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

by Susannah Gora

  Hughes’s speed as a writer was becoming legendary. He could write an entire script in two days. When he got going, he liked to say he felt he was “inside the script”—that it just flowed out of him, in an almost spiritual flood of creativity that he was somehow tapping into. Dan Aykroyd once asked Hughes how he wrote. “He told me this story,” remembers Aykroyd. “He said that he was starting a script and it was morning. And his kids came in and said, ‘Dad, we’re off to school…’ Then, what felt to him like two minutes later…‘Hi, Dad. We’re back from school’…‘Dad, we’re going to school…’ ‘Dad, we’re back from school…’ He sat at the computer for two days writing, and the cycle of life went by like in a time machine. And when he got up from the chair, he had herniated one of his discs because he sat there so long, continuously writing.”

  Howard Deutch himself says that the zeitgeist-capturing power of Pretty in Pink “is a direct result of John Hughes and his voice.” With modesty that verges on inaccuracy, Deutch says, “I mean certainly it’s not my voice. John was always very, very generous, and he would say to me that directing is interpretation, and that I interpreted his material in a way that makes him proud. But the truth is, I really believe a lot of directors could have interpreted that script in a way that would have made him proud, because it was a terrific script. I am not trying to deflect any credit, but his voice—if you want to get right down to it—is the voice.”

  And it was Hughes’s voice, Hughes’s gut, Hughes’s writerly soul, that inspired Pretty in Pink, particularly the film’s ending: After falling into deep, true, intimate love with Andie, the preppy Blane wimps out, dumping her because of pressure to do so from family and friends, breaking her heart, and crushing her dream that someone could love her even though she is poor. Andie is crestfallen, but she is reinvigorated when she and Duckie reunite at the prom, in an “us against the world” climax. “It was sort of romantic,” Cryer says of the sequence, “but mostly, they were friends. There was not a kiss.” In that last shot, with Duckie and Andie twirling together in the center of the dance floor, oblivious to the stares, the movie seemed to be saying: there will always be Blanes in the world, but in this moment, that doesn’t matter. Duckie and Andie are sticking together, and together they are sticking it to the snobs, to the preps, to heartbreak, to secondhand clothes, to the gym class taunts from richies, verily, to the injustices of life. All those sentiments seemed to be captured perfectly in the lyrics of the song that played over the shot, David Bowie’s “Heroes”:

  Though nothing

  will drive them away,

  we can beat them

  just for one day.

  In an early preview test screening in which teenagers were asked to watch Pretty in Pink and give their opinions, things were going splendidly, recalls Deutch. Paramount’s then president of production, Dawn Steel, “had now accepted me, and thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. She’s sitting there holding my hand, and John Hughes is in front of me, and Ned [Tanen] was there…It was all going so great, and the kids were applauding and screaming, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, they love it.’ And John was like, ‘We got it! We got it!’” Then came the prom scene.

  When Andie and Duckie’s dance flickered on-screen, the kids in the audience reacted quite passionately: they started loudly booing. The filmmakers sat there stunned and saddened, as the truth sank in. “It was clear,” says Deutch, “they didn’t want her to be with that guy.” Shuler Donner recalls that 60 percent of the audience said they wanted Andie to end up with Andrew McCarthy. “Personally,” she says, “I was horrified. I thought, ‘Oh, no, that’s not right!’ But then we thought about it and we decided, Well, you know what? We’re making a movie for them.” It was decided that the ending would be reshot.

  The booing teens in that preview screening weren’t the only ones who had a problem with the original ending: some cast members seemed able to sense that the original climax wasn’t quite right even while it was being filmed. According to Cryer, Ringwald seemed amiss. “I thought she had kind of bought out, emotionally,” he says, “like, she was even more remote than usual. She wasn’t feeling it.” What she wasn’t feeling was a romantic spark between her character and Cryer’s. Ringwald was ill during the shooting of that ending, which didn’t exactly help the chemistry on-screen. “I had a terrible flu,” she says. “We filmed at the Biltmore Hotel [in L.A.], and they got me a room there because I couldn’t even travel from home to work, I was that sick.” Quips Cryer, “She was on the verge of fainting for a large amount of the day—and not from love.”

