Schumacher first realized the yuppie theme could make for interesting filmmaking while shooting his earlier movie, D.C. Cab. “It was yuppie madness,” he says. “Georgetown seemed to me like an entire town of these upwardly mobile young people, with these university educations, and it was the period of time where you were coming out of college and you had to already be recruited by some company and have a twenty-five-year plan; you were wearing very expensive clothes, you were sort of pretending to be an adult.”
To portray the worldview of these young people with as much verisimilitude as possible, many elements of the St. Elmo’s script were culled from real events in the lives of the filmmakers. Unlike today, when many youth films’ scripts are created after months of focus group research, “it wasn’t, ‘let’s test-market it,’” says Kurlander. “It was, ‘this stuff is happening.’ There’s not a character in St Elmo’s that doesn’t have some correlation to my life, or Joel’s life, or somebody we knew’s life. A lot of the movie is very personal.” The band that Lowe’s character plays saxophone with was the real-life band of Mare Winningham’s brother. The film’s costume designer, Susan Becker, once said she “never thought she’d be so tired at twenty-two,” and this became Jules’s famously melodramatic line of exhaustion and emotional defeat. After getting his heart broken by a girl at Duke University, Kurlander tried to freeze himself to death in his dorm room. “Trying to freeze yourself to death in North Carolina is not the easiest thing to do,” Kurlander deadpans. That incident found its way to the page, and then to the screen, in the climactic scene where Jules tries to commit suicide by freezing herself to death in her apartment, windows wide open, curtains billowing cinematically about her now-empty home. (Jules lost all her possessions thanks to her drug habit.) Although Jules wears a thin T-shirt, “Demi wanted to do the scene naked,” says Kurlander. “We discussed what she should be wearing, and I remember the intensity of that.”
Jules’s suicide attempt is eventually thwarted by her six best friends when the whole gang descends upon her locked apartment bearing blowtorches to break down the windows and doors she has locked. Billy (Lowe) manages to make it inside, shut the windows, and wrap Jules in a blanket. Thus unfolds the film’s visually stunning scene in which Billy ignites a flame from the spray of an aerosol can while comforting Jules, who sits, shivering, devastated over the mess her life has become. “This smells to me like a little bit of self-created drama,” Billy tells her. “I should know. I’ve been starring in a few of my own. This isn’t real. You know what it is? It’s St. Elmo’s fire, the electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. The sailors would guide entire journeys by it. But the joke was on them—there was no fire. There wasn’t even a St. Elmo. They made it up, because they thought they needed it to keep them going when things got tough, just like you’re making up all of this. We’re all going through this.” That soaring, short-lived flame that Lowe sends out for one brilliant moment into the room is arguably the film’s most memorable shot; the flame was Lowe’s idea.
Lowe recalls, “When I came to the set, I saw it was cluttered with all of Demi’s character’s things: combs and clothes and furniture. And I saw the aerosol can, and I just sort of did it.” He says he was looking for a way to dramatize visually the theme at the heart of the film, “a burst of energy and beauty and youth and combustibility that is there for an instant, and then gone forever.”
Billy coming to Jules’s rescue is just one of the many ways in which the movie portrays friendship the way romantic films portray love—at its most sweeping, satisfying, cinematic best. The friendships in St. Elmo’s Fire are shown in a potent, beautiful way, in large part thanks to the comfortable ease of the group’s body language together: the casual looping of arms over shoulders; the shared, knowing grins; the kind of deep, throaty laughter one shares only with the truest friends. But just as you can’t easily fake romantic chemistry on-screen, the group’s chemistry as on-screen friends was based in the actors’ real-life dynamic together. “The camaraderie was real,” says Shuler Donner. “It really was. Everybody truly liked each other, and ended up close while we were filming. And it got to the screen.” Producer Michelle Manning put it simply: “Everybody did everything together—everything.”
