They never had a bigger hit.
With The Breakfast Club soundtrack and “Don’t You” rising up the charts in the spring of 1985, the filmmakers behind St. Elmo’s Fire were rushing to get their film, originally scheduled for an October release, into theaters by that June, to reach high-school kids as they were just beginning their summer vacations. Music producer David Foster was in charge of creating the original soundtrack, including writing an original score for the first time in his career, and he was feeling the strain of the time crunch when he asked John Parr, a relatively obscure British pop singer-songwriter, to come to Los Angeles to work with him on a song. Parr, at that time best known for his modern rock single “Naughty Naughty,” was on tour with Toto, and he met up with Foster as soon as that tour ended. “David was absolutely exhausted,” remembers Parr. “He was very nervous. Even though he’d sold millions of records, he’d never done a movie before.” When Parr arrived, Foster told him that the stress of producing a soundtrack in addition to writing an original underscore was getting to him.
Parr arrived at the Lighthouse, the small L.A. studio where Foster was working, on a Thursday, and whatever song they wrote had to be recorded the next day, because the music was going to be dubbed into the film the following Monday. The deadline couldn’t have been any tighter. Foster had been working eighteen-hour days, and he was spent. Recalls Parr, “He told me, ‘I just don’t want to write anything [else]. Will you sing one of these other songs?’”
Foster had Parr try singing one number, but it just wasn’t right for his voice. Parr was deeply disappointed: “It was my first movie track ever, and I’d dreamed of being involved in film ever since I was a little boy going to the Saturday matinees. So I wasn’t going to let it slip through my fingers.” Parr kept pleading with Foster, asking if they could try to work on something else, something new, together. “I just kept tormenting him,” remembers Parr, “and he said, ‘Okay. Let’s go next door into the control room, and we’ll just do an hour.’”
There Parr and Foster wrote two songs. Parr particularly liked the second song, and said he was happy with it. But Foster said, “No, we can do better.” Within an hour or so, an up-tempo tune for a third song was composed, sans lyrics, “just the melody,” says Parr, “with me singing dopey words.”
The song had to be recorded the next day, and the lyrics had to be written. Joel Schumacher came to the recording studio and relayed to Parr the emotional flavor of the film, and its storyline about the kids trying to find their way in life after college. He did not tell Parr that the phenomenon of St. Elmo’s fire is somewhat dismissed in the movie, in the scene where Rob Lowe comforts Demi Moore, lighting the aerosol can and saying, “It’s just St. Elmo’s fire.” “I am so pleased that Joel never mentioned that bit to me,” says Parr. Parr knew about the weather phenomenon St. Elmo’s fire, and the hopeful, mythical quality it imbued. “To me,” says Parr, “it was the embodiment of a dream. I saw it as a kind of metaphor for ‘anything’s possible.’”
But still, Parr couldn’t come up with any lyrics to go with the beautiful, catchy tune, and Foster was emotionally and physically exhausted. In an effort to reinvigorate himself and his cowriter, Foster showed Parr a videotape of a news story. Parr remembers Foster telling him, “This has nothing to do with what we’re doing, but this really moved me, and it might inspire you.” The video told the story of a young Canadian paraplegic man named Rick Hansen who was embarking on a journey in which he planned to travel twenty-five thousand miles around the world in his wheelchair to raise funds and awareness for spinal injury research. Hansen hailed from the same hometown as Foster (Vancouver), and had met with him recently. Hansen called his quest the “Man in Motion Tour.”
Parr was deeply touched by Hansen’s story. An athlete, Hansen had been enjoying a day of fishing with his friend when the two of them hitched a ride in a pickup truck. Hansen hopped in the back of the truck, which crashed a mile down the road. His friend walked away from the accident, but Hansen was paralyzed from the waist down. Parr was taken by the image of Hansen on the screen. “The guy is a beautiful-looking man; he looked like a young Kennedy. And when he spoke, you believed him. He thought it was crazy that you break your arm or leg and you’re in a cast for six weeks,” recalls Parr of Hansen, “but you break your back and you’re in a chair for the rest of your life. And he said he was going to do something about it.”
