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

by Susannah Gora

  Broderick’s on-screen sister, Jennifer Grey, continues to act, and notably starred in the short-lived but acclaimed late-1990s sitcom It’s Like, You Know…, as herself, in which she mocked her changed looks. (She famously underwent rhinoplasty.) She has a daughter with her husband, The New Adventures of Old Christine star Clark Gregg.

  Two decades after The Famous Teddy Z proved he could carry a sitcom, Jon Cryer is the Emmy-winning star of the wildly successful CBS program Two and a Half Men, the most popular sitcom on television. In 2009, he reunited with his Pretty in Pink costar James Spader in Robert Rodriguez’s family film Shorts. He is married to entertainment reporter Lisa Joyner, and has a son from a previous marriage.

  James Spader’s star kept rising after Pretty in Pink. He appeared in the classic eighties films Mannequin, Baby Boom, Less Than Zero, and Wall Street, becoming the on-screen personification of yuppie malevolence. In 1989, he starred in the acclaimed erotic drama Sex, Lies, and Videotape, with Andie MacDowell. (“He was one of the first actors I worked with that was very Method in his approach,” remembers MacDowell. “How I go about what I do in my craft came from my experience with working with him.”) Later came films as diverse as Stargate and Secretary, but his greatest critical success came after David E. Kelley hired him to play Alan Shore on the ABC series The Practice. When that show was canceled, Kelley gave the Shore character his own series, Boston Legal, on which Spader starred opposite William Shatner throughout the mid-2000s, earning two Emmys. Spader has three children.

  In 1991, Spader costarred in True Colors opposite John Cusack. Since then, Cusack has gone on to star in a wide range of major movies across all genres, the most notable of them being Grosse Pointe Blank, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Being John Malkovich, High Fidelity, Must Love Dogs, and Grace Is Gone. In 2008, the politically active Cusack, who blogs occasionally for The Huffington Post, starred in the political satire War, Inc., which he cowrote, produced, and starred in. He recently toplined the disaster movie 2012 and stars in the upcoming dramatic epic Shanghai.

  Cusack’s fellow Sixteen Candles alum Gedde Watanabe has appeared on television shows such as E.R. and in films such as Boys on the Side and Ed TV. After Sixteen Candles, costar Haviland Morris was on One Life to Live for two years, appeared on numerous television series, and was on One Tree Hill during its 2008 season. She also sells real estate in Manhattan.

  Mary Stuart Masterson still acts regularly in film and on television shows such as Law & Order. She has also become a writer-director. (She helmed the 2007 Kristen Stewart film The Cake Eaters.) “I guess you’d say I’m a shy person,” she says. “I don’t love being the center of attention, and so directing is so much fun for me. Being a ‘celebrity’ is not something I ever wanted. I’m not comfortable with it. I kind of chose to not be part of that.” She is married to actor Jeremy Davidson and they have one son.

  Eric Stoltz has made an impressively diverse career for himself, appearing in films such as Pulp Fiction and Jerry Maguire and television series such as Grey’s Anatomy and Will and Grace. Currently, he stars in Caprica, the prequel of the popular Syfy television series Battlestar Galactica.

  His Some Kind of Wonderful costar Lea Thompson survived both SpaceCamp and Howard the Duck (nothing that two Back to the Future sequels couldn’t fix) and reunited with John Hughes for 1993’s Dennis the Menace, which he wrote and produced. Throughout much of the mid- to late 1990s, Thompson starred as the titular character on the sitcom Caroline in the City. She now plays the lead in the series of Jane Doe telefilms for the Hallmark channel, of which she’s directed some episodes as well, and she has costarred in four upcoming feature films.

  Thompson’s husband, Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful director Howard Deutch, has gone on to enjoy a successful Hollywood career, directing films such as The Replacements, The Whole Ten Yards, and My Best Friend’s Girl. He and Thompson have two daughters.

