In 2009, it was as clear as ever that though Hughes had left Hollywood, his influence upon the industry remained vast. In the spring of that year, Adventureland was released. It follows the relationship between a cute girl and a nerdy guy in mid-1980s white suburbia, and many critics compared the film to Hughes’s movies. A few months later, in July, came the release of I Love You, Beth Cooper, a teen romantic comedy based on a novel by Hughes fan Larry Doyle and directed by Chris Columbus, who helmed the first two Home Alone movies. Later in July, Judd Apatow’s Funny People hit theaters, drawing many parallels between Apatow and Hughes, both prolific writer-producer-directors who used a stable of likeable young actors to create films that were at once broadly funny and unabashedly poignant.
And then, on August 6, 2009, John Hughes went for an early morning walk. He was in New York City visiting his son James, who’d recently had a child. Hughes was strolling by himself; his wife, Nancy, was back at their hotel.
As he crossed West Fifty-fifth Street, Hughes felt severe chest pains. He walked across the street with a great amount of difficulty. He made it to the sidewalk in front of a small restaurant, at 60 West Fifty-fifth Street, where he sat down against some water valves protruding from the building. When the paramedics arrived fifteen minutes later, he was unconscious. He was taken to nearby Roosevelt Hospital, where, later that morning, he was pronounced dead. John Hughes was fifty-nine years old.
In the days following, the countless people around the globe who had been so touched by his life struggled to grasp the reality of his death. The media paid loving tribute to his legacy. News outlets weren’t reporting any of the details surrounding his death, so Movieline’s Stu VanAirsdale, who was puzzled by this and had admired Hughes’s work deeply, traced the director’s last steps to the spot where he collapsed. Although people the world over felt their relationship with Hughes had been somehow personal, for some, of course, it truly was. Matthew Broderick said he was “shocked and saddened” by the news. Jon Cryer called Hughes’s death “a horrible tragedy.” Judd Nelson said that Hughes had made “a profoundly meaningful and lasting effect on my life as an actor, and as a young man.”
In her op-ed in the New York Times, Molly Ringwald referenced Ally Sheedy’s famous Breakfast Club line about how when you grow up, your heart dies, adding, “It does seem sadly poignant that physically, at least, John’s heart really did die. It also seems undeniably meaningful: His was a heavy heart, deeply sensitive, prone to injury—easily broken.” After she and Anthony Michael Hall decided to move on and stop making films with Hughes, she wrote, “We were like the Darling children when they made the decision to leave Neverland. And John was Peter Pan, warning us that if we left we could never come back.”
Hughes’s death was felt deeply in America, but abroad as well, where his movies distilled something universal about the teenage experience. Anna Pickard, a film critic for The Guardian in the UK, wrote, “As a lonely teenager, with a divorced dad in an area of the city that I didn’t know, few friends, and every visitation weekend filled with my own company and the local video rental shop, John Hughes and his cast were my very best friends. And I mourn him like any other person who made my teenage years what they were.”
Says Alan Ruck, “John was an American original. The reason he touched so many young people is that he treated his characters with dignity and respect and not as objects of derision. The teenagers in John’s stories are compassionate, adventurous, frustrated, loving, selfish, foolish, ambitious, confused, scared, brave, outraged, silly, needy, jealous, inspired—the list could be as long as you’d care to make it. John’s characters are complete and complex and compelling and full of contradictions. Just like all of us. John’s films remind us that life is challenging and complicated and wonderful, no matter what one’s age might be.”
In the days after his death, a makeshift shrine was placed in the spot on the Midtown Manhattan street where John Hughes slipped away. It was a framed photograph of him, and it was illuminated by the flickering glow of votive candles—sixteen in all.
chapter fourteen
DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME
How the Brat Pack and Their Films Changed a Generation
These movies,” says thirty-eight-year-old actor Mark Feuerstein, “are the glue of our generation—they connect us all. And,” he adds, with gravitas in his voice, “you can’t overestimate how much they impacted us all. They impacted us on a chemical level. It’s in our bodies, it’s in our behavior. The world,” says Feuerstein, “was broken down into Duckies and Andrew McCarthys.” For his part, the actual Andrew McCarthy says, “These movies had an impact in ways that I had no idea of until years later.” On and on, the impact continued throughout our teenage years, right into our grown-up lives. “Those films were hugely influential on me,” says thirty-nine-year-old Village Voice Media film critic Robert Wilonsky. “They were the documentaries of our lives, with better soundtracks.”
