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

by Susannah Gora

  Rob Lowe found himself in a similar situation around the same time, albeit one with a very different outcome. After many tumultuous, passionate years breaking up and getting back together, Lowe eventually proposed to Melissa Gilbert, and while she was prepping for their wedding, she discovered she was pregnant. When she broke the happy news to Lowe, he ended their relationship. A devastated Gilbert agonized about whether to have an abortion or become an unwed mother at age twenty-three. Lowe said he’d honor Gilbert’s decision and help her no matter what. Before she could make up her mind, however, she had a miscarriage.

  Of the term “Brat Pack,” says David Blum, “Generalizing is a very glib and simplistic thing to do, and that’s what I did” by coming up with the moniker. “I’m not going to deny it. It was glib and simplistic. A magazine is a form of entertainment just like a movie, and my job was to provide an entertaining framework for people to read an article, and that’s what this was. I wasn’t doing a piece on Defense Department contractors,” he says. “It was just a piece on a bunch of actors. I did think their behavior was bratty,” he says, “and I’ll stand by that.”

  But perhaps the Brat Pack actors were a study in contrasts. Insiders repeatedly argue that the actors were not wild kids, and whatever wildness Blum might’ve seen was greatly exaggerated in print. “That’s the irony,” says Kurlander. “[They] got written off with a term, ‘Brat Pack,’ that made it seem like these were days that were ‘party hearty.’ This was not that. These were really thoughtful people, trying to do good work.”

  These were intelligent kids, says Manning. “Judd would talk about a bill that Congress would pass, and Ally would talk about some spiritual New Age thing.” Kurlander remembers having deep conversations with Nelson about Billy Budd and Herman Melville. “He was very intense,” says Kurlander of Nelson, who’d majored in philosophy in college before pursuing acting professionally. “He had a longing to talk about that stuff.” Kurlander also suggests that these kids were quite sensitive. “There was a certain amount of social awkwardness, believe it or not, and shyness,” he says. “That was who they were. They were shy kids who were trying to do work, and trying to make a career. And that was what came across, much more than how people picture it.”

  Ally Sheedy seems to have been particularly far from the party-hearty type. “I remember I had to drop off [script] pages with her,” Kurlander says, “and she was living in a guesthouse, reading Yeats’s poetry, drinking herbal tea, and listening to The Nutcracker.”

  As hurtful as the New York article was for the reputation of the actors it profiled, one very good thing did come out of Blum’s piece: attention. “Look,” Joel Schumacher admits, the article “also helped make [the St. Elmo’s cast] famous…it did give us a little iconic status, being on the cover of New York magazine.” The term “Brat Pack” gave teens a group to latch on to, a moniker that summed up the actors who would represent them on-screen. Wrote Po Bronson, “The Brat Pack—they were going to be my generation’s actors.”

  And perhaps the New York magazine article, which had come out a mere two weeks before St. Elmo’s Fire’s release, was part of the reason there were so many paparazzi present the night of the premiere at the Palladium in New York. “It was the hottest place you could be,” remembers Kurlander. “It was insane. The poster says, ‘The Heat This Summer Is at St. Elmo’s Fire’—well, that night at the Palladium was as hot as it gets. It felt like being in the center of the universe…. At that moment is when it was a different world.” Soon enough, the media were snapping shots of these young actors as they emerged from restaurants and nightclubs together, ever asking Demi Moore and Emilio Estevez if their engagement was on or off. (Surely if the couple were together today, the press would christen them “Demilio.”)

  St. Elmo’s Fire hit theaters on June 28, 1985, opening in fifth place at the box office. The next weekend, Back to the Future opened, and should have taken St. Elmo’s potential young adult audience along with it, but word of mouth kept Elmo’s in cinemas throughout the summer, as it slowly but surely made millions of dollars in profit. Pop culture history has proven it to be a watershed youth culture film, but at the time, remembers Joel Schumacher, “St. Elmo’s Fire did not get one good review in the United States of America.” (“Barely has there been a group of more smug and obnoxious characters in a single film,” wrote Gene Siskel.) But thanks to the movie’s hefty commercial success, the reviews almost didn’t matter. The movie was Columbia’s lone bright spot that summer. Its $38 million gross was hugely profitable. The New York Times credited the movie’s success to its “ensemble of trendy young actors who have been dubbed ‘the brat pack.’”