  After helming St. Elmo’s Fire, Joel Schumacher went on to become one of the biggest filmmakers of the 1990s, giving a big boost to the careers of actors such as Julia Roberts, Colin Farrell, and Matthew McConaughey. He has directed two of the Batman films, The Lost Boys, Flatliners, Dying Young, Tigerland, Phone Booth, Veronica Guerin, The Phantom of the Opera, and many other films.

  Cameron Crowe, who has two children with his wife, Nancy Wilson, won an Academy Award for his semiautobiographical screenplay for Almost Famous. That film, along with Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky, and Elizabethtown, made Crowe one of the most respected Hollywood writer-directors. Before that, his 1992 film Singles helped bring the grunge movement into the mainstream. It also gave him a reputation as the best director of youth-themed films to come along in a while.

  The best since John Hughes.

  chapter thirteen

  LIFE MOVES PRETTY FAST

  John Hughes’s Final Years

  On New Year’s Day 2009, John Hughes returned to Wrigley Field, where almost twenty-five years earlier he’d shot parts of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He was there to attend a hockey game between the hometown Chicago Blackhawks and his beloved Detroit Red Wings. (In Ferris Bueller, Cameron wears the jersey of Red Wings legend Gordie Howe, one of Hughes’s childhood heroes.) It was cold and windy that first day of the year, but none of the fans seemed to care, least of all Hughes. He told NHL.com that he was “happy right now,” after the Red Wings took the lead. Innocuous as the quote had been, it was the first time the public had heard or seen from John Hughes in ages, and also the last public comment he would ever give, as he would pass away later that year.

  Hughes had spent most of the previous decade far from the public eye. Much of what was said about him in recent years tended to be in a revelatory tone, and in the past tense. “We talk about him as if he’s dead,” said R. P. Cohen in 2008. Cohen was right—and this spoke to just how far off the Hollywood radar Hughes had gone. Sometime in the mid-1990s, spurred on perhaps by his moving from L.A. back to the Chicago area, Hughes seemed to have made the transformation from sometimes cruel producer with a reputation for being difficult to something entirely different: a quiet, contemplative recluse who shunned not only the media, but most of the actors and filmmakers he had collaborated with.

  Hughes had already amassed a fortune from 1990’s Home Alone and its 1992 sequel, but things were taken to a whole other level in 1996, upon the release of 101 Dalmatians, the live-action version of the classic animated movie, which Hughes wrote and produced. Former Hughes collaborator Matty Simmons recalls, “I said to Hughes, ‘I hear you made $40 million on Home Alone.’ And he said, ‘I made more on 101 Dalmatians, because I had a piece of the merchandising.’” Some filmmakers would use money like that to become the heaviest hitters in Tinseltown, but Hughes was already one of those, and instead of becoming an even bigger brand, he took his ever-growing fortune back home.

  “I think [Hughes and his wife] surrounded themselves with a lot of people to shelter them from the outside world,” says Bob Richter. “They were so successful that they felt they needed to build a fence around themselves. There was a house in the distance. So they had a contractor with a bulldozer, an earth-mover, build a hill to block the view of that house to theirs. The guy worked all day,” Richter recalls, “and at the end of the day, the guy said to John, ‘If I work one more day this will be the highest point in [rural] Illinois.’ So he did, and it became a tobogganing hill.” Hughes had the power to move mountains, or in this case, build one. Richter finds some profound meaning in the incident: “I see it as somewhat symbolic of what the world encroaching on John may have felt like to him. And that’s probably why he didn’t talk a lot about himself to others.”

  Howard Deutch suggests that Hughes’s years living in Hollywood in the eighties were “kind of the unraveling of his identity. In other words, he was those characters, and he left [L.A.] to go back to be more connected to who was again. He was Chicago. And it was a source of nourishment for him.”

  It’s possible, suggest
s Deutch, that Hughes’s success had brought about a sort of cognitive dissonance that challenged his very artistic being. “Because he was alienated or subversive or whatever,” says Deutch, “he then could use all that to put into these characters and connect with them, and make them real. The minute he was accepted in Hollywood as a mainstream force, it fucked with his sensibilities, so that’s another reason he had to leave. He had to be an outsider [again] to be able to be the genius that he was. He can’t be one of the boys. He can’t be Spielberg. That’s not who he was. His genius lay in being the alienated one.”