  Ringwald’s health took a turn for the worse during the finale’s dance sequence, and she collapsed while spinning with Cryer on the dance floor. Production necessarily came to a halt for the remainder of the day. Cryer, still sounding frustrated all these years later, gripes that “we never got to shoot it the way that we wanted to.” Of the original ending as it was filmed, he says simply, “It didn’t work.” Ringwald knew it all along: “This is terrible; no one’s going to want this,” she remembers repeatedly telling Deutch. And when she found out the ending was to be reshot, she says, “I had this total ‘I told you so!’ moment.” For Deutch, the booing teenagers in the preview screening taught him a powerful lesson: “What I learned was that there are no rules, in the sense that life isn’t fair…Duckie should have the girl…And it was all built for that and it was designed for that. And it could have ended that way, had I not fucked with one thing. I cast Jon Cryer.”

  It’s not that Cryer didn’t shine in his performance. In fact, many would argue that his acting was, hands down, the best in the film. No, the problem with Cryer had more to do with something intangible. It had to do with that mysterious thing that happens when two characters you’ve been rooting for finally kiss—it had to do with lust, and crushes, and longing, and which boy a teenage girl would like to see Molly Ringwald fall into the arms of in the moonlight outside the high-school dance. Cryer had charm, he had brilliant comic timing, he had nice looks, he had rich dramatic talent. But there was one thing he didn’t have: chemistry with Molly Ringwald. Considering any on-screen spark between Ringwald and Cryer, Andrew McCarthy says, “It was just, nothing.” Ringwald believes that the original ending was likely based on Hughes’s own life: he felt like an outsider who got lucky and married a pretty, popular girl. “He ended up getting the girl that he wanted, and so I think that’s probably why he wrote it that way,” Ringwald surmises. But she was very in tune with what she thought Andie would need in a romantic relationship, and she believed Duckie should have been played by “somebody like Robert Downey, Jr. He was different, and he was quirky, but it was completely imaginable that we would end up together.”

  Ringwald, after all, had help cast McCarthy, but Cryer had been Deutch’s choice. “I think Howie really loved the vulnerability of Jon,” says Ringwald, “and I can understand that. I think he’s fantastic in the movie. But once he was in there, the chemistry completely changed. There was no way, really, that anybody wanted me to end up with Duckie. They just didn’t seem vaguely romantic together at all.” Evidently, at least one important test audience agreed with her.

  “Actually,” Ringwald continues, holding nothing back, “I think he seemed gay. I mean, if they remade the movie now, he would be, like, the gay friend who comes out at the end. He wouldn’t be winking at a blonde [Kristy Swanson], he would be winking at a cute guy…I feel bad saying that I really fought for Robert Downey, Jr.,” Ringwald allows, “because it sort of seems like I don’t appreciate Jon’s performance, which I totally do—it’s just, it really did affect the movie.” Cryer is indeed aware of Ringwald’s feelings surrounding all of this. He points out that on the 2006 “Everything’s Duckie” edition DVD of Pretty in Pink, “Molly dropped the bomb that she would’ve been fine with the original ending if Robert Downey, Jr., had played Duckie…But since it was me, she just couldn’t see it. It was like, wow, so I’m that unattractive? Thanks, Mol!”

  Of cou
rse, a lot of the problem lay in the zany way Duckie was written. It’s hard for that silly a character to come off as an erotically powerful presence. And Duckie’s costumes—the ridiculous pompadour, the embarrassing porkpie hats, the awful French ties—didn’t help either. “As written, Duckie was an asexual character,” says the film’s editor, Richard Marks. “You couldn’t even believe that it would happen. The only good thing about her going with Duckie was that it was a rejection of everything the Andrew McCarthy character stood for.”

  “I wore, like, lederhosen, and suspenders,” Cryer remembers. “What the hell was I doing?” However, when production wrapped, the actor did want to hang on to Duckie’s signature fifties-style white shoes. “I lent them to Planet Hollywood. And Planet Hollywood never returned them, and now cannot find them,” says Cryer. “I was sure they were, like, at the last Planet Hollywood, in Indonesia. I still don’t know where they are, and it really does bug me because, you know, those were a big deal. That they’re so cavalier about their artifacts,” he says in mock fury, “is disturbing!”