  The long-lasting ramifications the New York article would have upon these actors’ careers would not become clear for years. But in the summer of 1985, when the article had just come out, the piece had one very immediate, and very painful, effect on the lives of the young actors who had grown so close while making movies together: “Everybody just went their separate ways,” says Michelle Manning. Because, as Rodkin remembers, “everyone wanted to distance themselves from a ‘pack.’”

  Manning recalls how uncomfortable things got one of the few times the group got together in the immediate aftermath of the article: “I remember Ned [Tanen] having a birthday party for Ally somewhere in Venice Beach, and Andrew was there, Judd, Emilio, Tom [Cruise], maybe Molly. It was like a reunion kind of thing. So many people were whispering and talking about us and looking at us in the restaurant, and we were just having Ally’s birthday dinner. It wasn’t a conscious thing after that, like ‘let’s not go out to dinner anymore,’ but…” Manning’s voice trails off.

  “They portrayed us as victimizers,” says Judd Nelson. “They painted us all with the same brush, one of privilege and excess, of meanness and pettiness.” Understandably, the actors found it hard to continue living their lives together. “You are not going to pick up the phone and say, ‘Let’s all go out to dinner,’” Nelson says.

  For Sheedy, this disintegration of the group was particularly painful. “You know the thing where you get so famous so fast, and then there’s that twist, about bringing somebody down? In this case,” she says, “it was the whole group of us, and we slid into this negative thing. The article spearheaded that.”

  “We were friends,” she says softly, thinking of the actors with whom she had once shared so much. “I was really happy and comfortable, and felt accepted. That’s why it was just completely heartbreaking to me when the whole ‘Brat Pack’ thing happened.” Blum’s article, she says, “just destroyed it. I had felt truly a part of something, and that guy blew it to pieces.”

  chapter six

  SITTING PRETTY

  Ringwald and Hughes Reteam for Pretty in Pink, a Rose-Tinted Look at Teenage Love

  Thirty thousand feet aboveground, Andrew McCarthy was jetting his way to Los Angeles to begin work on Pretty in Pink, a new teen dramedy written and produced by John Hughes. It was the summer of 1985, not long after the publication of the “Brat Pack” article, and McCarthy was excited to have won one of the lead roles in the new Hughes project. “I hadn’t read the script,” he admits; he had been given only small excerpts during the audition process. “I needed the job, I wanted to go to work, and I was thrilled that anybody would give me another job.” As he read the entire screenplay on the plane—a story about Andie Walsh, a brilliant high-school girl who falls in love with a sensitive, rich preppy named Blane McDonnagh, while her charmingly geeky best friend, Duckie, is gaga for her—a story in which a teen love triangle culminates at a prom—the blood slowly drained from his face. He hated the script. “This is a ridiculous movie about a girl going to a dance,” McCarthy thought to himself. By the time he landed, he wanted out. “This is going to be a whole movie?”

  Indeed, it would, one that would present an unflinching portrayal of the pain of class distinction in teendom, and would quickly develop an iconic status that McCarthy would eventually come to appreciate. The
class theme was one that Hughes was quite deft at exploring, and one he had been thinking seriously about for years; he first came up with the idea for Pretty in Pink while still in high school. “I saw these sorts of things happen,” Hughes once said. “I felt a lot of those things, and it was something that I wanted to deal with.”

  Even though Hughes had written Pink’s lead character, Andie Walsh, for Ringwald, Paramount wanted a bigger name—Jennifer Beals, who was huge at the moment because of Flashdance. “So we went and met her, and she turned it down,” remembers Howard Deutch, Pretty in Pink’s director. (After directing three movies in two years, Candles, Breakfast, and Weird Science, with a fourth on the way, Hughes only wrote and produced Pink.) Hughes knew Ringwald was best for the role, and so did Deutch. “I don’t remember who else we talked about,” says Deutch, “but I went to Molly.”

