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

by Susannah Gora

  In keeping with this wacky, early version of the film’s male protagonist, of course it made perfect stylistic sense that Cryer would be a natural choice to portray Garth. So much so, in fact, that he believes he was quite close to being cast in the lead role. “It seemed like John and Howie wanted me to do it,” Cryer remembers. Then things took a turn. “It was very odd, because Howie and I had been really close on Pretty in Pink, but all of a sudden I could sense that he wasn’t sure if I was the right guy to do it. And I don’t know if John wanted me and Howie didn’t, or if it was the reverse, that Howie didn’t want me or John did, or the studio didn’t, or something. But basically, I went in and read, and they decided that somehow I wasn’t in it anymore.”

  As it turns out, Cryer wasn’t the only actor from the Hughes stable to be considered for the male lead in Wonderful: “[Hughes] asked me to do it,” says Andrew McCarthy, who promptly turned down the part “because I had just made, like, three of those movies in a row. It seemed like we just kept making the same movie!” The role of Keith was also turned down by Michael J. Fox, who was a megastar at the moment because of Back to the Future and Family Ties.

  “We just couldn’t find the kid,” says Deutch, sounding weary at the memory. “We couldn’t cast it. And then I was on a plane with [acclaimed Scarface director] Brian DePalma, and I hardly knew him, but it was, like, Brian DePalma, and he goes, ‘If you can’t cast it, don’t do it.’ I was like, he’s right. And I fucking freaked out.” Deutch panicked, and dropped out of the film.“He’s a little high-strung,” Thompson says of Deutch.

  Remembering another John Hughes script that he had very much wanted to direct, Deutch went to Hughes and said, “I want to do this other one, Oil and Vinegar,” as Deutch recalls. Clearly, that was not a smart move: the next day, he was locked out of his office at Paramount. “It took one day,” Deutch says in amazement. Hughes wouldn’t talk to him, and Jack Rapke, the super-agent who had repped Hughes and had been helping Deutch in his career as well, told Deutch that he was persona non grata. “I was like, ‘What? I just made this good movie!’” Deutch says, referring to Pretty in Pink. “It happened so fast, you can’t even imagine. It was beyond Hollywood; it was like, Vietnam. And I was gone. I was out of the loop.”

  When he was locked out of the studio, Deutch called Ned Tanen. “Ned called me back, late one night,” Deutch recalls. “And he goes, ‘Listen, did you ever see Day for Night?’ And I say no. He says, ‘Go out right now to a video store and rent Truffaut’s Day for Night,’” the classic movie portraying the inherent woes and frustrations of the filmmaking process. “I said, ‘Ned, what’s that got to do with my life right now?’ He goes, ‘It is your life right now.’”

  Soon after Deutch’s abrupt exit from Some Kind of Wonderful, Martha Coolidge was brought on to replace him as director. Coolidge had directed the critically admired 1983 cult film Valley Girl, which starred Nicolas Cage as a punk who falls for the titular mall-loving babe, and the surprisingly good teen comedy Real Genius, starring Val Kilmer. Known for her dark, edgy sensibility as a director, Coolidge started taking the formerly goofy Wonderful to an entirely new place.

  Says Masterson, “I remember reading the script and thinking that it didn’t seem like the same tone as the one that Howie [originally] had in mind.” Gone were the Ferris Bueller–like antics, and in their place was a starker tale about the pain of class-consciousness in teendom. Of course, as the film’s writer, John Hughes was responsible for many of these changes to the script, but so was his new director.

  This tonal change only added to the ever-growing feeling of insecurity surrounding the project. “When production got ready to go and Martha was brought on,” says Masterson, “it was sort of during the time when they were developing the script, and there was not a consensus necessarily on exactly which direction to go. I think people were happy with the changes, but there wasn’t comfort and certainty about it.”

