The production had trouble finding snow (“We couldn’t find a snowdrift anywhere in the United States,” said Ned Tanen, who produced the film), but there was still quite a chill on the set of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Wrote Premiere magazine in 1988, “The shoot was hellish, and according to some who worked on it, Hughes only made it worse…‘He acted as if we were pests,’ says one crew member, ‘when we were only trying to make his movie the best it could be.’”
A mere three months after Planes, Trains hit theaters came the release of Hughes’s She’s Having a Baby, which had been shot first. The movie chronicled the challenges of a young married couple (Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern) who learn they’re expecting. Bacon’s character bore a striking resemblance to the real-life Hughes: he was an advertising copywriter who even wore glasses similar to Hughes’s. It’s interesting to note that Hughes, who dropped out of college after only one year, never made a college-set film. His characters, like Hughes himself, went from being high-school kids to married parents in the blink of an eye. She’s Having a Baby was not a huge hit at the box office, which Hughes reportedly believed was because it was supposed to have come out when Breakfast Club’s audience was graduating from college and entering the work force, but instead was released a year later. (This is fuzzy reasoning at best. Was there only one graduating class in America who loved Breakfast?) The more likely cause of the film’s poor box office was its strangely unsettling depiction of marriage. Wrote Los Angeles Times film critic Michael Wilmington, “Seldom has a movie which seems to want to celebrate the joys of happy, everyday married life wound up giving it such a black eye.” Wilmington added that perhaps Hughes had earlier made movies with heroic teens and villainous grown-ups “because in some half-conscious way, he saw conventional adulthood as a kind of living death: the end of humor, adventure and romance.”
In 1988, Hughes made it even more clear that he had moved on from the teen genre with the release of The Great Outdoors, a family comedy starring Second City Toronto buds Dan Aykroyd and John Candy, and written and produced by Hughes (with Howie Deutch directing). This was Hughes’s second script starring Candy, and it was obvious that there was a real connection between the two men. “[Hughes] loved Candy,” says Aykroyd, “and Candy loved John Hughes.” On Outdoors, the same spirit of improvisation Hughes had often encouraged in his teen films permeated the set. “What was wonderful about working with John [Hughes] was that he was not wedded to his words,” says Aykroyd. “He was totally open to exploring new concepts that were suggestions of John Candy and Howie and myself.” Aykroyd, who played a slick yuppie businessman hiding the fact that he’s broke and humiliated, says, “I was actually able to kind of collaborate with him on the writing, in an informal sense, as actors do. We came up with some neat ideas.”
The next year, 1989, saw the release of the family comedy Uncle Buck, another John Candy vehicle, written and directed by Hughes, a sub-par movie in which his greatest stroke was casting child actor Macaulay Culkin in a scene-stealing role. The same year Uncle Buck hit theaters, Hughes continued his family-comedy streak with National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, which he wrote, based on another Lampoon article from his pre-movie days. These were successful films, and with them, Hughes began cementing his position as one of the most powerful players in Hollywood. But at the same time, with both films, it was clear that he was slowly edging away from adult comedies and into PG-rated, family-friendly fare.
And with each new movie, it was becoming painfully obvious that his former muse Molly Ringwald did not fit into his new plan. “I wasn’t really appropriate for any of those movies,” says Ringwald. “There weren’t any parts for me in the movies he was doing.” John Hughes had moved on, the Brat Pack had grown up, New Wave was dead, and the era of the great eighties teen movie seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be most definitely over.
But in Hollywood, there are always plenty of plot twists.