So Hansen began his tour, which left from Vancouver in March of 1985. He had virtually no money (a local music shop had donated four hundred dollars to his cause), and when he left Vancouver, there were very few people cheering him on. He got onto the California roads, but the police there said he was holding up traffic, so he had to wheel on the farm roads. “The news video’s coming to an end,” Parr remembers, “and you see a farmstead with a picket fence and a windmill. And just as Rick wheels past the gate, a little boy runs out of the house and punches the air, and goes, ‘Yeah!’ And that’s when I got the shiver,” says Parr. “I thought, this song has to be called ‘Man in Motion.’ This has to be about this man’s quest to do the impossible. And so I went back to the hotel that night and wrote the story of the man trying to do exactly that. But I also wanted to incorporate the essence of what the movie was about, which was really about growing up and thinking you know everything.”
The gang in St. Elmo’s adjusting to the “real world” after college were dealing with challenges a lot less serious than Hansen’s, yet there were some similarities between these stories of young people facing life after a big change. “I think they’re totally interlinked,” says Parr. He was able to combine the two themes, “so that even the film company couldn’t tell that [the song] wasn’t about their movie. The only thing they were saying was, ‘What’s the Man in Motion?’ I think I told them it was Emilio Estevez driving away from the love of his life, Andie MacDowell. But, really, it was about Rick.”
The next morning, Parr went into the recording studio with Foster. He felt certain that the song he’d cowritten would be of real help to the young man in the wheelchair journeying on that daunting, superbly heroic quest. “I am kind of a religious person,” says Parr, “but I am not demonstrably religious.” He walked away from the microphone and into the restroom. “I went down on my knees,” Parr says, “and I thanked God for what I had been given.”
The schedule was so tight that later that very day, Parr and the cast of St. Elmo’s filmed the video for the song. Though he was surrounded by the hottest young stars in Hollywood, says Parr, “I had no idea who these people were. In my stupidity, I thought these were kids doing their first movie.” The video’s script called, rather cheesily, for Parr to comfort a sad-looking Demi Moore standing by a jukebox, and to cheer up a bummed-out Rob Lowe. “If you look at the way they react to me, they hardly do anything,” says Parr. “In my ignorance, I thought, ‘They’re probably a bit inexperienced.’ And I had done school plays, after all! So to my eternal embarrassment I actually said to both Rob and Demi, you know, maybe if you just did this…”
“St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” climbed to number one on the U.S. Billboard charts. (Even though Parr is British, this is no New Wave song—it’s infused with David Foster’s trademark power-pop sensibility.) Parr went on tour with Tina Turner in the summer of 1985; her song “We Don’t Need Another Hero” was number two.
Foster and Parr made no secret of what their song was really about (in Canada, the video liberally interspersed clips of Hansen’s journey), and have played benefit concerts to help raise awareness of the Rick Hansen Foundation. When Hansen crossed the Great Wall of China, says Parr, throngs of Chinese people came into the street singing the song, “because they knew it was his anthem.” When Hansen returned to Vancouver, finally completing his cross-the-globe odyssey, he had raised $25 million, and Foster and Parr performed “St. Elmo’s Fire” as he crossed the finish line. The lyrics “I can climb the highest mountain, cross the wildest sea, I can feel St. Elmo’s Fire burni
ng in me” never rang truer, perhaps, than they did at that moment. The Rick Hansen Foundation is now one of the leading spinal research foundations in the world, and has raised $200 million.
As Hansen was on his journey around the world, he sent Parr a telegram. Recalls Parr, “It said, ‘Whenever I can’t wheel another mile, I play the song, and then go out and do another twenty miles.’ And to me, that means more than having a number one hit.”
When it came time for John Hughes to create the soundtrack for 1986’s Pretty in Pink, he turned again to David Anderle, whom he’d become quite close with; at that point, says Anderle, “he and I were, like, best buddies.” Once again, Anderle set out to find the most cutting-edge New Wave bands, “the music right down John’s heart.”
This time around, Anderle found it was much easier to secure artists. “Now,” he says, “all the English record company people, especially the indies, wanted their bands in these films, because they saw what happened with Simple Minds.” In particular, says Anderle, Steven Baker, a music executive at Warner Bros., “understood completely the potential for exposure of these acts through a John Hughes film.” And so Warner Bros. artists The Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen provided the angsty “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want,” and the dreamy “Bring On the Dancing Horses,” respectively. Anderle was friendly with the American manager of New Order, who, he remembers, “knew about the success of Simple Minds and was looking for a way to maximize New Order’s popularity in America,” so the band wrote and recorded the synthy “Shell Shock” for the soundtrack.