  Throughout the 1990s, from the fortressed comfort of the Midwest, Hughes continued to write and produce. (He never directed again after 1991’s abysmal Curly Sue.) Almost all of his output in the 1990s was inoffensive family fare. Many of the kid-friendly flicks Hughes wrote and produced later in the decade, such as the pseudonymously penned Charles Grodin/St. Bernard film Beethoven and Baby’s Day Out, were popular. Most were remakes of successful earlier family films, such as the aforementioned Dalmatians, Miracle on 34th Street, and the Absent-Minded Professor redo Flubber, with a big-screen adaptation of Dennis the Menace thrown in for good measure.

  But while creatively wan family fare made it clear that John Hughes could still make profitable movies, he seemed to have abandoned the touch that made him a writer who could easily connect with audiences. His one attempt to reconnect with his core audience was when he wrote and produced 1998’s Reach the Rock, a small-budget film that, despite its provenance, received next to no publicity, opened in few theaters, and disappeared quickly. The endearing if uneven film about a young petty thief who tries to reconnect with his ex-girlfriend over the course of one night in Shermerville wouldn’t be Hughes’s last credit, but it was arguably the last “John Hughes movie” to be released in his lifetime. Like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller, the movie combined his understanding of how young people speak about their lives with his penchant for the cat-and-mouse game between a charismatic young rebel and a buffoonish older authority figure. John Hughes III, the talented musician son of the director, served as music supervisor for the film, producing a soundtrack one newspaper called “mesmerizing.”

  One aspect of John Hughes’s personal teen angst did finally get resolved around this time: his parents came to be very pleased with their “artsy” son. In the nineties, John Sr. and Marion Hughes had moved to Lexington, Kentucky, and, recalls Barbara Mandt, who knew them through community service, “they had a director’s chair with the name ‘John Hughes’ on it in their living room, and talked about him with great pride.”

  After a decade away from directing, in 2000 it was announced that Hughes would helm The Chambermaid, his script about a room cleaner at a fancy Chicago hotel, played by Sandra Bullock, who falls in love with a wealthy politician. Though fans might have been disappointed that he had not returned to the teen genre that made him a household name, at least he was directing again. But in time, Hughes announced that he would only produce the movie, not direct; Hilary Swank replaced Bullock; Jennifer Lopez replaced Swank; Hughes pulled out as producer; the setting was sacrilegiously moved to New York; and the title was changed to Maid in Manhattan. Hughes’s comeback, if ever there was to be one, would have to wait. He reportedly was so unhappy with the many changes made to the script that he tried to get his name removed from the credits. “Edmond Dantès,” Hughes’s regular pseudonym, ultimately received the story credit. The last credit of “Dantès” was the 2007 Owen Wilson comedy Drillbit Taylor, which was based on an old story idea of Hughes’s (“Dant¨s” and Seth Rogen share story credit), and produced by Hughes devotee Judd Apatow. But for the most part, Hughes, as Molly Ringwald says, “just kind of stopped doing movies altogether.”

  Wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Patrick Goldstein in 2008, “Hughes now qualifies as something of a Howard Hughes–style recluse—he doesn’t have an agent, doesn’t give interviews and lives far away, somewhere in Chicago’s sprawling North Shore suburbs where most of his films were set…[Hughes] has disappeared without a trace.” (“I have jokingly said, ‘There’s something about John Hughes and Howard Hughes—something about the last name,” noted Anthony Michael Hall.) At his high-school reunions, says classmate Ann Lamas, “all I ever heard was people asking if anyone had heard from John Hughes—and the answer was always no.” Even Molly Ringwald was not in touch with him: “Honestly, it’s been so many years since I have had contact with him.”

