlander, and indeed, Alec does seem to be the glue that holds the group together: his girlfriend is Sheedy’s character, his best friend is McCarthy’s character, and he perennially finds work for Lowe’s character. Nelson’s trademark sneer, which had brought an alluringly menacing quality to the juvenile delinquent Bender in Breakfast Club, is used in an entirely different way in St. Elmo’s, adding a sort of determined, swaggering pompousness to the preppy political aide Alec. “He’s from the right side of the tracks,” says Nelson, “but I don’t think that guy knows the difference between right and wrong. He is looking out for himself. Bender is from the wrong side of the tracks, but he absolutely knows the difference between right and wrong.” (Even though Breakfast was set in high school, “St. Elmo’s seemed a lot less serious to me,” remembers Nelson.)
Emilio Estevez originally had his sights set on playing the “Billy” character that went to his friend from high school and The Outsiders, Rob Lowe. Instead, he was cast as Kirby Keger, a law student with a comically obsessive crush on a beautiful young doctor named Dale Biberman (the role that would eventually go to Andie MacDowell). This plotline was based directly on the experiences of Kurlander and the waitress he loved unrequitedly at The St. Elmo, and Estevez’s character’s name is inspired by that of a childhood friend of Kurlander’s, who popped into the writer’s mind during a particularly stressful moment some years earlier. “I told Joel a story about how I was about to get beaten up by some guy in Europe that I was trying to protect a girl from,” remembers Kurlander. “The guy asked me what my name was and, put on the spot, I said, ‘Kirby Keger.’” Schumacher liked the story, and from then on called Kurlander “Kirbo,” thus Estevez’s character’s nickname heard throughout the film.
One actor it was easy for the studio to agree on was Mare Winningham. She was something of an ABC Movie of the Week sensation, appearing in four such movies in the 1979–80 season alone. She routinely earned critical acclaim for her brave performances, including an Emmy-winning turn as a teenage prostitute in 1980s Off the Minnesota Strip. By the time casting was under way for St. Elmo’s Fire, she had just come off a costarring role in The Thorn Birds, a sprawling romance that was the most watched miniseries since Roots. “She had a cachet,” says Nelson.
Winningham won the part of St. Elmo’s Wendy Beamish, the kindhearted social worker who resists her wealthy father’s pressure to marry a nebbishy boy (who’ll help run her family’s greeting card empire) because she is quietly in love with her troublemaking best friend, Billy Hicks. The only problem was that the character, as written, was chubbier than Winningham. (The Facts of Life’s Mindy Cohn had auditioned.) “Mare was really skinny,” Kurlander remembers, “so we were gonna go that way.” Ironically,
when the married Winningham, then twenty-six, became pregnant with her third child during production, and thus slightly plump, references to the character’s insecurities about weight were brought back into the script.
As sold as Columbia was on Winningham, they were very hesitant to put model Andie MacDowell in the film. MacDowell had recently made the transition from supermodel to actress by starring in the 1984 film Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, but famously had her lines dubbed over by Glenn Close. “So then,” Schumacher explains, “the reputation was, well, Andie can’t act because they had to replace her voice.” So hurtful were most of her Greystoke reviews that MacDowell still cherishes revered film critic Pauline Kael’s glowing review of her performance. Kael called the actress “unconsciously beautiful” and found her performance to be “softly enticing.” “There was a lot of meanness and cruelness,” says MacDowell. “I could’ve clung to all of that, or I could hold on to the one thing to give me hope, which was Pauline Kael.”
As Kurlander says, “Andie was very determined,” so much so that she actually injured herself while working to hone her dramatic skills. MacDowell had a cast on her hand during her St. Elmo’s Fire audition because during a particularly passionate acting class exercise in which she was instructed to release her anger by hitting a bed, she broke her hand. “I had a cast on, but I said it was going to be coming off,” MacDowell remembers. “I was so scared that Joel wasn’t going to give me the job because I had just broken my hand.” It was a dispiriting time in MacDowell’s career, and she knew how important her shot at the role in St. Elmo’s Fire truly was. “I was really thankful that I got the job, because it was a time of my life when work was not coming easily,” admits MacDowell. “Joel changed the direction of my life, because so many people were questioning whether I could act or not. And for some reason Joel didn’t question that,” she says, gratitude in her voice. “Joel Schumacher came into my life and believed in me. And so then I held on to two things: I held on to Pauline Kael, and I held on to Joel Schumacher.”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 12
