These actors are now in their forties and early fifties, and yet they’re still commonly referred to as members of the Brat Pack. It’s something they’ve all grown to accept. “It’s just part of it,” McCarthy says. “That’s what my life has been. My life would have been different if I hadn’t made those movies.” He seems to have made a sort of peace with the moniker. “No one likes being reduced to any kind of headline, but that was a big headline.” And the fact that Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire are still part of his introduction on a talk show, as they were when he appeared on the Today show in 2008, is something McCarthy says he is “certainly used to. You can’t fight it, you can’t outrun it. It just is.”
But with the amber glow of time, the term “Brat Pack” has taken on a positive energy, an air of vintage coolness, not unlike the Rat Pack its pun was based upon. “The funny thing is,” says Ringwald, “a lot of people now think that it’s great, like it’s a club that they wish they were a part of. There are people in other countries who don’t even realize it’s a negative moniker.” Rob Lowe feels “it is really cool now that it has lost any negative connotation, and people just remember the work.” The phrase continues to gain mythic resonance. “There is,” says McCarthy, “I guess, something about it that is very romantic.”
The frequent television broadcasts of the films can serve as unexpected reminders of youth—and not just for the fans. For Matthew Broderick, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is “a nice, crazy memory of my twenties. I remember the shooting of it, and Alan and Jennifer and Mia, so well.” (Although, quips Broderick, “I don’t think I can sit through a whole movie of myself in my twenties…You see your skinny, rippling muscles. I never had those,” he laughs, “but I thought I had ’em.”) Rob Lowe has always loved Demi Moore’s line in St. Elmo’s Fire—“I never thought I’d be so tired at twenty-two.” “But of course now,” says Lowe, “looking back, I wanna say, ‘Hey, try forty-five!’”
Andrew McCarthy never sits down to watch these movies, but one time, several years ago, he says, “I flipped on the TV and I walked out of the room. And while I was out of the room I heard a voice, and I thought, that sounds familiar—who is that? I walked back in, and it was me, in Pretty in Pink. I sat and watched about ten minutes of it. I thought, ‘My God, look at that young, vulnerable boy.’ But it was lovely. It was the scene where I went into the store to get the records from Molly.”
At the end of the day, the overwhelming emotion the actors now feel seems to be a great collective sense of gratitude for having been part of these movies. “How can you be anything but thankful to be a part of it?” asks Anthony Michael Hall. “I have almost a reverential respect for it.” Ultimately, they’re wise enough to realize, like Sixteen Candles actor Gedde Watanabe has, that “it’s just kind of cool being remembered, period.”
· · ·
As the years have gone on, fans of the movies have been clamoring for sequels. (The stories don’t necessarily need to be revisited on the screen; Ringwald has suggested that The Breakfast Club would make for a great and very natural stage adaptation; it’s practically a play anyway.) Nothing ever came of it, but many years ago, St. Elmo’s Fire cowriters Carl Kurlander and Joel Schumacher wrote a script called St. Elmo’s Fire Two. “I think it was,” says Kurlander, “unfortunately, a career move. [The studio] wanted us to do it. It was a very hard script to write; it didn’t feel organic. It was set five years later. Can you imagine?” asks Kurlander, laughing. “They all had to get together for something, probably a wedding. I could write a really great sequel to St. Elmo’s now.” Perhaps there will never be a film sequel, but fans’ thirst will surely be quenched by the new St. Elmo’s Fire hour-long dramedy TV series that ABC is planning. It will be set in present-day Georgetown, and Joel Schumacher is one of its executive producers.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off star Alan Ruck says people frequently ask him what he thinks might have happened to his character, Cameron Frye, after totaling his domineering father’s Ferrari. Ruck’s response? “I say, ‘Well, his father killed him. His father threw him out the window.’ And I do think maybe Ferris and Sloane got married, and then got divorced. It was a great high-school romance and then maybe after that, they both might’ve grown up to be different people.”
