McCarthy made a name for himself with a film set in college, St. Elmo’s Fire, only to go backward in time with his next movie, the high-school–set Pretty in Pink. “I remember when Pretty in Pink was over, going, ‘I don’t really want to carry books anymore,’” quips McCarthy. Ferris Bueller star Jennifer Grey told People in 1987 that she was tired of teen roles, because it was “getting tougher and tougher to play them. I just don’t get that new hot music. I don’t know anything about all these groups like U2.”
Unfortunately, though, America wasn’t all too eager to watch the Brat Pack kids grow up. “John Hughes gave these actors the opportunity of a lifetime,” says film critic Leonard Maltin, “and seemingly defined them for all of us, to such a degree that we didn’t want to see them in any other mode, or any other guise.” In other words, we like our Molly Ringwald young and pouty and sweetly stressed about high school woes; we don’t want to watch her get old and worried about marriage problems or mortgage payments. “The audience, in a certain way, wants to freeze them,” says USC professor Leo Braudy. Noted Tanen, “You want them to be where that memory is. It’s good for you. But it’s not good for them.”
Audiences’ resistance to watching these actors mature on-screen was only part of the problem. There was also the fact that so many of these actors had been so different, so far from the cookie-cutter norm of child actors before, that when the movies made for them stopped being made for them, they were forced to take parts that weren’t always a good fit. The uniqueness that had made them huge stars as teenagers only made their transition to adult roles more difficult. “A person like Molly Ringwald—where do you go with that?” asked Tanen. “I used to think of the Loretta Young TV show where Loretta would sweep into the room, and I’d think, could Molly Ringwald do that? No. Molly’s is a very specific personality.”
Indeed, the Brat Pack actors often possessed qualities that made it difficult to mold them into all-purpose movie stars. The on-screen energy of Judd Nelson, suggests film critic Eric Hynes, has “a sort of darkness that I think would make it nearly impossible for him to carry on a career as a leading man.”
The Brat Pack’s rocky transition out of the teen films was made worse by the tremendous pressure so many of them were under to continue achieving the kind of success they’d known for years. “The expectation that they would become hit-making machines got really crazy in the second half of the eighties,” says St. Elmo’s Fire cowriter Carl Kurlander, “and was really difficult on all of them, and us, too. Because every time I wrote a script, I felt all this pressure. It was a really hard thing to live up to.” It was an era in which, even more than today, the deal was king in Hollywood, and these actors, under pressure from their powerful managers and agents, may have been signing on to projects that would bring in the biggest paychecks, even when these weren’t the best choices in terms of long-term career goals.
When these actors had first been swept up in money, fame, and power in the mid-eighties, it was a lot for them to handle. “I look at [Some Kind of Wonderful,]” says Eric Stoltz, “and think, Geez, I was young and naïve and just overwhelmed by life. You are twenty-four years old and you are making a movie; it’s kind of crazy.” It was exciting indeed, but it was a lot to get used to. “Suddenly,” says Mary Stuart Masterson, “you can have a fancy car and go to these restaurants, the Ivy or Orso or whatever the place of the moment is.” And when you get to the hot restaurant, people notice “where you’re sitting and with what agent you’re sitting, or what executive,” says Masterson. “Later on I was like, oh, I used to sit there!” she says, laughing. “I never realized it was a privileged seat. I was at the A table!”
As great as it may look when it’s staring out at you from a glossy magazine cover, fame can be tough. “Having been close to it,” says Joel Schumacher, “success is a motherfucker. Success is very difficult, and at a very young age—fame, fortune, everybody telling you what to do—I think it’s like you are riding a bucking bronco that is on steroids.” Success can be hard, but as many of the actors in the Brat Pack eventually learned, so is the opposite scenario: the strange experience of no longer being wanted for the cover of magazines, and of no longer having one of the most powerful directors in Hollywood interested in working with you.