When no one was expecting it, just before the decade’s end, the genre of savvy eighties teen films would be given one last moment of greatness with a tour de force movie that would take the form to a new place. The film would be the work of the screenwriter of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the very movie that had first turned Hollywood on to the power of well-made youth dramedies, paving the way for John Hughes’s success. Say Anything would be, in many ways, more complex than the teen films that preceded it, and more realistic, but it would pulse with the same emotional intensity. The genre, as it turned out, wasn’t dead—it was just being taken in a new direction.
chapter eleven
ANYTHING, AND EVERYTHING
In the Last of the Great Eighties Youth Films, Cameron Crowe and John Cusack Say Anything About the Passion of Young Love
I had it in my head that Elvis Costello should write the main songs for Say Anything,” says Cameron Crowe, the writer and director of the groundbreaking 1989 romance that would show the contours of young love in an exciting new way, and would mark Crowe’s directorial debut. Costello was staying at the Mondrian Hotel in Hollywood, and Crowe was told that the singer would be happy to watch a tape of the film if one could be brought to his hotel. “But he also needed a video player,” says Crowe. “So I brought a video player and I lugged it, and the tape, up the hill” that led to the Mondrian. Two days later, Costello called Crowe. And, remembers Crowe, “he said, ‘Well, I’ve seen your movie, and first of all, I can’t write a song for it.’” Crowe asked why not. To which Costello explained that he had never had the American high-school experience, so he couldn’t see a way to write music for the movie because of the way the film depicted that experience. Remembers Crowe, “He said, ‘You know, if it had been a John Hughes movie, which has its own removed, humoristic, satiric approach, then I would have a way to kind of get into the point of view where I can do the song.’ And,” says Crowe, “I was like, ‘Wow. Well, I’m sorry it’s not a John Hughes movie.’” There were no hard feelings—Elvis Costello went on to tell Cameron Crowe he thought the film was going to be good for its audience, and Crowe understood why Costello had turned him down. But, in many ways, the truth had been spoken: Say Anything was not a John Hughes movie.
Admittedly, Say Anything did share some key artistic elements with the movies from Hughes’s teen genre. For one thing, Anything had a plot that could easily have been one of Hughes’s, centering on the unlikely love that develops between Lloyd Dobler, an unconventional boy who’s just graduated from high school, and Diane Court, the gorgeous girl who’s the brightest student in their graduating class and is seemingly out of his league. And there were indeed some personal similarities between Cameron Crowe and John Hughes, two passionate young filmmakers who had at one point shared an office building. “[Hughes] worked upstairs and I worked downstairs,” remembers Crowe. “And it really felt like we were getting through the gates with something that almost was a risky, hidden venture for the studio. I saw all of those [Hughes teen] movies, and knew John Hughes a little bit, and felt like a fellow warrior,” he says, adding that the Hughes teen films have within them “great stories of love and longing.” Anthony Michael Hall sees “a great parallel” between Hughes and Crowe: “John had a lot in common with him: their awareness of music, and there is such a heart there.” Says Bruce Berman, who worked as an executive with both Hughes and Crowe, “Both of these guys—with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, it’s only the rock ’n’ roll that they were really into.”
Hughes and Crowe were both serious devotees of music, and used songs they loved to help them connect with young audiences. Born seven years apart (Hughes was older), the two came of age during rock’s golden years. Suggests music producer David Anderle, Hughes and Crowe “grew up remembering their life changes based around music.” So important was music to their artistry that Hughes and Crowe each often came up with the soundtrack for a film even before writing the script. “In your mind,” says Crowe, “a great song is the movie that you make in your head while you’re list
ening to it. It can be grand and meaningful. So it’s kind of like, well, if I have the tools to actually write dialogue, the chance to actually make a movie of the way this song makes me feel, I’ve got to go for it.” The music informed and inspired the screenwriting, because, Crowe says, “I would start with a song that had, kind of, the promise of a feeling, and try and match it with the movie.”
But as many similarities as there may have been between Crowe and Hughes, Say Anything was very much Crowe’s own creation, portraying the complexities and realities of teen love in a fresh way, one that had not been seen even in the Hughes movies or, arguably, in any youth movies before or since.
Says mega-producer James L. Brooks, who executive-produced Say Anything, “John Hughes created a world of young people that was sensitive to them and observational about them in a way that hadn’t happened before, and I certainly recognize the excellence of that work. But when you talk about what the difference [between Crowe and Hughes as filmmakers] is, you know—the hearts speak differently. I just think Cameron Crowe is Cameron Crowe.”
