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

by Susannah Gora

  Just as Hall transformed himself physically in these years, Rob Lowe went through a reinvention of sorts as well. In 1992’s Wayne’s World, he regained the public’s affection with a self-effacing role as a smarmy television executive, which showed he was truly capable of laughing at himself.

  Judd Nelson was changing his image, too. In 1991, he turned in a powerful performance in the hip-hop crime thriller New Jack City. In doing so, he broke free from the “arrogant badboy” typecasting he’d so often experienced, playing a cop, opposite Wesley Snipes, Ice-T, and director Mario Van Peebles. City showed that Nelson was capable of great character roles, if a filmmaker was willing to take a chance. He proved this again later that same year when he gave a critically respected, eccentric performance in the cult film The Dark Backward, a macabre black comedy in which he played a stand-up comedian with three arms. (The L.A. Times called the film “compellingly weird.”)

  During this period, Emilio Estevez continued to try to establish himself behind the camera. In 1990, his Men at Work hit theaters. He directed it, and costarred with his brother Charlie Sheen, as sanitation workers who get tangled up in a murder. Estevez had written the script years earlier and had excitedly discussed it, in great detail, in the infamous New York magazine article. John Hughes had told David Blum he thought Estevez’s script was extremely good; many critics did not have similar feelings about the finished movie. In 1992, Estevez married singer Paula Abdul, costarred in the Mick Jagger and Anthony Hopkins time-travel race car flick Freejack, and had the biggest financial success of his career: the Disney comedy The Mighty Ducks was so successful that it inspired not only two sequels, but also an actual professional hockey team, the Disney-owned Anaheim Mighty Ducks.

  Later in the decade, though, Estevez found himself in a challenging period. He once said that in the late 1990s he found himself thinking, “Now what? The business is somewhat cannibalistic. It eats its young, and I wasn’t young anymore…I had to keep reinventing myself. But that gets a little exhausting after a while.” When offers to play leading men stopped coming in as often, he found himself financially strapped. He even sold autographs over the Internet. “That was to pay my bills,” he once said. “I was doing everything I could to make ends meet. I took a second mortgage on the house.”

  Financial strain had caused Alan Ruck to take that job at the Sears warehouse, but fortunately, only a few months after his stint working there, he won a role in a major movie (alongside Estevez in 1990’s Young Guns II, in which, quips Ruck, “I played the slightly older gun”) and on a sitcom, Going Places, in which he costarred with Heather Locklear. “That was interesting,” says Ruck. “I basically couldn’t buy myself a job, and I went away to work at a Sears warehouse, and then I just met with people and I got offered two jobs.” Ruck later went on to appear in the 1994 action flick Speed and to costar once again with Heather Locklear on the hit Michael J. Fox sitcom Spin City.

  Ally Sheedy, who had found commercial success (but little personal fulfillment) by starring in a handful of romantic comedies in the late eighties, found herself doing some serious soul-searching. “I was trying to make this transition in my career,” she says. “I was almost thirty and I felt like, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ I was going for these roles, I was having trouble getting them, and I actually decided to look for them in the indie world, which was really just heading off into its golden time in about ’89 or ’90. I hit it at the right time.” In a period when many of her contemporaries were staying in L.A. and making big-budget, mainstream Hollywood movies, this was, says Sheedy, “a big risk. But I just thought, I am going to be miserable if I keep doing romantic comedies. It is not what I do.”

  It was a realization that she arrived at with help and advice from an actress enjoying incredible longevity in the film business. “I had always idolized Jane Fonda,” says Sheedy, “and I told her I was miserable with what was going on with work, and I had to break out. I asked her if I could talk to her. She invited me over to dinner at her house.” There, says Sheedy, Fonda told her, “‘Ally, you are a character actress. That’s what you are. You have huge range. You are not really the romantic leading lady. And it’s great because you’ll work your whole life, but you are going to have to find those parts, you are going go have to look for them. And you are going to have to work really hard.’ And she was right. I took it to heart. And it has been my, kind of, creed ever since,” Sheedy says determinedly. “I owe so much to that woman.” While working through these issues, Sheedy reteamed with her Breakfast Club costar Molly Ringwald, playing her sister in the 1990 romantic comedy Betsy’s Wedding.