  Director Kevin Smith has said that Hughes was “our generation’s J. D. Salinger,” and it must be said that oftentimes reclusiveness and artistic genius do go hand in hand. “I think there is something to be said for people who are artistic keeping to themselves, in a way,” says Anthony Michael Hall. “It sounds a little abstract, but there is something about people who are really creative, maybe something that artists have, that they have to stay apart. Sometimes people’s gift is what they don’t give, what they don’t show.” A friend of Roger Ebert’s bumped into Hughes a few years ago and gently teased him about disappearing from Hollywood. “I haven’t disappeared,” Hughes told Ebert’s friend. “I’m standing right here. I’m just not in Los Angeles.”

  It seems everyone likes to wonder about it, but no one knows exactly why John Hughes “dropped out” of the moviemaking business. It’s possible that in an ever more corporate industry, he may have, as Dan Aykroyd posits, “just gotten tired of the interference from executives. I think the appetite for dealing in that community just goes away.” And as one studio exec said of Hughes before his death, “He’s got money. He’s got legacy. What more do you need?”

  Alison Byrne Fields, a woman who became pen pals with Hughes for two years when she was a teenager in the 1980s, said that he told her he’d left Hollywood in part because he didn’t want his children to grow up in that environment, and in part because he felt the industry had helped contribute to the early death of his close friend John Candy, by making him work too hard. But the question still remains—did Hughes take himself out of the game because he wanted to, or because Hollywood was tired of dealing with him? The animosity toward him was so great throughout the industry some years ago that, in 1993, a studio executive predicted to the snarky Spy magazine that if and when Hughes’s movies stopped making serious money, “it’s going to look like the Oklahoma land rush in reverse—people will be running as fast as they can to get away from him.”

  But Howard Deutch insisted that Hughes pulled out completely on his own accord: “He didn’t leave because nobody wanted him.” In the years leading up to Hughes’s death, Deutch was one of the only people from the entertainment industry whom Hughes would talk to. Deutch would go to meetings, he remembers, “and all they wanted to talk to me about was John. I’d go, ‘What about me?! Can we talk about me? And this script?’‘Yeah, yeah, yeah—but first, where is he? And do you talk to him? And what’s he like? And would he work again?’” But Deutch didn’t mind being asked so relentlessly about Hughes. Rather, he felt “honored by it.”

  The last years of John Hughes’s life were spent in a cloistered, peaceful, and seemingly quite happy existence. He divided his time between his large farm in northern Illinois and his home in Lake Forest, a Chicago suburb and one of the wealthiest towns in America. Hughes surfaced in print, for the first time in years, in the summer of 2008, when he published a brief but revealing essay in Francis Ford Coppola’s literary journal Zoetrope: All Story, about the process of adapting his short story “Vacation ’58” for the screen. He spent time with his wife, his grown sons, John III and James, and his four grandchildren. He was an avid reader, and maintained his membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Interestingly, the man who with his films planted so many metaphorical seeds of emotion in our hearts spent his last years on earth planting seeds of a different kind: “When I heard that he was really into gardening,” says Ringwald, “I thought, of course he’d be into gardening, because so am I.” A few years ago, Howard Deutc
h was talking to Hughes and, recalls Deutch, “I said, ‘Why aren’t you working?’…He says, ‘I made my best movie here, on the farm I live on.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’” Hughes, says Deutch, then told him, “I planted this tree today. And it’s the best movie I’ve ever made.”

  Before Hughes passed away, Howard Deutch said the creative spark was still alive in him. “He’s writing,” said Deutch of Hughes. “I know he’s writing. Because he told me he’s got a stack of scripts. My hunch is he’ll come back, but when he does, it won’t be for one movie, it will be for a bunch. He always needs to write,” said Deutch. “He writes all the time. That’s what he is, a writer.”

  For so many of the young actors Hughes directed, after he left Hollywood he was a tough act to follow. When asked if it was difficult to get used to working with other people after the comfort of being with Hughes so many times, Anthony Michael Hall says, “Oh, yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever had that since.”

  It’s only natural to wonder about the reasons behind Hughes’s disappearing act from Hollywood, but, says Howard Deutch, “regardless of what people say about him, he did what he intended to do. He came out here, wrote a whole lot of movies, most of them successful, made a ton of money, and went back home, and never looked back.”