When asked how her legendary union with John Hughes came to an end, Molly Ringwald ponders the question for a moment and then says, thoughtfully, “I don’t know, exactly.” She says she turned down the chance to star in Some Kind of Wonderful in part because “I really did feel like it was time to move on at that point.” But then, Ringwald was possibly going to act in another Hughes film, a romantic comedy called Oil and Vinegar, in which she was to costar with Matthew Broderick.
“It was an interesting script,” says Broderick of Oil and Vinegar. “It was very intimate: it was just the two of them, basically, is my memory, often in a car. It was a very typical romantic comedy about two very different people who fell in love, but it was very inventive in its smallness. John wanted to figure out if he could write a movie with just two people in one room,” says Broderick, something that was of particular interest to Hughes, “having done Breakfast Club, which was almost completely in one room.” It sounds like it would have been fascinating, but as is so often the case in moviemaking, “schedules went wrong,” says Broderick. “It just never came together right.”
In the development process, Universal (the studio that would have made the film) asked for rewrites, “and John didn’t really want to do any rewrites,” says Ringwald, “and he was kind of reluctant to be involved, and didn’t really talk to me, and then I had to go do another movie, and then I think Matthew became unavailable, and then it just kind of fell apart.” Ringwald, in other words, and in stark contrast to the “I’ve moved on” attitude she put forth as a teenager while being interviewed for the cover of Time in 1986, would have, in fact, been happy to work with Hughes again after Pretty in Pink. “Yeah,” she says, “I wanted to do another movie. I don’t know what happened with people’s schedules, and maybe there were some misunderstandings—I don’t really know exactly what happened. I loved working with [Hughes], and I wanted to keep working with him.” But it was not to be. “I think,” says Ringwald of the demise of her greatest creative partnership, “it’s just kind of like, we moved in different directions.”
Time may have softened the actress’s recollection of what must have been at least a somewhat painful split from Hughes. “Hughes’s protégés have been dumped by their mentor,” wrote the Sydney Sun Herald in 1989, “and are struggling to find a niche in the new world of grownup roles.” By the late eighties, John Hughes seemed, at least in the media, all too eager to disassociate himself from Molly Ringwald. The bloom was so off the rose by early 1988 that when asked if he’d ever thought of putting Molly Ringwald in the lead role of his film She’s Having a Baby, Hughes told Newsday, as if Ringwald had been only a casual acquaintance, “Molly Ringwald? I never considered her.”
Ringwald found that when she graduated from John Hughes’s movies, she was in an odd predicament. “All of the big male stars were quite a bit older than I was,” she says. “There weren’t that many big male stars that were my age. So doing romantic movies at that time, when I was in my early twenties, it was difficult, because all of the men were older and they didn’t feel comfortable acting with a woman who was that much younger than them. As opposed to now,” says Ringwald, “where they practically are doing love scenes with teenagers. It’s completely different. That’s not the way that it was when I was in my early twenties.”
Ringwald’s post-Hughesian career looked to be getting off to a diverse start when she portrayed Cordelia in Jean-Luc Godard’s wild 1987 retelling of King Lear, which was only tangentially inspired by Shakespeare. That same year, she appeared opposite Robert Downey, Jr. (finally—she’d hoped to in Pretty in Pink), in the pleasant-enough romantic comedy The Pick-up Artist. The Warren Beatty–produced James Toback film had some interesting names behind it
, but Ringwald was flat in the role; and it seemed that somehow, without Hughes, she wasn’t as easily able to convey the quirky watchability that had first made her a star.
The next year saw Ringwald star in the misfire Fresh Horses. The angst-ridden drama set in Kentucky reunited Andrew McCarthy and Ringwald. He played a wealthy guy, she his lower-class girlfriend (à la Pretty in Pink). Horses’s poster featured a tag line that could have described the dilemma faced by McCarthy’s Pink character to a T: “What do you do when the wrong kind of girl gives you all the right feelings?” But Fresh Horses lacked the cinematic spark of the rose-tinted classic. The same year, Ringwald appeared in a dramedy about a teenage girl having a baby, For Keeps (which, oddly enough, was released around the same time as Hughes’s She’s Having a Baby). Many of her professional choices during this time were unwise or ill-advised: Ringwald reportedly turned down the lead role in Pretty Woman, which went to Julia Roberts, and fumbled the chance to star in David Lynch’s erotic masterpiece Blue Velvet. It’s believed that Ringwald’s mother, Adele, who also acted as her manager, read the script and found it so distasteful that she never even showed it to her daughter.
