Rob Lowe followed up St. Elmo’s Fire with Youngblood, a melodramatic, testosterone-laced story of a rising hockey star, and About Last Night, the 1986 yuppies-in-love romantic drama he costarred in with fellow Packster Demi Moore. The film, based on a David Mamet play and costarring Jim Belushi, showcased Lowe and Moore in a very adult, and rather erotic, light. (Moore said at the time that it was odd to be in such a picture with Lowe, her close and purely platonic friend.) It was a good career move in terms of helping the two transition away from teen parts, but reviews were mixed at best. Soon after, Lowe was seen in the 1988 courtroom comedy Illegally Yours. It had a great pedigree (Last Picture Show helmer Peter Bogdanovich directed it), but performed terribly at the box office, pulling in less than $300,000. As it turned out, it would be the second most seen Lowe performance of that year.
While at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta with his friends Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy, Lowe met a couple of attractive young women in a nightclub called Club Rio, not knowing that one of them was only sixteen years old. (Lowe was twenty-four at the time.) Lowe and the women returned to his hotel room, where they had a sexual romp that the actor, in the greatest mistake of his life, chose to videotape. Afterward, Lowe, who had reportedly been high on cocaine and ecstasy at the time, passed out, and the women grabbed the tape and left the hotel room. The next morning, the older of the two women called the publicity director of the nightclub and said she was in possession of the tape. Soon copies of it were being watched all over Atlanta. When the underage girl’s mother sued Lowe, the general public’s interest was piqued, and news media all over the world began covering the story. Ultimately, a civil lawsuit arising out of the incident was settled out of court, and no criminal charges were filed, although Lowe was ordered to do community service.
Seemingly overnight, the once golden Lowe was seen as a joke at best, a sex fiend at worst. His career took a nose dive. “God knows what I might have accomplished if things had been different,” he later told a reporter. “But you can’t run away from it. I accept full responsibility. I’m flawed.” The sex tape disaster was an eye-opener for Lowe, who checked himself into rehab soon afterward.
Lowe, Judd Nelson, and Ally Sheedy were passionate about politics, and that’s why the three actors had gone to the convention in Atlanta together. Of the sex tape scandal, says Nelson, “That was a tough situation.” Because Lowe met these women at a bar, points out Nelson, “you would think they would [both] be of age. So that’s the craziness of it.” (But Nelson does admit that “filming yourself is kind of asking for a little bit of trouble.”)
Lowe’s boyhood friend Emilio Estevez was wracked with guilt over the New York magazine debacle, something that may have pushed him to work even harder to try to establish a body of work in the years following St. Elmo’s Fire. In 1985, a few months after Elmo’s, Estevez appeared in That Was Then…This Is Now, the screenplay of which he adapted from a novel by S. E. Hinton, the author of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. The following year saw Estevez star in Maximum Overdrive, notable only because it was the only film Stephen King directed, and the crime romance Wisdom, a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde story that Estevez directed, as well as wrote, produced, and starred in. (At twenty-four, he was the youngest person to do all four in a studio film.) In 1987, he appeared in the comedy Stakeout, with Richard Dreyfuss, and the next year he played Billy the Kid in the Wild West epic Young Guns. He saddled up again in the sequel two years later.
In addition to About Last Night, in 1986 Demi Moore costarred in the wacky comedy One Crazy Summer, with John Cusack. The next year, she met Bruce Willis at a screening of Estevez’s Stakeout, and fell in love. In a glamorous ceremony held in November of ’87, a mere three months after they met, Moore and Willis married, officially cementing their status as a rising Hollywood power couple. Little Richard sang at their wedding, Ally Sheedy was a bridesmaid, and the celebrations reportedly cost over $800,000. Moore’s ascent to total superstardom was still a couple of years away, but in this period she toplined for the first time, in the 1988 thriller The Seventh Sign, and followed that with a prestige project, 1989’s We’re No Angels, costarring Robert De Niro and Sean Penn and written by David Mamet.
