As far back as the screwball comedies popular during the Great Depression, “when there was all of this class tension and class hostility,” says cultural historian Neal Gabler, “romantic comedies took a partner from each class and put them together, and unified America.” Gabler sees a parallel between the romantic comedies uniting the classes in the 1930s and the teen films doing so in the ’80s, such as Pretty in Pink. The eighties saw “a dramatic divide between the wealthy and the poor,” says Gabler, “and I think that, intuitively, the Hughes movies are addressing that increasing divide. Everything is a signifier of class when you’re a teenager. So what Hughes was doing, in using teenagers to address class issues at a time when class was increasingly important in America—there was a certain kind of brilliance in it.”
For some, the new ending was a hard thing to accept. “It was a very disappointing turn in the film,” says Marks. “One of the things that I found attractive about the movie was that the loser gets the girl. It made it unusual. I very much wanted her to wind up with Duckie—I thought it made a real statement about those characters, and what life is really like. By having her choose Andrew McCarthy, it made the film a little more fluffy. But,” says Marks, “I also understood the commercial aspect of changing it. It probably made it into a successful movie. It might not have been if they left the ending as written.” Shuler Donner had similarly mixed emotions about the ending switch. Even decades later, she admits, “I’m still kind of torn on it. I guess in traditional movie terms you don’t see the lead girl ending up with the outsider. But I don’t know—I sort of wish she did.” Says Deutch, emphatically, “I thought the new ending was heartbreaking. Heartbreaking. I thought it was unfair and wrong, and that’s not what the movie was intended to be. It felt,” he says, searching for the right word, “immoral.”
The filmmakers weren’t the only ones upset by the new ending. Many fans were furious when word of the ending change leaked out, and they’re still angry, decades after the movie’s release. “Among the ’80’s obsessed,” wrote the Washington Post’s Jen Chaney, “the [ending] switch can still spark debate on a variety of topics: true love, selling out, the social class structure in American society, and why McCarthy’s hair looks so hideous in the final prom scene.” It seems that diehard Duckie lovers will never get over his snubbing: “I am stunned at the reservoir of rage for that,” says Jon Cryer. “It’s like, Kosovo is forgotten, but ‘Duckie-gate’ lives on. I don’t understand it. It’s a movie, folks.”
Although, when he’s really honest with himself, Cryer admits that the new ending upset him, too. “I was a little hurt,” he says, “because you feel it reflects on you as an actor, because you didn’t get an audience to invest enough in [Andie and Duckie’s] relationship in such a way that it would be satisfying that they would end up together. But at the same time,” he points out, “I got it. The whole movie seems to be about trying to bridge that divide,” the divide between cool kids and nerds, between the Blanes of the world and the Andies, between rich and poor. “You can’t give people the impression that it can’t be bridged,” says Cryer, earnestly. “You can’t send a message that interclass romance just can’t possibly work.”
The message that the new ending did send—that a poor girl from a troubled home could be loved by a rich, handsome boy because she is brave and smart and kind and has an inherent grace—was indeed a hopeful one. “It’s a good message,” says Shuler Donner, who then, pondering it a bit more, adds, “It’s a wonderful message. It’s Cinderella, and I think it will always resonate that way.” Maybe there’s nothing wrong with dreaming about ending up with a Blane instead of a Duckie; maybe it’s a courageous thing to do. “It taps into the fantasy of what young women want,” Andrew McCarthy says of the film. “And that’s why the movie still works, because something was captured. And it still touches people on a human level, generation after generation.”
Ethics, class distinction, values—all these issues play a part in the ‘Duckie-gate’ debate, but none of that mattered on the night of Pretty in Pink’s premiere, when it was crystal clear that the new ending was what the movie needed in order to please audiences and become a great commercial success. Howard Deutch recalls, “I remember [director] Rob Reiner saying something after the premiere…something like, ‘Of course, it has to be that—the princess has to wind up with the prince, not the frog!”
