So That Happened

by Jon Cryer

  Why, I did. Mick Jagger. “All my friends love my Mick Jagger!” I said. “I’ll do ‘Start Me Up’!” Howie okayed it. Now, my Mick Jagger is less an impression of the Rolling Stones singer than it is an approximation of Al Franken’s famously uncanny impersonation of him. An homage to an homage, really, but a sure hit of mine at parties: rooster walk, hip undulating, lippy flamboyance and all. But now I was working on it like the most eager of hoofers, preparing my music cues, props (funky sunglasses), and moves instead of counting on something spontaneous to happen.

  When I went for the callback, the vibe was a little more intense, since Molly and John were there. In person, Molly came off as both more stylish and sexier than the image I had of her from Sixteen Candles. This was partially because she’s taller than you think she is. She had a good inch or two on me in height. She might have been wearing heels, though. And taken out of the context of movie scenarios, she had a calmly alluring vibe, an attractive confidence for someone only seventeen. Meeting her, I found Molly was polite but noncommittal, which is understandable in an audition situation. The filmmakers are looking at several people, so she doesn’t want to instantly act all best friend-y and have the auditioner walk out thinking, “I’m in; I’m Molly’s best friend!” only to not get the part and recede emotionally into “Fuck you, Molly! You led me on!” It’s a fine line, so while she was well mannered, she was also pretty reserved. John Hughes was also civil yet remote, a quiet figure in owlish glasses and eighties-coiffed hair. I started to miss the instant friendliness of the first audition with Howie. I know we’re all professionals here, but does it have to be so serious?

  There was no small talk. It was all business. I read with Molly, and I felt that the scenes didn’t go as swimmingly as they had when Howie was reading opposite me. (Was I more nervous with Molly and John? Perhaps.) Howie didn’t ask me to do my Mick Jagger, either, which I was initially disappointed by, but then relieved about.

  It was all over pretty fast, and suddenly I was leaving the room. But then John Hughes decided to accompany me to the elevator, and the callback ended on a nice, collegial note. I complimented him on Sixteen Candles, and he sounded surprised that I was familiar with his Lampoon writings. John even said that he’d taken a crack at turning that secret-agent story into a screenplay. At that moment, I appreciated the fact that John didn’t treat me like a wannabe actor but instead like a coworker. He seemed to be breaking the unspoken hierarchy of the audition—the rule that discourages getting too chummy with those trying out for fear of sending someone out with unmanageable expectations or false hope. He didn’t have that usual aloofness. He was open and friendly and I left feeling good. (Between Robert Altman’s love of National Lampoon and John Hughes having written for it, I must say that my favorite teenage jerkoff rag really stood me in good stead as an icebreaker when meeting major filmmakers.)

  But then I didn’t hear anything for a while. Usually you’ll get word of a decision within a few days, but a week went by and nothing. Then another week. My agent had no news. I was still doing Brighton Beach Memoirs, so I was busy with eight shows a week, not to mention other auditions.

  I went up for a play that was going to star Kevin Spacey. Well, “star” isn’t quite the right word, since no one had heard of him at that time. He was already considered an actor of great skill and charisma, though, and I was excited about the opportunity. I’d met him years earlier, when he’d done a play with a British actor named Greg Martyn, who just happened to be my mother’s boyfriend at the time.

  Greg was memorable due to his odd habit of wandering around our apartment nude when we had company over. I remember a time when he walked through the living room while David Dennis and I were watching TV. A few moments passed and then David turned to me, nonplussed, and said, “You know there’s a naked British man in your house, right?” I nodded and we continued to watch TV.

  The role I tried out for required a British accent, and I recall Spacey’s being so amazing in the audition—and mine so Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins—that I literally paused midscene and said aloud, “I’m not going to get this, since this guy is so fucking good.” Kevin was a pleasure to audition with, though: funny, charming, and devoid of actor bullshit.