Andrew McCarthy would break out in 1987’s Mannequin, in which he found love with a magical department store dummy (Kim Cattrall). Not only did the movie feature the undeniably awesome Starship power ballad “Nothin’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” but it also helped establish McCarthy as his own star, separate from the Brat Pack, and showed that he had great comic timing.
McCarthy does not have fond memories of the film that reunited him on-screen with Ringwald the next year. “I think by then Molly was pissed off at me, and over me,” says McCarthy of Fresh Horses. And, he adds rightly, “Molly was badly miscast in that. The movie was weird; it didn’t really have a point of view; I wasn’t good. It was wrong from the start.”
His most notable work during this period was Less Than Zero, based on twenty-one-year-old Bret Easton Ellis’s novel about privileged, drug-addled Beverly Hills teens going from high school to college. With its young, angst-ridden characters, Zero did call to mind a darker, more stylized version of McCarthy’s earlier films, albeit with more sex and cocaine.
The original script for Less Than Zero, says McCarthy, stayed closer to the novel’s sense of detachment. It was, he says, “without any judgment—just an observation of a subculture that was pretty nasty.” But much of the film was reshot, “watered down,” as McCarthy puts it. “The subculture that the movie was examining is the privileged youth of Beverly Hills,” he says, “and who are the privileged youth of Beverly Hills but the children of the studio executives. So I think when they saw that movie, they went, ‘My fucking kid is not doing this. This is not a movie I am supporting!’ So they freaked out.” Soon enough, a scene was added in which Jami Gertz’s character, a drug-addicted socialite, flushes her cocaine down the toilet. (“‘Just Say No’ had happened in a big way,” says McCarthy.) Despite its gorgeous cinematography, thanks in large part to those eerie shots of swimming pools shimmering at night, the movie ended up being panned by critics.
Ironically, critics disliked the preachiness of the film’s cocaine-flushing scene, and probably would have gone for the original, harder-edged version of the story. “The first [version of the] movie was very scathing and disturbing,” says McCarthy, “and the heart was cut out of it. The movie that was released didn’t work.” And sadly, he points out, “Less Than Zero was not a hit in any regard.” Worse, costar Robert Downey, Jr., who played an addict in the film, blamed that film for his worsening drug dependency. Said Downey in later years, “Until that movie, I took drugs after work and on the weekends…For me, the role was like the Ghost of Christmas Future. The character was an exaggeration of myself. Then things changed and, in some ways, I became an exaggeration of the character.”
McCarthy himself had an alcohol problem around this time. “I drank too much,” he admits. “I was certainly drinking a lot when I was doing Pretty in Pink,” but, he says, “I am not sure if it was affecting my life adversely, as it did soon after that. Alcohol works—that’s why people drink. It works, until it doesn’t work.” McCarthy took himself in hand. “It took me a couple of years to realize I had a drinking problem,” he says, “and a couple of years to do something about it.”
In 1989, McCarthy costarred with Jonathan Silverman in Weekend at Bernie’s, the cheesy but genuinely funny comedy about two buddies who find themselves in a bizarre predicament that involves schlepping their boss’s corpse around swanky shindigs in the Hamptons. (“Bernie may be dead,” read the poster’s tag line, “but he’s still the life of the party!”) The movie was a big hit, and spawned a sequel in which McCarthy also costarred a few years later.
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Jon Cryer’s career was launched because of Pretty in Pink, and in 1987 he capitalized on his John Hughes experience in a big way. First, he made Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, in which
he played a Ferris Bueller–like free-spirited son of a U.S. senator, to limited laughs. He also appeared as a baddie in the notoriously low-budget and poorly received Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. His most mature role of 1987 came in Hiding Out, an action-thriller-romance where he delivers a particularly strong performance. But by 1989 he had grown tired of the politics of the film world, and sought out television producer Hugh Wilson. The result was the CBS sitcom The Famous Teddy Z, about a naïve mail room employee who impresses a legendary actor and becomes an agent. The show only lasted most of one season, but its brilliant pilot is considered one of the best first episodes of any sitcom.
