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

by Susannah Gora

  When shooting began, the days took on a certain rhythm. The cast would get up in the morning and meet downstairs in the lobby of the Westin O’Hare, where many members of the cast and crew stayed during production. A van would take the actors together to the set each morning. “Molly and I were listening to [British singer-songwriter] Joan Armatrading a lot,” remembers Sheedy, “and we would play that on the boom box in the van. I’m pretty sure Judd didn’t want to hear it, so he had headphones on. And we would get to the set; our little [dressing] rooms were school offices. You would get in your costume, you would go down to the set, and everybody would sit down where they would sit, read it the way they would read it, and just go with it.”

  Hughes knew to take advantage of the moments on the shoot in which things didn’t go exactly as planned. One of the movie’s more memorable scenes, a bit of physical comedy involving Estevez, happened by accident, and it in turn brought about another well-known image: Sheedy flopping her face down on a table, hiding under the hood of her coat. “The thing with the screw and the door, that just happened,” says Sheedy, referring to the comical instance in which Estevez’s character slips while trying to prop a door open with a heavy magazine rack. “The trouble Emilio had moving that thing, the way the door slammed when it did, it really happened. I couldn’t get through that scene with a straight face,” says Sheedy, and her brooding character “was not supposed to be laughing. So I just hid behind my hood. I was shaking in my shoulders from laughter, and I could not look at Michael [Hall], Judd, or Emilio, because I would lose it. Molly was totally able to stay focused on it, but I couldn’t. Michael was right across the aisle from me, and I could not look at him for one second. I ruined a couple takes, and then I decided I was just going to stay on the desk with the hood on me.”

  Hughes was smart enough to know that the more time he took to shoot a scene (and the more film stock used), the more chances his actors would have to create something magical. “I just remember looking at the big, fifteen-hundred-foot film magazine on the camera,” says Nelson, “and looking at Anthony Michael Hall when [his character is] getting stoned, and it’s like, he’s just going and going and going. And after a while, Michael would stop,” says Nelson, but only because “we would hear a ‘click, click, click,’ which meant the magazine had run out of film.” There were so many times like this on the Breakfast shoot. Remembers Manning of Hughes, “He would never say, ‘Cut.’ ‘Cut’ was when the film would run out.” It cost time, and it cost money, but ultimately, giving the actors this kind of freedom paid off in the veritas of their performances. “Hughes wanted it to sound real,” says Nelson, “and to sound true.”

  “John did make that character,” says Sheedy of Allison, “and then he gave me a lot of room. I had a voice in what she looked like, the physical movements, all that stuff just came extremely naturally to me. I really identified with that character. There was nothing in that character that was not what I already had. And I loved being able to put how I felt on the inside onto the outside.” Sheedy was responsible for many of Allison’s physical attributes, including her trademark eye-shielding bangs. “I was positive Allison should have hair she could hide behind. There had been some talk about cutting my hair short and jagged,” says Sheedy, “so it would feel kind of punk, but then I told [Hughes] I hid behind my hair in high school all the time, and I still do.” Hughes used that idea, and considered another of her suggestions as well. In the scene where the group eat their lunch, Sheedy’s zany character removes the meat from her sandwich and replaces it with puffed corn cereal, which she then chomps so loudly that it echoes across the library. “I asked him if, instead of everything being soft in [the sandwich], if we could put Cap’n Crunch in it, because that is an angry sound. You know, you eat that crunchy stuff when you are pissed off—at least I do—because it is satisfying, and you can make a big noise.” Hughes, of course, said yes.

  A powerful scene in The Breakfast Club changed the way many Gen Xers think about female sexuality. In the charged discussion sequence in which the recluse Allison (Sheedy) is trying to get the princess Claire (Ringwald) to reveal if she’s ever “done it,” Allison says, “It’s kind of a double-edged sword, isn’t it? If you say you haven’t, you’re a prude. And if you say you have, you’re a slut. It’s a trap. You want to but you can’t, and when you do, you wish you didn’t, right?” The Breakfast Club was obviously not the first time this sexual Catch-22 was highlighted—it’s been referred to as The Madonna-Whore complex in grown-up circles for quite some time. But this was the first time the idea was addressed so directly in a teen movie. “The history of eighties virginity can be broken into two eras—pre–Breakfast Club and post–Breakfast Club,” writes Julianna Baggott in her essay “A Slut or a Prude: The Breakfast Club as Feminist Primer.” “Because that’s when the truth was first spoken—the prude/slut trap, the double-edged sword of our fragile sexuality.”

