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

by Susannah Gora

  “They didn’t believe in the movie that much at the studio,” admits Crowe. “They showed it to one critic, who came to a preview, and he’s a famous critic. And they said, ‘Help us and tell us if this is a movie that could cross over, or if it’s just a teen movie.’ And the critic said, ‘It’s just a teen movie.’ And they sold it that way. And, really, the movie was kind of flailing for any kind of attention.” But then everything changed for Say Anything when it received two very important upturned thumbs of praise. “Siskel and Ebert saw it,” says Crowe, “and declared their love for it. And everything changed from that day. It was Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert who really championed that movie, and said that it was something that could be more than just a teen movie.” Siskel said it was “not like anything I’ve seen in quite a while from American movies,” praising Crowe’s understanding of teenagers. Ebert called Say Anything “a miracle.” Their approval held deep personal significance for Crowe. His father, who passed away shortly afterward, “had just seen [the review] before he died,” says Crowe. The exultant review was a kind of validation of his son’s chosen career, and of the idea that Crowe could, as he says, “actually be a director.” The film went on to receive acclaim from critics across the country, and ended up on many film critics’ Top Ten lists for the year. The movie has, as John Cusack says, “a sophistication and a reality to it—it doesn’t have to have a hyper-hip line every two seconds. It wasn’t just trying to be a piece of distracting entertainment; it was trying to do something about character.”

  It’s also the reason why, decades after Say Anything was in theaters, it still seems to mean so much to so many people. It not only works as a true film about teens, but it’s a pitch-perfect romance. “Never before, or since, has there been a movie that so beautifully and authentically captures the teen love experience,” says MGM’s Sloviter; “the ‘I can’t live without you’ intensity mixed with such humanity and humor is still unparalleled. I think I spent most of high school confused as to why no one was outside my bedroom window holding a boom box in the air.” When Lionsgate vice president of publicity Jodie Magid first met her husband, and he told her he had been in a band called Joe Lies (an esoteric reference to one of the songs Lili Taylor performs in the film), “it was an instant connection,” says Magid. “I knew that if he was a Cameron Crowe fan, he was the sensitive, Lloyd Dobler–esque type of guy that I’d been looking for.” John Mahoney says that when people come up to him and talk about his movies, nine times out of ten they want to talk about Say Anything, and how it matters to them. “It hit a chord,” says Mahoney, “and it resonates still.”

  Indeed it does, and not just with the fans, but with the actors and filmmakers who brought it to life over twenty years ago. “I still drive by that park,” says Cameron Crowe—the park where, on the last shot of the last day of the first film he ever directed, after various unsuccessful attempts at shooting the scene, a significant moment in modern film history was made when Crowe finally got the iconic boom box scene just right. “I kind of look at that one spot,” says Crowe, and he thinks of his cinematographer and his star: “Thank you, László Kovács. Thank you, Johnny Cusack. Thank you for giving it one more shot.”

  John Cusack not only gave it one more shot, he gave so much of himself to Say Anything, shaping Lloyd Dobler into the character we know and love. The experience of working on the film, says Cusack, “confirmed a lot of my creative instincts, and made me want to write more, and push myself that way.” And when he thinks about how Say Anything still means so much, he says, “I am always proud. I always feel good about it. It is something I put my heart and soul into as a young man, and it worked out really well.” Perhaps, then, it’s only fitting that decades after the film’s release, Cusack is still, as Vanity Fair put it, “sewn into memory holding a boom box above his head.”

  Say Anything is one of a handful of films Cameron Crowe would create that highlighted the myriad emotions felt by young people. Youth is a time of life that Crowe felt passionate about exploring in his art, and the reason behind that has something to do with his own adolescence. “My mom was a teacher and skipped me some grades,” says Crowe. “And I sort of fell out in high school early from feeling like I was—they treated me like a mascot, a little bit. So in a way, it’s like a European who comes to America and sees everything differently because it wasn’t their experience. Some of it is the friends I wished I had, or the guy I wanted to be, or the people that I wanted to be in the crowd with.”