The reshot ending was not a secret (Hughes discussed it in promotional interviews), but as a result of that knowledge, critics were ready to pounce. Though the film received solid reviews, the last scene probably knocked each review down by at least a half-star. The Washington Post said the conclusion “turns teen trauma into so much gooey, rose-colored mush”; Newsweek called it “dopey”; the Times of London deemed it “patently contrived”; and the New York Times said that it allowed Ringwald’s character to avoid making difficult choices and, “keeping with the spirit of the times, she gets to have it all.”
In terms of the film’s marketing, “we went for cool,” says Shuler Donner. “We went for, making it an event. Paramount had a huge marketing machine at that point.” Pretty in Pink’s poster, like that of The Breakfast Club before it, featured its young stars looking smoldering, intense, and deadly serious—a universe away from the cheekily grinning teens of earlier Beach Blanket Bingo–esque one-sheets. The Pink poster was visually striking: it was a black-and-white photo of Ringwald, Cryer, and McCarthy, but it featured a superimposed wash of the color pink over Ringwald’s blouse.
Pretty in Pink had an advantage that Hughes’s earlier films did not: exposure, thanks to Hughes’s earlier creations. Sixteen Candles was a hit on video and had been showing regularly on HBO, and The Breakfast Club was a bona fide sensation on home video, topping the rental charts for weeks, while also doing well on the sales charts. The audience who couldn’t see the R-rated movie theatrically discovered it at home. Months after its release on video, it was still one of the top rentals in North America, just as Paramount was preparing to release Pretty in Pink, another Hughes/Ringwald collaboration. Pink, which was rated PG-13, hit theaters on February 28, 1986, topping that weekend’s box office (a first for Ringwald and producer Hughes) and with a budget of around $7 million, it eventually pulled in over $40 million domestically.
Though still feeling dejected about the ending switch, Howard Deutch knew that he and the other filmmakers had made the right choice as soon as the box office numbers started coming in. “When it was as successful as it was,” says Deutch, “it was a good antidote for the pain.”
The great success of Pretty in Pink marked the auspicious beginning of a new professional partnership for John Hughes: it was his first film at Paramount, where he had gone from Universal along with his mentor, Ned Tanen, who was hired to run the studio. Paramount was quite pleased to be inheriting Hughes along with Tanen. Artistry aside, the teen films Hughes created were cash cows. They didn’t have many special effects, and they featured young actors who, even as their fame and salaries grew, didn’t require the astronomical paychecks of the era’s grown-up megastars like Sylvester Stallone and Harrison Ford. Hollywood, says Andrew McCarthy, was realizing that “there’s a huge market, and we can make a lot of money off of this.”
To address this growing demographic of teen consumers, new movie marketing strategies were arising. Keeping teenagers’ inherent skepticism in mind, “the marketing didn’t feel like marketing,” says Loren Schwartz, a senior marketing executive at Columbia Pictures. “It felt kind of natural.” Fortunately for American teens everywhere, their increasing buying power ensured that the makers of everything from designer jeans to smart youth movies would keep creating these products to sell just to them. As Schwartz puts it, the 1980s was the first time that marketers said, “You know what? Kids are important. This is our audience. They’re ours. And we’re gonna hold tight.”
Paramount had every right to expect a hit in John Hughes’s next teen film, a movie that he started production on before Pretty in
Pink had even wrapped, and which the studio planned to release that coming summer of 1986. This next film told the story of a high school senior who plays hooky for a day. But while John Hughes’s own story as teen cinema’s greatest filmmaker continued with the development and production of his next project, one very important chapter of Hughes’s story was coming to a close. For Pretty in Pink would be his final collaboration with his great muse, Molly Ringwald.