  Ringwald lost her grip on the ever-slippery reins of fame sometime in the early nineties, as she continued to star in forgettable fare. She did act opposite Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade—sort of. She starred in the short-film version, Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade, but when the feature film was produced a couple of years later, Ringwald’s part was recast. After her ABC sitcom Townies was canceled after one season, she would find a kind of personal salvation a world away from Hollywood. “I have always been a bit of a Francophile,” Ringwald says. “I started learning to speak French as a teenager, and I always liked French cinema, and the style, the fashion, the food. I even ad-libbed a [French] line in The Breakfast Club.” After it all got to be too much for her Stateside, Ringwald went to live in France in the mid-1990s for a number of years. In that “only in Hollywood” kind of way, she owes her time there to one of her Pretty in Pink costars. “I ended up in France,” she says, laughing, “because of Andrew McCarthy.”

  The actor had called Ringwald to see if she’d be interested in filming a movie with him in Paris called Face the Music, in which they’d play co-songwriters who were once married. “I read the movie,” says Ringwald, “and it wasn’t very good, and so I said, ‘I really don’t think that I’m going to do it.’” But McCarthy persisted. “He said, ‘Oh, come on, it will be like a paid vacation.’” Ringwald said thanks but no thanks, and they hung up. But then, she says, “I thought about it, and I said, it really would be like a paid vacation. I doubt anyone’s even ever going to see it, and why not?” She was right about nobody going to see it, but Ringwald agreed to do it. By the time she did, McCarthy was unavailable and Patrick Dempsey had been hired to fill the role. Ringwald went to France “to do this movie,” she says, “and then I ended up staying.”

  In France, Ringwald was, maybe for the first time in years, truly free. “I felt like I could just sort of walk around,” she says, “and be myself. If I was recognized, it was usually by American tourists, and I knew where to go in France to sort of avoid that. And then once in a while there would be somebody that was French that happened to be a fan, but they always sort of seemed different, not as rabid as American fans can be.” It was a chance for her to reflect on all that had happened to her in the whirlwind that was her adolescence, to discover new dramatic talents (she appeared in a handful of French films there), to discover, perhaps, herself.

  Ringwald—talented, quirky, soulful Ringwald—was the actress that the smart money would have bet on to break free of the Pack. But the one actress who did manage to not only do that, but to become one of the decade’s biggest stars, was, perhaps, the one no one expected it from at all; the one with the more conventional good looks, the one who had started on—gasp—a soap opera.

  In the late 1980s, Demi Moore was following the same kind of post–Brat Pack era career trajectory as many of her peers: a mix of flops and serviceable films. Everything changed, however, when she won the female lead (opposite Patrick Swayze) in a 1990 supernatural love story about a woman who communicates with her recently murdered lover with the help of a psychic. The movie was called Ghost, and it served to break Moore free from the public’s perception of her as just another Brat Packer. Ghost (which was also produced by Ned Tanen) was a new kind of movie, mixing supernatural themes, comedy, and dramatic romance. It would be the movie that allowed Moore to reach complete and total
superstardom.

  You could, perhaps, pinpoint the very moment that this superstardom was launched. In the trailer for Ghost there is a moment, as the music swells, when we see a close-up of Demi Moore’s face, exquisite in its hard angles, accentuated by her boyishly short haircut. Her lips are parted slightly, and her face is already wordlessly conveying a universe of feelings—grief at the loss of her love, confusion at what force of nature is allowing her to commune with him again, joy at experiencing the unthinkable. And then, she blinks. It’s a blink that releases two glossy, pendulous tears from her eyes, and sends them rolling languidly down her cheeks. It was a small thing, but somehow, by the time the trailer ended, before you’d even seen the movie it advertised, you knew it: Demi Moore was a movie star. 1990’s Ghost went on to become a staggering blockbuster hit, pulling in over $217 million, second that year only to Home Alone.