Remembers Lowe, with warmth in his voice, “We were all the best of friends…We all really supported each other, and genuinely liked each other, and wanted the other to succeed.” He recalls good times shared, such as “the dinners that we would all host for each other, and for anyone else in our clique and group after filming, and on the weekends.” The actors were also going through a major life transition, not unlike the characters they were playing on-screen. “We were growing up together,” says Lowe. “It was clear at that point in a lot of our careers that we were coming into a time where we were going to have a lot more opportunities than we had ever had before. And it was helpful to have a peer group to share and navigate that with.” And just as the St. Elmo’s characters were finding newfound freedoms (like Winningham’s Wendy, who finally gets her own home and gleefully recounts the unexpected joy of making a sandwich in her very own kitchen), the actors were experiencing similar newfound independence offscreen. “I was new to being out with my buddies,” says Lowe, “and I was about to get my own place. Every scene that was in that movie, we were all living at that time.”
Andie MacDowell, who felt she was on the outside looking in on this group of pals, remembers, “They were all friends. There was that camaraderie and that chemistry among them. They were hanging out together and having a good time, and it was true, and honest.” Kurlander points out that the drinking cheer the guys bellow out together throughout the movie (“Ooga Ooga Booga!”) was something the male actors came up with when hanging out offscreen. “There were lots of laughs,” says Judd Nelson, affectionately.
The chemistry of the group as a whole was strengthened by the solid individual relationships within the clique. In particular, Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson, who played on-screen lovers, always had a deep connection as friends offscreen. “I felt it for him the minute I saw him bouncing a ball outside the Breakfast Club audition,” says Sheedy. “It was such easy chemistry. I think I have had that with one other man in all these years, only one. And I trusted Judd. I felt close with him. I was not going out with him—I never had anything going on like that with him—but it’s just one of those things that are made in heaven.” Of course, one cast relationship was not purely platonic: “Emilio and Demi did not hook up at the beginning of the movie,” says Kurlander, “it was over the course of the movie, and it became a real relationship. That wasn’t hooking up, that was love.” Although they never married, the two would eventually become engaged; and Estevez would later say of Moore, “I was deeply in love with her.” Of Estevez, Moore would tell Cosmopolitan, “[He] was definitely my first love” (a powerful statement considering she’d been married to someone else before dating Estevez).
A photograph that would become the image on one of the film’s main posters featured the entire cast sitting together on a bench outside the “St. Elmo’s Bar.” Some are smiling, some are relaxed, but the group looks deeply comfortable together—and seemingly in character. In fact, the poster image was a happy accident. The cast was sitting on the bench one day, waiting for the set to be lit behind them. Says Shuler Donner, “They all hung together; they were friends. And they were all just sitting there. I grabbed our still photographer and I said, ‘Shoot that.’” Knowing that the shot was candid, with the cast unaware they were being watched, the image takes on a new verity and tenderness, from Judd Nelson’s gentle slouch against Sheedy to Moore’s soft clasp of Estevez’s arm.
“We inadvertently made a film about how everybody has a group of people,” says Schumacher. “It’s your team, your gang, and no matter what it is in life, you all have this pledge that you are going to stay together, and nothing is ever going to split you up. But,” Schumacher adds, “it doesn’t work that way. Ultimately th
at’s what the movie turned out to be about: that you can’t stay friends forever.”
These sentiments would be captured powerfully on the film’s soundtrack (the first movie scored by the now-renowned uber music producer David Foster). The soundtrack would go on to become most famous for the exuberant pop song “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” sung and cowritten by John Parr. But the soundtrack also featured a song that went more to the theme of the inherent poignancy of evolving relationships: “Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire (For Just a Moment),” sung by Donny Gerard with Amy Holland. (It’s often referred to as “We Laughed Until We Had to Cry.”) This song, which enjoyed success in both its instrumental and vocal versions, featured a melody both uplifting and melancholy, and lyrics that captured the bittersweet swell of emotions surrounding the moments in life—a friendship, a romance, our own youth—that are precious, and gone too soon:
We were the best
I think we’ll ever be…
We had it all
For just a moment
Indeed, they did have it all, this group of young actors captured together in a photo hanging out on a bench casually enjoying one another’s company—they had it all, but for just a moment. For soon they would see their relationships with one another, and the courses of their young careers, change forever. It all started one night after shooting had wrapped, when, like so many nights after a long day of shooting, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, and Rob Lowe went to relax at L.A.’s Hard Rock Café. What made this night different, though, was that Emilio brought someone new out with him that evening: a writer for New York magazine. And once that happened, nothing would ever be the same again.