“There was talk of” a sequel to Ferris, says Broderick. But, he adds, “Ferris Bueller is about the week before you leave school, it’s about the end of school—in some way, it doesn’t have a sequel. It’s a little moment. It’s a lightning flash in your life. I mean, you could try to repeat it in college or something. But it’s a time that you don’t keep. So that’s partly why I think we couldn’t think of another.”
“But just for fun,” says Ruck, “I used to think, ‘Why don’t they wait until Matthew and I are in our seventies, and do Ferris Bueller Returns, and have Cameron be in a nursing home. He doesn’t really need to be there, but he just decided that his life is over, so he committed himself to a nursing home. And Ferris comes and breaks him out. And they go to, like, a titty bar, and all this ridiculous stuff happens. And then, at the end of the movie, Cameron dies.’”
There was also talk of a Sixteen Candles sequel, but John Hughes wouldn’t do it, and Ringwald wouldn’t do it without him. With his involvement, she would’ve considered a sequel to that or to Pretty in Pink, but not The Breakfast Club. “I think that’s a movie that just should stand on its own,” she says.
Anthony Michael Hall is uninterested in revisiting his Candles character on-screen. “I feel about doing that the way I feel about when I was offered Dancing with the Stars,” he says, “or a guest shot on The Surreal Life. I just feel like, who would want to see that? I hope to as a filmmaker, in the next ten years, maybe approach similar material and do something like what John did for me, direct something like that.” Hall says he’s in this for the long run; it’s important to make the kind of career decisions that allow him to have longevity working in the field he loves. “I want to have a body of work, and I want to be an old man in this business,” he says. “I want to produce and direct. It’s always been about the work. I never think about playing a celebrity—that’s why I didn’t try that hard to be one.”
John Hughes was aware of the tremendous affection people feel for The Breakfast Club, and he realized that fans would be incredibly eager to see a sequel to the film. “I know everybody would love to watch it,” he told the Hartford Courant in 1999. But he also knew that portraying the teens as grown-ups with adult worries would take something away from his original creation. He didn’t want to do that, he said. “I’m too fond of those characters.”
And maybe sequels to these films aren’t really necessary—after all, each new generation of teenagers, it seems, discovers these “old” movies anew, and is captivated. “For my fourteenth birthday, I had a slumber party where I showed these movies,” says Houston teen Ann Suttles. “My friends and I were so excited—it was going to be our first time watching them. We were gathered around the TV, with our blankets and pillows and chocolate, and we watched The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Pretty in Pink. As we were watching, we kept commenting in unison, and we’d talk about which one of us was which character, and we’d giggle together, or sigh together. You haven’t lived, as an adolescent, until you’ve seen these movies.”
Maybe the reason today’s teens relate so deeply to these films is because the movies helped create the very notion of the teenage experience as we know it. Literary scholar Harold Bloom suggests in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human that the Bard, through the self-aware characters he created, may have helped humans become the self-aware beings we are. Maybe these culturally absorbed eighties youth movies created a template for the modern American high-school experience; a blueprint for the emotional makeup of the brains, beauties, jocks, rebels, and recluses of any new era; a model for how they can interact with one another. Wrote the New York Observer, “Hughes essentially introduced the modern teenage hero: wise beyond his years, artisti
cally inclined, hyper-articulate, romantic, and hopelessly misunderstood.” If Shakespeare invented the human, John Hughes reinvented the American teenager.
In 1991, cultural historian Neal Gabler predicted in the New York Times that in the future, “people will talk about how [Hughes] synthesized the culture.” Asked now about his clairvoyant statement, Gabler remarks, “I said that I don’t think you can take the measure of Hughes’s movies until there’s been a passage of time, and what’s happened over that passage of time is that we’ve seen that Hughes’s movies, so located obviously in that 1980s sensibility, nevertheless have a kind of eternal quality. Ten years from now, people can be watching these,” says Gabler. “I think you’ll find that these are the films that define every teenage generation.”