After the boffo success of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Alan Ruck, praised by critics and loved by audiences for his comically skilled yet deeply touching portrayal of Ferris’s best friend, Cameron, was a certifiable star. In the year or so after Ferris Bueller hit theaters, Ruck acted in plays and filmed a movie called Three for the Road, in which he costarred with Charlie Sheen. But, says Ruck, it was “a wildly unsuccessful movie, in every sense. It didn’t make any money, it didn’t even play for a full week at the theaters,” he deadpans. With that film’s failure, he had problems getting work. Part of Ruck’s challenges had to do with his age. He was now in his early thirties, and starting to look too old to play teen roles just at the time he was taking off as a teen star, but he also looked too young to play parts of characters his own age. “I would go in for like, the part of a thirty-two-year-old lawyer,” says Ruck, only to hear, “‘He looks like a kid.’ So I was in a bad spot. Many things conspired, and I wasn’t working.” So Ruck, who was married at the time and had a new baby, decided it was time to move to Los Angeles to try his hand at the world of television. He filmed a pilot with the late Nell Carter for NBC, but that didn’t last, because the show, says Ruck, “was unwatchable.”
Worse, he had made some unwise financial decisions. “I should’ve known better. I moved out here instead of just renting a place for a little while. I moved all of our furniture. I rented a house instead of an apartment. I spent too much money,” Ruck admits. “And then, all of a sudden, the pilot season was over and I was out of cash. And there was just no acting work for me.” With a family to support, Ruck had to find some kind of work, any kind of work. “So I went to an employment agency called Extra Help,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Whatever I’m going to do, I’m going to make my car payment, if nothing else.’” At the employment agency, Ruck remembers, he was asked, “‘Can you file? Can you type?’ I had no computer skills. I was like, ‘No, I can’t do anything.’ So they sent me to work at a Sears warehouse in East L.A.”
Ruck’s new job at the warehouse would prove to be quite an experience. “I was one of two white guys that worked there,” he says. “All the Hispanic guys who worked there called me Homes,” he says, laughing at the memory. “And all the black guys who worked there called me the N-word.”
Ruck’s job was to take products from one conveyer belt and place them on other conveyer belts, depending on which Sears stores across the western states they were destined for. But he wasn’t exactly suited for a job that required heavy lifting. “While I was there, I was really skinny,” he says. “I mean, at the time I weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet, six feet tall. And I wore glasses.” Sometimes what would come down the conveyer belt “would be, like, a coffee cup,” he says. But sometimes it would be more along the lines of “a swingset. It would come down, and it would be twelve feet long, and it would weigh a hundred and fifty pounds.” Ruck’s coworkers, who were big, strong guys with muscles and tattoos, watched him struggle to pick up the swingset-type products and, understandably, found it endlessly amusing. “They had a lot of fun with me,” he says, laughing. “They called me Superman, and they would say, ‘Hey, Superman, take that Clark Kent disguise off and pick that shit up!’ And I would think, well, I’m supposed to do this, so I would try. And they would laugh their asses off at me because I was this skinny little white geek trying to pick up this thing that weighed as much as I did. They would let me struggle with it for a minute, and laugh like hell, and then they’d just come over and pick it up and put it wherever it was supposed to go,” he laughs.
One day, Ruck remembers, he was sitting in the break room of the warehouse smoking a cigarette. “There were these two guys in there, and one of them says, ‘You ever see that picture Ferret Buford’s Day Off? And the other guy says, ‘What?’ And he says, ‘Ferret Buford—it’s a movie, muthafucker! Homeboy over here looks like the guy with the Daddy Car. Ferret Buford is supposed be dying, but he’s actually downtown dancing in a parade. Homeboy looks like the guy with the Daddy Car—they take it to the garage and the homeboys in the garage tear ass all over town. It’s got like three miles on it, but by the time they get home, it’s got like four thousand miles on it. You ain’t never seen that picture?’” Although Ruck never confirmed to them that he was indeed the actor from the movie, he remembers thinking to himself that his coworkers must’ve seen him as “a dumb son-of-a-bitch that had a job in the movies and then wound up working in a Sears warehouse.”