chapter five
BECOMING
“THE BRAT PACK”
A Magazine Writer Coins the Term That Permanently Labels Young Hollywood
Judd Nelson vividly remembers the first time he saw the June 10, 1985, New York magazine cover story by writer David Blum, with the large headline “HOLLYWOOD’S BRAT PACK” splashed above a photo of Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, and himself. “When I saw it,” says Nelson, with a mixture of sadness and finality in his voice, “I just knew, that’s it.”
He was, unfortunately, rather prescient. For the clever label that Blum came up with would taint Nelson, Estevez, Lowe, and the other actors included in the article, including Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, and Ally Sheedy, and many actors not even named in the article, such as Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall, throughout the course of their careers.
It all began innocently enough. Estevez, and Estevez alone, was to be profiled in a short, inside piece (not a cover story) for the magazine. Estevez was, after all, Martin Sheen’s son, and a hot, up-and-coming actor and director, so it would’ve made for an interesting short profile. “At the time,” says writer David Blum, “he was twenty-three, and he had just made a deal to write, direct, and star in his own movie—and since that was the same age that Orson Welles was when he made Citizen Kane,”—Welles was actually twenty-five—“I thought it was sort of funny and interesting to look at Emilio as the new Orson Welles.” A flattering comparison, to say the least, and Estevez granted Blum the kind of complete access reporters very rarely are given.
Estevez, who spent many a night at home working on scripts, was concerned about how he was going to be portrayed in the article. Says his friend Rob Lowe, “I remember vividly Emilio saying, ‘You know I have been doing this magazine story, it’s about me being a young writer and director. And I feel it’s been so serious, so about work, and I feel like I am just going to look like this dull, self-serious, sequestered guy. I thought it would be a good idea for the writer to go out and see that I can have some fun. So can you put some guys together and let’s all meet and show him a good time?’” Lowe obliged.
Not long after, Estevez and Blum were having lunch at the Hard Rock Café at L.A’s Beverly Center when, as Blum recalls, Estevez said to him, “You know, we come here at night a lot, too—maybe you’d want to come tonight? It’s going to be me and Rob Lowe and Judd Nelson and some other guys.” “Sure,” Blum replied.
It was an invitation that surely haunts Estevez to this day.
The group gathered that night at the Hard Rock Café with Blum and Estevez included Nelson, Lowe, Loree Rodkin (Nelson’s then manager and girlfriend), Michelle Manning, and Bright Lights, Big City author Jay McInerney, invited by Blum at Estevez’s urging. “Emilio is very open-hearted,” says Joel Schumacher, “and remember, everyone was very young, and he really included David Blum and let him into his private life.”
According to many of the people who were there that warm Thursday night, this was not a wild evening by any means—rather, it was a group of friends getting together for a few beers. “We were just all hanging out at the Hard Rock,” says Manning, “and playing pinball.” Rodkin remembers of the evening that “there were no crazy shenanigans,” and that the group was laughing, joking as friends do. “There was nothing serious, there was no arrogance going on,” says Rodkin. “It was just cute banter.”
There seemed, perhaps, no reason to have one’s guard up, either, because the media of 1985 was so different from how it is today. Back then, paparazzi weren’t the ubiquitous, invasive nuisance they’ve since become. Photographers mainly showed up at premieres and other industry events, where their presence would actually be appreciated. The entertainment news business was tiny compared with the mega-industry it has grown into. The more conventional entertainment journalists who did cover the ascent of Lowe, Estevez, and friends at the time tended to produce tame, relatively short pieces that focused more on the actors’ work than on their personal lives, and unlike today, the tabloids were but a handful of trashy publications that no one took too seriously. And so the minute details of the lives of these young actors were kept relatively private.
