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

by Susannah Gora

  Against Jake’s wishes, Caroline invites hundreds of kids to party at his parents’ swanky house after the dance. From the first shot of the toilet-paper-covered trees on the lawn of the magnificent home, we know we’re in for quite a cinematic fiesta. “They filmed at night, and they’d bring in hundreds of empty beer cans and distribute them over our lawn,” remembers Jeffrey Lampert. “They’d take pictures of how the beer cans were, remove the cans for the daytime, and then replace the cans and put them exactly in the same places the next night.”

  The house that stood in for Jake Ryan’s, located at 1407 Waverly, in Highland Park, was a sixteen-thousand-square-foot lakefront home that boasted twenty-two rooms. The mansion was physically large, to be sure, but it represented, perhaps, something even bigger. For the house John Hughes had grown up in, in nearby Northbrook, was a far cry from chez Ryan. Northbrook was where you would find houses “like the house that Molly’s family lived in” in the movie, says Carol Lampert, who along with her husband, Jeffrey, owned and lived in the house that stood in for the Ryans’. Jake’s house, on the other hand, was located in a glitteringly wealthy suburb right on Lake Michigan. Sixteen Candles, says Carol Lampert, “was based on experiences Hughes had had when he was in high school in the area, so he was really looking for a house that fulfilled that dream.” When Hughes first came to see the Lamperts’ opulent home, they had a hole in their ceiling due to a leak. Jeffrey Lampert assured Hughes that the hole would be patched up by the time filming began, but Hughes said, as Lampert recalls, “Leave it just the way it is; I’m gonna use it in the movie.”

  And he did. In the course of the raucous party at Jake’s parents’ house, the aforementioned exercise machine goes crashing through that hole in the ceiling, lending the film one of its great comedic climaxes. Also during that party scene, Caroline’s blond hair gets trapped in a slammed door (“I remember being stuck in that door for a long time,” says Morris), and she’s freed only after a girlfriend, egged on by a pal played by Jami Gertz, snips off a huge chunk of Caroline’s lustrous locks. At party’s end, Jake befriends The Geek as a way to learn more about Samantha—who, amazingly, has become Jake’s new love object. No longer interested in his cheerleader girlfriend, he asks The Geek to drive Caroline home in his father’s Rolls-Royce. Fifteen-year-old Anthony Michael Hall “was sweating bullets” during the scene, remembers Jeffrey Lampert. “Our garage doors were very narrow, and he was so scared pulling that car out. The Rolls belonged to the father of a friend of John Hughes. The concept is scary.”

  At the end of the night (and the movie), Caroline and The Geek wake up in each other’s arms, wondering if they actually had sex the night before. Reflecting on it now, Morris says, “I can’t think that he would really go through with it.” While trying to piece together their evening of possible carnal delights, Caroline and The Geek share a passionate kiss. Hall’s mother happened to be visiting the set that day. “I start walking up to where they were shooting,” Mercedes Hall recalls, “and all of a sudden Michael says, ‘Wait a minute, stop. It’s hard enough filming my first on-screen kiss, and now my mom’s gonna be here to witness it?!’” But lovely as Morris was, Hall had a bit of a crush on another of his costars that summer. “Molly was creative and artistic, someone who had a lot of interests,” he has said of his feelings while making the film. “I was sprung, I was into her. I thought she was hot.”

  On the set of Sixteen Candles, Hughes’s uncanny familiarity with the teenage soul helped him in myriad ways when directing his young cast. “He connected with those kids like he was one of them,” says Glynn of Hughes and his cast members. “He was very in tune with what kids needed, like the boom box blaring in the vehicle taking you to the set at four a.m. He understood that that’s what kids wanted. He was just totally on their level, totally ‘got’ them.” Hughes filmed his scenes from a teenager’s perspective emotionally, and often also physically. Many of the angles were shot from below, as if from a teen’s point of view of the world. Says Michelle Manning of Hughes, “It’s like he channeled teenagers.”