  And some of it, says Crowe, the legendary former music reporter, “is just pure journalism—like wanting to catch the spirit of Lowell Marchant.” Crowe says he finds there is something so compelling “about real, actual passion, where your life depends on it,” the kind of passion so often experienced “early in a person’s life…So I guess my quest,” he says, “is going to be to always write about that kind of thundering spirit of belief, and finding music, or love, or a book, or a person, that opens your world up.”

  For Diane Court, and for countless Gen Xers everywhere, the person who opened our world up was a soulful, kickboxing antihero who bravely chose to embrace optimism, who decided to stand, in the face of darkness, with a boom box raised high above his head, playing a song of hope, a song of defiance, a song of love’s power to conquer everything that stands in its way. Diane Court was listening to it with all her heart. And so were we.

  chapter twelve

  PACK TO THE FUTURE

  The Eighties Become the Nineties, John Hughes Becomes the Creator of One of the Highest-Grossing Comedies of All Time, and the Brat Pack Actors Become the People They Are Today

  The 1990s truly began on September 24, 1991, the day Nirvana’s album Nevermind was released. The album, and the attendant grunge movement, forever changed the musical and cultural landscape, imbuing everything, it seemed, with a sense of cynicism, fury, realism, and hopelessness. The sushi of the eighties became the meatloaf and mashed potatoes of the nineties; the shoulder pads and feathered hair and high-heeled pumps of the eighties became the flannel shirts and ripped jeans and combat boots of the nineties. In an instant, anything or anyone—like the Brat Pack—who was associated with the frothiness of the eighties became almost painfully obsolete. And soon enough, the eighties teen film, the genre that ignited the cinematic souls of young people across the world, had finally run its course. When Say Anything finished its theatrical run in the spring of 1989, it truly marked the last gasp of the golden era of teen cinema.

  Josh Goldstine, a senior marketing executive at Columbia Pictures, says that film trends seem to follow a pattern. “It leads in where no one quite gets it—and it’s amazing, and it’s the excitement of discovering something. Then, it’s, ‘Oh, I love that so much, I want more of that.’And then it’s, ‘Why are you giving me more of what I have already seen?’ Something gets hot, and then it burns out.”

  These teen movies, with their sensitive, melodramatic, heart-on-sleeve portrayals of teen angst, were replaced by the nineties “twentysomething” film, instilled with the hot new worldview of the new decade: irony. “Reality Bites was too hip and clever for the room,” says Goldstine of the 1994 film starring Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, and Ben Stiller, who also directed. “I think the central joke in that movie was, ‘Can you define irony,’ and yet its ironic tone made it ultimately not identifiable.” (In an episode of The Simpsons from that era, one teenager comments on seeing something cool. His friend turns to him and asks, “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” His friend responds, “I don’t even know anymore.”) Movies about hopeful suburban teens navigating cliques gave way to movies about cynical young adults facing grown-up woes in big cities, and “no one was really speaking to teenagers in an authentic voice,” says Goldstine.

  But none of this concerned John Hughes. His power and personal wealth had been growing steadily throughout the eighties, but were taken to astronomical new levels upon the 1990 release of Home Alone. Written and produced by Hughes and directed by Chris C
olumbus, the comedy centers on what happens when a large, wealthy Chicago family leaves their nine-year-old son at home by accident when they go on Christmas vacation. Hughes’s genius was not only in coming up with the simple idea (“I felt that the concept, the idea of a kid taking care of himself, was the most important thing,” he has said), but knowing it would work—and would have to work his way. When Warner Bros. balked at the $18 million budget, Hughes refused to back down, and took the project elsewhere. (It landed at Fox.) “To me, this was always an A picture, and I didn’t want to see it treated as a B kiddie title,” Hughes told the New York Times.

  Aided by a John Williams score and directed by a Steven Spielberg protégé, the movie had a timeless quality that elevated it above most comedies, including Hughes’s own. Still, uncertain how the film would be received, Fox moved its release date when they learned that it was slated to come out the same day as the Three Men and a Baby sequel. They needn’t have worried. Instead, it opened against the heavily hyped Rocky V, and to quote just about every headline writer in America, KO’d it. Home Alone, whose biggest star power came from a John Candy cameo, pulled in an astonishing $533 million worldwide on a budget of approximately $18 million. It was, and remains to this day, the top-grossing live-action comedy of all time. Home Alone was every studio executive’s wildest holiday dream come true, and they had John Hughes to thank for it. Coming twelve months after National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the film was one of two Hughes-penned contemporary holiday classics in as many years. The man who admired Frank Capra had, in some respects, become him.

