“Any movie made in the past twenty years where attractive young people in trendy clothes obsessively articulate their feelings as they stumble through mishaps toward love and adulthood probably owes a debt to Hughes,” wrote the Canadian Globe and Mail in 2007. (The breakout film of that year was Juno, written by Diablo Cody, who thinks of Hughes as one of her great heroes.) English filmmaker Tom Vaughan’s Starter for 10, starring James McAvoy as a young man who falls in love with his quirky best female pal, was Vaughan’s homage to Hughes. In the romantic comedy He’s Just Not That Into You, starring Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Connelly, and Ben Affleck, characters watch a scene from Some Kind of Wonderful and passionately discuss its lessons about love.
Columbia marketing exec Josh Goldstine says the innovative way in which the eighties movies treated teen problems with gravitas even impacted how filmmakers created Columbia’s blockbuster Spider-Man films starring Tobey Maguire: “That’s how we made Spider-Man relatable’we treated his emotional highs and lows, his depression and his anxiety, like it was opera. To appeal to teenagers,” says Goldstine, “is to take the emotions and turn them up to eleven.”
“We all related to these movies,” says Joel Gallen, the director of 2001’s Not Another Teen Movie, a spoof that lovingly parodied the great eighties youth films and reimagined their most iconic scenarios. “These are treasured. We tried to embrace them, and have fun with them, and not do anything that would be critical of them, because we held them in such high regard.” Gallen’s film is the cinematic mother lode of Brat Pack references: many of the same filming locations were used, and the students attend John Hughes High School and eat in the Anthony Michael Dining Hall. Molly Ringwald has a witty cameo, as does the late Paul Gleason, who spoofs his Breakfast Club character Principal Vernon—wearing the same jacket he wore in Club. (Gleason had held on to it all those years.) “I think today’s good youth entertainment was inspired by those movies,” says Gallen. “And it seems that characters like the kind Anthony Michael Hall and Jon Cryer played had a big part in inspiring the stuff that Judd Apatow does today, from Freaks and Geeks through Superbad.”
Apatow indeed owes much to Hughes. “[Hughes’s] film characters, starting with Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles,” Apatow told the Los Angeles Times, “were big inspirations. When we were growing up, we were all like Hall—the goofy, skinny kid who thinks he’s cool, even if nobody else does. Superbad has that same attitude, that mix of total cockiness and insecurity.” Even Anthony Michael Hall sees a connection here. Of his days working with Hughes, Hall says, “I always have funny memories of how we got to certain jokes—just laughing at things that made us laugh. And I’m thinking of how guys like Seth [Rogen] and Jonah Hill and Judd Apatow work today, and I know they have that same thing, and I really smile when I see the films like Superbad. I know that comes from that same spirit of improv, and I’m sure they have that same kind of kinship.”
Although Apatow is the most high profile example, it can probably be said that every filmmaker making young adult films since the mid-eighties has been influenced by Hughes, either positively or reactively (1988’s Heathers can be seen as a rebuke to the sunny, redemptive spirit in Hughes’s work). Wrote the L.A. Times’s Patrick Goldstein, “It’s hard to find a thirty- or fortysomething writer or filmmaker who doesn’t credit Hughes as a seminal figure in their movie education.” Director Kevin Smith so loved the films of John Hughes that in 1999’s Dogma, he used the characters’ quest to find the fictional Hughesian ’burb of Shermer, Illinois, as the plot’s framing device. Smith even thanked Hughes in the credits of his movie Mallrats “for giving me something to do on Saturday nights.” Smith once said of Hughes, “If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be doing what I do. Basically my stuff is just John Hughes films with four-letter words.”
Hughes’s influence can even be seen in a filmic genre that seems a world away from his own: documentary. Nanette Burstein, the Oscar-nominated codirector of The Kid Stays in the Picture, recently focused her lens on the annals of high-school life when she directed the doc American Teen. Like a real-life version of The Breakfast Club, Teen explores the pressures faced by five archetypical high-schoolers (The Geek, The Jock, The Princess, etc.) and the surprisingly close bonds they forge. Burstein was influenced deeply by the eighties youth films, and was interested in exploring the truth behind “the stories you see over and over in teen fiction films: the Romeo and Juliet story—love across class or race or clique; the triumph-over-adversity story; the sports story; the mean girl’s story; the underdog story. They all exist in reality.”
