So That Happened

by Jon Cryer

  The day we shot the prom scene at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, I was in a good mood. My dashed wardrobe hopes for Duckie were given a generous parting gift: I was okayed to wear a snappy rockabilly-tinged tuxedo ensemble for the finale. Molly, however, wasn’t feeling well. She had a stomach flu of some kind, and there was a lot to get done that day. There was Andie showing up all nervous, then Duckie making his appearance, and then the two entering the prom, the whole room stopping to gaze in utter shock, and then our characters stepping out onto the floor, where a spotlight hits us as we spin and spin and spin to David Bowie’s “Heroes” as the whole of the high school looks on with the relieved sense that the world has righted itself. Andie and Duckie, together forever! Cue the freeze frame—my Breakfast Club fist-in-the-air moment had arrived!

  What is that? You don’t remember it that way? That’s because Pretty in Pink originally ended with Duckie winning Andie. Or Andie winning Duckie. Or the two of us cowinners in the lotto of love. Long live the outcasts!

  As we filmed it that day, though, it never felt like we really nailed the scene as a true romantic crescendo. Molly was remote again, more so than usual, but I just chalked that up to her being under the weather, and it was soon apparent to everybody how she was feeling. When we got to the part where we were spinning on the dance floor, she actually collapsed in my arms and fainted, she was so sick. People rushed up to help her, and though she quickly came back to consciousness, she was escorted off the set for a long break.

  I said to Howie, “Should we wait it out? Come back and shoot tomorrow?” (If you recall from my No Small Affair illness, my view of leading-actor incapacitation didn’t take into account such pressing matters as production overruns—the Biltmore ain’t cheap.)

  “No, no,” Howie replied. “You know, I think we got it. We’re not going to come back.”

  Fine, I thought. I trust these people now. Something seemed off, but hey, maybe it looked great in dailies.

  The rest of the shoot went smoothly, and after Pretty in Pink wrapped I went straight to Virginia to shoot my next movie, a dark comedy called Home Front, about a neglected teen who decides to sabotage his absent dad’s senate campaign. It was a funny script, and I would be the lead, so I leaped at it. I landed in something very different, however: The director was fired and replaced after a week, the production shut down for a month, and when everyone came back we had a new script that was being rewritten further on a daily basis. It was painful to watch everything that was good in the original screenplay be slowly drained and replaced by mediocrity, but I was stuck.

  I was in the middle of this sinking production when I got a call from manager Marty.

  “Hey, Jon,” he said. “So it looks like they need to reshoot the Pretty in Pink ending.”

  Bingo. “You know, Marty, I saw this one coming. Molly was pretty out-of-it that day.”

  “Well, they’ll get you the pages,” he said. “Oh, and they’re going to change it so she ends up with Andrew McCarthy at the end.”

  I froze.

  Wow, okay.

  “I told you so” had suddenly become “I didn’t know that!” But in receiving the blow that Duckie wouldn’t get his big romantic sendoff with the girl of his dreams, something in me instinctively knew that I had to be a good soldier and accept it. And I did, just as Duckie invariably would when I played it. This is how it works, I figured. Movies change. Reshoots happen all the time. Don’t get me wrong: I was crestfallen, and quick to blame myself for not generating whatever was needed in the scene for it to work. But I was going to do what was required for the good of the John Hughes brand.

  It turned out Paramount needed me for a couple of days in Los Angeles for the reshoots, but that apparently was a problem for the Home Front producer, who turned into a prick and wouldn’t let me leave for any length of time unless he got a ton of money. He was essentially holding me hostage, so Paramount opted to work around him. My schedule gave me one day off—Sunday—and there were no direct flights to LA, so the studio okayed making the corporate jet available. The solution was, I’d finish Saturday’s Home Front filming (which always went past sundown), jet to LA that night, cram in all the Pretty in Pink reshoots that Sunday, and fly back in time to be at Home Front for my six a.m. Monday call time. It would be physically grueling for me, a brutal exploitation of the miracle of modern travel, but I was ready to make it work.