  Ringwald, it seems, also knew deep down that she was truly the only one who could play this part. “I couldn’t imagine not doing the movie,” she says, “because it had been written for me, and it just would have been really weird. I remember actually hearing that Jennifer Beals was in the running, and it was sort of upsetting to me to imagine her in that [role]. I felt like she was already an adult by then.” How could you think of Beals as anything but a grown-up after her erotically charged performance in Flashdance? “It just didn’t seem possible,” says Ringwald. “So I was really glad when I was approached about it.”

  Yes, Ringwald wanted to play Andie Walsh, but, she admits, “I was kind of disappointed that John wasn’t directing it. I didn’t really understand why he wasn’t directing it.” But Hughes called Ringwald and convinced her that everything would be fine, and the actress grew even more comfortable when she met the film’s director, Deutch, and liked him right away. “I didn’t feel like I was going to have the same connection with him that I did with John,” she admits, “but we had a great connection regardless.” Still, she was wary. “You’ve got to do this movie, Molly,” Deutch said excitedly, “so, what do you think?” Deutch remembers that Ringwald responded, “You’ve never directed a movie before. What do you know?”

  Ringwald was right: Howie Deutch had never directed a movie before. But he did have a highly respected career in Hollywood, as the maker of some of the industry’s most important trailers, cutting previews and commercials for Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Sydney Pollack, and Francis Ford Coppola. He was also an in-demand music video director, helming videos for artists including Billy Idol and Billy Joel. And he knew a thing or two about capturing Ringwald’s essence in a Hughes project: Deutch had cut the trailers for both Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, and had directed a video for a song off the Sixteen Candles soundtrack.

  After fighting so hard for the chance to direct Sixteen Candles just a few years earlier, John Hughes was now looking for ways to write and produce movies without actually having to direct them, and he trusted Deutch with his material. “John was prolific,” says Pretty in Pink producer Lauren Shuler Donner, “and I think he just realized that he could write a lot of movies and get them made, as long as he didn’t have to direct every single one of them.” R. P. Cohen, who had worked as Hughes’s first assistant director on The Breakfast Club, suggests that “it wasn’t a bad thing when John handed over his scripts to Howie Deutch. I don’t think that John had the kind of temperament to be a director. John was much happier writing and creating on that level than he was being a director, and he found, with Howie Deutch, a kind of substitute.”

  Hughes knew that Deutch wanted to try his hand at directing, and he had faith in Deutch’s artistic talent. And so one day, Deutch received two scripts from Hughes: Pretty in Pink and The New Kid, the latter based on some of Hughes’s experiences growing up. Hughes asked Deutch which film he wanted to direct, and Deutch chose Pink for a simple reason: its script made him cry. After that, Hughes fought fiercely for Deutch to direct the film, against the wishes of Paramount’s then president of production, the late pioneering female executive Dawn Steel, who felt that if Hughes was not going to direct the picture, a woman should. But Hughes was insistent. And so it was that Howard Deutch had the opportunity countless other directors would’ve killed for: the chance to helm a Hughes-written teen dramedy.

  The character Andie Walsh, with her innate grace, passion, and winning combination of elegance and funkiness, seemed as close to Molly Ringwald’s offscreen persona as a character could get. In many ways, the character “was her,” says Deutch. The Pretty in Pink script presented Andie’s sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking story: that of a smart, brave teenager who’s been dealt a bad hand. She lives with her father (the scruffy, ever-unshaven character actor Harry Dean Stanton), who is kind-hearted but perennially unemployed because he’s emotionally paralyzed: Andie’s mother left them years earlier. (We get the feeling Andie’s after-school job at the record store Trax is what’s keeping food on the table.) As with his earlier films, in the script for Pink (which was printed on rose-hued paper for production), Hughes blended the sadness of the adolescent experience with humor and optimism. Andie’s best friend is the lovable dweeb Phil “Duckie” Dale, a boy who’s adored her secretly since they were kids, and whose wacky, over-the-top antics hide a tender, passionate heart. Meanwhile, Blane is a rich, popular dreamboat who drives a BMW, notices Andie, and begins a sweet flirtation with her in the school library in the greatest pre-Internet film scene of computer-aided courtship.

