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Simon & Schuster announced a first printing of five thousand copies of Less Than Zero, expecting to sell maybe half that amount. In the spring of 1985, I honestly didn’t care how many copies it sold—I was just amazed the book even got published, that something I’d been working on for five years was going to be an actual hardcover sold in real bookstores. In the long ago Empire of America it took much longer than it does now not only for a novel to catch on with what was then a more substantial reading public, but also for actual books to make it into actual bookstores, which was where we all went to buy a book. We might spend an hour there, browsing the aisles, a favorite pastime of mine that’s now just about impossible to replicate, so many of us having been lured away from brick-and-mortar shops by the ease of Amazon, and their promise to deliver a copy to our mailbox the day the book is officially published. This wasn’t the case in May 1985, when a first novel by a writer nobody had ever heard of left a warehouse and was slowly made available through the rest of the country over the summer and even into the fall. And it wasn’t until October that the book appeared on The New York Times best-seller list. Though hardly a blockbuster, it sold well for a first novel and it was a genuine word-of-mouth success, since Simon & Schuster had initially budgeted no money to promote and advertise it.
But the media, almost immediately, grew curious and began writing about both the book and its author, and—for whatever reason—Less Than Zero soon started to connect with a large and youthful audience that saw itself mirrored in its attitude and sensibility. The novel seemed to confirm something for many people, as if it were a news bulletin from the front lines—this is what kids are like today!—rather than a highly personal novel that I’d been working on, in one form or another, since I was sixteen. But when I finally finished it, at twenty, the book ultimately did feel like a reflection of where we were in the moment and not just an autobiographical story—the narrator was always both me and not me. Or perhaps the real appeal was the spell it cast for readers thousands of miles away from Southern California: What would it really be like to live in this Beverly Hills fantasy that they felt was so cool? This was often, I found out in fan letters, the takeaway for young readers in Indiana, in the UK, in New Delhi.
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Our tour guide through Less Than Zero is handsome and pale Clay—eighteen, passive, druggy, bi. A boy profoundly disconnected from just about everyone: his family; his girlfriend, Blair; and his friends, among them Julian, who turns tricks with older men in order to pay off a drug debt. There’s no real plot until the last quarter of the book; the story’s told in fragments, a mosaic, and the details keep adding up with, hopefully, a quiet menace. There’s no love, and no real friendship: money, teenage sex and easy access to drugs open the door to a kind of gleaming nihilism. “Disappear Here” the book keeps insisting, quoting a billboard on Sunset Boulevard that haunts Clay. Part of the book’s appeal to young readers could be that they’d never been presented quite like this in contemporary American fiction before: as sophisticated teenagers who aped the attitudes of their materialistic and narcissistic boomer parents. But Less Than Zero doesn’t blame the parents. And in fact it’s still rare for a young person’s novel to feature kids who are just as bad as their parents, if not even worse. Most of those parents are demonized, but the parents in Less Than Zero are rarely on display at all. It’s kids left to their own devices who have tripped themselves into this world of too much money, too many drugs and too much entitlement who become their own worst enemies. The novel also reflects a numbness that was pervasive in the culture, particularly in Los Angeles, when I started writing it in 1980—a numbness that was thrilling and yet also contrary to reflexive understanding, to genuine feeling as well.
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The movie rights were optioned before publication by an independent producer named Marvin Worth (Lenny, The Rose), who had a deal with 20th Century Fox, the studio that would be financing the movie. The purchase on their end was sponsored by Scott Rudin and Larry Mark, who were the vice presidents of production under Barry Diller, who, at that time, was the studio’s chairman—and all three of them wanted this movie to happen. The first script was written by the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Michael Cristofer, but Fox thought it was too harsh for a “commercial” film and already we’d reached a divide between the novel and the adaptation. Why buy the rights to Less Than Zero if you weren’t going to accept the spirit of the book? Since the novel had quickly become a touchstone for young people, maybe the studio could roll the dice and make some money by adapting faithfully what was already a well-known title. But we were never talking about a sure thing—unlike The Fault in Our Stars, Less Than Zero hadn’t sold eighteen million copies—and this was never going to be a family-friendly enterprise. If Fox wanted to make an honest re-creation of the book they would have to go all the way, because a compromised version was never going to work: it wouldn’t be the thing readers had initially responded to, which was the cool numbness of it all.
Fox brought in Jon Avnet, who had successfully produced Risky Business, a big hit featuring upper-middle-class teenagers that made Tom Cruise a star, but Avnet considered the Michael Cristofer script “depressing and degrading” and you began to wonder if Avnet had ever read the book, because he now wanted to “transform a very extreme situation into a sentimental story about warmth, caring and tenderness in an atmosphere hostile to those kinds of emotions.” Larry Gordon, the president of Fox when the book was purchased, had been replaced by Leonard Goldberg, who, unlike the other players at the studio, was a family man, and he found the material distasteful, but Barry Diller persisted and wanted the movie made. Everyone just needed to get on the same page and figure out how to do it. The screenwriter Harley Peyton was hired to write a new script where Clay’s bisexuality and drug use were eliminated in a narrative that no longer presented him as passive and “amoral,” and yet executives at the studio still worried that it was too edgy a proposition for even eight million dollars, which wasn’t a lot of money for a studio film in the 1980s. But they believed, however, that they’d found the right director: Marek Kanievska, a Brit who was hired because he’d dealt with ambivalent sexuality before and had made “unlikable” characters appealing in his film Another Country, which featured Rupert Everett in a role loosely based on Guy Burgess, the famous—and gay—spy.