In the decades since they were in theaters, time has shown that Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful, and Say Anything helped act as societal guideposts for a generation that was somewhat rudderless. Filling the void, the films helped define a social culture, and suggested how young people could behave. They helped us figure out what to look for in our love lives, our friendships, our careers. And rather than being relegated to the dustbin of the pop cultural past, with each passing year they seem to take on more cultural resonance. “I am sometimes astonished at the staying power of what is essentially a sweet little prom movie,” Jon Cryer says of Pretty in Pink.
The movies were filled with exuberance, with joy. They were, in the parlance of that decade, totally awesome. But they also dealt with issues in a serious manner, which helped set them apart from disposable teen fare at the cineplex. And so it’s no surprise that now we emulate aspects of these films “in our daily lives,” author T Cooper has written, “in hopes of causing a little bit of that veneer of significance to run off on our decidedly more quotidian realities.” We live in a world where conversations are casually peppered with lines from St. Elmo’s Fire, where people dress up as Duckie and Ferris Bueller for Halloween, where a boom box can never again be raised above someone’s shoulders without calling to mind the yearning strains of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” “These characters became your friends,” says Dylan Lauren, founder and CEO of Dylan’s Candy Bar and daughter of fashion legend Ralph Lauren. “I was a bit younger than the characters when I first saw the films, but it was like an introduction of what to expect in high school or college.”
The concrete sociological impact these movies have had upon many people can be thought of as an example of cine-sociology, the examination of the real impact that fictional movies can have upon the way we live our lives. One of the lyrics in The Breakfast Club’s theme song, “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” tells of how we’ll all be changed “when the light gets into your heart,” and for a certain generation, the light got into their hearts twenty-five years ago, and shines a little brighter every day. India Leval, a thirty-one-year-old fashion industry executive, says that those films “were almost like my religion.” Andrew McCarthy suggests that “they captured a fantasy of how people thought their lives could be.” Of course, aspirational films are almost as old as the cinema. But in these eighties movies, the teens were so very relatable that, as Leonard Maltin says, the movies “provided role models for a generation, and beyond.”
Certainly, the films “touched a nerve with people who were brought up in the same kind of way, from different parts of the United States,” says noted cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, “and who recognized in those movies the same things that they were going through.” But the films were also popular outside of North America. When Joel Schumacher once went to Japan to promote a film, the young woman who served as his interpreter said she fought for the position because he had directed St. Elmo’s Fire, and she loved the movie so much she
had memorized every word of the script in English and Japanese. The London-based Financial Times called Ferris Bueller’s Day Off a film that “unites an entire generation.” Andie MacDowell remembers walking down a street in London’s Soho neighborhood when two stylish young women started yelling, “Dale Biberman! Dale Biberman!” her St. Elmo’s Fire character’s name. Part of the movies’ international appeal may be attributed to the universal themes of the stories, but it might have more to do with the reality that, thanks to the global reach of the Hollywood product, the U.S. high-school experience is understood everywhere. Of the climactic smooch at the end of Pretty in Pink, McCarthy says, “It’s so American. Summer, night, car, kissing, teenagers—just American. All I need is a hundred bucks and a full tank of gas and my girl by my side, and that’s what that moment is. It works.”
The movies were able to make such a lasting emotional impact for many reasons. Importantly, they entered many people’s lives at that most absorbent stage of emotional development: adolescence. “You’re still forming your ideas, your impressions of life,” says Leonard Maltin, “how it all works, and you’re susceptible to the persuasiveness of film. There’s something about seeing a film at an impressionable age that, I daresay, stays with you forever.”
