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

by Susannah Gora

  Through sheer determination, relentlessness, and raw talent, John Hughes had made the leap from writing jokes in his boyhood bedroom to succeeding in the world of advertising to becoming a part of the industry that had mesmerized him his whole life. He was now officially in the movie business.

  Hollywood’s new emphasis on youth entertainment only increased in the years after Animal House’s success. Theatergoers were offered a wide array of movies having to do with young people, from the farcical and stupid (such as 1982’s Porky’s, a paean to raunchiness that made Animal House seem like Citizen Kane in comparison and became the highest-grossing comedy of that year) to the innocuous (Meatballs) to adult movies about young people (Breaking Away, Diner). But one film stood out as truly groundbreaking: 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, directed by twenty-eight-year-old Amy Heckerling and penned by a young Rolling Stone writer named Cameron Crowe, based on a book by the same name that Crowe had written while spending a year posing as a student at a San Diego high school. Crowe, who had skipped some grades in school, was himself barely out of his teens when he wrote the script. Fast Times would, in many ways, open the door for the youth films John Hughes and his contemporaries would make in the mid- and late 1980s, by proving early on that youth audiences of that decade were hungering for entertainment that was amusing but that still took their struggles seriously.

  Sure, Fast Times had a relaxed vibe, thanks to its Southern Californian setting, shots of kids hanging out in pools, and Sean Penn’s inimitable stoner-surfer dude Jeff Spicoli. But it was also, says Heckerling, “completely realistic, based on Cameron Crowe’s journalistic look and honest reporting of what was going on.” Unlike the teens of movies past, the Fast Times kids had real problems that weren’t entirely played for laughs or melodrama—from the mundane (dealing with lousy bosses at their mall jobs) to the heavy (Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character loses her virginity and eventually has an abortion). “I wanted to show kids who actually had problems that were bigger than what a kid could handle,” says Heckerling. “To me, that’s what Fast Times—the title Cameron had given it—meant. The times are too fast for the maturity these people have. And that meant something to me.”

  As hot as youth-centered entertainment was becoming, says Cameron Crowe, “the big studios had no formula for how a movie about young people from a young person’s point of view would work.” Crowe recalls the difficulties Fast Times faced during development: “The thing that they used to say when we were trying to get Fast Times done was that nobody is going to come see this, because kids don’t see movies about themselves—if you have a hit movie about youth or high school, it has to be nostalgic, like American Graffiti. That was the thing they used to say—that you need the nostalgic element of the old Beach Boys songs so that Dad can dig it, too,” Crowe says bemusedly.

  Fast Times’s budget was around $5 million—chump change for Universal—and because the suits were preoccupied with bigger projects, the young filmmakers were given a sort of accidentally acquired artistic freedom that resulted in a startlingly real, fresh movie. “It was a fly-under-the-radar routine,” says Heckerling. In that period Universal execs were consumed with the day-to-day work of making The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, “a very expensive movie with big stars in it, and it took some watching,” says Heckerling of the Burt Reynolds–Dolly Parton musical. “To them,” says Crowe, “that was, like, the movie they should be making. And we were just this thing that should’ve been on TV, but was too nasty for TV.”

  When Fast Times hit theaters in August 1982, a young woman barely out of USC Film School named Michelle Manning was working as the production supervisor on her boss Francis Ford Coppola’s latest project, The Outsiders. The dramatic film, based on an S. E. Hinton novel, starred Matt Dillon and then-unknowns Ralph Macchio, Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, C. Thomas Howell, and Patrick Swayze as a gang of troubled 1950s teens who survive their hardscrabble lives through their powerful friendships, and serve as each other’s substitute family. The Outsiders script offered many meaty roles for young people, something that felt new and different. Remembers Rob Lowe, “All of us were trying to be actors in a time where the only hope you had of working in the acting business was to play someone’s son, or to be the fifth lead.”