  To complicate matters, Brighton Beach Memoirs wanted me to re-up for another six months in the role of Eugene. But in the back of my mind the whole time was, Why haven’t I heard about the John Hughes movie? It was disconcerting, like being interrupted midfilm and told you have to wait for the final reel to show up. And I use a movie metaphor, because movies were where I ultimately saw myself going as an actor. It was the medium that excited me the most. Pretty in Pink was my best shot yet at really establishing a movie career for myself, at making something that, unlike No Small Affair, would resonate with audiences in that way the best movies do.

  Finally, after three weeks of silence, I called manager Marty and said, “Can you find out what’s going on?” He paged me later, and I called him from a phone booth on Fifty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue.

  “You got it!” he said.

  It had been touch-and-go, though. Instead of calling the casting people, he had called producer Lauren Shuler directly, who told him that they were definitely interested in me, but that there were other factors that were holding off the decision-making process on Duckie.

  So Marty played the trump card: “Brighton Beach wants Jon for another six months, so shit or get off the pot.” And they said, “We’ll shit.” And by “shit,” they meant “hire your client.”

  I got off the phone with Marty and felt like I was on air. It was the kind of news one celebrates by taking a cab home instead of a bus. That’s right, living large.

  Soon after, Hughes’s second directorial effort came out, The Breakfast Club—about five high schoolers from different walks of life enduring a soul-baring, daylong detention—and I rushed over to the Guild Theater on Fifty-ninth Street to see it. That was an exhilarating and strange experience. I remember enjoying it but also thinking during some of the heavier parts, Well, these kids are taking themselves a bit seriously. Nevertheless I still laughed with it, and experienced the tension of these archetypal teenagers feeling one another out and wondering if their shared humanity is enough to break the barriers of cliquedom. Everyone was memorable—Molly, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez—and at the very end, when Judd’s brooding antihero is on the football field and raises his fist as Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me” swells on the sound track, the audience erupted and I thought to myself, Oh, my goodness, I’m actually in the next one of these.

  I was now in that pretty exclusive club myself, and I couldn’t wait to activate my membership.

  Chapter 10

  But Now I Have to Shoot It

  On the plane to Los Angeles to film Pretty in Pink, I thought, Am I really now one of the cool kids? I was going to shoot a movie about high school, but I was going through all the feelings one experiences right before heading off to the real thing. Am I too weird? Am I going to fit in? Am I going to have any friends?

  It was a strange feeling to have, considering a solid two decades of outsiderdom, and all permutations of nerd: space nerd, musical theater nerd, Carol Burnett nerd, Marvel Comics nerd, Star Wars nerd, Star Trek nerd, Little Rascals nerd, Twilight Zone nerd, Looney Tunes nerd. . . . I could explode with facts and quotes from any of these at a moment’s notice. But would I have to quell that to be accepted in this rarefied air of top-tier studio moviemaking, and this burgeoning genre populated by very serious, attractive teen thespians? And would anyone sit with me at lunch?

  I decided to trust that the process of making the movie would give me the tools to feel connected to my fellow actors. Namely, rehearsal. Lots and lots of rehearsal.

  Ever wonder why certain movies get slice-of-life and character interactions more naturally and effortlessly than others? They probably had rehearsal tim
e. Ideally, instead of taking actors who are supposed to play family members, lifelong friends, chummy coworkers, or biweekly bondage partners, and barely allowing them to say, “Nice to meet you,” before throwing them in front of cameras for scenes of stark intimacy, a sensible movie production lets camaraderie and familiarity emerge by putting its cast through a rehearsal process.

  Fortunately, this was the case with Pretty in Pink, as I happily discovered upon arriving in Los Angeles to begin preproduction. It was an incredibly organic, slow-paced process—a lot like theater—and it allowed us to really get to know who we were playing, and who we were playing opposite. I met Andrew McCarthy, who was set to play Blane, and though I hadn’t seen his breakout movie, Class, he was somebody I’d run into occasionally at auditions and who I knew had all the recommended daily allowance of prep-school handsome required for the part. I also remet Molly, and the three of us sat down with Howie and talked about our characters before starting to methodically work on scenes.