· · ·
The cover of Time magazine’s May 26, 1986, issue featured a photo of a half-smiling Ringwald, and the feature inside, written by Richard Corliss, proclaimed her America’s “model modern teen.” “All I remember is that suddenly she’s on the cover of Time magazine,” says producer Michelle Manning. It inspired Manning to ask herself, “What happened to little Molly?” A few weeks earlier, pegged to the February release of Pretty in Pink, Ringwald had also appeared on the cover of Life, which proclaimed her “Hollywood’s Teen Queen,” her sunny, smiling face juxtaposed awkwardly with a much smaller image of the fallen Challenger astronauts. This kind of media attention cemented it: Ringwald was the biggest teenage star America had seen in generations, perhaps even since the heyday of the young Elizabeth Taylor. “Warren Beatty has been a friend and a mentor from the age of fourteen on,” says Ringwald, “and when I told him I was going to be on the cover of Time magazine, he knew the significance of it, and he kept saying, ‘This is going to take you a long time to get over. You can’t say no to Time magazine, but it’s going to take you at least five years to get over it.’ So I think because he was making such a big deal about it, I realized it was a bigger deal than I initially thought—I didn’t really care that much at that time. I was still a teenager, and the magazine that I cared about was Seventeen magazine. When they told me they were going to put me on the cover of that, I was way more excited.”
The spring of 1986 was the moment—a couple of months after Pretty in Pink had been such a hit—when Ringwald’s fame would reach its greatest apex. It was also when Mollymania swept the land, as teenage girls across America were dressing in Molly’s signature style and calling themselves “Ringlets.” The trend even went international—Lorraine Candy, now the editor in chief of British Elle, went so far as to dye her hair Ringwaldian red in homage as a teen.
In the Time story, it was clear that Molly Ringwald felt she was ready to work independently of John Hughes, the director who had simultaneously been her greatest teacher, her best friend, and her crush, the director whose sentences she was always finishing, the director with whom she shared a passion for music and a birthday, the director who had made her a star.
Like the Breakfast Club kids who are painfully aware that their magical Saturday detention bond might dissolve once Monday comes, Ringwald seemed to sense that her time with John Hughes was destined to end, and soon. “When John moved from Chicago to L.A. after The Breakfast Club,” Ringwald told Time’s Corliss, “he changed. I wouldn’t say he ‘went Hollywood,’ but he started looking very GQ. I don’t really see him anymore. I still respect him a lot, and if he gave me a good script, I’d read it. But I don’t think we’ll work together again real soon.” Corliss then added: “Sorry, all you Ringlets and Breakfast Clubbers. Molly’s cutting the Hughes-Ringwald umbilical string. Time to grow up.” And so it was that Pretty in Pink would be the final entry in the Ringwald/Hughes partnership that Corliss called “the Molly Trilogy.”
Ringwald still isn’t completely sure if she and Hughes had a falling-out. “I don’t really know, myself,” she says, gently. “John felt really, um, hurt by things and by people. And sometimes I feel like he felt hurt by things that weren’t really the way that he thought. I do feel like he felt slighted by people that didn’t really intend to slight him. He always seemed to be incredibly, incredibly sensitive. Overly sensitive,” she says. “I mean, there were a couple of times where he got upset with me because he just completely, like, misunderstood.”
Molly Ringwald’s role as Hughes’s muse came to an end after Pretty in Pink, and the director went on to work with plenty of other young actors. But in all of the teen films Hughes had ever made, or ever would make, Ringwald brought his stories to life like nobody else could. And because of that, it was Ringwald, far more than any other young Hughesian actor, whose work made an indelible mark on the young psyches of the generation of kids who grew up watching her on-screen. “It is difficult to explain,” wrote New York magazine, “to those who weren’t teenagers in the 1980s, just how large Molly Ringwald once loomed in our lives.”
chapter seven
WE GOT THE BEAT
Behind the Music of the Brat Pack Films
The premiere for Pretty in Pink was held at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. MTV covered the event, and Fee Waybill, the front man for the eccentric rock band The Tubes, was the host for the broadcast. After the screening at the Chinese, there was a party at The Palace, a trendy nightclub. “It was like I died and went to heaven,” remembers Jon Cryer of the evening, “because there’s New Order hanging out, and The Psychedelic Furs, and George Michael came out of the bathroom with a guy. What was up with that?” he asks with mock shock, laughing.