  The one actor whom Ringwald did seem to have real chemistry with, perhaps unsurprisingly, was McCarthy. In fact, many people close to the production guessed that Ringwald might have had some offscreen feelings for him. “I thought that he was really cute, definitely,” Ringwald admits. After she had championed for him to be hired, McCarthy remembers, “I don’t know why, it was ridiculous, I was twenty-two, but when I got the part, I sent her a giant, four-foot-tall Gumby. Remember Gumby, the green thing? And I sent it to her as a thank-you gift, and I wrote, ‘Gumby for You,’ on my note, and gave it to her. And I think that had an effect.” When asked if he could sense that Ringwald might have had feelings for him, McCarthy replies, “Yeah, I was aware that there was something. And I was unconsciously smart enough not to even look at it too closely or violate it, and just let it work.” Remembers Cryer, “They were very pals-y.” But, says Ringwald of McCarthy, “we never dated…which is probably why our chemistry is so good on-screen.” (It goes without saying, perhaps, that Ringwald and Cryer never dated, either.)

  After the booing teenagers made their wishes known in that test screening, the filmmakers fretted over how to end the film, but ultimately decided that Andie would have to end up with Blane. The only question was, how? What would have to be done to the script so that Blane and Andie would wind up together without making him seem like a total jerk after having dumped her for shallow reasons? That part had to stay—they couldn’t reshoot the whole movie, after all, just the final scene at the prom. How could it be done? The plot conundrum was like an advanced algebra equation where the variables weren’t x and y, but lovesick teenagers. “John [Hughes] was letting it marinate,” says Deutch, “and he was going, ‘I’m thinking about it.’ Weeks would pass. Dawn [Steel] would go, ‘What the fuck are we doing?’ I would be like, ‘Well, we’re thinking about what to do.’” All the while, says Deutch, “I was thinking, ‘How do we do this?’”

  The answer came to Hughes one day in a flash, and Deutch was there when it happened. He was with Hughes and the film’s editor, Richard Marks. Hughes was sitting on the floor, remembers Deutch. “He always sat like a kid on the floor, in the corner. He’s sitting there and he’s smoking, and he has his John Lennon glasses on, and he takes a cigarette out, and he’s scratching himself a little bit—he did certain little gestures that I knew meant, like, it was percolating.” Just then, Deutch remembers, Hughes said, “I think I got it. He has to come alone to the prom…Andrew can’t come to the prom with anybody.” Hughes had realized that the solution was to have McCarthy’s character, Blane, show up alone to the prom—it shows that he feels remorseful about his treatment of Andie, that he’s rejected the pressures of his cruel friends, and that there’s no other girl for him. Yes, “he has to go alone,” Deutch remembers Hughes telling him. Once he’d solved the plot puzzle, Hughes wrote the new ending “in five minutes,” Deutch recalls. It entailed Blane confronting Andie at the prom, telling her how sorry he is, and saying simply, “I love you. Always.” Duckie hears this, selflessly tells Andie she should run after Blane, Andie follows Duckie’s advice, and then jumps into Blane’s arms in the parking lot outside the prom. It was quite an involved scene, and the filmmakers had one day to shoot everything. “It was insane,” says Deutch.

  Many weeks after they had moved on to other projects, Ringwald, Cryer, Spader, and McCarthy reassembled for the reshoot. Of course, a main goal of any reshoot is continuity: the actors have to look pretty much the way they looked in earlier portions of the film. This wasn’t a problem for most of the young cast, with one exception.

  At the time of the reshoot, Andrew McCarthy was on Broadway performing in John Pielmeier’s new play Boys of Winter, opposite Matt Dillon, Wesley Snipes, and Ving Rhames. McCarthy was portraying a soldier serving in Vietnam, and his head had been shaven clean. When he arrived at the Pretty in Pink reshoot, he was given a wig to wear, and not a particularly good one. “If you look at the movie, it just looks terrible,” says McCarthy, correctly, of the fuzzy brown mass that rests atop his head during the film’s new climax. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about the offending hairpiece: “Oh, God, it looks like he’s wearing a helmet,” says editor Marks. “It’s a horrible wig,” says Deutch. “He looked like an axe murderer.” But perhaps McCarthy himself captured it best: “It looks like a rodent on my head. I’m sure if they had known we would still be talking about the movie twenty years later, they would’ve paid for a better wig.”