  While I loved the Pretty in Pink rehearsals for the time they gave me to get a bead on Duckie, I was also thrown a little bit by the social dynamic. Molly and Andrew held so much in check personally that I wondered when we’d get to the hanging-out part. At work, all went well. But attempts to socialize never felt that comfortable—Molly would meet my verbal parries with awkward silences. We just didn’t flow. Trying to befriend Andrew was so tough it sent me in the other direction: as in, I adopted a low-boil dislike toward him. It was as if the pair of them was computers with an internal barometer that indicated exactly when we’d all have enough chemistry to look realistic on film, and once that was reached, they could switch off and go into sleep mode.

  That being said, it was a tension that worked on-screen, and, as I found out later (among other things), was the point behind our casting.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be the three of you as friends,” Howie told me recently over lunch. “It’s an uncomfortable three-way relationship.”

  Okay, but it would have been nice to know I was on a Sisyphean mission trying to buddy up to those ice cubes. See, I’m a theater guy, and actors who grew out of the stage have a certain “we’re all in this together” thing that bolsters and inspires, because you’re going through a trial by fire as a team. You’re in an instant family, with all the attendant highs and lows of close-quarters interaction, but it always gives you strength. The give-and-take interconnectedness of a theater enterprise is ever-apparent, since you’re always in the same space every day with the cast and crew, until the show ends. That kind of daily cooperation and nurturing camaraderie, however, isn’t always required of a film actor, who in many circumstances needs only to get it right between “Action!” and “Cut!” once for the thing to work, before holing up in a trailer the rest of the time if that is his or her wont.

  In Andrew’s interview about Pretty in Pink for the twenty-fifth-anniversary DVD edition, he remembered me as “just so needy.” Setting aside the fact that under the guise of a supposedly objective comment about my behavior, this is really just a pithy euphemism for “could he have been more annoying?” I will take the observation at face value and say, Well, of course, why wouldn’t I be needy? I was acting opposite two people who’d had success in films already, which was intimidating to say the least. (No Small Affair didn’t exactly set box office charts on fire.) This was my first truly high-profile movie, I cared about the script, and its level of anticipation in the film world in the wake of Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club was sort of equivalent to Quentin Tarantino calling you to be in his next thing after Pulp Fiction. To put it bluntly, I was excited, nervous, committed, and hungry. I wanted it to work, I wanted it to be fun, and I wanted to not feel like an outcast for once. That’s “needy,” all right. That’s also how showbiz should be, as far as I’m concerned. I want to see everyone’s desire to engage, whether you’re the new kid or the veteran. I find it invigorating. (Remember, just don’t high-five me. )

  I was also, I might add, playing an occasionally pushy dork with attention issues. This is not a job for the faint of heart, or voice, or chutzpah. I needed “needy” as a way into the character. Molly and Andrew, on the other hand, weren’t there to wring laughs from the audience or juice the movie’s energy, two of Duckie’s more entertainment-related responsibilities. They were hired to turn their easily available reserve into heartbreaking moodiness. Actually, one of the great things about Molly as an actress is what she doesn’t give you. Whatever frustrations I may have had with Molly off-camera when it came to her fraternizing skills, that less-is-more acting style—already honed at seventeen—was made for the movies. Coming from the theater, I knew how to work an audience, but was still nailing down how to translate my craft to a medium in which I played to a camera, not a crowd.

  Since Duckie was no wallflower, I knew his look would go a long way toward ramping me up to embody him each day of shooting. An actor can get a lot out of the costume—it’s the building blocks of a persona, really—and if the clothes are already different from who you really are, all the better. My idea, then, was to dress Duckie in the manner of my good friend and rockabilly fan Artie, who managed to pull off his pompadour with a great sense of personal style. Girls went crazy for it. Although Duckie wasn’t supposed to be a chick magnet, I wanted Duckie to have that aggressively fifties-tinged look of cool: a prow of teased-and-greased coif on top, augmented by rolled-up sleeves, a leather jacket perhaps, and blue jeans. Maybe loafers. No, wait: biker boots!