  Then things got belabored. Andrew McCarthy’s manager, Mary Goldberg, got the word that Paramount was sending me the jet, so she insisted it swing by New York and pick her up as well as Andrew, who was performing in a play there. This despite the fact that commercial flights were plentiful from New York City. Marty, hearing that Mary was getting a seat on the jet, now insisted on flying to Virginia so he could be on it, too. I thought, Is he expecting a fight to go down and feels he needs to be my in-air cornerman? No, apparently this is just the politics of perks in Hollywood. Never mind that this actually increased the amount of travel time, reduced the time on the ground in LA to make the reshoots happen, and would invariably tire us all out.

  As it turned out, the Paramount jet was a tiny thing, and hardly designed for multiple posses. You could certainly sense from Andrew and Mary as they crawled onto the plane that it was smaller than they’d imagined. Mary’s enormous head of frizzy hair was practically another passenger in that constrained cabin space. The extra stop also meant refueling halfway across the country, too, so it quickly began to seem like a needlessly lengthy travel experience just to get two actors to Los Angeles with their status levels intact. I did get a little bit of vengeful enjoyment later when Andrew—whose hair was now cropped because of the play he was in—needed to be fitted with a short-notice Blane coif that had to be one of the least convincing cinematic wigs ever. I, meanwhile, was still in possession of my locks, which were blown into my luxuriously snazzy pompadour. I took every opportunity to smirk at his goofy hairpiece.

  It was good to see Howie again, but I had to inquire about the ending change.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “We did testing, and audiences just didn’t go for it,” he said, as if this were no big deal. “Besides, the movie is about bridging the class divide, and John felt that had he gone with the original ending, it would have been like saying, ‘You can’t do it. Don’t even bother falling in love with rich people—’”

  I couldn’t help it. I interrupted: “And John doesn’t want audiences to come away feeling there was no hope for them to have rich people in their lives.”

  Howie shot me a look, but I just smiled at my snarky joke and went back to work. And let’s face it: John Hughes did come up with a way to solve the ending and not completely cut Duckie off at the knees. Howie said that John was pretty despondent about the audience reaction to the ending, and just disappeared for three weeks, as if it never happened. But Howie had kept pushing John—who was by then deep into Ferris Bueller—and eventually John showed up at Howie’s, sat on the floor, and said, “I’ve got it. Andrew’s character has to show up at prom alone, and Duckie has to be the one to notice he’s there alone. Then Duckie has to let Andie know that Blane’s the guy for her.” John solved it by making Duckie the romantic martyr, the one who recognizes when he’s been bested by true love, and the one who instigates the moment that makes two and two four. (Or in this case, one and one two.)

  I was comfortable enough with it that day. A little hurt, yes. Too tired to fight? Sure. But it was something to play dramatically, which is all you can ask for as an actor. We shot the scene, and when it came to the consolation-prize moment in which Kristy Swanson’s flirty pink vision nods suggestively at Duckie, I must admit I felt mystified by it.

  “It’s so patently ridiculous,” I said to Howie. “She’s never seen him before, but all of a sudden she’s into him?”

  “Look, the audience really loves Duckie,” he said, “and I just want to open
a door for him.”

  How could I argue with that? During the rehearsal take, I got playful and chose to turn Duckie’s reaction to this hot girl’s leer into a self-conscious “can you believe this?” joke in which I looked straight into the camera—what they call “breaking the fourth wall,” or shattering the illusion that there’s a barrier between characters and audience. I knew it was weird, and not exactly appropriate for a slice-of-life teen movie. I was probably feeling a little loopy by that point, and maybe thinking about how well Eddie Murphy’s hilariously deadpan turn to the camera worked in Trading Places. But I never thought Howie would love it as much as he did. He insisted I do it for the real take, too. Although we also shot one without it, Howie kept the one with my cheeky nod to the audience.

  I got the main shots completed, but there was little time for insert shots if I was going to make the flight, so for the close-up of Duckie’s hand in Andie’s, they inexplicably picked a crew member much older than me, and now that shot in the finished movie looks like a wizened claw is suddenly clutching our heroine’s hand. Whatever.