  Perhaps the greatest imprint Coolidge made was the casting of Eric Stoltz as Wonderful’s lead character, Keith Nelson. An intense, handsome actor best known for his red hair and his powerful turn (behind layers of prosthetics) as Cher’s disfigured son in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1985 drama Mask, Stoltz was born on September 30, 1961, to schoolteachers Jack and Evelyn Stoltz. The family spent five years living in American Samoa, but returned to Santa Barbara when Eric was eight. He fell in love with theater at a young age, appearing in dozens of plays by the time he finished high school. Stoltz then studied at USC (where he connected with Ally Sheedy), acted in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and made his film debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

  By the time Wonderful was casting, Stoltz was getting a reputation for his deadly serious approach to acting. He had been cast as Marty McFly, the lead in Back to the Future, but after four weeks of shooting, producer Steven Spielberg felt he was too serious for the role, and replaced him with Michael J. Fox (it’s been said Stoltz insisted he be called “Marty” at all times). Stoltz’s austere quality would seem to have made him a natural fit for the darker version of Wonderful that Martha Coolidge was planning on helming, and he very much liked the direction the script was heading in. “I met with Martha,” remembers Stoltz, “and she told me about her vision for the project, which was very interesting. Her vision was almost like a dark, silent film. A very dark take on teen life at that point in time, which was very intriguing.” He was also fascinated by what he thought would be Coolidge’s attempt to turn the Pretty in Pink story on its ear. “Martha Coolidge wanted to take it in a different direction, to make it its own living, breathing story,” he says. “And that’s why I wanted to get involved, because the idea of making a darker version of Pretty in Pink that didn’t have the Duckies in it, was intriguing—sort of like making a darker version of a kid’s fairy tale.”

  Though he’d never acted in a John Hughes production before, Stoltz had visited the set of Sixteen Candles because he had friends in that film. “We’d always go to each other’s sets and get free food, quite frankly,” he laughs. “We were just all actors looking for work.” At the time of Wonderful’s casting, Stoltz had only a passing knowledge of who John Hughes was. “At the point that I was sent the script for Some Kind of Wonderful, I just experienced him as a prolific and interesting guy who wrote scripts for a lot of actors my age.”

  By this point in the film’s development, the cast was filling out, with All My Children’s Kim Delaney in the role of Amanda Jones and Dune’s Kyle MacLachlan in the role of Hardy Jenns, the nasty, rich preppy who dates Amanda and humiliates Keith. The cast, including Stoltz, Masterson, Delaney, and MacLachlan, started preliminary rehearsals. Masterson had also been cast in Francis Ford Coppola’s war drama Gardens of Stone, which was filming in Washington, D.C. This meant she had to commute from D.C. to Hollywood, where Wonderful was gearing up for production. “I would fly to L.A. on a night flight, and then rehearse on a Saturday with Martha,” she remembers.

  One of Wonderful’s smaller yet crucial roles is that of Laura Nelson, Keith’s little sister. The fast-talking character brings a zany, smart-ass, Anthony Michael Hall–esque element to the story, but she also shows fierce loyalty to Keith and comes to his aid at an essential moment in the script. Actress Maddie Corman, who was sixteen at the time, remembers the process of auditioning for the role: “The first time I got the script, there was no title page, so I didn’t know it was a John Hughes movie.” Corman went into Manhattan from her suburban home and read for Martha Coolidge. She was told that the filmmakers liked her, but then didn’t hear anything else.

  The night before Corman’s junior prom, her parents went to the movies to see, fittingly, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “The preview during Ferris showed the hands of a drummer girl drumming,” says Corman. It was for Some Kind of Wonderful. Upon seeing this, Corman’s mom turned to her father and whispered, “Well, I guess she didn’t get it.” Two days later, though, a role in a John Hughes movie was the farthest thing from Maddie Corman’s mind. “A real
tragedy struck my family,” she explains. “My mother had a stroke, and it was the morning after my junior prom. She was rushed to the hospital and was very, very ill.”

