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

by Susannah Gora

  Judd Nelson, then twenty-five, had first impressed Hughes, Burch, and producer Michael Chinich when he auditioned for them in New York, but it was his next audition, in Los Angeles, that would make all the difference. Nelson inhabited the physicality of Bender in a startlingly powerful way, showing up to that audition in “pretty much the clothes the character ends up wearing,” as Nelson recalls. He remembers Hughes saying to him, “I really like that look.” Nelson had put a lot of effort into getting his character’s image just right—down to the shoes on Bender’s feet. “They were basic motorcycle boots,” says Nelson, “and they had no laces. How do you break in a pair of motorcycle boots like that?” he asks playfully. “You put them in a bathtub, throw a quart of motor oil around the sides of them, and just leave them there for a day. Clean ’em up, and there you go,” he explains, grinning. “Motor oil is the best.”

  Judd Nelson made an indelible mark on Ally Sheedy before his actual audition began. “We were upstairs,” says Sheedy of herself, Ringwald, Hall, and Estevez. “We had all gotten cast except for Judd’s part. We were walking up to go to the office, and he was actually outside the building, hitting a ball against the wall. He is very graceful and beautiful,” says Sheedy, “and he is very dark. Not just in the way he looks, in the way he is. He has this complicated thing.” While throwing the tennis ball against a wall, waiting to be called into the audition room, Nelson was listening to music on his Walkman, the music Bender would listen to, and he had the volume pumped as loud as it would go. “I was listening to the Sex Pistols’s ‘Holiday in the Sun,’” remembers Nelson. “There was this little outdoor area where I am waiting to go in and read. I have a tennis ball and I am throwing it against the wall, with this thing blasting about as loud as it can go. Minding my own business. I get this tap—someone tells me, ‘You gotta calm down.’” Interestingly, this interference actually helped Nelson get even more in touch with Bender’s anger. “I go, ‘What?!’” remembers Nelson. “He says, ‘You’re throwing this ball too loud,’ and I go, ‘WHAT?!’ And I walk around a bit, and smoke a cigarette.” By the time Nelson walked into the audition room, he had completely inhabited Bender. “He was acting like he was that guy,” remembers Manning.

  Nelson recalls his first impressions of the audition space: “It was not very big, but there were a lot of people in this room. There are five stools, and I sit down on this one stool and the four other actors”—Estevez, Sheedy, Ringwald and Hall—“are there, playing the roles.” Nelson took the Walkman off his head and threw it onto the floor, leaving the sound on. With the angry echoes of Johnny Rotten still blaring tinnily through the headphones, he began his audition. Remembers Sheedy, “I was really kind of dazzled by him. He is so unpredictable. He did not stick to anything John wrote in the audition. He stayed with it, and then he went off on his own riff. He went all over the place, and John loved it.”

  Offscreen, Nelson’s personal history was about as far from the character of Bender’s as you could get. Whereas Bender was from a poor, abusive family, Judd Asher Nelson was born November 28, 1959, in Portland, Maine, the son of an attorney, Leonard Nelson, and attorney and Maine state assemblywoman Merle Nelson, both Harvard alums. Growing up, he attended the tony New England prep school St. Paul’s, where he “had to wear a coat and tie at dinner four nights a week,” and then Haverford College, where he was a philosophy major.

  “Judd came from a very well known family,” says Joel Schumacher. The Nelsons have participated in religious, community, and social activism issues in their state: Merle is a lauded political trailblazer with a prestigious community service award named after her, and Leonard Nelson, who served as the first Jewish president of the Portland Symphony Orchestra, worked to fight anti-Semitism throughout the area by calling out local organizations that restricted Jewish members. In the book Maine’s Jewish Heritage, historians Abraham and Jean Peck commended the elder Nelson for his “leadership role in representing the Jewish community in the cultural life of Maine.”

  After leaving Haverford, Nelson pursued acting full time, studying with famed drama teacher Stella Adler and landing costarring roles in his first two movies—the teen comedy Making the Grade, and the Steven Spielberg–produced coming-of-age dramedy Fandango, opposite Kevin Costner—before being considered for the role of Bender.