And the very way the films were released to us during our adolescence helped ensure their iconic stature years later. From John Hughes’s perspective, it was by design. “There was a strategy,” Hughes revealed to the New York Times in 1991. “I’m growing a market: Sixteen Candles will come out on videocassette as The Breakfast Club is opening. Breakfast Club will be on cassette as Pretty in Pink is coming.” The cycle would keep building upon itself because, as Hughes pointed out, “every four years there’s a whole new crop of teenagers.” Rather presciently, he added, “And then again in twenty years it’s going to be their nostalgia. And their kids are going to watch.”
The fact that the VCR became a common household object in the very years these films were being released allowed teens to have deep personal relationships with movies like no other teenagers before. It permitted them to have the kind of connection with movies that their parents had had with albums and books—something to return to again and again. “It meant,” says Leonard Maltin, “you could commit a film to memory.” With the advent of the VCR, says Say Anything producer James L. Brooks, “films truly became literature. It’s that simple.”
The VCR also allowed Generation X teens to experience the sensation of ownership over these movies, as though they were baseball cards you didn’t have to trade. On a deeper level, ownership meant we had some psychological control over the films. Watching a movie at home with a VCR meant “you’re bigger than the screen,” says sociologist Joshua Gamson. “Rather than those characters being huge in front of you, you’re huge in relation to them.” Suddenly, instead of submitting to the films among hundreds of other people in a big theater, you could watch them in your own bedroom, with your stuffed animals, posters, and high-school yearbook all within reach. Sure, the movies starred kids who were famous, but there on the screen of your TV set, these actors’ faces were the size of your own. You could turn them on and off at will. That power made you feel quite at ease with them, enough that you opened your heart up and truly let in their stories.
Also intensifying the films’ emotional impact was the music they introduced. “The songs influence people’s abiding love for these movies,” says Mary Stuart Masterson, “because it is like instant recall. By hearing the song, you remember the movie.” Dave Ziemer, the creator and program director of Sirius XM’s Cinemagic, regularly plays songs from the soundtracks of these films. “They are so intertwined in Hollywood history,” he explains. “I used to get complaints from serious score aficionados asking, ‘Why are you playing these?’ And I would always say, ‘These soundtracks are an integral part of these movies, and to ignore them is to ignore the movies themselves.’ The movies are such an important part of pop culture that you can’t do that.”
The songs of these films find new meaning throughout our lives as we get older. Entertainment executive Matt Smith grew up imagining that the songs on the soundtracks would be “the themes to certain things in my life. And when I got married, I made my own set list for the wedding—I had the DJ play ‘St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)’ because in my head as a kid, I expected it to be heard at pivotal points in my life, because that’s how it is portrayed in the movie.” It all runs on a nonstop reel of memory and sound. “You hear those first chords of the instrumental music from the beginning of St. Elmo’s Fire,” says lawyer Kelly Farrell, “and suddenly you are back there—back in the commons room of your college dorm, watching that movie with your friends.” Music and memory are processed in adjacent areas of the human brain, and nothing, says Duke University music professor Bryan Gilliam, “will take you back as fast as a string of six notes from a song you knew twenty years ago.”
With the wisdom of hindsight, we can now take a serious look at the ways in which these movies changed Hollywood, changed teen culture, changed us. The films made their mark, and now there is, says Columbia executive Josh Goldstine, “a sense of the movies being a dominant issue in our culture—some kind of reference point.” Indeed, references to these films have become a shared secret language; a password that gets you into the clubhouse, the shorthand of a generation.