  Although Hughes was close with all of his young cast members, it seemed at times that he was using Anthony Michael Hall, whom he’d cast as the insightful, writerly outsider, as his on-screen avatar—a celluloid representation of his own adolescent self. So closely did Hughes associate with the Hall role that he portrayed Hall’s father in a brief cameo at the end of the movie. “I think it’s probably fair to say that I was a muse of sorts for him,” says Hall.

  The two, who had discovered a shared sense of humor on Candles, would spend weekends during the Breakfast shoot hanging out. Hughes would teach Hall about filmmaking by showing him old Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy videos. “I can tell you this, all that stuff in Home Alone”—the sequence in which Macaulay Culkin outwits the thieves by ensnaring them in elaborate traps inspired by the pratfalls and physical comedy of old films—“that entire sequence, comes from what John Hughes would do on the weekends: he watched Laurel and Hardy movies,” says Hall. Hughes also enriched Hall’s knowledge of how moviemaking works by letting him in on his methods as a director. “He would share his thoughts about what he was doing, and how he put things together,” says Hall. “He was very open. There was a transparency to his process, which was so cool.”

  So deeply did Hughes believe in Hall that he cast him in his next movie, a sci-fi teen comedy, while shooting Breakfast. “He came in one day [during filming] and said, ‘I wrote thirty pages of this thing—it’s going to be you and this other guy, and you’re gonna make a girl with a computer.’ It was Weird Science,” says Hall, “and he had written thirty pages of it after coming home after shooting all day on The Breakfast Club. I was blown away.”

  Hughes and Ringwald had enjoyed an extraordinary kinship on the set of Sixteen Candles, but on Breakfast Club they grew even more deeply connected. Manning remembers that on the set of Breakfast, Ringwald and Hughes “were almost inseparable. Really, by then, they were finishing each other’s sentences.” Thinking back on it, Ringwald agrees that the set of Breakfast marked the apex of her relationship with Hughes. She says, thoughtfully, “I think we were probably the closest that we ever were.”

  On the set of Breakfast it was clear the director was deeply emotionally connected not just to his young stars, but also to the material. This wasn’t just a job to him. Hughes felt those characters in his bones—he knew their fears, their embarrassments, their tentative sense of hope. Says Sheedy, Hughes was “magically in touch with the emotional life, or the emotional math, of all of his characters—not just one, all of them.”

  Director Howard Deutch remembers what it was like to watch Hughes write. “Sometimes tears would come into his eyes. And then he’d start laughing. And I’d ask, ‘What’s so funny?’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, I convinced myself that she was sad, but she’s not really sad.’” It’s only too appropriate that Hughes would be crying one minute and laughing the next while writing a script, for his screenplays possessed an alluring combination of humor and drama that was virtually unheard of in youth films. “He gives you a laugh, and he gives you a cry,” says film critic Eric
Hynes, “but it’s all part of the same thing. Hughes understood that that’s how life works, that this is what it’s like to be human.”

  So connected was Hughes to his young cast and his young characters that it seemed at times as if he were going for a “do-over” (as they say in high-school volleyball) of his own teenhood. Of Hughes, mused Time’s Richard Corliss, “Who wouldn’t grab the chance to remake one’s adolescence?”

  The Breakfast story was filled with elements from Hughes’s own teenage years. For example, Principal Vernon was based on a particularly hated wrestling coach of his from high school. Says Jon Cryer, “I think all writers try to fix in their writing that which was wrong with their youth. It’s like sometimes that’s the only place you can fix things.”