Her documentary, like virtually all of the eighties teen flicks in the canon, was set in a Midwestern suburban high school. Burstein did not originally intend for her film to mirror the narrative of The Breakfast Club, but after industry screenings, people kept telling her the film reminded them of Club. Teen’s promotional materials included a poster that was a direct homage to the iconic Breakfast Club poster—it featured the film’s stars sitting in exactly the same geometrically arranged positions, against the exact same shade of ethereal lavender.
The American Teen poster was just one example of the impact the marketing of the eighties youth films made upon the entertainment industry. Before Breakfast Club, most posters for youth films had been goofy or tongue-waggingly zany. But the Club poster showed the young cast glaring at us in a new and unforgettable combination of anger, sexiness, and intensity. (John Hughes’s one instruction to the posing cast was that no one smile.) “It broke tremendous ground,” says Columbia’s Goldstine. “In the world of movie marketing, the attitude and the style of that poster is a constant reference.” Goldstine says he rarely sees an early presentation on a teen film’s promotional materials that does not use Breakfast’s poster as a reference point. The poster, says Goldstine, “was a watershed moment in terms of the change in the visual iconography of teen movies.”
And now virtually all dramatic youth entertainment is marketed upon that template. Drive down Sunset Boulevard and you might see a gigantic billboard for the TV series Gossip Girl featuring the young cast glaring fiercely at the camera, just as the young cast of The Breakfast Club did decades ago. Many have suggested that Gossip Girl is a descendant of the Hughesian teen films, and Stephanie Savage, executive producer on the show, says indeed that’s because of common narrative threads, such as “putting kids, and their culture, at the center. Everything is happening for the first time, the smallest moments have huge social significance to them. All of that can be traced to the John Hughes eighties movie moment.” Savage says that she learned things like “how to tell stories using archetypes, with strong character separation, how to make sure everyone has a unique point of view. I think that’s something Hughes did really well. Claire [in The Breakfast Club] is eating sushi for lunch, Andie [in Pretty in Pink] drives a Karmann Ghia—the specifics of it.”
The Brat Pack movies made indelible marks on the people who create today’s films and television shows, but they also had widespread impact on artists from other widely divergent creative fields. In the fine arts, pop surrealist painters bring haunting new visual meaning to iconic images from the films. Ellen Lohse’s Ode to Lloyd Dobler depicts the music emanating from Lloyd’s boom box as a cluster of magical-looking swirls. Dave MacDowell’s painting For the Birds features images of Breakfast Club cast members, and inventively plays with these familiar visages to explore the heightened drama of teenhood. “I was always inspired by adolescent scenes—it’s universal, the horrors of puberty,” says MacDowell, “and there was no better way to capture that than The Breakfast Club. The film has had tremendous impact on our culture, and the way that we looked at ourselves.”
British author Jenny Colgan’s novel Looking for Andrew McCarthy tells the story of Ellie, “an eighties child who really thought life was going to be like Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, and all those other movies where everyone was astoundingly glamorous, popular, successful, had huge apartments and lived Happil
y Ever After,” writes Colgan. In New York, The Awesome 80s Prom has been a critically and commercially successful interactive musical. “We took all these movies and molded them into one,” says the show’s creator and director, Ken Davenport. “I saw similar characters that went through many of the films and I pulled out the ones that appeared the most, like the captain of the football team, the exchange student, the geek with the big triumphant monologue at the end—all those things that were iconic.”
Unsurprisingly, the sound of the dreamy music featured on the films’ soundtracks left an indelible mark upon the creative souls of many musicians who grew up with those songs. The synthesizers, the lyrical angst, the emphasis on vocals over guitars—it’s all there. Says musician Eric Singletary, “I see all these synthy bands today, and they are all influenced by that sound from the music of these eighties movies.” In their hit song “1985,” the band Bowling for Soup describes an adult woman who never got over the Brat Pack era: “She loves all the classics…Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, even St. Elmo’s Fire.” Fall Out Boy has a song called “A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More ‘Touch Me,’” and another one called “Pretty in Punk.” (“Knowing they filmed The Breakfast Club ten minutes away from where I lived was, like, awesome,” the band’s lead singer Pete Wentz, a Chicago-area native, once said.) Minneapolis progressive rock band Aviette (whom The Onion’s AV Club called “a slick indie pop unit”) has a passionate song simply titled “Judd Nelson.” Aviette’s Holly Muñoz says, “These movies are such a part of our consciousness—they permeate us.”
