Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (3 page)

‘Without a film that can work on thousands of screens and draw in big audiences based upon a pre-sold property, i.e. a remake, sequel, bestseller, major star vehicle, no one will commit the money to marketing the film. So we’re getting a certain kind of film, the McMovie, and there’s a growing sameness to what works in these big mainstream releases. Thirty years ago in 1984 films like
Amadeus
and
The Natural
were all top hits. Would they get greenlights today? I doubt it,’ says Steven Gaydos, editor of
Variety
.

‘
Field of Dreams
?
The Big Chill
?
Moonstruck
? No way, not today,’ says film producer Lynda Obst.

Comedy, too, has suffered because of this. But wait! you cry. Surely this is the golden age of comedy!
Hangover
!
Bridesmaids
! APATOW. Ah, but those are gross-out comedies, and raunch is funny in all languages. What is less easy to translate is Nora Ephron-style comedy, the kind of comedy you quote for ever and live and die by. No one will ever live and die by anything that is said or happens in
The Hangover
. But I know people who have changed their entire lives because of a line of dialogue from
When Harry Met Sally …
, and when I say ‘people’ I obviously mean ‘me’.

But this is not just about studio system shenanigans. It’s also about how western culture and politics have changed. American culture has become increasingly conservative since the 1980s. This might seem counterintuitive, considering the legalisation of gay marriage and the election of a two-term mixed-race President. But the fightback from these and other developments has been vicious and this and the growth of pressure groups have impacted on what studios feel able to show now in movies, especially when it comes to young women’s stories, sexuality and abortion. ‘What happens in movies always reflects what’s happening in the culture and what we’re seeing onscreen is an American culture trying to put women back in their place,’ says Melissa Silverstein.

Then there are the increasingly screwy ideas about beauty, desirability and maturity that come from western pop culture. It is impossible to imagine a young woman playing the romantic lead in a movie today without perfectly blow-dried hair, a size 0 body and body-clinging clothes – or if she did go without any of those, it would be some kind of statement about her (and she’d certainly remedy her oversight by the end of the film). But this was simply not the case back in the 1980s. Molly Ringwald, Jennifer Grey, Ally Sheedy, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Elisabeth Shue, Annie Potts, Susan Ursitti: the reason young women loved those actresses so much is because they felt recognisable to them. They still do. The sight of Melanie Griffith’s gorgeously curvaceous and pale body in
Working Girl
when she’s dolled up in her lingerie feels downright subversive compared with nowadays when actresses’ bodies are tanned and toned to an occasionally painful fault. That movies from the eighties – the eighties! – look so much more innocent and politically engaged and female-friendly and even moral than many of today’s mainstream films says quite a lot about how things have changed since, and without many of us really noticing because these changes happen incrementally.

Now, a word of warning: there is an excellent chance that your favourite eighties movies are not discussed in this book. That is because this book features my favourite eighties films and, as such, is faintly autobiographical and deeply subjective. To spare you the shock and disappointment, here are some of the eighties movies that are pretty much ignored in this book:

The Empire Strikes Back

The Return of the Jedi
(fine, I admit it: I never got into
Star Wars
)

Star Trek
(ditto)

Most films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger

Ditto Sylvester Stallone

Friday the 13th
and
Nightmare on Elm Street
(I find the opening scene of
Ghostbusters
terrifying enough, thanks)

Anything horror, in fact

Iron Eagle
(apparently guys really love this movie)

Salvador
(sorry, Peter Biskind)

Many, many more that I love but just couldn’t fit in (
St Elmo’s Fire
is an especially regretted omission here)

This is not an encyclopedia of eighties movies. If you want that, buy an encyclopedia (although probably the last time you saw an encyclopedia was in the eighties). But I think even if your favourite movie of all time is
The Return of the Jedi
(weirdo), you’ll find things here that will go some way to explaining why the
Star Wars
films in the seventies and eighties were great and why the new ones are absolute cack.

Another word of warning: I tried to talk to the main people from each of the movies I look at in this book, and that has been one of the real joys of writing it. It took thirty years but I finally found a (vaguely) legitimate excuse to make Molly Ringwald and Ivan Reitman speak to me. But in some cases I was just too late. Three of my favourite filmmakers from the eighties died in the past decade and it is a source of real regret that I didn’t get my act together sooner in time to talk to John Hughes, Nora Ephron and Harold Ramis. They feel like big omissions from this book because they have all been such a huge presence in my life.
^fn6

I love these movies because they’re hilarious and sweet and smart – because they’re fun. They’re Good, capital G, and it might sound odd to say this of a film behemoth like
Ghostbusters
, but they’re also underrated. These films didn’t just make us all happy, they teach you more than you learn from movies today. Yes, ‘the force is in you, Lone Star – it’s in you,’ to quote one particular eighties film
^fn7
I loved so much as a kid that I watched the video cassette to ribbons. But that force is in me because of these movies. Thanks to them, the true eighties force will always be strong with us.

Dirty Dancing
:

Abortions Happen and That’s Just Fine

Few movies have been as underrated and misunderstood as 1987’s
Dirty Dancing
. I first saw it when I was ten and I’m afraid that far from appreciating that I was bearing witness to one of the great feminist films of all time, I was so excited to be watching a movie that had the word ‘Dirty’ in the title that I spent the whole film waiting for it to finish so I could call my friend Lauren to brag about this achievement.

‘Well, I just saw
Can’t Buy Me Love
, twice,’ said Lauren balefully, referring to the Patrick Dempsey teen romcom, ‘and two viewings of
Can’t Buy Me Love
is worth one
Dirty Dancing
.’

Out of politeness, I agreed, but we both knew that was totally not true (
Can’t Buy Me Love
doesn’t have a single sex scene so, like, come on). But just to make sure, I then watched
Dirty Dancing
two more times in a row so that Lauren would definitely not be able to catch up with my coolness. And just to prove how cool I was, I then called Lauren again to tell her that, too.