Crowe was born in Palm Springs, California, on July 13, 1957, and grew up in nearby Indio. His father, James, was a real-estate salesman, and his mother, Alice Marie Crowe, was a professor of English and sociology. Rock ’n’ roll music was forbidden in the Crowe household, and as such, became even more appealing to young Cameron, who as a boy played in a band called The Masked Hamster while a student at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Crowe started high school in Indio, then moved with his parents to San Diego. There, he began reporting for his school paper, where he first fell in love with writing about music, and with the free albums that came with it. Crowe was unusually intelligent and, under pressure from his mother, skipped grades of high school, graduating at age fifteen.
In 1971, Crowe began covering music for a San Diego paper called The Door. There he was connected with venerated rock critic Lester Bangs, who edited Creem magazine and who assigned Crowe to write a piece about the band Humble Pie for the mag. At the offices of a music public relations company, Crowe met the man who would change his young career, Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres. Crowe offered to show some writing samples to Fong-Torres, who was impressed. “They were good enough that I felt like there was something here,” Fong-Torres once told a reporter. “He had the facts down, not too gushy and teen-magaziney.” Rolling Stone didn’t have a lot of coverage of the music scene in San Diego, and Crowe was offered the chance to begin writing for the magazine. His first Rolling Stone piece was on the band Poco, which ran in the April 26, 1973, issue. Crowe was not yet sixteen years old.
Crowe entered San Diego City College, but dropped out soon after, focusing entirely on his budding career as a rock journalist. He began conducting interviews with rock royalty like Peter Frampton, Neil Young, and the Eagles for Rolling Stone. In 1975, Led Zeppelin was about to begin a stadium tour, and though the band had never granted an interview to the magazine because it had always been critical of their albums, the band members liked Crowe, who had written a piece on them for the Los Angeles Times. Before long, Crowe was traveling on tour with Zeppelin, interviewing them for a cover story that would mark one of the magazine’s best-selling issues ever. (Decades later, his experiences as a wunderkind music journalist hanging around with rockers would inspire his film Almost Famous.)
But, as cool as his job was, young Cameron Crowe was itching to write something longer and meatier than a magazine piece. And so, at twenty-two, Crowe, for whom high school had ended almost as quickly as it had begun, spent two semesters posing undercover as a high-school student at Clairemont High School in San Diego. He was there doing research for the book he would write about the American high-school experience. Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story was published in 1981, and received great reviews. Crowe told kids at the school that his name was Dave Cameron, and that he was a transfer student. He listened to these teens, took copious notes on what they were saying, and crafted a compelling, eye-opening book that gave a real-life glimpse of American teenagers in the late 1970s—teens who loved rock ’n’ roll, had after-school jobs, had sex, and sometimes had abortions. Impressed by the book, producer Art Linson contacted Crowe, purchased the film rights, and suggested that he adapt his book as a screenplay. Crowe met with rockstar sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson of the band Heart to discuss music for Fast Times. He and Nancy fell in love, and later married.
The cast of Crowe’s screenwriting debut was comprised of talented young unknowns who wouldn’t stay unknown for long. “The pool of actors was fantastic,” says Crowe. The young actors in the film included Sean Penn (who was so “Method” even then that he insisted on being called Spicoli at all times, and had that name written on his dressing room door), newcomers Nicolas Cage (as Nicolas Coppola), Eric Stoltz, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Anthony Edwards, and Forest Whitaker. (Whitaker gave Fast Times director Amy Heckerling a particularly powerful audition, and she cast him on the spot. He left the room, and she looked out her window and saw the strapping, intense actor walking to his car in the parking lot. His walk then became a skip, due to his sheer excitement at getting his first film role. “That was one of my happiest moments in showbiz,” says Heckerling.)