It was an odd moment in Ringwald’s life. “I really didn’t like my early twenties very much,” she once told the Washington Post. “I just really felt very awkward. I kind of felt still like a teenager, but I felt like an adult because I’d been working for so long. And I had more money than kids have at that age, but all my friends had jobs; it was just a very strange time for me.” And as her film roles grew less impressive, wrote the Sydney Sun Herald, Ringwald projected “an image of a spoiled young actress who dithered over scripts, dithered over interviews and punctuated the rare ones she agreed to with regular tirades about how the press wouldn’t let her grow up naturally.”
Hughes’s split with his other muse, Anthony Michael Hall, first began when the young actor felt the need to break away from the John Hughes high school movies he was becoming so irrevocably associated with. For Hall, doing three teen movies with Hughes (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science) was enough. He had practically grown up on-screen (he has jokingly referred to them as his “Puberty-on-Film trilogy”), and it was time for a new phase of his life.
“Michael had reached his saturation point with the John Hughes films,” says Hall’s mother, Mercedes Hall. Hall had turned down roles in two Hughes films, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller, because, says his mother, “he felt, ‘I’m maturing, I’m getting out of my braces.’ He was growing up, looking to become a leading man a little bit more. He was becoming handsome, he was looking to go into another style of film, not get pigeonholed any more than he already was.” But, she says, “John Hughes didn’t want to hear it.” Mercedes says Hughes and others drove Hall to someone’s office, to get him away from his parents, and tried to convince him to take the lead role of Ferris—they thought he wasn’t accepting the part because his parents didn’t want him to. “Like we had any influence on what movies he wanted to do?!” says Mercedes. “He knew what he wanted; it had nothing to do with us.” The Bueller character did not go over well with the Halls. “Even though the film was a big critical success, none of us felt that this character had any redeeming qualities; we could not stand Ferris Bueller,” Mercedes explains. “They really did keep him in a room for four hours trying to talk him into doing the movie.” Their efforts, of course, were fruitless: “Michael did not want to do any more of these films.”
Anthony Michael Hall’s desire to move on was completely reasonable, but Hughes, says Mercedes Hall, didn’t see it that way. “John would not accept it,” she says. “He could not give him his blessings. Michael tried reaching out to him, calling him, and Hughes never once responded to Michael. Hughes discarded him.” Anthony Michael Hall, out of tactfulness, kindheartedness, diplomacy, or a combination of all three, speaks highly of John Hughes, gratefully appreciating the director for having launched his career. But a mother never forgets. “I said to Michael, ‘He’s a grown man. You’re half his age and he couldn’t acknowledge what you were doing and just move on?’” Mercedes recalls. The way she says Hughes treated her son must have been particularly painful for Hall, if for no other reason than the closeness he and Hughes had once shared. Of John Hughes, Anthony Michael Hall once told a reporter, “He was my best friend.”
After 1985’s Weird Science, Anthony Michael Hall did one season of Saturday Night Live (he was the youngest cast member in history), and made an underwhelming thriller called Out of Bounds (1986). There were many reports that Hall somehow botched the chance to star in legendary director Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). The film would have made for a prestigious moment in Hall’s career, and a natural way to segue from the teen genre to more critically acclaimed, serious films. It seems unclear exactly what went wrong—some reports suggested that Hall was offered the role and was fired from it because of creative differences with Kubrick, but Hall says that is patently untrue. “It was a very long negotiation with Stanley Kubrick,” says Hall, “and it just didn’t lead to me making the film. It was reported that I was fired—I just didn’t make the film. I had a couple of conversations with him,” says Hall of Kubrick, “and that is pretty much all I want to say.” Soon afterward, Hall starred in the teen football comedy Johnny Be Good (1988) alongside his good pal and fellow Weird Science and Saturday Night Live castmate Robert Downey, Jr., and a fresh new actress named Uma Thurman, but the film wasn’t exactly going to help Hall break free from the genre of high-school movies.
