Masterson knew how essential an element drumming was to Watts, and so the actress was determined to learn the instrument. Early in the production, she worked with noted percussionist Billy Moore, who’s drummed with musicians such as Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. Masterson and Moore would drum for five hours a day, and, she says, “he became my Yoda.” She and Moore would find themselves “talking about life and relaxation and how all this applies to rhythm and the drums. It was awesome.” Masterson was given a private space in which to hone her new skill. “They gave me the old Mork and Mindy screening room, a little screening room on the lot of Paramount. It had twenty-five velvet seats, and my drum kit. And I’d just play drums for hours,” she says warmly of the memory. “Oh, God, I loved it so much.” The talent served her well later in her career: “When I was doing Benny & Joon, I bought a drum kit when we were in Spokane, and [costar] Johnny [Depp] and his friend Sal and I all turned this one room in the warehouse where we were shooting into a studio. And so we had amps and guitars and basses, and my drum kit. And we’d sit in there and we’d all jam. It was the only time I played with people,” she says, until years later, at a friend’s wedding right after September 11, 2001, when the band couldn’t make it to the event. Masterson was asked to play the drums, and willingly obliged.
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On the set of Some Kind of Wonderful, Masterson’s skills on the skins were helping her to further inhabit her character of Watts, but her costar Eric Stoltz’s methods of getting into character were particularly irritating Howard Deutch. Even though Stoltz had helped Deutch by bringing Thompson to the project, he and Deutch still quarreled, and their differing styles of filmmaking only made matters worse. At the time, Stoltz was a fervently devoted student of the Method style of acting—in which an actor “becomes” a character in every possible way, and stays in character at all times, even when the camera isn’t rolling. This method of acting helped him navigate what was, for him, a very difficult shoot. Thanks to the firings and the drastic changes in the script’s tone, “I had such a hard time with the film as a whole,” says Stoltz. “I wanted to do as much as I could to remind myself to stay in character and to be this guy. It drove Howie crazy, which was an added benefit, I think,” he says, semi-seriously.
The root of Stoltz and Deutch’s tension may have lain in the very character Stoltz was portraying. “Interestingly enough,” says Stoltz, “in retrospect, it seems like we had a similar relationship to the father and the son in the film. The father wants him to do it his way, because he thinks it’s right. And the son says, ‘I gotta do it my own way!’ And you sort of battle through.”
If Stoltz’s “own way” was to stay in character, Deutch’s was to shoot a great number of takes. “We just worked differently,” says Stoltz. “Howie liked to do thirty-five, forty, forty-five takes of a scene of, like, opening a door or something, because he is obsessive about getting it the way he wants it, which drove me insane.”
Inherently, the two men’s styles of filmmaking were at artistic odds with each other. How can a Method actor stay truly in character if he’s asked to do a scene forty-five times? “Eric and Howie did butt heads,” says Maddie Corman. “There were a couple of times when they weren’t speaking to each other. It was obvious that the two of them were not thrilled with each other.”
The strain was most obvious to Deutch and Stoltz themselves. “It was terrible, terrible, terrible. We hated it,” Deutch says of his time working with Stoltz. “I thought he shouldn’t have been an actor,” says Deutch, directly. “I thought he should have been a poet or a writer. It was like he didn’t enjoy himself acting. It was a struggle, and he was miserable if I asked him, God forbid, to do something. Everybody has their cup of tea,” says Deutch, “and he was not my cup of tea.”
Stoltz’s acting style was also upsetting Lea Thompson, not because she found it annoying, but because she was concerned for him. “I had seen him be fired from Back to the Future. He was my friend,” she says, “so I was more worried about Eric. I was afraid he’d get fired.” Thinking upon Stoltz’s unique personality, Thompson muses, “Eric’s a very interesting person…I don’t know. Oh, I love him. I still love him. I think he’s so beautiful, and he has that little twinkle in his eye—that mischief thing that he’s got going on, which is so cute.”