So shooting commenced, but ultimately Fox took the movie away from Kanievska because, according to people on set, he kept making it edgier and straying too dangerously close in spirit to the source material. The cinematographer Edward Lachman later recalled that the studio hated his incredible Steadicam shot of the (then unknown) Red Hot Chili Peppers performing at a club, because the band was “shirtless and sweaty,” and Fox demanded that the shot be removed. Early test-screening audiences between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one revealed that they hated the Robert Downey Jr. character, so new scenes were shot to make his character more “likable” and “repentant”—that was the studio’s word: “repentant.” The lavish high-school graduation sequence that opens the movie was part of the reshoots, and it now contained a lot of smiling and good vibes along with champagne bottles being popped.
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Because of all this panic and wrangling, something’s off in the finished product: it doesn’t work dramatically. In the opening, pre-credit sequence there are already strained plot devices that begin to engulf the movie: expressions of intense emotion from the main characters that aren’t in the book, a push for everyone to be likable. Clay and Julian and Blair are now a team, happily graduating from high school on a sunny day and looking forward to the summer and beyond. In flashbacks, Clay recalls these events from his chic dorm room somewhere on the East Coast, and it seems that he and Julian are best friends, and Blair is his main squeeze. Julian has stayed in LA to pursue a career as a record producer-slash-club
promoter, and Blair wants to concentrate on her modeling career rather than go to college. (In the book Blair attends the University of Southern California.) In the movie, during Clay’s first term away, Julian becomes impossibly addicted to drugs, and he and Blair end up sleeping together. Clay discovers this when he returns to LA at Thanksgiving break for a surprise visit, only to find the two of them in bed in Blair’s beautiful downtown loft. And so, a love triangle’s set up. A conventional narrative structure has been imposed upon a book where narrative is nonexistent, and this now needs to resolve itself, because the movie—even before the opening credits roll—has set this particular storyline in motion.
Clay is now upstanding: antidrug, resolutely heterosexual and prone to chastising everyone for his or her behavior, the ultimate Jewish mother. The Clay from the book who doesn’t care about anything or pretends not to is now the uptight center of the movie. This choice straitjackets a panicked-looking Andrew McCarthy, who had already become a go-to guy for Gen-X stoicism and moral despair, and his presence here is a drag, wholesome and preppy and whitewashed. (My first choice for Clay had been Anthony Michael Hall, which the studio rejected as they did my first choice for director, Walter Hill.) Downey tries hard to make Julian, the novel’s unreachable nihilist, lost and lovable, and the book’s smart-spoiled tough girl Blair, who knows all this is a total mess and a scam, becomes the super-jittery and helpless Jami Gertz, teary-eyed and earnest and completely miscast. The supposed “heat” between McCarthy and Gertz (which isn’t in the book) is especially iffy, even though they are constantly making out and have to simulate sex twice. There’s even a scene in which McCarthy has to fake an orgasm when Gertz gives him a hand job in his vintage convertible Corvette spinning wheelies on Rodeo Drive, as a biker gang zooms by. The credit sequence, with neon-red block lettering and the Bangles cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter” blasting over it, still feels somewhat iconic, but watching Clay smile in recognition at familiar landmarks (the Hard Rock Cafe, and, oddly enough, the Beverly Hills boutique Giorgio) once he’s back in LA for Christmas break, craning his neck out of the cab to get a better look, is flatly bizarre, because he’d been here just three weeks earlier yet seems to have little trepidation about returning to a city where he grew up and is now problematic in troublesome new ways since he discovered his best friend and girlfriend are an item—happily taking in these sights makes no sense. None of this is drawn from the novel, where I don’t think there’s a single scene when Julian and Blair are even in the same room together.
Edward Lachman ends up being the key creative artist in Less Than Zero—the film is gorgeously lit and shot. Visually, the movie’s often stunningly beautiful, accentuating massive open spaces that suggest the loneliness of LA, and the sets are spectacular: there’s an over-the-top Beverly Hills Christmas party complete with fake snow and hundreds of extras (Brad Pitt is one of them), and fake icebergs dotted with video monitors and giant Christmas trees dusted white, all of which propose that this is ostensibly a movie about cocaine, and its grandeur might remind you that this kind of movie will never be made again on such a lavish scale. As an artifact from that era it’s unparalleled: no other youth-culture movie set in LA has such an epic look, certainly compared to Valley Girl or Fast Times at Ridgemont High (both better movies by the way). And yet it doesn’t work because it betrays the source material and takes the punk nihilism that influenced the novel and squeezes it into a big, teen-friendly, mainstream studio movie—about “friendship” with way too much smiling: tearful smiling, sexy smiling, happy and sad smiling—which creates an incredibly lopsided experience. The movie’s earnestness and yearning to be likable and relatable is what ultimately kills it.