Ally Sheedy faced great challenges trying to bridge the divide between teen star and grown-up actress. She followed up St. Elmo’s Fire with 1986’s Blue City, a steamy crime thriller costarring her dear friend Judd Nelson and directed by producer Michelle Manning. Sheedy and Nelson were never romantically linked, but they’d always shared a deep bond, and Blue City was their third film together in as many years. “They loved each other,” says Manning, matter-of-factly. The film was perhaps too adult a story for Nelson and Sheedy to take on so soon after their iconic roles playing teens and early twentysomethings, and Blue City was met with poor reviews and disappointing numbers at the box office.
But later that year, Ally Sheedy, so used to working in ensembles, toplined her first movie, 1986’s Short Circuit. The endearing story of a robot with a soul (Who could forget Sheedy telling Steve Guttenberg that “Number Five is alive!”?) was a hit, pulling in over $40 million. It was a role that Sheedy chose to portray over the female lead in Top Gun, which ultimately went to Kelly McGillis. “I thought Top Gun was an ad for the military,” says Sheedy. “I was brought up by a radical feminist who was in the antiwar movement, and so it was not my kind of movie. Honestly, with a couple of things that have been smash hits, my reaction to the script has been, who the hell would want to see this?”
Even though she was finding success away from the teen genre, the soulful, introspective Sheedy didn’t feel totally comfortable in light romantic comedy roles. “I felt like I was really going have to prove myself as an actress and not this flash in the pan,” she remembers. “I was really driven to do that.” The kinds of roles she had found herself taking on in the new, post-ensemble-movie Hollywood were sweet romantic comedies in which she was the only star—films such as 1987’s Maid to Order. “I did do a whole bunch of movies,” she says, “and I liked being on my own; it was a completely different experience, but in about 1987 I was really frustrated. I felt like this is not going to work for me. I really believe that I had much more depth than [those romantic comedy roles] and much more range than that. I was not feeling happy.”
The late eighties were personally challenging times for her. She had suffered with eating disorders during her adolescent days as a dancer, and the problem worsened when she became an adult working in the entertainment industry. “I mean, people really did tell me I was fat,” says Sheedy. “A lot.” She remembers being told at one audition, “They really like you, but they want somebody beautiful.”
Eventually the pressure to look a certain way and the challenges of finding satisfying roles all got to her. Around 1988, she says, “I wasn’t really shooting anything at that time, I hooked up with a bad guy, I got some sleeping pills from him, I got addicted to them, and I ended up going to rehab to get off them. That’s basically what it was. I am not really quite sure why I needed them,” she says, “but I felt just really strung out, emotionally. And they really worked for me. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing with my life.” Demi Moore helped stage the intervention to get her off the sleeping pills. “She completely showed up for me,” says Sheedy.
Ally Sheedy’s Blue City costar, Judd Nelson, had been portrayed in quite a negative light in New York’s Brat Pack article, and unfortunately, two of the roles he played in 1987 didn’t help distance him from that image of arrogance in the public eye. In The Billionaire Boys Club, he played an egotistical son of privilege, and in From the Hip, the charming legal comedy that marked the screenwriting debut of major TV writer David E. Kelley (L.A. Law, Boston Legal), Nelson portrayed a cocky young lawyer. During the press tour for that movie, he expressed his frustration at being referred to as a member of the Brat Pack. “Even the Indians have stopped talking about Custer’s last stand,” he told one reporter. Nelson himself may have inadvertently helped breathe new life into the moniker in an incident in 1987 in which he was booted from a nightclub for being rowdy, then yelled obscenities at police officers. He was arrested while trying to get back into the club, and when he smashed his face against the window of the police car, he reportedly said, “My face is my business, and you’re going to be responsible!” One newspaper snarkily commented that he “apparently went too far with his Brat Pack routine.” (Nelson later pled no contest to a charge of disorderly intoxication, and his record was cleared of the incident.)
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 30