  Ringwald’s spirit shone through in the role, more than in any she had played up to that point (or since, many would argue). Actress Annie Potts, who would play Iona, Andie’s eccentric mentor at the record store, has suggested that Ringwald related extremely well to the character for an interesting reason: “I think that [Ringwald’s] family was dependent on her working as well, so she knew the underpinnings of that character.” The Ringwalds’ economic situation was better than the Walshes’. But it’s not hard to imagine that Molly’s screen earnings—like those of so many teen actors—might’ve helped round out the family budget, especially considering that her dad was a musician who at one point ran a luncheonette and her mother a homemaker, and that Ringwald was paid approximately $1 million for Candles, Breakfast, and Pink combined.

  Ringwald was involved in the filmmaking process—one of the reasons she agreed to the role was because Deutch told her she would be his creative “partner”—and she was instrumental in the casting of one of her costars. “Molly got me that part,” insists Andrew McCarthy. “I wanted to audition for Pretty in Pink, and they didn’t want me to because they wanted a hunky, square-jawed jock. And I wasn’t that,” he admits. (Charlie Sheen, who had at one point been considered for the role, would’ve fit such a mold perfectly.) But because McCarthy had a bit of cred from his role in St. Elmo’s Fire, he was allowed to come read scenes with Ringwald in front of Deutch and Hughes. After the audition, Ringwald went up to Hughes and Deutch and said, “That’s the kind of guy I would fall in love with.” According to McCarthy, she told them that she found him preferable to a typical lantern-jawed jock, to which they responded: “Him!? He’s just sort of this little shy, twerpy guy.” Ringwald held her ground. “No, that’d be good,” she said. McCarthy grins thinking back on it. “I wasn’t gonna outcool a guy,” he says. Vulnerability and humility were what he “had to offer. And so I accentuated that.”

  “Yeah,” says Ringwald, rather sweetly, “I did push for him to get hired. I was involved in all of the auditions, and I actually read with everyone, and I thought he was cute,” she says, laughing, “and I thought, if I thought he was cute, then Andie would think he was cute! I liked how he wasn’t typical, and he seemed so right for that part. Andrew McCarthy has always [seemed] so tortured with indecision, at least at that time, and so was Blane, who really is a tortured soul. And Andrew and his eyes,” says Ringwald, gushing a tad, “there’s just nobody who has those tortured eyes.”

  After hearing Ringwald’s reasoning, says McCarthy, “John Hughes just went, ‘Okay, fine.’ He
listened to her.” And the choice of the gentle McCarthy over a more traditional movie hunk helped give Pink some of its intrigue. “I remember being slightly afraid of Pretty in Pink,” says the film’s editor, Richard Marks (who also edited St. Elmo’s Fire), “afraid that it was going to be—I shouldn’t say this, but that it was going to be just another John Hughes movie, another teenage thing, and that it wasn’t going to offer anything new.” Specifically, it was the teaming of Ringwald and Hughes that made Marks hesitant. “How would it be reinterpreted?” he wondered. Marks saw McCarthy as a key element in that reinterpretation. “They were talking about Andrew McCarthy,” he remembers, “but they weren’t sure. I really liked Andrew a lot from St. Elmo’s Fire, and I remember pushing very hard with both Lauren and Howie that they should hire him.” Although he’s a bit biased, Andrew McCarthy agrees. “If they had hired the square-jawed jock it would’ve been flat. It would’ve been…blah.”

  In the end, McCarthy won the role of Blane McDonnagh relatively handily. But casting the role of Phil “Duckie” Dale, the other lead in the teen love triangle, would prove far more difficult, and would bring with it ramifications that would trouble the production all its days. “Yeah, Duckie took a while,” admits Shuler Donner. The role of Duckie, the endearing goofball whose zany exterior hides the ardor he’s felt for Andie since middle school—“I would’ve died for you,” he earnestly tells her as she readies for her first date with Blane—was originally intended for Anthony Michael Hall, who had by this point appeared in four Hughes screenplays (Vacation, Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, and Weird Science) in two years. All the filmmakers wanted Hall, but Hall didn’t want to be part of this project. “It just was a redundancy issue,” remembers Hall. When he read it, he thought it seemed “like it was a rehash” of Sixteen Candles, because of “the girl with the two guys, that whole thing.” This presented the filmmakers with a conundrum. “How are you going to compete with Michael Hall?” asks Deutch. “Michael Hall after Breakfast Club was, like, the greatest kid in the universe. And Duckie was Michael Hall. But he wouldn’t do it.”