Anderle was an invaluable asset to Hughes. Musicians trusted him because of the credibility he’d established earlier working with artists such as Frank Zappa, something Anderle could bring up “if somebody thought I was just being some Hollywood soundtrack hack. Not to pat myself on the back, but I think I was able to convince some of these people that this would be something they should do. I said to them, ‘You won’t be embarrassed by doing this.’” INXS, who was just beginning their rise to superstardom, wrote and recorded the boppy song “Do Wot You Do” for the soundtrack. Anderle also approached indie-world darling Suzanne Vega. “I told Suzanne, I want you to write a song that represents Molly Ringwald’s character in this film. She’s left of center.” The result, of course, was Vega’s taunting, bold song “Left of Center.” The most out-of-left-field album choice, perhaps, was a cover of Nik Kershaw’s “Wouldn’t It Be Good,” by the Danny Hutton Hitters, a band fronted by the former lead singer of Three Dog Night. Kershaw never quite understood why his original hit version from 1984 was bypassed. “I guess they were supposed to be the next big thing when they recorded it,” he mused in an interview.
The Psychedelic Furs had originally released their song “Pretty in Pink” in 1981. Ringwald adored it. And it’s considered basic Brat Pack knowledge that she introduced Hughes to it. But that may not quite be the case. “I have heard that I did,” says Ringwald, “but I can’t imagine that he hadn’t heard it already. I think maybe I reintroduced him to it, or maybe he heard it in a different way when I played it for him.”
The Furs’ original recording, though great, had an almost bitter sound to it. “We couldn’t get the rights to their original master, and I didn’t want that anyway,” says Anderle. “I wanted to have a Psychedelic Furs ‘Pretty in Pink’ that we could promote.” The band watched dailies from the film and recorded the more spirited version that appears on the soundtrack. “It’s a richer sound. It’s recorded better, and it’s recorded not as edgy as the first one,” says Anderle. “It doesn’t have an indie feel to it; it has more of a produced feel.” The attitude of the rerecorded version is different, suggests Anderle, “because they were now doing it for a different reason—doing it for the film.”
The band The Rave-Ups, whose lead singer Jimmer Podrasky was dating Ringwald’s sister Beth and later had a child with her, was featured prominently in Pink; they’re the ones performing in the nightclub scenes. And yet they’re absent from the soundtrack. Anderle chose not to put the A&M artists on the album, because he felt he already had enough good material. “So I get a phone call from Molly’s agent,” he recalls. “She said, ‘Molly Ringwald is not going to do any talk shows to promote this film if you don’t put that band in the soundtrack.’ I went, ‘Lady, are you kidding me? You think you can scare me? I’m not in your world.’”
Anderle called Hughes, “hysterically laughing,” to tell him about the phone call. “I said, ‘Man, I just had a Hollywood moment.” Ringwald did ultimately do the talk show circuit, even though the song was not put on the soundtrack, so Anderle thinks Hughes must have intervened. The incident might have made the rift between Ringwald and Hughes grow even deeper, because Hollywood politics were anathema to Hughes. “He didn’t have much respect for that stuff,” says Anderle.
The song that would become Pink’s biggest hit, “If You Leave,” was performed by Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark, a British synth-pop band who had been around for years but hadn’t quite broken the U.S. market. Hughes, a big fan of theirs, had asked the band to write a song for the film based upon the original script. The tune OMD came up with was called “Goddess of Love,” and it mirrored the storyline in which Andie ends up with Duckie. But when OMD came to Los Angeles and watched the final version of the film in a screening Hughes arranged for them on the Paramount lot, they found that “Goddess of Love” no longer worked, and quickly wrote “If You Leave,” to better mesh with the pro-Blane ending. (Once again, Duckie gets the shaft.)