  I was now headed back on the jet so I could make my Monday morning call time on the Home Front set. It occurred to me that I’d come away from my filmed high school experience much the same as I left my actual high school: saddened that I never felt accepted as a part of the in crowd, but all the wiser for it. And as Home Front continued to spiral out of control, looking more and more like a ready-made dud, I took comfort in knowing that in the can was something good, something people would have an interest in seeing, and a project that would show the world what I had to offer.

  That sense of accomplishment really hit home when on opening day I rented a limo and took some friends as we hit various theaters to celebrate the moment. One of those theaters was the Loews Astor, where years prior I’d sat in wonder at Star Wars, and my hoot-and-clap policy of acknowledging movie magic began. We arrived after it had started, but I hightailed it to the front row and sat down just in time to catch “Try a Little Tenderness.” It was still a little surreal to see myself so uninhibited on-screen, but I was proud of it. When my dance was finished, however, I heard it: hooting and clapping.

  It remains indisputably one of the happiest moments of my life.

  Chapter 12

  People Actually Booed

  Boy, you think you know a film you starred in when you were twenty. Turns out there were quite a few elements to the crazy cocktail that is Pretty in Pink that I never knew about until years later.

  For one thing, I learned that Howard Deutch is not Machiavellian. Not that I thought he was a master manipulator. I mean, Howie’s a great guy. We’ve stayed friends all these years. But when it came to one source of filming frustration on Pretty in Pink, I’d always blamed Howie for it, until he gave me the true story last year over lunch as I was getting my memory jogged for this book.

  It was the nightclub scene in which Duckie, Iona, and Andie are hanging out, Blane shows up, and I’m a dick to him. It’s four people around a table, and those scenes take a long time to shoot, because you have to get everybody in single shots as well as the group take. As the day goes on, you’ve performed the scene many, many times, because when a fellow actor is getting his or her single shot, it helps if the scene partners are off-camera delivering their lines for the sake of flow and realism.

  There’s a hierarchy, though, as to who gets to do their singles first, and my new-kid status meant my singles would be filmed last. I didn’t mind being last, because coming from the theater, I’m used to running scenes over and over and over. I considered it a badge of honor, in fact, that when it came to my singles, I’d be as fresh for the final takes as I’d been at the beginning of the day.

  But when it came time to have the camera on me, Molly and Andrew started fucking around with the lines from behind the camera. It was already a tense scene of arguing, but they were making lines up that were even more outwardly hateful, compounded by giggling and laughing between each other. My dander wasn’t just up; it was airborne. I thought, I just did rock-steady off-camera line readings for all you dicktards, and now is when you fuck around, after three-quarters of the day is gone? Where’s the professionalism?

  I was really angry about it, and after we finally got the take of me that Howie liked, I went over to Molly and vented.

  “What the fuck!” I said. “What was that all about?”

  “Oh, well, they told us to try to make you mad so that the scene would be fresher,” she said.

  That only made me more furious. There was an assumption that I wouldn’t be fresh enough to make the scene work, when I’d given no indication that I wasn’t rarin’ to go. I took it as an insult, and from then on was floored that Howie would feel the need to manipulate me into getting what he wanted, something he’d never done before.

  Well, what I learned was that it was John Hughes’s doing. Howie said that when John was around, it was not uncommon to hear, “That scene needs a little more something,” and then he’d push for more takes, or a different approach to a take. We’ll never know if the buttons-unpushed version of my singles would have been better, but out of respect for the late writer of Pretty in Pink, let’s just say the scene works as it stands.

  At least I got confirmation that Howie is a hundred percent mensch, as opposed to 99.9 percent!

  I also learned in recent years that Robert Downey Jr. and I are not the same person.