  Michelle Manning was catching a ride back to L.A. on the Warner Bros. jet from an early test screening of The Outsiders in her home state of Arizona when she overheard two Warner executives, Mark Canton and Lucy Fisher, in a heated conversation. They were discussing the fact that Jeff Berg, an uberpowerful agent, had a spec script that Canton and Fisher weren’t going to do because, as Manning recalls, the script’s writer, who had never directed before, was demanding to direct the film himself. Soon afterward, Manning was interviewing for a job working for Ned Tanen, the entertainment industry legend who had worked at MCA/Universal for nearly three decades, and had taken Universal to record-setting financial success when he held the top post there. Tanen was stepping down to focus on what he loved most, pure moviemaking, and was starting up his own production company, Channel Productions. Manning was interviewing to work for him there.

  Tanen was, in many ways, the man responsible for the youthquake taking over Hollywood. After all, he was the executive who had greenlit and nurtured a troika of watershed youth movies: American Graffiti, Animal House, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Tanen was known and admired for giving young, first-time directors a shot, and for having a keen eye for new talent. So much so, that by the time the decade was over, he would have a hand in making the most culturally resonant movies about young people of the 1980s.

  Manning impressed Tanen during her job interview, and soon she was working for him at his new production company. Tanen asked Manning if she knew of any scripts, and keenly aware of Tanen’s penchant for working with first-time directors, she told him the anecdote from the plane about the script the Warner Bros. execs didn’t want. She couldn’t remember what the script was called, but she did remember that the writer was named John Hughes. Tanen told Manning to call Hughes’s agent, Jeff Berg. She did, and the script arrived later that day. It was called Sixteen Candles.

  The screenplay told the story of a teenager whose parents had forgotten her most important birthday yet. “I read it as soon as it came in,” says Manning. Upon finishing it, she thought, “This is unlike any of those other teen movies—it has a unique voice, it’s not pandering, it speaks to that generation in their language, and the dialogue is the way kids talk. It was just a great piece of writing.” Tanen also read the script, and was struck by a memory of something that had happened to him years earlier.

  While making Animal House in late 1977, he had met with a bunch of Lampoon writers. He was a top Hollywood executive, so naturally, as Tanen recalled, “all these writers from the Lampoon were trying to one-up each other. In the back of the room is this strange guy with horn-rim glasses and a crew cut, who doesn’t say much. The rest of them are being so over-the-top funny. Every once in a while, he says something, and he’s the one who’s like a laser beam cutting through all of it,” said Tanen. “Here was the guy who wasn’t shouting and screaming and trying to show you how witty he was, from Brown or Dartmouth…I kept looking at him, thinking, ‘Why does he get what none of the others seem to get?’” The guy in the back of the room was John Hughes, of course, and Tanen was intrigued. “I said, ‘If you ever decide to get in the business, call me.’”

  And so when Tanen read the script for Sixteen Candles five years later and fell in love with it, it was clear—he was going to change John Hughes’s life, just as he had changed the lives of so many other young artists hoping to become directors. In the years since the crew-cutted Hughes stood out from the other Lampoon writers, he’d gone on to become a screenwriter. In addition to National Lampoon’s Vacation, he had penned a film adaptation of The Joy of Sex. (His script was abandoned, however, when the film’s would-be star, John Belushi, died.) He had also written the script for Mr. Mom, a satire tappin
g into the increasingly enfeebled male of the early 1980s. Vacation and Mr. Mom would go on to become huge successes, but at that point, they hadn’t yet been released. The only Hughes-penned movie that had hit theaters was the Animal House follow-up, National Lampoon’s Class Reunion. So, by the time Hughes’s script for Sixteen Candles landed on Tanen’s desk, Hughes had gotten his feet wet in the filmmaking business, and to paraphrase the Tinseltown adage, what he really wanted to do was direct.