That night was one of countless happy evenings that the group of friends shared together in the heady time before Blum’s article came out. They were dear pals working together, with interesting directors, on projects that all of young Hollywood was dying just to audition for—and they were getting paid nicely to do what they loved, and would probably have done for free. Their careers, and indeed, their lives, lay stretched out before them, glittering with possibility. “Emilio and Demi were madly in love,” says Joel Schumacher, “and Emilio was already thinking of writing and directing. So that was ahead of him. And Demi,” Schumacher continues, “I thought with her looks and that voice and her talent, I knew we would hear from her—I just knew it. Ally was absolutely one of the most breathtaking human beings I had ever known. Her intelligence, her curiosity, her warmth. She had a fascination with film, and wanted to be very much a part of the filmmaking process. I thought Ally would go on to be not only a very important actress, but I thought she might also one day direct.”
Everywhere they turned, the world offered these young actors possibilities—of romance, of deep friendship, and of exciting, lucrative, meaningful careers beyond their wildest dreams. They were charmed kids living a charmed life, and it seemed like it would never end. And the group was in the sweet spot of fame: they were just well known enough to experience the first excitement of fans coming up for their autograph, yet not so famous as to have celebrity become a disability, the level of fame that prevents you from comfortably going to the supermarket or strolling down the street. It was, as Frank Sinatra (of that other famous gang of pals, the Rat Pack) would say, a very good year.
As Lowe had alluded to, the characters they portrayed on-screen were adjusting to a life change; offscreen, the St. Elmo’s cast was making the journey from semi-known actors to budding movie stars. Lowe’s living arrangements at the time mirrored this duality between celebrity and normalcy: his home was chicly and expensively decorated with the black leather furniture, glass bricks, and neon lighting so trendy then—but his home was his mother’s guest house. Increasing fame was a lot to get used to. “That Halloween after St. Elmo’s Fire had come out,” says Lowe, “I
remember going to parties and seeing people dressed as my character.” Kurlander found it interesting in this period to watch the St. Elmo’s gang go from being fans of other artists (Lowe particularly loved Woody Allen and Bruce Springsteen) to “people who were rising stars themselves.”
As they got their first taste of serious money, many of the actors were living up to the materialistic standards of the time. Lowe had courtside tickets to the Lakers and bought himself a new Porsche, and Demi Moore lived at the then-new Trump Tower, in an apartment that reportedly went for eight thousand dollars a month, a sum that would seem high even today, but which, in the eighties, could buy you plenty of hair mousse and bangle bracelets.
They were all experiencing these kinds of life changes together. And as so often happens with actors, many of them hadn’t gone to university (it’s hard to, when job offers are coming in and you don’t know if they ever will again), and so in many ways, the long days of shooting followed by long nights of laughing, partying, loving, or just talking stood in for the social elements of a college experience. “It seemed like it didn’t matter what we did, it was fun,” says Judd Nelson. “We just laughed a lot. Rob is a very funny guy, Emilio has an incredible, biting sense of humor. And I think we all just liked each other.”
A typical night, remembers Loree Rodkin, might include “Judd and Rob and Emilio and Demi and Michael J. Fox and Sarah Jessica Parker. And we would go to dinner at the Hard Rock, and then to a party for an opening, or to a screening.” Andie MacDowell, who would occasionally join the group on nights out, but still viewed them from the sidelines, says, “I remember Demi dancing. I remember just being fascinated, because she was so free, and she was a beautiful dancer. She always liked music. I was just amazed to be with these people. Rob Lowe, how beautiful he was…I was just stunned at watching them, and watching their energy.” Asserts actor Eric Stoltz, “They were hugely famous, and like any twentysomething would, they were enjoying it—as they should.”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 14