  Home Alone’s story (the last forty-four pages of which Hughes reportedly wrote in eight hours) about the plucky, temporarily abandoned kid, played by Macaulay Culkin—who is forever etched in our memory slapping his hands against his cheeks like the shadowy figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream—appealed to audiences all over America and the world. (In Turkey, for example, Home Alone was the number one movie of all time.) Suddenly, John Hughes, who had been up to then one of Hollywood’s more powerful multi-hyphenates, became, virtually overnight, the filmmaker every studio head needed to court. Now he was calling all the shots—and when he did, some say, he became more difficult than he had been in previous years.

  In 1993, Spy’s Richard Lalich described Hughes—based on numerous interviews with his colleagues—as a “crazed, scary, capricious bully…[with a] perpetually frightened staff…”A studio executive told Lalich, “He’s uncontrollable. No one can talk to him. If you tell him you’re not pleased with the dailies, he’ll just tell you to go fuck yourself.”

  “Sometimes,” said Ned Tanen, “he would suddenly decide he was angry. I don’t know why, but I would be the target.” Remembers Jackson Peterson, Hughes’s good friend throughout adolescence, “John was directing a film, around 1990, in the Chicago suburbs, and was filming a scene with dozens of teenage extras—not professional actors, just regular kids.” Peterson asked if his young daughter Rishie could be one of the sixty or so teenage extras in a scene shooting in a high-school hallway. Hughes, inexplicably, wouldn’t put the girl in the scene. “What would it have cost him?” asks Peterson, perplexed. “At this point, I thought, ‘He’s really turned into someone different.’”

  Whomever Hughes had turned into, it was someone that Hollywood wanted to do business with very badly, even though the films immediately following Home Alone were not exactly his best work. There was the underwhelming romantic comedy Career Opportunities (1991), which starred Frank Whaley as a loveable loser trapped in a Target overnight with his dream girl (Jennifer Connelly); it grossed only $11 million. Later that year there was Only the Lonely, a romance directed by Chris Columbus and starring Ally Sheedy and John Candy. It boasted a touching story, and more great Chicago scenery, but was an underperformer at the box office. Dutch, starring Ed O—Neill, out and out bombed.

  The callous behavior Hughes had been developing a reputation for seemed to reach its apex on the set of Curly Sue (1991), a formulaic comedy he wrote and directed starring James Belushi and Alisan Porter as homeless father-daughter con artists. The embarrassingly derivative movie was a universe away from the artistry, sincerity, and narrative power of Hughes’s teen films. His material grew less and less inspired. But somehow his power in the industry only continued to expand, a fact he seemed well aware of, and to greatly enjoy.

  Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than in the infamous incident that occurred when Disney top exec Michael Eisner wanted to meet with Hughes. After the enormous success of Home Alone, all the studios wanted to work with him, and sent top brass to Chicago to try to set up deals. Eisner, who was running one of the largest media companies in the world, wanted their meeting to be in L.A., but was told the director was simply too busy working on Curly Sue in Chicago. Fine, said Eisner, who happily flew to Chicago. But upon arriving there, he was told that Hughes was too busy shooting an important scene to meet him for lunch; would Eisner mind meeting him on the set? But when Eisner arrived on the set of Curly Sue, he was made to wait for Hughes. And he was made to wait for him in a cold, garbage-strewn alley filled with rats (a scene was being shot there). “And John thought that was just wonderful,” says Hughes’s former advertising colleague Bob Richter.

  The fun continued later, at a screening of Curly Sue that Warner Bros. execs and their families flew to Chicago for. An hour after the scheduled start time, John Hughes was nowhere to be found. The Warner Bros. execs told a Hughes editor there to start the movie, without Hughes. The editor obliged, even though he knew it would amount to career suicide. Indeed, when Hughes finally showed, he shot the editor a look, and fired him shortly after.