  And one person in particular, Molly Ringwald, inspired Hughes to channel his own inner teenager. Although Candles’s protagonist is female, Samantha Baker is nonetheless a passionate, misunderstood teen and thus, “really a portrait of myself,” Hughes once told writer Eve Babitz. Hughes was chummy with his entire young cast, but his relationship with Ringwald was strikingly intense. To the casual observer, Hughes and Ringwald wouldn’t seem to have much in common in that summer of 1983. He was a rather plain-looking thirtysomething Midwestern man; she was a gamine, alluring, red-haired fifteen-year-old California girl. And yet the two were drawn together by a powerful force. “I felt like he really got me,” says Ringwald. “I felt completely understood.”

  Ringwald had a strong hold over Hughes before they even met—even back when all she was to him was a face in an eight-by-ten photo hanging above him as he wrote a screenplay for her. To paraphrase a line from Hughes’s Breakfast Club script, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions, Molly was his muse. And during filming, she became enthralled by him as well. “John and I really had a special connection,” says Ringwald. They were each born on February 18, eighteen years apart (1968 in her case, 1950 in his). “It really felt like we just understood each other,” says Ringwald, a little dreamily. “At some point it was sort of a little bit eerie. We were so in synch that we would finish each other’s sentences.” Their powerful connection led to a rich artistic union. “He trusted me completely with his material,” she says. Time film critic Richard Corliss would later note that “Hughes wrote his scripts for [Ringwald], tailored the characters to her precocious range of emotions, found in her the focal point for his films.” And wisely, “he didn’t treat her like a child,” says Glynn. “He treated her like his star.” Manning describes Hughes and Ringwald’s relationship in familial terms: “He adored her and she adored him. A part of it was older brother/younger sister, sometimes father/daughter…He had two sons, and in a weird way she was the third kid, the daughter.”

  Although elements of their relationship seemed familial, there were other, subtle tones to Ringwald and Hughes’s connection that made their union seem as close as one between a married adult director and his nubile young starlet could comfortably get. “I had a mad crush on him,” admits Ringwald. “Without a doubt. It’s pretty heady stuff to have somebody who is so inspired by you that they are writing movies [for you], and studios are doing them.”

  It helped that Ringwald was wise beyond her years. She was witty, intellectual, cultured, poised. Manning remembers Hughes saying to Ringwald, “You’re far more intelligent than this character, you’re way more graceful than this character, but you need to go back to being a teenager.” Ringwald and Hughes had many things in common, including their shared love of film and music, which would lead to intellectually stimulating discussions on those subjects.

  “He was inspired by me,” says Ringwald of Hughes, “and I was, in turn, inspired by him. And it was great. I felt a bit that it was like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton.” She thinks about it for a moment, and adds, with bittersweetness in her voice, “I don’t think that I’ve worked with someone before, or since, who I felt understood my strengths as well as John. I just don’t know if I am ever going to find the same thing with anyone else.”

  As intelligent and poised as she was, Ringwald was, after all, still a kid—one who worried about the algebra tests given by her on-set tutor, and who couldn’t drive a car. At fifteen, she had the artistic triumph of an entire film resting on her delicate, freckled shoulders. Universal Pictures, then the hottest studio in Hollywood, had entrusted a film to a new director, who, in turn, had put a virtually unknown teenager in a high-pressure position: “She had to carry this movie,” says Glynn. At times, it may have been a bit too much for Ringwald to take. “Don’t forget she was going through the turbulent teenage years,” says Jackie Burch. Perhaps because so much was expected of her at such a
young age, Ringwald may have had some prima donna moments. Someone who was on set remembers her once asking, “Do you know who I am?!” Says Glynn, “I don’t remember her being very happy. I remember her being almost sullen, kind of uncommunicative. But at sixteen, who isn’t?”

  There is indeed, an inescapable distance and brooding in Ringwald’s performance. Whether it came from backstage tension, great acting, or a combination of the two, it gave the sardonic character real depth. Ringwald’s on-screen mother posits that Hughes may have intended her performance to have been that way all along. “The camera reads her inner thoughts very well, so whatever was going on with her worked for the movie,” says Glynn. “He knew the rightness of Molly for that part.”