  Judd Nelson’s then-manager/girlfriend Loree Rodkin believes his background growing up in a strong, close-knit family helped him in many ways as an adult. “Because he had a good upbringing, he wasn’t really intimidated by anything,” says Rodkin. “He could walk into any room and just command it. He was charming, open, funny, smart. Everyone loved Judd.”

  And on the day Nelson auditioned for The Breakfast Club, one very important person loved him: casting director Jackie Burch. “Judd was strikingly offbeat,” she says, “which is what I thought was great for the part.” With his dark hair and sensual features, Nelson presented an alluring alternative to the conventional, cookie-cutter handsomeness so often favored by Hollywood. “I love his looks,” says Burch. Ally Sheedy remembers Breakfast’s editor, the legendary Dede Allen (arguably the most important female film editor of all time; her credits include Bonnie and Clyde), talking to her about Nelson. “One day Dede said that Judd was so beautiful, that he reminded her of a young Al Pacino,” and not just his looks, but “his body language, the way he moved, everything.” (Allen would know; she edited Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico.) “Dede really got it with him.” And despite Nelson’s preppy background, he had an inherent intensity that shone through. At one point the character Nelson would immortalize on-screen tells Molly Ringwald’s character, “Sweets, you couldn’t ignore me if you tried,” and the same could be said of Nelson, who would bring such magnetism to the role. “He was your natural rebel,” explains Burch, “whereas these other kids [who auditioned] would have had to play the rebel. You couldn’t take a chance. You needed James Dean.” Burch championed Nelson. She believed in him, believed in the energy he would bring to the mix. “I kept saying, ‘It’s Judd, it’s Judd, it’s Judd,’” remembers Burch, “and then finally, John [Hughes] saw it, too.”

  While casting, Burch had a board on which she would post photos of the actors as she cast them in their roles. “I am a very visual person,” she explains, “and I remember I had all four people up on the board, and I was waiting for that fifth ingredient. And when I put Judd’s picture up there, I knew I had my Breakfast Club.”

  As essential as each individual actor was, it was the chemistry of the group that mattered most of all. And the group’s chemistry was electric. “They were wonderful together,” said Tanen. “Molly had this feeling of sadness—beautiful and sad—a great combo. Nelson was the Bogart of his era, the anti-hero hero. Emilio was strong. Ally Sheedy was just—wow. And Anthony Michael Hall was, at that moment, the perfect kid for that role: the pain, the humor, the vulnerability.”

  Though the five young stars were by far the most essential casting choices, there were two adult supporting roles that were also pivotal to the dramatic structure of the film. The movie’s detention would be overseen by the spiteful Principal Vernon, played by the late actor Paul Gleason. (The character’s name was an homage to the actor Richard Vernon, who appeared in A Hard Day’s Night alongside Hughes’s much-loved Beatles.) Nelson’s and Gleason’s characters were on-screen nemeses, but offscreen the pair got along well. “I loved hating him,” Nelson says, smiling. “May he rest in peace.”

  The detention would also occasionally be interrupted by visits from the school’s omniscient janitor, Carl. Originally, Rick Moranis, then a major comedy star, was cast in the role, and he wanted to play Carl for laughs, as a Ukrainian with gold teeth, an odd hat, and a heavy accent. Actor John Kapelos, who’d worked with Hughes in Sixteen Candles, says, “Rick sort of played the character with a huge wad of keys between his legs, sort of an SCTV type of Russian character. John would say to him, ‘Well, but did you read the script?’” The portrayal would have seemed a
irlifted in from another movie.

  Hughes had written Carl the Janitor as a semi-tragic character who, years before, had been a big-man-on-campus student leader at the very high school where he now cleans toilets. Of course, this backstory didn’t exactly mesh with the whole Ukrainian thing Moranis had devised, but Moranis told Hughes that was how he wanted to play it, and Hughes, to his great artistic credit, fired Moranis, who would have been a big name in a cast of relative unknowns, just to keep the integrity of the storyline.