The fact that some of the biggest musicians of the era were attending the premiere of a high-school movie speaks volumes. By the spring of 1986, the music in Pretty in Pink—and St. Elmo’s Fire, The Breakfast Club, and Sixteen Candles before it—had helped introduce a fresh new sound to the teens of America, while greatly contributing to the financial success of the films and providing nationwide exposure to otherwise obscure British bands. Says Colin Larkin, editor of the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, “A song has a better life, and a more powerful life, when it appears in a movie.”
No time was that truer than in the mid-1980s. Pop songs from films, and the soundtracks they appeared on, were wildly popular, regularly hovering at or near the top of the charts. When a song from St. Elmo’s Fire topped the singles charts in the summer of 1985, songs from Back to the Future and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome were in the runner-up slots. And at the Oscars that year, all five Best Song nominees had also topped the Billboard singles charts, something that had never happened before, and likely won’t happen again.
Some of the now-legendary offerings from the genre-defining soundtracks of the era’s youth movies include “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” by Simple Minds, the stirring theme of The Breakfast Club; “Pretty in Pink,” by The Psychedelic Furs; “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion),” sung by John Parr; and “If You Were Here,” by The Thompson Twins, from Sixteen Candles. Pop songs like these served as advertisements for their movies, and vice versa. “Two things are essential,” says David Anderle, who was the music supervisor on The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink. “One is to try to get a hit single to try to open the film—that’s the way the film people see it. And the record company wants to use the film to promote an artist.” When a soundtrack song became a hit, says Lionsgate music exec Jay Faires, “it was essentially millions of dollars of free marketing and advertising that was being given to those films.” The commercial synergy was great, but there was also a deep emotional synergy happening in the hearts of the young audience. The songs only intensified viewers’ already intense feelings surrounding the films. It was, says music promoter Mike Galaxy, “a combination of the films, the actors, and the music that we all identified with collectively. It was the soundtrack of our generation.”
You can’t talk about music, teenagers, and the 1980s without talking about MTV. The newly minted cable network played a pivotal role in popularizing the soundtrack singles of movie music by playing the videos of these songs on heavy rotation.
Broadcaster Nina Blackwood, who was hired as MTV’s first video jockey (or VJ), remembers the salad days of the network: “It really was tremendous. We were all young, and pulling together,” she says. The idea for MTV was a brilliant one, Blackwood suggests, because it combined “two of the great American pastimes—listening to music and watching television.�
� In the early days, MTV wasn’t even broadcast in Manhattan (as a means of putting pressure on cable companies to add the channel, the network came up with the advertising slogan/rallying cry “I Want My MTV”) and so for the network’s launch, on August 1, 1981, Blackwood and the other early VJs, including Martha Quinn and Mark Goodman, were bused to a club in New Jersey to watch. Seeing the first moments of MTV was, says Blackwood, “an electrifying experience for all of us there. Everybody was crying, holding each other, laughing and cheering. Here it was.”
Teenagers of all eras have loved music, but thanks to MTV, 1980s teenagers could love music in an entirely new way. “MTV changed the world,” says lawyer and social historian Geoffrey Holtz. It forever revolutionized not only the music industry, but indeed the ways in which music is absorbed, both personally and culturally. It gave rise to a new art form, the music video, and all but required popular artists to have an appealing look. The theatrical, showmen-style musicians who knew how to make the most of their music videos—artists such as Duran Duran, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Cyndi Lauper—quickly became the darlings of the channel. Before long, MTV became the driving force of the music industry. “Getting a record deal was important,” says Blackwood, “but to have a video on MTV—now that was really big.” With MTV, fans could put a face to an artist, which deepened the bond the young public felt toward singers and groups. We actually got to see our musicians on TV, on an almost mind-numbingly constant basis. Early MTV was like Top 40 radio with visuals.
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 20