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A week before the movie’s release, and just a few days before I was planning to see it screened at Fox’s offices in Manhattan, Marek Kanievska called to say he needed to see me. We hadn’t met but I was close friends with a woman who’d had an affair with him during postproduction and told me about the problems Marek was having with the studio, so I had some ideas about the difficulties he’d had. Marek wanted to meet at six o’clock at Nell’s, a popular nightclub that I was frequenting then, though I doubted that Nell’s was open that early but it turned out to be, sort of. Only Marek and his date were sitting in a booth in the otherwise dark and deserted space, and I realized that the club had been opened for him—a friend of the Brit Pack that owned and operated Nell’s—and also that I’d never been there much earlier than midnight. I also realized I hadn’t heard anything specific about the movie itself because having graduated from college only a year earlier, I’d just recently moved to New York and was working on a new novel and more interested in other things. I’d only skimmed the Michael Cristofer script but I’d never read the Harley Peyton draft.
When I sat down Marek was slumped over in the booth, already drunk. My initial smile froze as he started talking: “I’m so so sorry for how the movie turned out. I tried my best, I fought the battles, I lost. I’m so so sorry.” And because of this, I was prepared later that week when I watched the movie in a packed screening room where I’d invited friends, people from MTV, the VJs of the moment, several actors I knew. It didn’t take very long to tell something was wrong, and for my excitement of seeing my fictional world visualized to quickly fade. As the movie crept to an end, it dawned on me that there hadn’t been a single scene or line of dialogue in the movie that was taken from the book. Marek Kanievska didn’t direct another film for thirteen years. Oddly enough, that one—Where the Money Is, starring Paul Newman—and American Psycho opened the same week in 2000, and American Psycho beat it at the box office.
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In an unpublished forward to his 1964 autobiography, Charlie Chaplin wrote, “In this record I shall tell only what I want to tell, for there is a line of demarcation between oneself and the public. There are some things which if divulged to the public, I would have nothing left to hold body and soul together, and my personality would disappear like the waters of the rivers that flow into the sea.” I thought about this quote recently, after having Judd Nelson on a podcast I hosted infrequently starting in the fall of 2013 and into the late spring of 2017, because it seemed like the perfect summation of something I’d detected with a number of actors I’d talked with on that PodcastOne show. I hadn’t seen Judd in nearly twenty-five years when I invited him to participate, ostensibly to discuss The Breakfast Club on its thirtieth anniversary but actually because I remember him back in those days as intelligent and outspoken and completely realistic about Hollywood; in particular, he’d told hilarious stories about the troubled production of St. Elmo’s Fire. In real life he was closer to a male version of Molly Ringwald’s Claire Standish, and if that sounds prim and unattractive, it wasn’t. This was the private Judd I’d spent time with at the height of his brief fame, and when I greeted him, now in his midfifties, at the podcast studio in Beverly Hills, I wasn’t surprised that he seemed to have mellowed out. But the private person I had expected to shine on the podcast never really showed up in front of the microphone.
The frazzled and funny Judd still existed, but not necessarily in public. In the studio when I asked how tricky the St. Elmo’s Fire shoot had really been, he hesitated and answered diplomatically even though it had taken place more than thirty years earlier and everyone’s career had by now come and gone, and I realized then that he was putting on a performance—wanting to be liked, wanting to sell himself—and anything that sounded critical or negative wasn’t going to help his cause. The only criticism he volunteered that hour, in fact, was directed at the journalist who had trashed him in that New York magazine piece about the Brat Pack. Yet after the podcast, while we were standing around the parking garage of PodcastOne, Judd started regaling me and my producer with those stories about making St. Elmo’s Fire. I interrupted him to ask why he hadn’t talked about any of this on the show where I had prodded him gently a
nd then less gently but then stopped when it became obvious he simply wasn’t willing to go there. When we scheduled his appearance I’d assured Judd this wasn’t a shock-jock podcast and we weren’t hunting for or addicted to controversy, but afterward he explained that he wasn’t in the business of telling tales out of school.
There in the garage, I asked who exactly might be offended: St. Elmo’s Fire’s somewhat flamboyant director, Joel Schumacher? Or was it Jo-elle Shoo-ma-Shay, as I remembered some cast members called him when we were hanging out together in the summer of 1985? Weren’t the stories of drugs and Demi Moore already out there—was this really a problem? But Judd considered these sorts of truths negatively. There were other topics we hadn’t hit during that hour though, and he agreed to come back and record some stuff that we could edit into the episode before we posted it. I emailed him later that day inviting him back, offering him a few dates when the studio was free, but only if he was going to be more honest and transparent. Otherwise, what would be the point? I wrote this in a semi-joking, bro-to-bro tone, but I haven’t heard back from Judd since, and he lives not far up the street from me. My naïveté in expecting him to seize this incredible opportunity was part of an ongoing narrative experienced with other actors I interviewed on the podcast, and this left me feeling, as usual, foolish and lost. But that was my problem, of course.
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