  Curly Sue, like most of the films Hughes had a hand in creating in the early nineties, was essentially cinematic drivel. But that didn’t matter. Because of Home Alone, “[Hughes’s] name is a selling point,” a Universal exec told Spy, “even if you’re selling shit.” By 1993, Hughes’s going rate for a screenplay could reach $4.5 million. (Considering that he normally cranked out a script in less than a week, that’s not a bad hourly rate.) On top of that, he would charge an additional $2 million to direct one of his scripts. Curly Sue was his last directorial effort.

  Even with the studios giving him those princely sums, there were times when Hughes would become unreachable, seemingly for no reason. Remembers exec Bruce Berman, “There were really tough moments with John, because when John got upset, he just stopped talking to you. He shut down. He would just go radio silent from Chicago. So there was no way to work something out in a timely dialogue. Those periods of silence could be very disconcerting. He would do it with the studio, and with his lawyer, and his agent. It could go a month. Or it could go six months.”

  John Hughes was rarely one to schmooze, kiss ass, or even display the usual social niceties. And so once he held all of Hollywood in his hands, it seemed that his already questionable social skills became even more strained. He had, at that point, absolutely no reason to try to keep them in check.

  Hughes would become close with a colleague, and then shut that person out, often for no easily discernible reason. “What happens with John is that you are either very close and friendly, or you’re in Siberia,” onetime Hughes colleague producer Tarquin Gotch once said. Premiere wrote that people who worked for him were often “stunned by Hughes’s unpredictable changes in affection. Those who thought they were his confidants suddenly found themselves frozen out, for no apparent reason.”

  And unlike the power players in Hollywood who are respectful enough (or just politically savvy enough) to regularly acknowledge those mentors who helped them achieve their power in the first place, Hughes sometimes appeared ungrateful or, at the very least, uninterested in showing deference. When Matty Simmons, founder of National Lampoon, the man who first hired Hughes away from the advertising world and then gave him his first shot at screenwriting, needed Hughes to do a rewrite on National Lampoon’s European Vacation, Hughes told Simmons he was too busy to do it, because he
was shooting another movie. “And,” remembers Simmons, “I said, ‘You can’t do this to me—remember me? The one that broke you in to the industry?’” Although Hughes eventually came back to write the third Vacation installment, he and Simmons didn’t speak for years after the incident.

  While Hughes found highly bankable new actors to work with (“He’s the reincarnation of me, isn’t he?” Anthony Michael Hall once said of Macaulay Culkin), the director’s onetime protégés were finding that the struggles they had faced trying to prove themselves in adult roles in the late 1980s only grew more challenging in the 1990s. Many of them would indeed forge rewarding careers, but only if they were very smart about choices of parts, and very lucky. Even then, they sometimes found themselves in odd or undesirable roles.

  One year in Anthony Michael Hall’s career, 1990, proved just how hit-or-miss it could be for these actors trying to reinvent themselves in the new decade. That year, Hall filmed an embarrassing fantasy-comedy, A Gnome Called Gnorm, and was seen also in the haunting and now-revered Edward Scissorhands, which unveiled his muscular, hefty new look. The gawky, skinny geek had matured into a six-foot-tall, hundred-and-eighty-pound man with a powerful physique who bore a strong resemblance to the decidedly ungeeky actor Steve McQueen. Tim Burton’s gothic fairy tale Scissorhands allowed Hall to display his dramatic talents, as did a scene-stealing turn in 1993’s film Six Degrees of Separation, in which he played a gay man who has a relationship with Will Smith’s character.

  Around this time, Hall was dealing with some bad press. In 1992, People quoted him as saying that when he was in his late teens, he “was drinking vodka by the quart every day,” mixing it with Sprite, as well as going to clubs, getting into fights, and punching people in the face. “It was a moment with the writer,” says Hall now. “I was in my early twenties when I was doing the article, so I was talking about growing up, and probably first experiences drinking or partying, like anyone in high school would. And of course it was magnified, and it was a bullshit thing—and it was edited, and I don’t know, it’s all a bunch of bullshit.” It was also reported that Hall had been in a rehabilitation facility sometime in the mid-1980s, something his mother, Mercedes, vehemently denies (“I think I would know,” she says) and which Hall himself has also insisted is untrue. “I never hit bottom, and I never went to rehab,” he told the Chattanooga Times Free Press in 2002.