  After she costarred with Tom Cruise in 1992’s A Few Good Men, Moore became one of the most bankable women in Hollywood, with a leading-man husband (Bruce Willis) to boot. Sexy thrillers such as 1993’s Indecent Proposal, with Robert Redford, and 1994’s Disclosure, with Michael Douglas, only served to catapult Moore to an even higher level of superstardom, as did her two nude cover shoots for Vanity Fair—she was pregnant in one, and wearing only body paint in the other. She was given $12 million to star in the 1996 flesh-fest Striptease, making her Hollywood’s best-paid actress. One could argue that there was a moment in the mid-nineties when Demi Moore was the most talked-about female movie star on the planet.

  Film critic Eric Hynes suggests that the significant physical transformation Moore underwent in the nineties may have helped her to become more accepted as a grown-up movie star than many of her Brat Pack peers. “Getting her breast implants was probably the best thing she could’ve ever done,” says Hynes. Moore was so physically different looking in the nineties than she had been in the eighties, thanks not just to her body’s newly acquired…er, assets, but also because she so memorably shaved her head for 1997’s G.I. Jane. “All of a sudden,” says Hynes, “all the hair was gone, the body was showcased, and she had emerged.”

  This kind of bona fide superstardom would not come to so many of the other actors who made their names in the eighties youth films. When Molly Ringwald returned from her personally restorative stint in France, wrote Richard Roeper, “she found that Hollywood had moved on to new sensations…Ten years ago, I would have predicted that Molly Ringwald and Mia Sara were going to be movie stars, real movie stars, for a long time. Instead, Demi Moore gets $12 million to show off her scary, siliconed, industrial-strength body while Ringwald and Sara exist somewhere outside the Entertainment Tonight universe.”

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  So why were some actors from the Brat Pack–era movies (Demi Moore, Matthew Broderick, and John Cusack, for example) able to become true stars, while others foundered? In the late 1980s, the New York Times’s Aljean Harmetz wrote a piece called “Crossing the Line to Stardom,” in which she asked a dozen executives and producers to take a look at seventeen young actors and try to handicap which ones could become true stars. They weren’t questioning how talented the actors were, wrote Harmetz, “only whether they had the special quality that makes a genuine movie star. To almost every one, Rob Lowe was too pretty…Sean Penn was too self-destructive. Nor did they think that Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez…[or] Ally Sheedy had the special qualities necessary for stardom. On the other hand, Molly Ringwald was intrinsically intriguing, said one. She demands that you watch what she’s up to…”

  The Times piece also examined how crucial it is for a young actor to pick just the right kinds of roles early on in his or her career. Tom Cruise, for example, was offered roles of fanatic young men after playing an obsessed cadet in Taps. He wisely waited it out until just the right star-making part came along: 1983’s Risky Business. “I don’t have a family to feed, and money isn’t the reason I became an actor,” Cruise told Harmetz when explaining his reasoning. “I would have held out as long as it would have taken.”

  In the modern age it’s more difficult for an actor to gain and sustain real movie stardom than in the old days of the studio system. “Nowadays,” said Ned Tanen, “there’s no continuity of these roles—you can’t establish your character strongly enough over a period of time so that the audience wants you. Then,” he said, “Molly Ringwald starts getting worried about whether she should do a role or not, instead of being told what she’s going to do. I remember Mike Nichols saying, ‘I wish the studio system still existed so someone would tell me what to do.’”

  The fact that the Molly Ringwalds and the Emilio Estevezes had control over the direction their careers took was indeed a mixed blessing. The choices these stars had the freedom to make would determine the course of their careers. John Cusack and Demi Moore represent two very different versions of breaking out successfully from the Pack, thanks to savvy role choices. Cusack never became an interplanetary superstar like Demi Moore, but he did achieve something that is in its own way greater, and certainly more lasting: a career as a respected, serious dramatic actor, perhaps one of the greatest dramatic talents of his generation. In some ways, he was fortunate to have lost out on the Breakfast Club role that eventually went to Judd Nelson. Perhaps this allowed Cusack to avoid the Brat Pack label to the extent he did.