  It should come as no surprise, then, that on the set of The Breakfast Club, Hughes was pretty much just another kid, sporting spiky hair, high-top basketball shoes, and a Peter Pan–esque aversion to grown-ups. Mary Stuart Masterson, who would work with Hughes soon after Breakfast, in 1987’s Some Kind of Wonderful, remembers that his office was “filled with candy dispensers,” and was decorated in “Hanna-Barbera colors, aqua and gray and pink—very bright, and he had music going all the time.” On the set of Breakfast, he could be seen running with his cast members through the hallways or blasting tunes in the makeup room. Says Dan Aykroyd, who also worked with Hughes in that era, “He was, psychically, one of those kids he wrote about.”

  This ability to truly relate to his young actors allowed Hughes exposure to their genuine feelings, personalities, and worldviews. It was an all-access VIP pass into young America’s psyche. And every time Hughes shared something with one of his young stars—be it an anti-adult attitude, a favorite British pop song, or a preferred brand of sneaker—he was enriching the quality that ultimately made him matter as a director.

  Because Hughes had his finger on the pulse of young America, it’s only fitting that the cross-section of personalities inhabiting the library in The Breakfast Club represented what was happening in the lives of many real-life teenagers across the country in the 1980s. Claire was a child of impending divorce; 1980s teens’ parents were getting divorced at an unprecedented rate. Allison was a lonely youth ignored by her parents; this was the era of latchkey kids, adolescents who came home to an empty house and often were their own primary caregivers. Brian was a teen considering suicide; 1980s teens killed themselves at a rate triple that of their 1950s counterparts. Because of national cultural shifts occurring throughout their adolescence, eighties teens were an often overlooked, undervalued, and misunderstood group—something that Hughes was sensitive enough to appreciate.

  Gen X teens often had it hard from the beginning of their lives. Americans born in the late 1960s and ’70s were the younger siblings and offspring of the demographic colossus that was the Baby Boom. And the Boomers were, to put it mildly, a tough act to follow. As Geoffrey Holtz wrote in his book Welcome to the Jungle: The Why Behind “Generation X,” “Born just after the magnificent baby boom, we are forever cast in the shadow of that pig-in-the-python that has dominated our nation’s attention, from its members’ sheer numbers as infants in the fifties, their vociferous social and political exploits in the sixties, their epic quests for self-fulfillment in the seventies, and their drive toward materialistic gain in the eighties. In the wake of this group, we have often had to fight to be noticed at all, let alone be judged by fair standards or to be understood.”

  As many great advances as the Boomers made, they also kind of sucked all the air out of the room, leaving Gen Xers feeling like an irrelevant group in comparison. The 1960s and ’70s teenagers changed the world—and all the 1980s teens had to do was live in it.

  The script of The Breakfast Club spoke so well to this forgotten generation because it featured characters, says cultural historian Neal Gabler, “whose problems aren’t with the direction of the country. Their problems aren’t poverty. Their problems aren’t Vietnam. Their problems are the eternal adolescent struggle, of who am I?” Remembered Ned Tanen, “There were no more campus revolutions, it was not even a return to normalcy but rather to absolute lethargy. And here was this huge population of young people who had no place to put their energy.”

  Hughes seemed to relate much more to these 1980s teens than he did even to members of his own Boomer generation. “Hughes simply took our side, the side of the Boomers’ children, against his own,” wrote the Canadian newspaper the National Post. “He saw that we had been thrust into a world like none before, wherein the existence of the family had been suddenly declared held hostage to whim.” (But creating smart entertainment for young people wasn’t just the sensitive thing to do; it also made great business sense, because teenagers had indeed become an increasingly powerful demographic around this time. Spurred on by the rise of two-income families and the fact that many kids held after-school jobs, teen spending skyrocketed between 1975 and 1985, even though the teen population shrank in those years.)

  “When those kids are being dropped off that day at detention in The Breakfast Club,” said Ned Tanen, “you get right to what this movie was about, and what this generation was about: middle-class suburban kids trying to keep it together.” Hughes knew from experience that there is a very real pain to be found in the hearts of the teenagers walking the high-school hallways across America. He knew it was there because he had felt it himself as a teen. “Hughes knew what he wanted to say to you,” says Breakfast’s first assistant director R. P. Cohen. “And in his own way, he was saying it to himself. Because there is an agony that the white kids of suburbia carry around with them that is very much their own.”