But one key person apparently wasn’t all that swept up in the New Wave songs permeating the film’s soundtrack: the movie’s director, Howard Deutch. “Howie hated this music,” says Anderle. “Howie likes California rock: Jackson Browne, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, JD Souther. That’s his music. That’s what he wanted for this film. So I was battling him the whole way.” Deutch, who was usually in synch with what Hughes wanted, has said, “John and I actually for the first time didn’t agree—about the music.”
Anderle worked hard to get all the musicians Hughes wanted, and, he says, Deutch resisted each one. Anderle understood the New Wave sensibility of the movie’s characters, and so when Deutch would ask him why, for example, Jackson Browne couldn’t be on the soundtrack, Anderle would reply, “‘Because it has nothing to do with the film, man!’ Finally,” says Anderle, “it got so bad that I called John and I said, ‘I gotta see you.’” He told Hughes, “Every act that I have, that are all the acts you want and love, Howie is not putting in the film. There is no way in the world I can do this for one more day. I don’t need this shit, buddy.’”
Hughes called a meeting later that day with Anderle, Deutch, and Shuler Donner, where Deutch leveled with everybody. “Howie says, ‘I don’t like this music. I don’t get it,’” Anderle recalls. And then, much to Anderle’s credit, Hughes said, “Every single thing that David wants in this film is going in the film.”
But this wasn’t about a power play to Anderle—it was about staying true to Hughes’s ideals. “I didn’t question Howie’s musical taste,” says Anderle, “because I loved those [California] acts myself. I could’ve gotten them—I produced stuff like that. But it wasn’t right for the film, and more importantly it wasn’t John’s vision. John was very specific on this film, the acts he wanted. Look at the record shop! Look at the posters on the wall!” In time, Deutch came to see the error of his ways: “In the end, I can say that I was wrong,” he has admitted.
The Pretty in Pink soundtrack became a huge hit, both with swooning teenagers and music critics. Unsurprisingly, part of the soundtrack’s great success came from the fact that the videos for “If You Leave” and The Psychedelic Furs’ updated “Pretty in Pink” were played frequently on MTV. Like The Breakfast Club soundtrack before it, the Pink album was major exposure for the bands featured on it. “The Pretty in Pink soundtrack was probably the first hit record that most of these bands were ever featured on,” says music critic Rob Sheffield. “It wa
s such a huge part of American acceptance for them.”
In the spring of 1986, Pretty in Pink, the film and the soundtrack, were major hits, and John Hughes and David Anderle were close friends who spent many hours together hanging out in Hughes’s office on the Paramount lot. In the album notes for the soundtrack, Hughes called him “the best friend and ally anyone venturing into the blur of film music could ever have.”
“You’re gonna be working with me for all my films,” Anderle remembers Hughes telling him. Sadly, like so many of Hughes’s relationships with colleagues, his personal and professional union with Anderle would soon come to an abrupt end. But Anderle couldn’t have known that then. And so he set to work organizing the soundtrack for John Hughes’s next teen movie. It was called Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
chapter eight
I LOVE FERRIS IN THE SPRINGTIME
Ferris Bueller Crafts the Perfect Day Off Before Graduating from High School—and John Hughes Graduates from Directing Teen Films
Act 2, scene 9—Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues, the Neil Simon Theatre, New York City, March 1985. The play chronicles the lives of young men preparing to fight in World War II, and a charming young actor named Matthew Broderick is reprising his role as the lead character, Eugene Jerome, which he originated two years earlier in Brighton Beach Memoirs. In the final scene of the play, he’s on a train with his army buddies, about to be shipped off to parts unknown. The soldiers, one of whom is played by Broadway newcomer Alan Ruck (who’d become close friends with Broderick through the course of the production), are sleeping while Eugene gives a soliloquy, clutching his notebook-size journal. Offstage, Broderick had recently been offered the leads in two movies—the film adaptation of Brighton Beach Memoirs, and a comedy, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, by John Hughes. Because of the conflicting shooting schedules, Broderick would have to choose which movie to do. “I was curled up there on-stage,” remembers Ruck, “pretending to be asleep.” While talking to the audience one evening, Broderick scribbled something in his notebook, presumably the inner thoughts of his character. During the scene, though, he subtly nudged Ruck and showed him a page in the notebook. On it, Broderick had written a number—the amount of money he’d been offered to play Ferris—and a question: “What should I do?”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 22