Some bands go so far as to name themselves after Brat Pack movie characters, as in the case of Save Ferris, a popular “ska-pop-swing” band, or even the genre’s godfather, as with the Denver band The John Hughes Fan Club. Says Adam Lindsay, lead singer of the JHFC, “In movies like The Breakfast Club, John Hughes puts teens together from different backgrounds and lifestyles. They battle throughout, and yet in the end they realize what they have in common—that they’re here for a reason. And that is like a band.” Phil Kominski, vocalist and guitarist with The Lloyd Dobler Effect, says of himself and his bandmates, “We think that Lloyd Dobler portrays what every guy entering a new relationship with a girl should be like. He is weird, spontaneous, honest, funny, sincere, and driven, at least, when it comes to Diane Court and kickboxing. We admire this in Lloyd Dobler, and my hope is that we incorporate the same attributes into our music, and in our relationship with our fans.”
Eric Singletary spent many years with the Seattle-based band The John Benders. This included musicians who’d earlier been in a band called Sporto (the taunting nickname given Emilio Estevez in The Breakfast Club) and also one called Duckie’s Dilemma. “But Bender was our favorite,” explains Singletary. “A lot of us came from broken homes, or single-parent homes, and we were punk rock kids, so we were outsiders. We could totally relate to him.” The band sold popular T-shirts at their performances that featured “a silhouette of the iconic image of Judd Nelson walking off the field,” says Singletary. “It was just a guy in a trench coat, with his fist in the air—and people totally got it.”
Anthony Gonzalez of the critically acclaimed band M83 grew up in Antibes, France—a world away from American teen anxieties. And yet films such as The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Say Anything influenced him deeply. (He has the posters of those films framed and mounted on the walls of his recording studio in France.) “When I first watched these movies,” says Gonzalez, “it was like a new world opening its gates.” His 2008 album Saturdays=Youth, which Rolling Stone called “songs for John Hughes movies yet to be filmed,” features the same dreamy synth-pop as Gonzalez heard in the New Wave songs of the Brat Pack soundtracks. “I always listened to the soundtracks in my car,” says Gonzalez, who describes the sound as “really pop, and really dreamy at the same time. It’s magical.” For Saturdays=Youth, Gonzalez re-created an authentic eighties New Wave sound by working with producer Ken Thomas, who has produced for legendary synth bands such as Cocteau Twins and Depeche Mode. But Gonzalez went even farther than that to achieve the true sound. “We only used musical instruments from the 1980s,” he explains, “analog and modular synthesizers, and no computer at all, except for the recording, of course.”
When choosing models for his album’s cover, Gonzalez naturally picked a Ringwald lookalike: a fair-skinned girl with short cherry-red hair and pouting lips, and dressed her in a frilly party dress like the one Ringwald wears when kissing Jake Ryan in the final scene of Sixteen Candles.
“We absolutely wanted to capture the eighties spirit,” says Gonzalez. “I just wanted a picture that could have come from a John Hughes movie.”
CONCLUSION
When the Light Gets into Your Heart
You know,” says Andrew McCarthy as he walks out of a downtown Manhattan restaurant, “these movies had a big impact on your life”—the people who grew up watching the eighties youth films—“but as you can imagine, they had a huge impact on our lives as well.” The films changed the worldviews of those of us in the audience, but they also, of course, had immeasurable impact upon the actors and filmmakers who created them for us. “When there’s a good role,” says John Cusack, with Lloyd Dobler in mind, “it transforms you. It becomes a big moment in your life as well.”
Over the years, the actors who starred in these movies have faced complex emotions regarding the roles they played in these cinematic cultural touchstones. There was a time there when the actor most commonly associated with this era, Molly Ringwald, was tired of being so closely identified with the films. But over the years, as she’s grown older and become a mother, her outlook has changed. Now, she says, “Being a part of something that mattered to so many different people—I feel like I was a part of something that was really special.”