When Apple introduced its rose-colored iPod, the ads featured the only three words needed to instantly summon thoughts of pure coolness in the minds of Gen Xers: “Pretty in Pink.” New York magazine, when looking for the appropriately laudatory descriptive for Oscar-nominated Juno star Ellen Page, proclaimed her to be “the next Molly Ringwald.” Long before his death, on Amazon.com all of John Hughes’s eighties teen movies were routinely ranked in the top ten bestselling teen DVDs. YouTube boasts scores of homemade videos in which fans re-create the dance scene from The Breakfast Club. The West Side Lounge, a bar in Boston, holds a John Hughes Film Festival, in which patrons sip the “Jake Ryan Martini” (dry with lots of olives) while mouthing along with the lines of their favorite Brat Pack flicks. The Ferris Bueller parade sequence has been reenacted (with incredible attention to detail) in Greenwich Village’s legendary annual Halloween Parade, as part of something called “Project Bueller.” Weekends at O—Neill’s Pub in Lexington, Kentucky, hundreds of fans come listen to their favorite eighties cover band, Long Duk Dong.
References to these movies are so ingrained that they even pop up when describing something as seemingly unrelated as politics. When the New York Times’s Alessandra Stanley was searching for a way to describe Hillary Clinton’s face during a debate with Barack Obama, she wrote, “At times, Mrs. Clinton looked like the Jennifer Grey character struggling to show up her favored brother in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” In a piece called “The Barack Pack,” conservative commentator S. E. Cupp described the Democratic National Convention in terms familiar to us all: “John Hughes couldn’t have scripted it better…For anyone nostalgic for the angst-ridden, sigh-filled, eyeroll-inducing diorama of drama that is the typical high school experience, the DNC absolutely delivered.”
On television, the St. Elmo’s Fire bar and Ferris Bueller’s mad dash through his neighbors’ backyards have been hilariously spoofed on Fox’s hit animated series Family Guy. On Gossip Girl, Blair (Leighton Meester) assures Serena (Blake Lively) that it’s okay to confide in her friends because “we’re the nonjudgmental Breakfast Club.” The series premiere of the NBC sitcom Community featured numerous references to The Breakfast Club and was dedicated to John Hughes. Bart Simpson’s mock-taunting catchphrase “Eat my shorts” is often attributed to the character of John Bender; apparently, Simpsons creator Matt Groening loved the “shorts” line when he heard Judd Nelson growl it in The Breakfast Club. (It must also be noted that The Simpsons features a sensitive, denim-vested schoolyard bully named Nelson, and that Groening’s other series, Futurama, includes a robot named Bender.)
When it’s time for a commerci
al break, the references keep coming. The ad campaign for JCPenney’s 2008 back-to-school line was Breakfast Club inspired, including a commercial that featured teenagers dancing in a high-school library to a cover of “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” The ad is a shot-by-shot homage to the most well known images from The Breakfast Club, with teen actors standing in as modern-day representations of Ringwald, Nelson, Sheedy, Estevez, and Hall. The chief marketing officer of JCPenney told the New York Times that the ad was created to speak not just to the parents out there, who grew up on the film, but to their kids, the “teens who are posting updated versions of ’80s songs online.” Flip the channel, and you’ll hear the smooth voice of a man narrating a BMW commercial: “We didn’t intend to be a part of any pop culture,” he says, while the image of Andrew McCarthy kissing Molly Ringwald in front of his Beemer in Pretty in Pink flickers onscreen. Howard Deutch, who directed Pink, was reminded of the image’s staying power while directing Kate Hudson and Dane Cook in the 2008 romantic comedy My Best Friend’s Girl. “Kate’s kissing Dane in this sequence,” recalls Deutch, “and I say, let’s not do it in the car, let’s get out here so you can be illuminated by the headlights. But Kate told me I’d be ripping myself off. She said, ‘You’ve done that—it’s your iconic shot!’”
Others have used these movies to discuss faith. Pastor Tripp Hudgins of the Community Church of Winnetka, Illinois, in the Northern Chicago suburbs (where else?), preaches a series of sermons he calls “The Gospel According to John Hughes.” In one such sermon, Hudgins teaches his parishioners a lesson about God’s forgiveness by discussing the plotline of Sixteen Candles: “Samantha has been forgotten. Jake, too, is lost and forgotten. Popularity is no guarantee of love…Love is what rescues them. The Gospel According to John Hughes is: God does not give us up for lost.”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 39