  It was with visions of rockabilly Duckie dancing in my head that I went into my first fitting with costume designer Marilyn Vance, who had worked on Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. She knew her teen togs. But the first thing she did was put me in a paisley shirt, and over that a plaid vest. Okay, I thought, I’m not exactly sure where this is going. Then she added another item with a left turn in the pattern department. Then another. Then she stood back and took a moment to think.

  “Maybe his thing is that nothing matches,” she said.

  My face fell. That’s not a thing, I thought. That’s early-onset dementia.

  Of course, in retrospect, Marilyn was a hundred percent right in how she envisioned Duckie. Since the character is more complicated than the average nerd, the mismatched layers and prints suggested the right amount of collision-course personality. If I couldn’t be the Clash, I could at least, well, clash.

  The height of youth fashion at the time in Los Angeles was centered on Melrose Avenue, so we hit the eye-popping street’s thrift stores and clothing shops and slowly began putting together the traffic pileup of textures, hues, and patterns that became Duckiewear: oversize blazers with sleeves ripe for rolling up, optical-illusion vests, flowery shirts that best showed off bolo neckwear, and a galaxy of accessories to make sure your eyes never quite knew where to focus. We got pins! Pins! Pins! Supercheap circular wire-rim glasses, too, to ground it all in something resembling Lennon-esque new wave. Then the porkpie hat for that touch of jazz-sideman insouciance.

  The shoes, meanwhile, came from a true clothing-curiosity emporium called Aardvark’s Odd Ark: dirty white crocodile creepers that suggested serious retro flash. The problem was that there weren’t enough of them in my size, however, and I kept ripping out of them. I have massive feet (that’s right, ladies). The shoes have vanished, incidentally. I have photographic evidence of me lending them to New York’s Planet Hollywood, where they were promptly lost. I suppose I should never have entrusted revered Hollywood pop-culture artifacts to a place that served coconut shrimp.

  I was asked once what made an article of clothing unsuitable for Duckie. I answered, “If it’s tasteful or matches.” It was not easy convincing me to sign on to Duckie’s clothes. I was Irene Cara reduced to stripping in that scene in Fame, only instead barely suppressing a sob because of what I had to put on. I’ll admit, every day I’d come to my trailer, take one look at the day’s wardrobe, and mutter out loud, “Really?”r />
  But it’s to the credit of Marilyn’s unerring sense of character-centric clothing that her ideas defined Duckie’s sense of individuality for so many, and in the boldest of visual ways. And years later, when the Costume Designers Guild gave her a lifetime achievement award, I had the privilege of presenting it to her at the ceremony. I did not, however, dress as Duckie. Let’s make that perfectly clear.

  As for Duckie’s hair, I again had my ideas in the run-up to filming.

  “Give me a pompadour . . .” I told the hairstylist.

  “You bet,” he said.

  “. . . with a weird little ponytail!”

  “Huh?”

  Hey, the guy tried. Although I had enough hair back then for the pomp, I did not have enough for the extra appendage. We tried tying one on, but it just looked too weird. (And for Duckie, that was saying something.) So we just went with the pomp, which I want to say took a fair amount of work every day, between teasing my very fine hair into a properly bulbous ridge, then spraying it into place. My rough estimate is that two tanker trucks of spray were depleted throughout the course of the shoot on Duckie’s look alone. I was just not used to spending a lot of time in a hair-and-makeup chair, and it has ever since given me new appreciation for the hours actresses spend in them on shoots, sometimes just to look as if they haven’t been in them at all. One thing about being in that chair that was exciting, however: The makeup artist was Tommy Cole, who had been a Mouseketeer in the 1950s. I thought that was unbelievably fucking wonderful, that I was getting made up by Tommy!