  But even a bad wig couldn’t stop the white-hot on-screen chemistry that Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy would share in the new ending. It seemed so natural, so organic, so obvious, that maybe those booing teenagers (and Ringwald) had really been on to something. “We wouldn’t have reshot the ending if that [chemistry] didn’t exist,” says McCarthy. “It works,” he adds, “because for whatever reasons, we worked.” Pondering what allows an actor and an actress to share on-screen sparks, McCarthy says it all comes down to something pretty simple: “Sex. It’s like in real life. It’s sex. You meet someone and you instantly go, ‘I’d have sex with them.’ Or you instantly go, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’ Maybe women don’t,” says McCarthy, “but men do.” As for those booing teens’ desire to see Ringwald wind up with McCarthy on-screen, Jon Cryer says, “I think you do invest in Molly and Andrew’s relationship. To not deal with that—I don’t know that this movie would’ve been as popular as it is now.”

  A prom is the most emotionally charged event in many young people’s lives, and as Pretty in Pink explored so respectfully, the prom is a tradition that has taken on great cultural importance. It has, says sociologist Robert Bulman, “become this symbolic marker of entering adulthood. The rich still have debutante balls, but, for the rest of us, the prom becomes this cultural marker of the end of our childhood and the beginning of adulthood. So we dress up, and we go to fancy restaurants, and we rent limousines, and we, very often with parental approval, check into hotel rooms with our boyfriends and girlfriends. It’s the closest we get in the United States to having a formal rite of passage.”

  The prom matters tremendously in real life—and so for real-life teenagers to embrace Pink, it was essential that the reshoot give the story just the right narrative finale. “I had everything riding on this, so it was the big dice roll,” says Deutch, adding that Pink’s cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto, “got me through it, he was brilliant.” Fujimoto did some of his most memorable work in the reshot ending, which culminates in McCarthy and Ringwald kissing in the parking lot outside the prom, standing in front of her beat-up pink VW Karmann Ghia, with Ringwald sweetly dropping her purse on the ground to reach her arms around him tighter. It’s a sort of bookend to an earlier shot in the film—one that is so deeply iconic now—in which McCarthy and Ringwald kiss illuminated by the headlights of his BMW. By then kissing in front of her charming but inexpensive vintage Karmann Ghia, the characters have come full circle. You’d swear the scene was shot outside,
but “it’s on a stage,” says Deutch. “It was raining out, and we couldn’t get the car outside. Tak lit it, and figured it out. He’s a genius.”

  Andie gets Blane, Blane gets Andie, but the new ending raised a question: What would the long-suffering Duckie get? “We had to figure out something for Duckie,” says producer Shuler Donner, “and so he gets Kristy Swanson,” a gorgeous blond actress who went on to star as the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the 1992 film. When last we see Duckie in the final version of Pink, Swanson is checking him out at the prom, motioning him to come over to her. Cryer then breaks the fourth wall (a Hughesian hallmark, also done by Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles), giving the audience a sweetly surprised look that seems to say, “Don’t worry about the Duckster!”

  With this new ending shot, Pretty in Pink’s filmmakers held another test screening. This time, they ran both versions of the movie. “We tested them both the same night,” says Shuler Donner, and overwhelmingly, the audience wanted Andie “to end up with the rich guy, the good-looking guy. So we had to go along with it. It was such an eye-opening experience,” she says. “A lot of people in my business don’t like previews, and I do, because of that, because you learn a lot.” Even if people like a movie, if they leave unsatisfied (particularly with the ending), they often won’t recommend the film to their friends, and they certainly won’t come back to see it again. As a result, in Hollywood, where cinema is both art and commerce, the role of test screenings is a controversial one.

  Andrew McCarthy, a beneficiary of the new ending, favored the reshoot—partially because his character doesn’t end up being the cad he was in the earlier version. But also because “reshooting the end was clearly the right thing,” he says. “It is a fantasy. Give them what they want, and that’s what they wanted. And the movie worked then because of that.” Deutch remembers what Hughes said of the ending debacle: “‘Forget the politics—teenage girls aren’t interested in the politics. They want her to wind up with the guy who she wants, the cute boy.’ And that,” says Deutch, “is a lesson I learned.” It’s simple: the young audience seeing the film in the first preview screening “got invested,” says Andrew McCarthy. They wanted Andie to end up with Blane, and they wanted it very badly. Says McCarthy, matter-of-factly, “They cared.”