  John Kapelos, who remembers Hughes all but promising him the role of Carl the Janitor while filming Sixteen Candles, was upset to read in the trades that Moranis had been hired. But then, says Kapelos, “I got a call from my agent saying, ‘Listen, it wasn’t working out with Rick, and could you come to Chicago to do this part?’” Kapelos recalls Hughes telling him what he truly wanted for the role: “He said to me, ‘The guy went to this school. He was once part of this culture.’ And that was enough for me to work on.”

  In stark contrast to the broad comedic brush Moranis wanted to paint Carl with, Kapelos’s resignedly defeated Carl—smirking through a restrained sadness—added a poignant darkness to the film, and also perhaps served as a bit of dramatic foreshadowing. “I think it was just a subtle little piece of shading,” says Kapelos, “to say, maybe that’s what Judd Nelson’s character’s going to be ten years from now.”

  Production on Breakfast began in the early spring of 1984, again in the suburbs of Chicago. “After Sixteen Candles,” says producer Bruce Berman, shooting in that locale “was just a foregone conclusion—you do it in Chicago because that’s where John works best.” The filmmakers found the perfect shooting location, in an empty high school called Maine North, in Des Plaines, Illinois. The modern-looking high school opened in 1970 in what was planned to be a suburban development, “and I guess they thought the suburbs would reach up to it or something,” said Tanen. When the school’s enrollment didn’t rise to expected levels, Maine North was shut down a scant eleven years after it opened. The empty building was “this big, weird, concrete, gigantic high school,” recalls R. P. Cohen, Breakfast’s first assistant director. “We were renting it for twenty-five-thousand dollars a week,” remembered Tanen, and because it had been a real, functioning high school, “it had everything in it.”

  Hughes knew he wanted his detention to take place in a library, but Maine North’s existing library was far too small. “So we went into the gym,” says Cohen, and built the library set right there, in the large, double-story area that had been the high school’s gymnasium. Discarded books from the Chicago Public Library filled the newly built shelves of the impressive library set, and a modern, abstract sculpture, inspired by a sculpture in the lobby of Universal’s offices, was placed in the center of the room. “It almost fell over one day,” remembers the film’s cinematographer, Thomas Del Ruth. “It was braced heavily from the back, which we had to be careful not to show.” The sculpture would give the actors a lot to work with physically. Judd Nelson, as Bender, would be seen climbing upon it angrily after a hurtful confrontation with the other students, and Ally Sheedy, as Allison, would throw cold cuts upon it in a now-iconic shot from the film’s lunch-eating scene.

  Working within the limits of one space would prove uniquely challenging. It was a risk: How do you shoot a feature-length film in one room without losing the audience’s attention, especially if all that happens in that one room is basically a lot of talking? And how do you do so in a movie where, thanks to the detention setting, “boredom is so much part of the dynamic of the film,” as R. P. Cohen points out. “It’s difficult to portray that boredom without getting the audience bored.” Says Nelson, “There weren’t any car chases. We were pretty much just in one room talking. Hughes knew that was going to be a risk—is that going to be interesting to people?”

  One day, Hughes revealed to Nelson his inspiration for the setting of Breakfast: “Hughes told me he got the idea for it from seeing Breaker Morant, an Australian movie about the Boer War. It primarily takes place in the courtroom. He was fascinated that it held his interest, and so he wrote The Breakfast Club.”

  The gamble paid off—the drama of Breakfast was, in fact, only intensified because of its confined setting. Working in one space had, at times, a noticeable effect on cast and crew: “There was a cabin fever aspect to it,” says Manning. “When we’d break, you’d see Michael [Hall] and Molly on a blanket having their lunch under a tree, because you wanted to be outside. It got to be a bit claustrophobic.” It was all meant to capture what the film’s cinematographer, Thomas Del Ruth, calls “depressive incarceration.” Just like their on-screen counterparts, the actors “really were kind of stuck inside a school,” says Hall, “and I think that opened up the whole process.”

  Richly drawn characters sitting around in one room, talking intensely for two hours—The Breakfast Club seemed, at times, less like a film and more like another art form. “Basically, The Breakfast Club is a play as a movie,” says exec Bruce Berman. (“That’s why I liked it,” says Nelson.) Hughes required his actors to be on set to provide reactions, regardless of whether they were in a particular scene, as if it were indeed a stage production.