  Upon reading Sixteen Candles, Tanen told Michelle Manning, “Let’s fly this guy out here, and let’s get this movie made,” as Manning recalls. The film had been passed on by other studios, but Tanen, who had recently nurtured Amy Heckerling through her directorial debut with Fast Times, was willing to provide Hughes with the safety net he might need to make his first helming experience work. “We’ll surround you with people that will help you make your directorial debut,” Manning recalls Tanen telling Hughes.

  The prolific Hughes had also written another script—a pure drama—about five high-schoolers spending a day together in detention. A&M, a company known mainly for its work with music, was hoping to branch out into filmmaking, and had already agreed to produce the other script for very little money. Universal wanted to make both, but wanted to produce Sixteen Candles first. Candles’s lighter, comedic tone and slightly more formulaic premise made it a bit easier to swallow than the school detention script, which was set pretty much in one room, something that Tanen worried might be too great a challenge for a first-time director. “I thought we’d better start with something that is at least controllable,” Tanen said. “If you end up shooting the whole damn thing in [one room], God knows what it could end up being—a series of monologues. So we did Sixteen Candles [first].” The next project, The Breakfast Club, would have to wait.

  And so, with Sixteen Candles, thanks to Ned Tanen, John Hughes was given his first shot at directing a movie. Hollywood had taught Hughes invaluable lessons about youth films over the preceding decades, and now, carrying inside him the rich, emotionally layered memories of his own formative teen years in that quiet Chicago suburb where he’d dreamed of so much more, he was ready to begin work on his directorial debut. When considering the casting of Samantha Baker, Sixteen Candles’s lead character, Hughes knew exactly which actress he wanted in the role—after all, he’d been staring at a photo of her face the whole time he wrote the script. “He wanted,” says Molly Ringwald, “to meet the girl who was in the picture.”

  chapter two

  ETERNAL FLAME

  Sixteen Candles Lights Up the Screen

  On a day in 1983 that would change both of their lives, John Hughes flew from Chicago to California to meet Molly Ringwald, and to talk to her about playing the lead role in Sixteen Candles. The precocious teen actress had recently received glowing praise and a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in the acclaimed film Tempest, whereas Hughes was a virtual unknown who’d yet to helm a film. But when Molly Ringwald got the script for Candles, she remembers “immediately loving it.” She didn’t have her driver’s license yet, and “was still being driven around,” Ringwald recalls. “I was in the backseat of my parents’ car, reading it out loud to them.” She was still a baby in the industry, but already she was savvy enough to know, even then, that this script was special. “It was so funny, and fun to read,” Ringwald says, “and so different from anything else that I’d been given at the time.”

  Different, indeed. The script for Sixteen Candles made clear that a comedic and light teenage film could also contain within it an examination of the deeper contours of adolescent life. This was a different kind of teen flick, and fittingly, Molly Ringwald was different from any other young actor. She was pretty, to be sure, but hers was not a typical Hollywood prettiness. To look at Ringwald was to be presented with a compelling, unique combination: ivory-colored skin, transfixing brown eyes, a pronounced jaw, full lips, and softly waving copper-colored hair. In an age where teenage boys drifted off to sleep staring at posters of the picture-perfect blonde Christie Brinkley, Ringwald offered something else entirely: a thinking man’s (or boy’s) version of beauty. “She was offbeat, interesting looking,” says Sixteen Candles casting director Jackie Burch. Ringwald’s different beauty also meant that teenage girls, so often insecure about their own looks, wouldn’t be intimidated by her.

  But her appeal, of course, was more than skin deep. “Molly had depth,” says Burch. Indeed, Ringwald could convey more feelings with one arch of an eyebrow than most teen actors could in an entire movie. And something in Ringwald’s round, dewy eyes invited you to dive with her into the turbulent sea of emotions that is teenhood. When Ned Tanen first encountered Ringwald, he recalled, “I thought immediately, that’s one of the prettiest and saddest girls I’ve ever seen. She was captivating.”