  The lives of Maddie, her father, and her younger brother, Noah, were, she says, “turned upside down.” While in her mother’s hospital room in New York City, Corman checked her family’s answering machine and heard messages from her agents frantically telling her that the filmmakers wanted her to read again for Wonderful. “It was in about an hour that I had to be there,” Corman remembers. “And I went in to tell my mom, who was still with it enough to know what I was talking about. She gave me a big thumbs-up and told me, go, go, go. So I did, and I got in a cab and went across town with no script, no preparation, no nothing. I got there and it was just the casting director putting me on tape,” Corman recalls. “There was no feedback, because there was nobody there except the casting agent. Everybody else was in L.A.” Regardless, Corman went back to the hospital afterward, and, she says, tears welling in her eyes now at the memory, “I told my mother that I got the part. I said, ‘Oh, they were all there, and I got the part.’ And she was so happy. And it was a lie. But a week later, she died. I was sixteen, and she had been my very best friend.”

  The lie she told her mother came amazingly true when Maddie Corman was cast as Laura Nelson within two weeks of her mother’s death. “We got the call that I had gotten the part,” Corman says, “and I was ecstatic. It was such a big deal—not so much for my career, but for my family. We were lost. My father and brother and I had nothing to do; we didn’t know what to do. It was summertime, and now we had a family trip for me to be in a John Hughes movie, and it was like a godsend.”

  While Coolidge was casting actors and gearing up for production, Howard Deutch was dealing with the fallout of his decision to leave the project. “I was receiving all these other scripts and offers,” he says, “but I was afraid to work with anybody but John [Hughes]…I remember my shrink saying to me, ‘He’s the golden goose—You gotta get back to the goose!’” Deutch was consumed with anxiety over the situation. He went to his parents and asked them what he should do. They told him to calm down, to which Deutch responded, “‘Calm down?! What calm down?!’ I was having a nervous breakdown.”

  The answer to Deutch’s problems would come soon enough. “I found out that [Hughes] wasn’t that happy with [Coolidge],” says Deutch. “I heard somewhere that he didn’t agree with the music or something.” Hughes agreed to meet Deutch for dinner, and over the course of the meal Hughes expressed some discontent with Coolidge’s work on the project. “Something was not his thing,” says Deutch. “And I grabbed that. I saw light in the doorway. And I called Ned [Tanen].” This time, Deutch made the right move. “John took me back,” says Deutch, “with me groveling, sniveling. He was like, ‘all right.’” Deutch was brought back as the film’s director.

  For Stoltz, who had been cast by Coolidge and had connected with her over weeks of rehearsal, the experience was unsettling. But he could see Hughes’s reasoning: “He thought it was not the film that he wanted to make, which is certainly his right, and understandable. I’m sure now I have much more respect for that process than I did then.”

  Corman recalls showing up for her first day of work, with her grieving father and little brother in tow. “We drive onto the Paramount lot, and it’s just the greatest escape from the saddest moment. My dad has his camera, my brother has his Goofy ears [from Disneyland] on. We walk into the offices at Paramount, where we are supposed to start rehearsing and I’m supposed to meet everybody. The other actors in the film had been rehearsing for two weeks before I got there.” Then Corman remembers noticing something strange. “We walked past a group of people who looked like they were crying, but I kind of ignored it. And I felt like something was kind of weird.” Corman was told that Coolidge wanted to speak with her. “So my father and my brother and I march up to the second floor, into Martha Coolidge’s office, and she is taking a poster down off the wall. And there were tears coming down off her face.” An emotional Coolidge welcomed the Cormans to California and expressed her sorrow at their loss. Then, Corman remembers, Coolidge told her, “Listen, I’m not going to be directing the film anymore. Don’t worry about anything. Obviously you guys know that life is more important than this. Good luck. You’re gonna be great, and good-bye.’”

  Stunned, Corman and her family walked downstairs and back to the production office. “Now I do see that these other people are crying,” Corman remembers, “and that they are the other actors who are in the movie.” Just then, Corman was told that Howard Deutch wanted to speak with her. “And as crazy as this sounds,” Corman says, “I was then marched across the Paramount lot to another office building, up another flight of stairs, and Howie Deutch was—I swear to God—putting a poster up on the wall. He said, ‘Hey, guys. Welcome. It’s gonna be great.’”