Indeed, except for a couple of painfully specific eighties reference points, these stories could have taken place anytime. “Remove the floppy disk jokes and Sixteen Candles is ageless as a Hudson/Day romantic comedy,” wrote The Huffington Post. As for the timelessness of a film like The Breakfast Club, Hughes reasoned to a reporter in 1999, “I think, if it has lasted, the reason was I dealt primarily with the immutable things in human character, like belonging and loneliness. Those are all things that are never going to change.”
“What’s resonant,” says St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink producer Lauren Shuler Donner, “is that they were about themes that are timelessly accessible. When you move from one part of your life into another, it’s scary and unknown, and therefore you can relate to St. Elmo’s Fire. It’s fun to imagine you’re with those kids, in that bar, or riding in that car, having a good time. You’d go, and all of your pals would be there. It’s wish fulfillment. And Pretty in Pink is also a wishful film. If you’re poor, and you’re on the out, and you don’t have a dress for the prom, you watch that movie and you say, ‘I can still end up with the cool guy.’ You say, ‘I still can have a good life.’”
There is a small tragedy in the fact that now, twenty-five years since the New York “Brat Pack” article changed those actors’ lives, writer David Blum says, “I wouldn’t do it today.” He explains, earnestly, “If I thought it was going to harm them on a personal level…or that I was being really cruel, I would have never done it.” Blum now teaches journalism, and he says he talks about his article “as a cautionary tale.” He reveals that he has said to his students, “You want to think twice before you pass judgment. It’s fun, and it’s easy, and it’s glib to come up with an expression to describe people. But it can be hurtful.” Looking back on the friendships that disintegrated after the article ran, Judd Nelson says, “I miss those people, and I tell you, I don’t know those people anymore. I think about them.”
The article, the moniker, and its inherent limitations made it harder for these actors to succeed in Hollywood, something they endeavored to overcome over time. But on some level, if the eighties youth movies turn out to be the most iconic films they ever make, maybe that’s okay, too. As author Dan Pope has written, “So what if Molly Ringwald peaked early? Hemingway did his best work before he was thirty. Ditto Einstein, for that matter. What more need one do in a life after figuring out that E=MC squared? Or writing The Sun Also Rises? Or starring in three of the greatest teen movies ever made?”
For a generation of fans who grew up on Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful, and Say Anything, the films have made a lasting impact on our minds, our hearts, and the way we see the world. “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” the theme song of The Breakfast Club, asked us not to forget. Twenty-five years on, it’s clear we never will.
“They are classic,” Molly Ringwald says of the watershed eighties youth films with which she will forever be associated. “They are only going to get even more iconic. At this point,” she says, “they are pretty much here to stay.”
· · ·
It’s a warm summer night, and the American Film Institute’s Silver Theatre in Silver Springs, Maryland, is packed. Sixteen Candles is showing this night, as part of the AFI Theatre’s summer-long tribute to classic films from the eighties. Popcorn is munched, soda is slurped, and a palpable excitement fills the air as the opening credits begin.
Everyone in the crowd is eagerly watching the story as it unfolds on-screen: the tale of Samantha (Molly Ringwald), a quirkily loveable teen whose family has forgotten her sixteenth birthday. The teenagers in the audience sit up in their seats, watching with rapt attention—it seems to be, for many of them, their first time experiencing Sixteen Candles, and you can tell they’ve been waiting for it. But you see something different on the faces of the thirtysomethings and fortysomethings in the audience. On these faces, you see the kind of warm, knowing familiarity that comes from looking at something you love, and have loved for a long time. These are the people who laugh a few seconds before each joke is uttered on-screen; these are the people who speak the long-memorized lines out loud. And some of these people, at the film’s touching climax in which Samantha and Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling) finally kiss, are moved to tears.