The cast turned to each other for comfort, and to let off steam when they were away from their often-stressful shoot. “There was camaraderie, and we were friends,” says Stoltz. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God, this experience is so fraught and difficult, let’s all go out and get a drink and go skinny-dipping together.’ We were always getting away from work to try and reclaim a good time, because it was a very difficult time.”
After long, harried days of shooting, the actors would unite as friends, relax, and act like the kids they really were. “It was like camp,” says Maddie Corman. “We went to dinner every night, and they had movie screenings. I was so happy to be there.” For Corman, the youngest of the main cast members, it was a particularly meaningful summer. The experience perhaps meant the most to her of anyone. “They took us to Spago one night,” she remembers, “and I had read about Spago in magazines, so I wore my prom dress and pearls. And one after the other the cast showed up. Every single person was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt.” But to make sure Corman didn’t feel uncomfortable, Mary Stuart Masterson said to her, “It’s so great that you would wear a dress,” as Corman recalls fondly. For Corman, it was a summer of “great highs and great sadness. I had my seventeenth birthday—the saddest birthday of my life. Yet Mary Stuart and Eric brought me a little cake. I wanted to be her, and marry him.”
Corman’s relationship with her on-screen big brother developed into a true friendship offscreen. “I had never had a little sister, and she was like my little sister,” says Stoltz affectionately. “We all sort of took her under our wings.” Masterson also turned to Stoltz for friendship and support. “I became good friends with Eric,” she says. “I had been alone and on the road,” working on various far-flung film sets, “for years by this time.” Masterson hadn’t spent time in L.A. for a while, so when she returned there for the shoot, “I didn’t have anybody to hang out with,” she says. “Eric was really sweet, and we hung out a lot.” The cast’s comfort together and camaraderie off-screen helped the shoot go more smoothly.
As filming went on, the similarities between Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful became harder to ignore. One night during the shoot, the filmmakers screened Pretty in Pink for the cast. The title song of Pink features the lyric “Isn’t she pretty in pink?” and after seeing the film screened, some members of the cast, remembers Maddie Corman, “went around singing, ‘Aren’t we Pretty in Pink?’ because that whole movie was kind of similar.” The sarcastic lyric, says Corman, “was another source of tension, because Eric would sing it, and Howie couldn’t quite tell if he was making fun of the movie.” When asked if the Wonderful script seemed formulaic, Stoltz replies, “Sure it did. We struggled, the actors—and Howie, too. Everybody struggled to bring to it elements that would deepen it, and help us distinguish ourselves from that film.”
Importantly, Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful also shared the same intense, painful view of class distinction in teendom. From the film’s very opening montage, as the title credits are still rolling, we know what we are getting into: We see Keith walking to his home and, literally, crossing railroad tracks to get there (could his being from “the wrong side of the tracks” be any clearer?), while Amanda makes out with her rich boyfriend Hardy.
Amanda Jones uses her beauty and sex appeal to move into a higher social stratum, and in one of the film’s more interesting narrative elements, she goes on to regret her actions. The rich girls who’ve been her best friends for years drop her, loudly debating vacations in Aspen versus the Virgin Islands while ignoring her pleas for an explanation of their coldness. Amanda ultimately falls for the noble, middle-class guy (Keith) over the rich jerk—and the m
oral here is that qualities such as kindness and intellect can win out over riches (the same message that made Pretty in Pink’s ending so alluring in terms of the Ringwald character finding love).
The two films do have some significant differences. “The feeling of the movies is very different, the tone,” says Thompson. “I am of the opinion that Some Kind of Wonderful is better, but that’s because I’m in it,” she says, smiling coyly. And in Pink, Ringwald’s character is choosing between a middle-class boy and a wealthy one, whereas in Some Kind of Wonderful, Stoltz’s two potential loves are from similar backgrounds. However, Thompson adds delicately, squirming a bit, economic background wasn’t all that Amanda Jones and Watts had in common. “I’m sorry, I can’t really say this in a really good way,” says Thompson. “In Pretty in Pink, Andrew McCarthy was so much more dreamy than Jon Cryer. But Mary and I were sort of equally dreamy.” Which, of course, leads to the one great difference between Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful: here, Keith chooses the misunderstood outcast best friend (Watts) over the conventionally dreamy girl (Amanda).