  Hughes was warm and spirited around his young cast—in sharp contrast to his interactions with adult colleagues. At times, it seemed he was merely shy around other grown-ups: “He was not a very outwardly social human being,” says Cohen. “[The crew] would never see him after work, never hung out with him. John used to run away and lock himself in his house.” But shyness was only part of the equation. “He was extremely difficult to deal with,” said Tanen. Hughes could be sullen, he could be unpleasant, he could be thin-skinned, often thinking that people had slighted him when they hadn’t intended to do him any harm. “John was big into firing people,” says Cohen. One of whom, very nearly, was Judd Nelson.

  The problems first arose, ironically, because Nelson was, if anything, too devoted to his craft. The former Stella Adler student was a Method actor, and stayed in character throughout the shoot, even when the camera was off. Considering the character John Bender’s angry, abrasive, provocative personality, this posed a certain challenge, and did not endear him to his coworkers. “This has to stop,” Manning remembers thinking. “At least when he was Method during the shooting, there was a script controlling him, there was a camera controlling him. But when we weren’t shooting and he was still wanting to be Bender, it was a little out of control.” Nelson had tremendous energy—it was what gave his performance such heat, but it also made him a bit hard to handle at times. “You could feel that he was always going to explode,” recalled Tanen. “The energy from him—just, boom. You could feel it on the set; you couldn’t ignore it. Judd was kind of where the action was.”

  Hughes, used to working with younger actors whom he could control more easily, and unaccustomed to directing a Method actor, wasn’t feeling the love. “He was used to the Molly Ringwalds and the Anthony Michael Halls,” says Jackie Burch. The strain between Nelson and Hughes was, at times, quite palpable. “Judd and Hughes really never got along,” said Tanen, “and Judd was a bit of that character: he wasn’t going to be pushed around. It wasn’t horrifying, we didn’t have to shut the movie down, but there were moments with the two of them. Because he didn’t back down from John.”

  To further inhabit his pugilistic character, Nelson was ad-libbing things that were meant to provoke Molly Ringwald. “I knew what he was doing, and it didn’t really bother me,” says Ringwald. “I am not a Method actor, but I could see
it was so clearly what he was doing that I think I was just sort of rolling my eyes.” Her director, however, did not share this view. “It really did upset John,” says Ringwald. “He was incredibly protective of me. And I think there were a couple of comments that Judd had made, sort of referencing my father’s blindness. And I think that was really what pushed John over the edge. I have never, ever seen him so angry. He was really irate.”

  Michelle Manning remembers sitting Nelson down and telling him, “You can be Bender when we’re shooting, but you can’t be Bender twenty-four hours a day.” Manning noted Nelson’s privileged upbringing and innate intellect when driving the point home to him. “I know who you really are,” she remembers telling him. “You’re an intelligent guy. So stop fucking around, and just act, and when you don’t have to [play Bender], be the smart, preppy boy that you really are.” Looking back on those days in which he was almost released from what would become his most iconic role, Judd Nelson says, “I know that they were concerned about me. I know they wanted me to ‘be less,’ but less what? Less everything, maybe. I took it to mean less everything.”

  His cast members jumped to Nelson’s defense. “I think,” says Ringwald, “it was only because everybody sort of rallied together—myself included—and pleaded with John not to fire him, that he didn’t fire him. I really wanted Judd in that part. There was nobody who got that character the way that he did.” Sheedy says, passionately, that if Nelson had been fired, “it would’ve wrecked the entire thing—wrecked it emotionally.” Although he wasn’t certain what exactly he had done wrong, Nelson tried to behave in a way that would appease the people he’d upset. “I am glad that I was smart enough to give [Hughes] what he wanted,” he says, “although I think I wasn’t sure I knew what he wanted.” Eventually tensions cooled, and Nelson was off the hook. “To everyone’s credit,” says Sheedy, “whoever it was, they just decided to switch tactics and leave him alone, and that’s fantastic. Because he adds an enormous element to the movie.” Indeed, Gene Siskel would later write, “Nelson is excellent in the film’s biggest role, effectively turning a boor into a tragic character.”