When pondering the impact that playing Ferris Bueller had upon his own life, Matthew Broderick says, thoughtfully, “It opened the door to a million things. It probably closed some doors too, truthfully, as every job does. The more successful they are, the more they limit you at the same time as give opportunities, so it is complicated. I am,” he says, “extremely proud to have been in a movie that people still remember and can enjoy twenty or thirty years later. I never thought that would happen. There aren’t that many. I am eternally grateful to have been in it.”
When fans approach them, the actors learn the extent to which these roles touched people’s lives. Ally Sheedy initially did not appreciate how much of an impact her role in The Breakfast Club had. But, she says, living in New York, people come up to her almost every day and tell her that they were just like her character in high school. “Now,” she says, “I understand.”
Anthony Michael Hall says he is always reminded of the films’ tremendous impact, “year round, since I made them. That’s how I relive them, when I hear from other people. I am proud,” he says. Knowing what these movies have meant to people, he says, is “a great gift that inspires me in very private moments. It is humbling. And it has renewed me at so many times.”
Andrew McCarthy admits that years ago he tried to distance himself from his Brat Pack eighties roles. “I found it limiting,” he says. “People perceived it in a certain way, and that is all they see. And I felt it was slightly unfairly thrust upon me.” Now he’s more philosophical about it. He says, with fire in those eyes as green and luminous as marbles, “Keith Richards said to Mick Jagger once when they were fighting, ‘Baby, this thing’s bigger than the both of us. Come on, let’s tour.’ It’s a bit like that. It’s big. These movies, this phrase,” he says, referring to the words “Brat Pack,” “captured and defined something that is very powerful and meaningful to people.” There’s a relationship between fans and the characters they love, and when people approach McCarthy, he says he tries to be respectful of that. “What they have is precious to them,” he says, “and I have been given a lot, being able to give that to them.” Sometimes, people just gush, but other times, says McCarthy, they tell him thi
ngs like, “My parents had gotten divorced, and I watched this movie every day, and I didn’t feel alone.”
Judd Nelson, whose John Bender was ultimately able to see eye to eye with teens from different backgrounds, says, “People tell me they are in the mental health field, and counseling kids, and they show the movie to classes and it helps bridge communication gaps.” (Then there are the annoying “fans” who pester Nelson about the mysterious joke that Bender tells before crashing through the ceiling—the one that involves a naked blonde, a dog, and a salami. The joke has no punch line, but some folks insist on knowing what it is anyway. “People come up to me and say, ‘Don’t be an asshole man, just tell me what the joke was,’” says Nelson, a touch wearily.)
Sometimes the the films’ legacies pop up in the actors’ lives in amusing ways. Jon Cryer, who in Pretty in Pink famously and bitterly cried, “Blane is not a name—it’s a major appliance,” later found himself making amends for the line (which he improvised) when he worked for a director with that first name. “I said, ‘Look, I’m sorry if I’ve given you a lifetime of major appliance jokes.’” Ferris Bueller’s Day Off star Matthew Broderick reveals that people ask him if it’s his day off “constantly, and it’s usually at ballgames,” he says, laughing. “The combination of baseball and beer just inspires people to say, ‘Hey, Matt, is this your day off? Matt? Matt? This your day off?’ I’m like, ‘Well, I’m at a game, so yeah, it is, actually!’”
Even the actors who played smaller roles in these films, the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns of the eighties movies, are regularly reminded by fans just how much their work from twenty years ago still means. After realizing how much fans love Long Duk Dong, Gedde Watanabe decided to auction off voice mail messages as the Donger for charity. Haviland Morris, who played Jake Ryan’s girlfriend, Caroline, gets recognized regularly, which, she says, “after all these years, is so incredible, and so flattering.” Often people even quote entire sections of Caroline’s dialogue to her. Maddie Corman, who played Eric Stoltz’s little sister in Some Kind of Wonderful, says, laughing, “The good news is people recognize me. The bad news is people often say, ‘What happened to you?!’”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 41