  And if anything, her occasional moments of sullen behavior might only have made the often-moody Hughes value Ringwald more. Wrote a philosophical Hughes in an essay appearing in the journal Zoetrope: All-Story, “I understood that the dark side of my middle-class, middle-American, suburban life was not drugs, paganism, or perversion. It was disappointment. There were no gnawing insects beneath the grass. Only dirt. I also knew that trapped inside every defeat is a small victory, and inside that small victory is the Great Defeat.” Yes, if Ringwald was brooding, Hughes would’ve found it appealing, endearing—and yet another thing they had in common.

  But ultimately what Hughes treasured most about Ringwald, more than their shared love of music and film, more than the stimulating conversation, was her dramatic talent. Ringwald breathed life into his words; she was the living incarnation of his artistic vision. “I think he had real love for her,” says actor Jon Cryer. “I think he had a crush on her, and on her talent as well, and saw her talent as a vehicle to portray his own adolescent vulnerability. She was,” says Cryer, “the vehicle for showing a side of him that he never really showed in school.”

  Hughes also had something of a boy muse on the set of Sixteen Candles. He and Anthony Michael Hall connected mainly over their shared sense of humor. Looking back to what a typical day was like on the set of Sixteen Candles, Hall says, “I remember the joy of making John laugh.” Adds Morris, “They would crack each other up all day long. On that set, they were the same age, and they were instant soul mates.”

  Anthony Michael Hall was blessed with extraordinary comic gifts, and cast and crew would watch in amazement as he riffed and improv’d on themes with the prowess of a comedian twice his age. “It was like watching a wunderkind,” says Manning. Gedde Watanabe remembers watching Hall work, and thinking, “Where is all this coming from?” Partially, it may have come from a desire to amuse Hughes, and from the fact that the director brought out the very best in Hall as a performer. “I am telling you, [Hall] became brilliant because of John,” says Burch. Hall could take a simple line and deliver it with impeccable comic timing and panache. In no instance was this truer than when he uttered The Geek’s famous plea to Samantha, “Can I borrow your underpants for ten minutes?”

  “He cut me loose,” Hall says of Hughes. “He saw my talent. If you stripped the script and everything away, he allowed me to be myself. I was that funny, skinny fifteen-year-old kid who wanted to get laid. Something was captured with the camera, like a photograph.”

  But Hall and Hughes weren’t the only ones cracking up while making Sixteen Candles: “We just laughed our way through the summer,” remembers Morris. By all accounts, this was an environment of excitement, camaraderie, buoyancy, and joy. Of all the teen films she would make, Ringwald says, “I had the most fun on Sixteen Candles.”

  Off set, there was plenty of fun to be had as well. “We were all staying at the Skokie Hilton, with the green shag carpeting,” muses Manning. “On Saturdays, for fun, Michael [Hall] decided we would crash the bar mitzvahs that were going on at the hotel. No one was of age to drink, nobody did drink—they were all kids—so that was our big fun activity, crashing bar mitzvahs at the Skokie Hilton every Saturday.” And then there was the time cast and crew threw a party for Hall’s sixteenth birthday at the ever-classy restaurant Chuck E. Cheese. (Hughes gave Hall a bass guitar as a birthday present.) But ironically, the actor who played B.M.O.C. Jake Ryan was usually absent from any after-hours revelry. Says Morris, “I remember Michael Schoeffling really just wanted to be in his room on the phone with his girlfriend,” model Valerie Robinson, who later became his wife.

  In the movie’s penultimate scene, Jake rushes to the church where Sam’s sister is getting married, and waits for Samantha in the parking lot, his warm brown eyes shining. Sam, decked out in her poufy, frilly lavender bridesmaid dress, catches him staring at her, and in utter disbelief (a disbelief shared by those in the audience), mouths to him, “Me?!” Jake grins, and mouths back, “Yeah, you.” When we consider all that Samantha has been through over the course of the film—the forgotten birthday, the humiliation of having her sexual-experience survey discovered by Jake Ryan, the agony of having her panties ogled by nerds—the following scene, the final one in the movie, is particularly rewarding. Jake and Sam slowly kiss atop his family’s dining room table later that night, lit by the glow of candles on the birthday cake he’s gotten for her.