After the show has ended, these audience members slowly file out of the theater, into the evening air. As they disperse, heading to the parking lot, to their waiting minivans and adult lives, they pause to look at the poster for the movie that started it all, Sixteen Candles, lit up outside the theater, under the marquee. Some pose for photos in front of the poster. Others, however, stop to read the poster’s tag line.
For printed right there, in inconspicuous blue letters positioned just above the poster’s photo of the geeky Anthony Michael Hall and the dreamy Michael Schoeffling and the soulful Molly Ringwald, is a sentence that no one could have predicted—when it was written over twenty-five years ago—would go on to describe the shared experience of a generation forever changed by the movies of their youth.
“It’s the time of your life,” it reads, “that may last a lifetime.”
Notes
All the quotations used in this book are from the author’s own original interviews, except for the following, unless otherwise noted in the text.
INTRODUCTION
“Judd Nelson’s portrayal of the flannel-wearing misfit” Jason Zinoman, New York Times, 2/25/05.
“the cultural phenomena that helped make us what we are today” AFI Silver Theatre and Culture Center, “Totally Awesome 2: More Films of the 1980s,” 7/4–9/4/08.
“John Hughes was our Godard” A. O. Scott, New York Times, 8/7/09.
“few directors have left a more distinctive” Roger Ebert, www.rogerebert.suntimes.com, 8/6/09.
“I feel like my ’80s childhood” Community message board, www.avclub.com
CHAPTER ONE: NOTHING COMPARES TO HUGHES
“the philosopher of adolescence” Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 6/11/86.
“My father used to say, ‘What are you worried…’” Joseph Gelmis, Newsday, 2/16/88.
“grimly serious” Bill Carter, New York Times, 8/4/91.
“the point in your life where you’re your most serious” Ibid.
“You love to see somebody pompous sit” CBS This Morning, 10/25/91.
“was the greatest romance movie ever made” Ibid.
“A key moment in my life came” Bill Carter, New York Times, 8/4/91.
“Hughes has out-autered the auteur” Richard Lalich, Spy, 1/93.
“on the lower end of a rich community” Bill Carter, New York Times, 8/4/91.
“I just don’t care for birthright” Ibid.
“reminded me of how things were back then” Joseph Gelmis, Newsday, 2/16/88.
“Paper clips can be funny” Julia Cameron, Chicago Tribune, 6/8/86.
CHAPTER TWO: ETERNAL FLAME
“Listen to all the Thompson Twins songs you want” Hank Stuever, Washington Post, 2/14/04.
“a grounding moment” Paul Dooley on the Sixteen Candles: Flashback Edition DVD, released September 2008, Universal Studios.
“Molly wa
s creative and artistic, someone who had a lot of interests” Anthony Michael Hall, Ibid.
“Hughes wrote his scripts for [Ringwald]” Richard Corliss, Time, 5/26/86.
“I understood that the dark side of my middle-class, middle-American” John Hughes, “Vacation ’58/Foreword ’08,” Zoetrope: All-Story 12, no. 2 (summer 2008).
“It doesn’t hate its characters or condescend to them” Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 1/1/84.
“I had loved movies, but I had never seen on-screen” Michael Joseph Gross, New York Times, 5/9/04.
“I couldn’t speak after Sixteen Candles was over” Molly Ringwald, Seventeen, Spring 1986.
CHAPTER THREE: BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
“seemed less like another Fast Times at Ridgemont High” Douglas Brode. Films of the Eighties (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990).
“at that age, it often feels just as good” Sean M. Smith, Premiere, 12/99.
“leadership role in representing the Jewish community” Abraham J. Peck and Jean M. Peck. Maine’s Jewish Heritage (Charleston, S.C: Arcadia Publishing, 2007).
“The history of eighties virginity” Julianna Baggott, “A Slut or a Prude: The Breakfast Club as Feminist Primer,” in Don’t You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, ed. Jaime Clark (New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2007).
“Who wouldn’t grab the chance to remake one’s adolescence?” Richard Corliss, Time, 8/7/09.
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