  The daughter of Bob Ringwald, an accomplished jazz musician and radio host who is blind, and Adele Ringwald, a homemaker, Molly Kathleen Ringwald was born on February 18, 1968, in the Sacramento, California, suburb of Roseville. She was a natural performer, belting out torch songs when she was barely old enough to talk. At the tender age of six, Ringwald recorded I Wanna Be Loved By You: Molly Sings, an album on which she sang jazz standards. Roles in local theater led to a part in the Los Angeles production of Annie and small parts in television shows. At eleven, she was cast as one of the schoolgirls in the Diff’rent Strokes spinoff, The Facts of Life. Yet while the show would have a long, successful run, Ringwald was among the cast members cut at the end of the first season. Ringwald persevered, though, and broke out from the ranks of workaday tween actors when acclaimed film director Paul Mazursky offered her a key role in his drama Tempest, playing the bright child of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes. When the film was released in 1982, what was striking about Ringwald’s performance was how natural she was on-screen, a rare quality to find in any actor, particularly in a young thesp (teen actors can be prone to overacting; see any cereal commercial for evidence of this). In Tempest, Ringwald somehow delivered her lines with the accurate cadence of everyday life, but also gave them an intriguing dramatic undercurrent. She was a director’s dream because of this duality. Ringwald could seem like a real kid, while still possessing a compelling theatrical quality that demanded an audience pay attention to her. She was blessed with, in the words of The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, “a charismatic normality.”

  In Sixteen Candles, the story that John Hughes crafted for her, Ringwald would star as Samantha Baker, a charmingly ordinary Everygirl whose family is so wrapped up prepping for her ditzy older sister’s wedding that they completely forget her sixteenth birthday. (This actually happened to a friend of Hughes.) Sam’s embarrassing grandparents—including a grandmother who feels her up and exclaims, “She’s gotten her boobies!”—have descended on her family’s home for the wedding weekend, along with an Asian exchange student named Long Duk Dong. The socially awkward Sam is hopelessly in love with a popular senior in her high school, the dreamy Jake Ryan, while a gangly jokester known simply as “The Geek” lusts after her. But by story’s end, Sam wins the heart of Jake Ryan. In a Hollywood ending, it turns out that the most popular boy in school is also kind and sensitive—in other words, he has a heart worth winning.

  Ringwald’s life as a teen was quite different from that of Samantha Baker, but she could still connect with many contours of Sam’s existence. “There were elements to it that were like me,” says Ringwald. “I did relate to that feeling of not belonging. I felt a little bit different at school and a little excluded, and I got a little bit bullied because of what I did.” It’s hard to imagine a kid being picked on for being a successful actor, but as Ringwald points out, “in middle school, anything that makes you different is just brutal.” Once Ringwald agreed to portray Samantha Baker (she didn’t even have to audition for the part), the filmmakers could forge ahead with casting the other roles.

  The next essential element in the mix was the actor who would play the character kno
wn as “The Geek,” or, sometimes, “Farmer Ted.” The Geek is a freshman with the hots for sophomore Samantha. (“She has smallish tits. Decent voice. Smells pretty good,” he says of Baker. “She drives me crazy.”) At the end of the audition process, it was down to two actors: Eric Gurry, whom casting director Jackie Burch remembers as being “the hot kid at the time” from his role as Al Pacino’s son in 1982’s Author! Author!, and a skinny, metal-mouthed, strawberry blond boy named Anthony Michael Hall. “I remember going in and auditioning at the Universal building on Fifty-seventh Street,” says Hall. He “came in very shy, very quiet,” remembers Burch, “and Eric Gurry came in like a ball-buster. I would say ninety percent of the room was leaning for Eric Gurry.” But Burch was fighting for Hall, because she thought “there was something so special about him.” Hall had another advantage: he was already familiar with Hughes’s writing style, having played Chevy Chase’s son in National Lampoon’s Vacation.