Soon after, a young man named Alex who worked with Ruck at the warehouse and was interested in film asked him, “‘Have you ever seen a movie called Three for the Road?’ I lied,” admits Ruck, “and said no. He said, ‘Because you look like someone who was in this movie Three for the Road.’” But Ruck said, “I don’t know anything about it.” Alex asked him his name. “I said, ‘Um, Alan Ruck.’ And then the next day, he comes back, and he says, ‘Did you know that the person who is in this movie Three for the Road is also named Alan Ruck?’”
In the time following their iconic roles, Ruck’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off costars Matthew Broderick and Jennifer Grey were facing personal struggles of a completely different kind. Broderick and Grey, who had fallen in love on the set of Ferris and were at one point engaged, were vacationing together in Northern Ireland in August of 1987. Ferris had come out the year earlier, making Matthew Broderick a bona fide movie star. Jennifer Grey’s star-making turn in Dirty Dancing had been filmed, and the movie was about to be released. One night on their vacation in Ireland, the rented BMW that Broderick was driving crashed into another automobile, killing two people, a mother and a daughter. Broderick was hospitalized with a broken leg; Grey was hospitalized with shock. Broderick, who told reporters at the time that he couldn’t remember anything about the accident, was accused of driving on the wrong side of the road (in Ireland, they drive on the left). Ultimately, he pled guilty to careless driving and was fined the equivalent of $175. Of the accident, he told 60 Minutes II in 2004, “I live with it all the time. You think about it as much as you can think about it and bear it, and then you go on with your life. That’s what you do. That’s what I do.”
Dirty Dancing came out two weeks after the car crash. Grey curtailed her publicity appearances for the film so she could help Broderick recuperate. The two remained together for a time, sharing an apartment in Manhattan, but soon afterward, the relationship fell apart.
While his former protégés struggled through personal and professional challenges, John Hughes’s power in the movie industry only increased, and with it, his ego. There’s just something about Hollywood that tends to change people, and often not for the better. Perhaps the effect that Tinseltown would have on John Hughes was foreshadowed when he told Gene Siskel in 1985, “When I come home to Northbrook after some time [in Hollywood], I’m usually an ass for a day. Then I sleep it off and then I’m okay again.” Indeed, eventually the earnest, no-bullshit Midwestern guy had a hard time resisting the sway of being uber-hot in the industry, and the power and astronomic paychecks that came with it.
Hughes and family lived in L.A. for the four years that coincided with the release of most of his teen-king films. “There is a certain amount of seepage incurred from all the time he’s now spending in the California sun,” wrote the Chicago Tribune in 1986. “Hughes does sport a light golden tan. The classic sneaker
s have given way to neoclassic Reeboks.” Hughes’s change in look may have been at least partially inspired by a powerful new friend of his, mega-producer Joel Silver. “John had always dressed like I did, in button-downs,” says St. Elmo’s Fire cowriter Carl Kurlander. But then, says Kurlander, Silver “did a makeover on Hughes. He started wearing shirts from this place Max Fields, where you pay thousands of dollars for a shirt, and for a while he had spiked hair, too.” Says Bruce Berman, who worked as an exec on Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, “When [Hughes] came to L.A., I think he went through going from preppy to trying to be kind of hip, because Joel Silver got close with him.” Of the connection between Silver and Hughes, suggests David Anderle, “This looked to me like they were two birds of the same feather. They were [each] very self-possessed, and really good filmmakers, and it was their way or the highway. So it was a match made in heaven.”
Hughes’s star was very definitely on the rise, and it was shooting far away from the teen genre. The first Hughes-directed “grown-up” movie to be released was 1987’s Planes, Trains and Automobiles, starring John Candy and Steve Martin. It achieved significant critical and commercial success. (Many consider it to be Hughes’s best work.) The film didn’t center around a prom, but it did have that familiar Hughesian blend of comedy and sentiment. “When you realize the John Candy character is a widower,” says Judd Nelson, “it’s heartbreaking.” Hughes was directing a comedy, but the tale was dark at the core. Of John Candy’s shower curtain ring salesman, says Dan Aykroyd, “He’s the Willie Loman of his age—it’s Death of a Salesman.” Steve Martin, not surprisingly, played an advertising executive.
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 31