  But what probably made all the difference was the film Cusack was seen in after Say Anything. It was 1990’s noirish The Grifters, in which he starred alongside Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening. It was exactly the kind of sharp, savvily written piece that all of the Brat Pack actors should have been so lucky to have followed their teen fare with. The Grifters showed audiences that John Cusack could be a grown-up. And then audiences accepted him as one, in subsequent films such as the comedy Grosse Pointe Blank, which Cusack cowrote.

  It was a strategy that Some Kind of Wonderful star Mary Stuart Masterson embraced as well. She starred in 1991’s Fried Green Tomatoes, the 1994 ensemble Bad Girls, and the 1996 romance Bed of Roses. Masterson says that being so associated with eighties youth movies “still impinges upon me even now, to some extent. But I deliberately didn’t continue to do similar roles at a time when there were a lot of them out there that I could’ve done. I definitely wanted to still be around later in life.”

  Matthew Broderick, who some feared would be forever thought of as Ferris Bueller, had a lot to prove in the years after his iconic 1986 movie. But with his powerful portrayal of a Civil War colonel in 1989’s acclaimed epic Glory, Broderick showed the depths he was capable of exploring; it set him on the course of the enviable career he’s had ever since.

  “I maybe overly tried to avoid anything that was similar [to Ferris],” says Broderick of his career choices in those years following that role. “I didn’t want to get stuck where suddenly I was thirty and everybody says, ‘Oh, he’s not Ferris anymore. I don’t want him anymore.’ I always wanted to try to make my career last. So I wouldn’t want to stick too long in Ferris Bueller–land, because then I’ll get stuck and I won’t be liked for that anymore. That was my theory. But you can’t really plan any of it out the way you think. I think I tried to avoid teen comedies after that, basically. I didn’t want to just be that. I felt I could do more.”

  And yet, no matter how savvy the career choices, if an actor happened in his or her youth to play a Ferris Bueller, or a John Bender, a Lloyd Dobler, an Andie Walsh, or a Jake Ryan, chances are many in the public will always associate him or her with that character, at least to some extent. That’s the problem with larger-than-life roles: they can indeed be larger than the actual life the actor continues to lead afterward. Ben Stein may have joked that his own obit will read, “He said, ‘Bueller…Bueller,’” but Matthew Broderick has it worse: no matter how many fascinating, critically and commercially successful parts he takes on, his obit will say, “He was Bueller.”

  Thinking back on his iconic performance as Pretty in Pink’s Duckie, Jon Cryer says, “A few years after that, I had
done a bunch of features, most of which had failed at the box office. And consequently I was like, ‘Wow, I did the best thing I’m ever gonna do, when I was twenty. And now—I’m done?’ That’s a weird feeling to deal with.” How does an actor work through that? “You just keep showing up,” says Cryer, “and sooner or later you catch the lightning in the bottle again. But sometimes it takes a while.”

  The thing about an unforgettable part, says Jennifer Grey, “is that people associate you with that role forever. If you’re lucky, if it makes that indelible a mark.” But there is, of course, a downside to that. “It is very hard to change people’s idea of who you are,” she says. “You have to reestablish yourself, and it is very hard to, once people are putting you in a slot.” Ultimately, though, says Grey, “being really identified with a character has its challenges, but there is really nothing bad about it. As long as you know who you are, as long as you don’t think you’re the girl from Dirty Dancing all your life, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”

  By the late 1990s, enough years had passed that the lingering negative ramifications of that 1985 New York “Brat Pack” article should have dissipated. In fact, the opposite happened, and the conceptions that grew out of that piece hardened, making the moniker much more difficult to shake. Says Loree Rodkin, “We never thought it was going to become the stigma that it became.” Indeed, in many irrevocable ways, the night that Estevez, Nelson, Lowe, and a bunch of friends let journalist David Blum come out with them to the Hard Rock Café in L.A. was, in the words of Joel Schumacher, the “night that became the turning point,” because “this term ‘Brat Pack’ totally and completely dehumanized them as individuals. They just became all of one piece. And for years, whenever you saw any of the actors’ or actresses’s names, they were called Brat Packer.”