This was the kind of ending that Duckie fans had been longing for since Pretty in Pink. But the process of making Wonderful had been anything but duckie for Deutch. “It wasn’t like things went smoothly,” he says. “There was a lot of turmoil in all of this, and I was surprised that Some Kind of Wonderful actually came out as good as it did.” It was an emotionally draining time for Deutch. He worried, among other things, that the audience would have a hard time believing that Watts would chauffeur Keith and Amanda around on their date. “I was a wreck,” Deutch says. “I don’t drink. I remember I had to have a couple of drinks during it, because it just wasn’t working.”At an early screening, the film was particularly hard for Deutch to stomach. “The first time I saw the rough cut, I remember saying, in the screening room, ‘I have to go throw up,’” he recalls. “The projectionist heard me, and told Frank Mancuso, the head of the studio, which got back to John.” Hughes was not amused.
With a marketing campaign that again featured a poster image shot by Annie Leibovitz, Some Kind of Wonderful was released in theaters on February 27, 1987, the same weekend Pink had opened a year earlier. There was a premiere in Los Angeles, which Maddie Corman didn’t attend, but she did go to a later viewing of the film, one that would prove even more meaningful to her. “My whole high school went to see it together in my town,” she says, “and I remember being carried on my friends’ shoulders, and everybody cheering so loud during my scenes that you couldn’t hear the movie. I was not the most popular girl in high school, but we had such a small school that it was like, one of us did something.”
Unfortunately, the film wasn’t met with that kind of excitement in theaters. Critics were largely unimpressed by it, and Some Kind of Wonderful, which was rated PG-13, grossed around $18 million, marking the lowest box office for a Hughes film yet.
But regardless of the movie’s poor box office performance, the film still has its supporters, and a legacy all its own. Some Kind of Wonderful certainly lives on in the hearts of its director and one of its stars: Lea Thompson and Howard Deutch were married in 1989. Theirs is one of a precious few Hollywood marriages with true staying power, and they are the parents of two teenage daughters. The couple didn’t start dating until after shooting had wrapped. “After the movie was done, around Christmas,” says Thompson, “I broke up with Dennis [Quaid],” whom she had been engaged to. Then, in January of ’87, she and Deutch went on a press junket to New York, says Thompson, glowing, “and that’s when we started to get together.” But she may have already had an inkling of Deutch’s feelings for her. Looking back on the making of the film, she remembered how Deutch kept hiring artists to paint her portrait over and over again for that scene in the museum, never satisfied that her essence was being properly captured. “That,” Thompson says, smiling, “was the thing that made me feel that he was in love with me.” She says their daughters’ friends think Deutch is a “rock star” because he directed Pink and Wonderful.
Ultimately, Some Kind of Wonderful’s resonance with today’s teens has much to do with the fact that “John understood that at that time of your life, you feel things more deeply than you probably will ever feel them,” says Thompson. “And most adults don’t want to remember that. They want to belittle that instead of celebrating that this is a unique time, a special time, a magic time.” Hughes and Deutch, says Thompson, had nothing but the sincerest feelings for the film’s subject matter, which came shining through on-screen. “Even inside, in their deepest recesses,” she says, “they weren’t making fun of it.”
One feels a sort of bittersweetness when considering Some Kind of Wonderful in hindsight. The film had an unimpressive box office performance and a troubled, exhausting shoot, and by the end of it all, John Hughes, once so prolific a chronicler of the adolescent experience, felt that he had simply said all he needed to say about teenagers. Some Kind of Wonderful would be the last teen-centered film from the man who changed teen-centered films forever.