  Homeowner Carol Lampert got to sample the confection. “I have to tell you it was the most delicious cake I have ever tasted,” she says. “There were dozens of them in our butler’s pantry. It was kind of a spicy flavor.” But of the now-famous scene, she says, “They weren’t supposed to film in the dining room.” And indeed, adds her husband, “they scratched the heck out of the table.” But all’s well that ends well. Universal replaced the Lamperts’ dining table, and twenty years later, Jeffrey Lampert was able to buy his wife a Hallmark greeting card featuring the now-iconic image of Ringwald and Schoeffling atop the table that was once theirs.

  During shooting, two of the films Hughes had written earlier, Mr. Mom and National Lampoon’s Vacation (featuring Anthony Michael Hall), came out within a week of each other, in late July of 1983. Hughes fretted about their release, but he had no reason to worry; both movies were hits, grossing approximately $65 and $61 million, respectively. “It was my first feature,” says producer Lauren Shuler Donner of Mr. Mom. Years earlier, she had been reading a clever piece in National Lampoon about a father taking care of his kids, rather cluelessly, while their mother was away. It was written by John Hughes. Donner had phoned him, and the two soon became friends and collaborators. Of Mr. Mom, says Donner, “The reviewers tried to outdo each other with who could give the worst review. And it was a huge hit. It bought me a house!” (It also introduced into the lexicon a lasting term for the househusband who became more common with the rise of women executives in the early 1980s.)

  With his name attached to two of the biggest comedies of the summer, Hughes could feel more confident about his next project. Toward the end of filming Candles, he asked his two young stars, Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall, to read his script about Saturday detention. So natural was the chemistry between the director and his two actors that working together again seemed like a foregone conclusion: “One day he just said we’d be doing The Breakfast Club,” Hall remembers fondly. “I knew that he was bestowing a great gift on my life.”

  With shooting on Candles wrapped, Hughes and his editor, the late Edward Warschilka, began the long and arduous process of editing the hours and hours of film into one cohesive story. Even in the two years since Fast Times, the attention span of young people had shrunk. The impact of the rapid-cutting editing techniques of music videos required some particular consideration in the editing booths. “There was so much great stuff,” says Manning, that it was difficult to “cut it to the length that would fit the attention span of the generation that it was made for.” Among the scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor: shots of Sam’s sister and new brother-in-law on vacation (the filmmakers colored the sand along Lake Michigan to make it look like the Caribbean), and a sequence in which Long Duk Dong performs a rap at the school dance in the gym. “It went something like, ‘I like Coca-Cola, lady skat
e roller, rock ’n’ rolla,” says Gedde Watanabe. “Somehow, I sneak behind the podium in the gym,” and once he starts busting a rhyme, “I get everybody dancing. I was really disappointed that they didn’t use it.”

  Sixteen Candles hit theaters on May 4, 1984. The PG film suffered the indignity of losing its opening weekend battle to the painfully cheesy breakdancing flick Breakin’. On a budget of approximately $6.5 million, Candles would go on to gross over $23 million domestically—certainly profitable compared with cost, but only a modest success, when one considers other films that appealed to young people. (The year before, the steamy Tom Cruise movie Risky Business had made $63 million.) But Sixteen Candles made its mark in ways that had nothing to do with dollars and cents. Its mix of broad comedy with fairy-tale passion and poignancy was something totally new in a youth film, and was, to audiences and many critics, irresistible. “There’s nothing clichéd about her performance in that film,” says critic Leonard Maltin of Ringwald. “There’s a wistfulness that seems absolutely genuine.”

  With characters as full and fleshed-out as Ringwald’s lips, the film was a surprise critical darling. Roger Ebert wrote, “It doesn’t hate its characters or condescend to them, the way a lot of teenage movies do; instead, it goes for human comedy and finds it in the everyday lives of the kids in its story.” Sixteen Candles’s success came as something of a surprise, even to the people behind the film. “We had a no-name director,” says Jackie Burch, “and Molly Ringwald was not that big of a star. It was just the material. Everybody thought the script was charming. I don’t think anybody thought it was going to have the impact that it did.”

  Of the film, Michael Joseph Gross would later write in the New York Times, “I had loved movies, but I had never seen on-screen something that looked so nearly like my life. When I put on my headgear that night before bed, I remember thinking I would never be the same.” Neither would Hollywood.