  And as with a play, The Breakfast Club had extensive rehearsal time—three weeks—a luxury virtually unheard of nowadays. “It was magnificent,” muses Nelson. The ability to flesh out characters beforehand added a rich emotional authenticity to the performances when it came time to film. Anthony Michael Hall attributes much of the film’s dramatic power to those three weeks. “We rehearsed it like a play,” he says, “just sitting together, and we just read the script every day. We’d read it, take a break for lunch, come back and work on it some more. Everybody cared about everyone’s character. Everyone would talk about everything, and be the audience for each other. It was a great thing that I’ll take with me as I direct in the future. It just unlocked so much, like a team practice, or a family praying together.”

  As with on Sixteen Candles, Hughes relied heavily on his young actors’ input, so much so that at one point in the Breakfast rehearsal process, he let the cast make suggestions that would drastically change the movie. “He really trusted me a great deal,” says Ringwald. “The Breakfast Club had gone through a lot of different scripts, and by the time we were actually going to shoot, it had changed significantly from the original script that I read.” Hughes asked Ringwald if she was excited to begin filming Breakfast, and she remembers replying, “Yeah, but you know, the script is really different.” After Ringwald reminded Hughes that the script had gone through so many changes over the course of its development, “he responded by getting all of the drafts…and bringing them into the rehearsal space,” says Ringwald, “just this huge stack, and everybody kind of went through them, going, oh my God, this is amazing.” As Judd Nelson remembers, “Hughes was talking to me and Emilio, and he told us he had written the first draft in his room in, like, three days, listening to music.” Which prompted Estevez and Nelson to ask their director, “So you have other drafts of this? Can we read those?” Soon enough, Nelson and Estevez were poring over earlier versions of the script, unearthing hidden gems of dialogue and plot development.

  Two scenes that ended up becoming some of the more memorable in the movie—the explanation for Andy’s detention, and Bender’s erotic taunt to Ringwald (“Calvins rolled up in a ball in the front seat, past eleven on a school night”)—were elements that Estevez and Nelson found buried in earlier drafts of the script, and urged Hughes to film. “Hughes was like, ‘Let’s try it,’” remembers Nelson. “Hughes was so open. He was a reasonably inexperienced guy, but he knew all these things, like, how does trying something hurt?” He loved it, for example, when Nelson suggested that Bender tell a joke while sneaking through the air-conditioning vents.

  During a memorable part of the extensive rehearsal process, Hughes arranged for Hall, Ringwald, Estevez, Nelson, and Sheedy to spend time hanging out at the high school he had attended, Gle
nbrook North. He hoped this exercise would prepare his cast to play regular Midwestern teens. Nelson laughs remembering it all. “Emilio’s cover was blown because he was recognizable from The Outsiders, which had come out. Ally was a little bit known from WarGames, but she had cut her hair, so she looked different enough. Sixteen Candles hadn’t come out yet—Molly had done Tempest, but that’s not a movie that these kids would’ve necessarily seen,” Nelson points out. “The movies I had done, Making the Grade and Fandango, hadn’t come out yet. So I could be whoever I wanted to.” Nelson relished the experience, learning all he could about the world of these suburban kids. “They had these two halls: Jock Hall and Freak Hall,” he remembers, smiling. “I chose Freak Hall, of course.” Nelson, as Bender, went to classes and walked the halls and, fittingly, after getting into a disagreement with a hall monitor who didn’t recognize him, was taken to the principal’s office.

  The experience was less amusing for Ally Sheedy. “I felt like I just wanted to be invisible when we were there,” she recalls. “It didn’t bring back good memories, because I wasn’t happy in high school.” She felt the exercise was “more for the three of us who had already graduated from high school”—for her, Estevez, and Nelson. “I think,” she says, “it was mostly to get the feeling of how horrible it really is—to make that fresh again.”

  That aside, Hughes could sense that preproduction was going well—the energy was there, and at a certain point, he knew it made sense to cut the rehearsal short so as to capture that energy on film. “Things were starting to happen,” remembers Nelson, “and he just said, ‘Let’s go.’”