Fast Times at Ridgemont High was largely filmed at The Galleria, an upscale mall in the L.A. suburb of Sherman Oaks; the teens in the movie work, shop, and flirt there. For real-life American teens of the time, the malls that were popping up all over the country served as a refuge, a meeting place, a town hall, and the site of many firsts—first time hanging out unsupervised, first time working somewhere, and even perhaps some first kisses, stolen by the amber glow of the Orange Julius sign. The mall was “like the soda shop of the 1950s,” says Heckerling, who still fondly recalls those long nights shooting at The Galleria, when the stores were closed to customers and the young cast and crew had free rein of the place. “I remember the smell of it,” she says. “When we were working there, it smelled like fast food, and the melting of the gels on the [set’s] lights,” she says wistfully. “It smelled like movies.”
Cameron Crowe lived and breathed music, and fittingly, he put his heart into creating the Fast Times soundtrack by persuading various musicians to be a part of it. Crowe remembers a “fuzzy, black-and-white tape that was an X-rated version” of Fast Times (complete with some later-removed frontal male nudity): “I would go around and I would have my tape, and I would visit musicians, or have them come see it, and I would beg for music, basically.” Crowe says he was “trying to get the musicians to write new songs, because I had this idea that the music should be original, like The Graduate, to create its own new world.” Fast Times’s young director also had a deep artistic connection to the cinematic use of music. Says Heckerling, “Music is where the movie comes to you. When you hear a song, the whole movie presents itself. That’s where all ideas for me come from, songs.” The soundtrack is an unlikely mix of established California rock (Jackson Browne, three members of the Eagles), American New Wave (The Cars, The Go-Go’s), and hard rock (Billy Squier, Sammy Hagar)’exactly the type of music that the average California teenager might have been listening to at the time.
“My dream,” says Cameron Crowe, “was always to be a guy who wrote about his generation as he got older, and captured what was going on, so that if you looked at the movies all together you would see a life journey. You would see a big picture of what it’s like to grow up, and grow old, in America.”
Fast Times hit theaters in 1982. From the naturalistic, offhand way the characters talk to each other, to the stark, matter-of-fact portrayal of the clinic where Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character gets an abortion, it was the realism that so set Fast Times apart from the youth movies that had come before it. “You watch Porky’s, and it doesn’t really hold up,” says actor Robert Romanus, who portrayed Mike Damone, Fast Times’s unctuous yet likeable ticket-scalping teen. “This movie was built on truth, that’s the beauty of it. It was a real slice of life. After
watching American Graffiti, I knew what it was like hanging out on a Friday night in some small Southern California town, and after watching Fast Times, I knew what it was like to be a teenager at that time, dealing with all those things.”
Crowe’s screenwriting follow-up to Fast Times was a forgettable, formulaic teen flick called The Wild Life (1984). Because this movie ended up being quite similar to the exploitative, poorly made youth movies that Crowe abhorred, it was of utmost importance to him that his next film come from a place of truth inside him.
Veteran television producer James L. Brooks, who, mid-career, had tried his hand at writing and directing for the screen and came up with the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment, was developing his second film, Broadcast News. In the process of speaking with many reporters as part of his research, he was particularly interested in hearing about Crowe’s background as a rock journalist.
Longtime Brooks collaborator Richard Marks, who would edit Say Anything (and had earlier edited St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink), recalls being struck by Crowe’s uniquely compelling dramatic style. “I read the story of Say Anything before it even became a full-fledged screenplay,” says Marks. “It was kind of an outline of the idea of it. And I remember saying to Jim [Brooks], ‘Cameron has this extraordinary voice as a writer that just sort of sticks with you.’ It’s unique, and I found it unforgettable.” It was a voice that was bracingly funny and at times sarcastic, and yet always wore its heart on its sleeve.
Over time, Brooks became a real mentor to Crowe, and the two men fleshed out the storyline of a screenplay together. “We worked on this script for years,” says Crowe. “What we used to say is, it began as a story about a golden girl, and we needed a side character. The idea was, this was a girl who was so smart that she was going to pick the one guy that nobody expected, or believed enough in, because she really knew that he loved her best. And that was the story of Say Anything; he loved her even more purely than her own father did.” But slowly, the dynamics of the story changed, and that side character—the golden girl’s boyfriend—slowly shifted into the role of protagonist. “What happened,” says Crowe, “was that the character of the boyfriend, the guy who loved her—caught fire.”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 32