“There are only five stories in the history of man,” said the late entertainment exec Bernie Brillstein. “Love, unrequited love, family, war, and greed. Only five stories in the history of man, and Hughes went and put it with kids.”
chapter ten
THE END OF THE INNOCENCE
The Brat Pack Makes the Tough Transition to Adulthood, While John Hughes’s Power in Hollywood Grows
One of the most beloved lines of dialogue in The Breakfast Club is spoken by Ally Sheedy’s loner character while ruminating on the nature of becoming an adult. “When you grow up,” she says, “your heart dies.” A theme central to many films in the Brat Pack canon is that growing up is tough, and the journey from adolescence to adulthood is often heartbreakingly difficult to navigate. And sadly, this very theme was mirrored in the lives of many of the Brat Pack actors as they struggled to make the transition to adulthood, both on-screen and off. Upon the underwhelming 1987 release of Some Kind of Wonderful, the smart teen genre of the 1980s seemed to be officially over. The very actors who just a couple of years earlier were Hollywood’s brightest rising stars found themselves fighting to establish new professional identities when the genre they’d been associated with had seemingly run its course. They also found themselves battling, for the first time, real personal challenges that were often exacerbated by their newfound professional woes. After years of headlining top-grossing movies and appearing on the covers of magazines, these actors learned a tough lesson when it seemed that the public had reached its saturation point. “Culturally,” says Jon Cryer, “the idea was, you’ve got to be sick of these people by now.”
And perhaps sick of the kinds of films they starred in. Though true diehard Brat Pack movie devotees know that there is a world of subtle differences between the plots of, say, Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, to others, these films seemed to be telling the same story: that of young white people experiencing passionate angst followed by exuberant joy, against a backdrop of New Wave and power pop, over and over again. “It was just too much,” says Robert Romanus, one of the stars of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. “Breakfast Club, great, okay. But I don’t need six movies about the same thing, especially with all the same actors. I like the actors, but I wasn’t seeing anything new.”
After the impressive financial success of the high-quality youth films, Hollywood began cranking out many poorly made, forgettable teen flicks in an attempt to capture the powerful youth dollar. “Unfortunately,” says producer Lauren Shuler Donner, “what happens is that once a movie becomes a hit, there are about ten imitations right after it. They aren’t as good. And the audiences see that.” Derivatively bad movies such as Playing for Keeps, Teen Witch, and Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home used many of the same surface elements, and occasionally the casts, of Hughes, Schumacher, and Deutch’s young adult films, but lacked any of their artistry or genuine emotion. These lesser teen flicks were critical and commercial failures,
and helped turn audiences off the entire genre.
But there is one fact that, more than any other, probably explains why the golden era of teen movies came to a close before the eighties did. Says Lea Thompson, “John Hughes stopped writing them.” Hughes wasn’t just an extraordinary talent whose artistic soul was a perfect fit for the youth genre, he was also, by the end of the eighties, a force to be reckoned with: “He had so much power,” says Thompson. “Somebody [else] might’ve written scripts that good. But they seemed like very simple stories, so I could see how if someone wrote something like that and didn’t have the power behind them, they wouldn’t be able to get it made.”
Ned Tanen, who had a hand in producing most of the great eighties youth films, thought studios just were not willing to take a chance on the next John Hughes: “Maybe I wasn’t around to encourage a John Hughes, or really take a guy like John Hughes and say, ‘Yeah, you can direct.’ Maybe there was somebody special at that moment, but nobody was paying attention.”
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As much as the actors appreciated the Brat Pack roles that made them famous, they were getting too old to pull off playing high-schoolers, but more important, they were ready to sink their teeth into something meatier than problems related to popularity and the prom. “These movies weren’t particularly respected at the time,” says Andrew McCarthy. “I wanted to be in more—for lack of a better word—highbrow movies. I wanted to be in movies with more respected people.” Rob Lowe believes there was a “ghettoization” of those teen films then because “that was still the time when the gods roamed the earth,” he says. “You still had Jane Fonda making movies; you still had Paul Newman making movies; Dustin Hoffman at the height of his game, and Al Pacino and Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek, and new guys were coming up like Mel Gibson. And those guys, those folks were where the real rub was.” Talented as they were individually, the Brat Pack had been stigmatized.
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 29