  The very next day after Corman’s “only in Hollywood” welcome to Tinseltown, Hughes called a meeting with Deutch and the cast so that Deutch could meet many of the actors for the first time and hold a read-through of the script. Corman remembers the first time she laid eyes on Stoltz, when he walked in: “Somehow, he came in above, like on a platform. He had a motorcycle helmet on, and he took it off and I just remember this long, bright, red hair flowing.”

  The cast started doing their read-through. “This was not the script most of the actors thought we were going to do,” says Stoltz, “and it was a very fraught reading.” The atmosphere in the room crackled with tension, because the cast felt hurt and angered by Coolidge’s sudden firing and the fact that Hughes was acting as if nothing had happened. “All these people had just lost someone they were very close with,” says Corman. Fueled by resentment, the actors were doing a lifeless, monotonous reading of the script. And then, about fifteen minutes in, something stunning happened. “John Hughes gets up, picks up his chair, and throws it across the room,” says Corman. “He said something like, ‘What the fuck are you guys doing?’”

  Angered by Hughes’s display, and feeling the need to defend the actors’ position, Stoltz decided to reciprocate. “Eric stood up,” says Corman, “and he threw his chair, and said, ‘I will tell you what we are doing. No one acknowledges this, no one has said anything, and we are not robots!’”

  “I remember we all ended up fighting,” says Stoltz now, “and John Hughes rather brilliantly defended his point of view, and I clumsily and emotionally defended my own, and we agreed to make the film together. I remember John Hughes’s wife was there, and she was really calming, she was like Switzerland. She was between these two upset nations and she got us all on board, basically.”

  Through the intensity of the moment, however, Corman felt she could relate to both Stoltz’s and Hughes’s points of view. “I understood why John was angry in that meeting—these were his words, and they were being delivered in a really poor manner,” by wounded actors bitterly muttering their dialogue. “And I understood why the actors were doing it—they were upset, and Eric was right: actors are not robots, you cannot just shut everything off. But,” Corman adds, “these are show people. This is what happens. It’s like a family, you blow up and then you love each other.”

  In an effort to calm the tensions in the room, Deutch made a speech in which he told the cast how excited he was to be there, reminded them that he had been the original director, and inspired them by saying, “Let’s jump in.” After the intensity of the read-through, it was agreed that everyone should break for the day, and meet again the next day for rehearsal. At the end of the meeting, “all the actors were huddled together embracing,” says Corman. “Eric came over to me and said, ‘Hey, do you wanna have lunch with us?’ That may have been the moment where I became his little sister and fell madly in love. He was the scariest, coolest person I had ever seen.”

  Martha Coolidge’s firing was just the first of many to come. (The film’s troubled history of hirings and firings is barely mentioned in the 2006 “Special Colle
ctor’s Edition” DVD released by Paramount: “They don’t want anything but a rosy picture of the past,” Stoltz suggests.) Soon after coming back to direct the project, Deutch released actors Kim Delaney and Kyle MacLachlan. It was a nerve-wracking period. “Every day we would come in and there would be someone not in the cast anymore,” recalls Corman. “I didn’t know if I was going to keep my job.” Stoltz remembers this as being “a very upsetting time, because we had all grown to love each other. It all came down quickly and quietly, sort of like the replacement of an Eastern European dictator. One day the photos are up all over the place, and the next day it’s just, no trace at all.” Stoltz says he didn’t feel particularly lucky to have been spared, “because I loved everyone I was working with.” But it was actually quite essential that Stoltz not be released from this picture. Having been let go from Back to the Future, he couldn’t let such a thing happen again. The damage to his reputation and career would have been incalculable. At the time of production, his emotions surrounding the Back to the Future firing were still raw. “My ego was shattered,” confessed Stoltz at the time. “I knew all along that the film was going to be a winner and I felt I should have been part of it.” Losing the Wonderful role would have been too much.