  Yes, that sounds like something pretty obvious to know about oneself. Taking that statement at face value, I also know that at no time have I been Dick Cheney, a golden retriever, the guy from the Joe Isuzu commercial, or Sir Francis Bacon. But when I say we aren’t the same person, what I mean is: When it came to the part of Duckie, Molly Ringwald wanted Robert Downey Jr., didn’t get Robert Downey Jr., and therefore could look at me only as Not Robert Downey Jr.

  Now, I knew back then that Robert Downey Jr. (are you sick of seeing that name now?) was somebody talked about for Duckie. I also knew Anthony Michael Hall was offered the part. But what I didn’t know until I sat my forty-something self down a few years ago to watch the other interviews on the twentieth-anniversary “Everything’s Duckie” DVD edition of the movie was that Molly’s view of the original ending would have been mighty different if that delectable (my word) Mr. Downey Jr. had been cast. She would have completely understood Andie and Duckie being together at the end if the sexually attractive (my phrase) Mr. Downey Jr. had been opposite her. But once the romantically unappealing (my inference) Jon Cryer was cast, she simply never bought the ending. To which my forty-something, just-thought-I-was-kicking-back-to-reminisce self responded to the TV, “Whaaaa?”

  Needless to say, I went over the whole ending rigmarole in my head and started to view it in terms slightly more complicated. Molly was certainly physically ill the day we shot the original finale—something I’m not so negative as to assume had to do with my actual presence—but was there an unknowing thread of actorly sabotage going on? Did she never intend for the ending to work? Had she heard about Robert’s masterful work in the subway improv at Stagedoor Manor and convinced herself only an actor capable of that kind of brilliance deserved her character’s love? Was the plan to make that Andie/Duckie pairing so unpalatable that the studio would pull Robert Downey Jr. out of whatever he was doing and erase me/insert him digitally, even though such technology didn’t even exist then? Was I really being this paranoid about someone who was only seventeen at the time?

  Once I came out of that irritable place, I felt I’d at least earned a few lingering irritations. I may not have given off the most palpably erotic vibe playing Duckie—something I now wish I’d been pushed into working on then—but at least I played the part where this flashy dork was plainly in love with Andie. Mightn’t Molly have tried a wee smidgen to pretend that first ending could have been realistic?

  Had there been, in some tangible way foiled by a lack of imaginati
on, at least a chance for Andie and Duckie with audiences?

  Then again, there were boos at those early screenings, another late-arriving fact to my mental history of this movie.

  Only last year, over that aforementioned lunch, did Howard Deutch inform me that those initial test screenings of Pretty in Pink weren’t just a case—as I was initially led to believe—of audiences politely indicating that they didn’t “go for” the ending. As if it were a case of Coke versus Pepsi.

  More like Coke versus horse urine.

  As Howie explained, “Through the whole screening, Dawn Steel”—then the production chief at Paramount—“is holding my hand, because the audience is just loving the movie so much. They were totally with it, until that moment at the end when she starts dancing with Duckie, and the freeze frame happened. People actually booed.”

  I had gotten my freeze-frame moment à la Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club, and instead of roars of approval, there were boos. Yikes.

  Howie added, “I’ve never had that happen where just everything came to a screeching halt.”

  Learning of actual boos altered everything again for me. Was that first ending just beyond the comprehension of everyone? Maybe it was like the famous story screenwriter William Goldman tells in his memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade about the reaction to The Great Waldo Pepper. They’d made a big period adventure about the early days of aviation, with Robert Redford—then the biggest star in movies—playing a brave pilot whose stunt partner was a young, vibrant Susan Sarandon. Everything was hunky-dory with audiences until they killed off Sarandon in a tension-filled aerial sequence. As much as the filmmakers thought they’d braced audiences for the possibility of a dramatic left turn, they apparently underestimated what people wanted to see—namely, their marquee hero saving someone—and after that, moviegoers simply checked out.

  Pretty in Pink was perhaps, without anyone realizing it initially, about a poor girl snagging a rich boy. Maybe even the instant eroticization speculatively attributed to Robert Downey Jr. wouldn’t have made that ending work. My costar’s secret preference is now to me exactly what it should be: something to roll my eyes over, shrug off, and make jokes about.