Adult critics and audiences at the time were just as blind as ten-year-old me when it came to seeing the feminism in
Dirty Dancing
(although presumably most of them didn’t immediately brag to their frenemies about having just seen the movie). Partly this comes down to sexism. Partly it’s a reflection of how times have changed in the past thirty years. And mainly it’s because the film’s writer, Eleanor Bergstein, rightly thought the best way to deliver a social message was ‘to present in a pleasurable way so that the moral lessons would sneak up on people’. But for a long time I was so distracted by the pleasure – specifically, the soundtrack, the sex, the Swayze – that the moral lessons didn’t sneak up at all. For years I didn’t realise I was watching one of the great feminist tracts of the 1980s, easily up there with Susan Faludi’s feminist study of the eighties,
Backlash
. But then, Faludi’s book doesn’t come with a half-naked Patrick Swayze, so it is easier to recognise it as a contribution to the fight against misogyny.

By the mid-eighties, both
Flashdance
and
Footloose
had been released and studios were desperate for another teen movie that featured dancing and came with a great commercial soundtrack. But one movie they definitely did not want was
Dirty Dancing
.

‘I cannot be clear enough about this: everybody thought
Dirty Dancing
was just a piece of teenage junk,’ says the charmingly chatty Bergstein. ‘Nobody wanted to make it. Nobody. I would send out the script to studios along with a tape of the soundtrack that I’d made to go with it, that was just recordings of my old 45s from the 1960s, and executives would call me and say, “Oh yeah, Eleanor, we’re not going to make the movie, but could you send me another cassette? I wore out the last one.” But not even that convinced them of the movie’s potential.’

MGM briefly took on the script at the encouragement of several female executives (the men there all hated it), but then dropped it. Not a single other studio would consider it. Eventually a small independent production company looked at it, saw it as an easy quick buck and offered to make it for $4 million, about a fifth of the average cost of a movie at the time. Bergstein and her producer, Linda Gottlieb, accepted.

Bergstein had already had one screenplay produced, the undeservedly forgotten 1980 film
It’s My Turn
in which Jill Clayburgh plays a mathematics professor who has an affair with an athlete played by Michael Douglas. The inspiration for that came from Bergstein’s observations of female mathematics students at Princeton, where her husband was and still is a professor, and the condescension they had to endure from men, including accusations that their boyfriends did all their work for them (‘It made me so mad!’ she wails, still just as infuriated today as she was three decades ago). During the making of that film, Bergstein included a dance sequence inspired by the kind of dancing she used to do with her friends when growing up in Brooklyn, but it was ultimately cut. This was fortunate for two reasons: one, just the thought of Michael Douglas dirty dancing is faintly traumatising; and, two, this then made her determined to write a movie that foregrounded the dancing. After a few years, she wrote the story of a young woman known as Baby (Jennifer Grey) who goes to a holiday camp in the Catskills with her parents and sister in the summer of 1963 and falls in love with the dance instructor, Johnny (Patrick Swayze).

After having endured so much studio scepticism about the film, Bergstein has become pretty hardened to critics misunderstanding and dismissing her film. Proving author William Goldman’s adage that no one knows anything in the film business, one producer said before the film was released that it was so bad they should just burn the negatives and collect the insurance money, and, hundreds of millions of pounds later, Bergstein laughs at the memory. But there are two comments she frequently hears that drive her crazy: ‘I hate it when people describe Baby as an Ugly Duckling, because Jennifer [Grey]’s beautiful, obviously. I also can’t stand it when people describe it as a Cinderella story, because all Cinderella ever did was sit on her rump!’

Baby definitely does a lot more with her rump than just sit on it. When the film opens she is reading a book about economic development because she’s going to major in the economics of underdeveloped countries – not English literature, she impatiently corrects a condescending suitor – and join the Peace Corps. ‘Our Baby’s going to save the world!’ her proud father, Dr Houseman (the delightfully eyebrowed Jerry Orbach), boasts to the folk at Kellerman’s, the (not very subtly Jewish) holiday camp (
Dirty Dancing
is easily the most Jewish eighties teen film, which is probably another reason it is so close to my own Jewish heart. As Bergstein says, ‘You just have to know how to spot the clues’).

But until she can save the world, Baby sets about saving everyone she meets. Grey is perfect as a naïve and idealistic but likeable teenager, one who is determined to help the poor and downtrodden, and yet has no concept of what life is like for anyone who is anything other than Jewish
^fn1
and middle class (another probable reason why I found it so easy to relate to this film so much). She is repulsed by the disdainful manner with which the holiday camp’s bosses treat the (Catholic) working-class entertainment staff, and she is horrified when she realises her father is just as big a snob. When she learns that the dance instructor Penny (Cynthia Rhodes
^fn2
) is pregnant with the waiter Robbie’s (Max Cantor
^fn3
) baby, she tells Robbie to pay for Penny’s abortion. When he refuses, she gets the money herself. When Johnny needs someone to stand in for Penny for the dance routine, Baby offers herself. When Penny’s abortion is botched, she gets her father to step in.

Baby doesn’t understand the lower-middle-class world in which Johnny and Penny live, a world in which one can easily lose one’s dreams in a snap, but she doesn’t judge. Baby is a great film heroine. As Johnny says, Baby looks at the world and thinks she can make it better, and at first he finds this irritating and dismisses her as a ‘Little Miss Fix-It’. But it’s also what makes him fall for her: when she messes up the dance and misses the lift, she improvises and they get away with it. ‘That is when Johnny falls in love with her,’ says Bergstein. ‘Because he sees how she always wants to make it better, and she shows him that she can.’