Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (8 page)

‘We were in dangerous terrain – because when you mix genres in a movie, that’s where you end up,’ Goldman writes in his delightful essay on
The Princess Bride
. It wasn’t until the movie came out on VHS and audiences were able to discover the film for themselves, without the cack-handed meddlings of the studio, that it became the success it deserved to be.

The lesson that
The Princess Bride
taught the film industry is that it is possible to make a movie for kids and adults alike, and this is one it has remembered well. Modernised fairy-tale films such as
Enchanted
and pretty much the whole output of Pixar all owe an enormous debt to
The Princess Bride
.
Shrek
in particular can be seen as the next generation’s take on
The Princess Bride
, with its toying with tropes and tongue-in-cheek humour. But as much as I love
Shrek
,
The Princess Bride
has a simple sweetness that
Shrek
doesn’t.
Shrek
is more knowing than
The Princess Bride
, with more winks over the heads of the kids to their parents. Part of the joy of
The Princess Bride
is that kids and adults enjoy it on the same level. It doesn’t differentiate between what kids get and what adults enjoy. There is no irony to
The Princess Bride
, no nudging nods to contemporary adult references. For this reason,
The Princess Bride
is a much more clever film than
Shrek
, which is no slur on
Shrek
. After all,
The Princess Bride
is one of the cleverest and most original movies ever made, and this is exemplified in its depiction of love.

There are plenty of reasons why
The Princess Bride
could not be made today: ‘It would all be done by CGI, which would make the movie completely different,’ says Elwes. ‘Also, I seriously doubt that a studio would let a director cast two unknowns, as Robin and I were then, in the leads of such a big movie. They’d want a big box office draw, like Tom Cruise, or whoever.’ But the most obvious reason is in its complex layering of different loves about different ages, emphasising how the film really is aimed at everyone.

Modern classic children’s movies feature many kinds of love: the love between an elderly couple in
Up
; the love a boy feels for the plastic cowboy he is leaving behind in
Toy Story 3
; the love between a donkey and a dragon in
Shrek
. Ahh, love in its infinite varieties! But I can’t think of another children’s movie in which there are so many different kinds of love featured, and all aimed fully at the children to understand.
The Princess Bride
teaches children that the love their grandparents feel for them, and what they feel for their grandparents, and the love friends have for one another, is true love, as important as Westley and Buttercup’s true love. This is why Kevin Arnold – and Nell – learned not to mind the kissing parts, thanks to
The Princess Bride
.

Decades after Nell shouted about how much she loved
The Princess Bride
in the cinema, I got a job assignment from work. My editor asked me to interview someone who had just written a book, and I eagerly agreed. I don’t usually bring family members on job assignments, but in this case I decided to make an exception. I called Nell and told her to meet me at an office block next Monday. As it happened, she had just had her second baby but she instantly agreed. And so, on a cold December morning in north-east London, Nell, accompanied by her three-week-old daughter Edith, met Westley. His hair was a little shorter, and his accent a touch more transatlantic after having spent three decades in the States, but he was definitely Westley.

‘Look at this most beautiful girl!’ cried Cary Elwes, reaching towards Nell, but stopping a few inches short of her face and reaching down instead to the baby in her arms. ‘This is just the most precious thing …’ and his voice trailed away as he gazed at Edith, utterly rapt.

Nell got her moment of great love with Westley. If it wasn’t quite as she’d imagined when she was seven, or seventeen, it was, ultimately, as she wished.

TOP TEN FASHION MOMENTS

10 Kevin Kline’s teeny tiny running shorts,
The Big Chill
(see also: Tom Selleck in
Three Men and a Baby
)

Coupled with some fine manly chest hair.

9 Tom Hanks’s white tux in
Big

Deliberately ridiculous, totally iconic.

8 Rob Lowe,
St Elmo’s Fire

Sweaty Rob Lowe wears a yellow vest top with black bats patterned all over it, while playing the sax. Your life = complete.

7 Michael J. Fox,
Back to the Future

A T-shirt, a shirt, double denim and the ‘life preserver’. One of the jokes in this film is how people in the 1950s don’t get 1980s fashion. People in the 1950s were right.

6 Nicolas Cage,
Valley Girl

Frosted hair, a leather waistcoat and a bare chest is a strong look, Nicolas.

5 Absolutely everything Michael Douglas wore in the decade

From his patterned blouson shirts undone to his mid-chest in
Romancing the Stone
and
The Jewel of the Nile
, to his braces in
Wall Street
, this man was eighties fashion in human form.

4 The Heathers in
Heathers

For services to shoulder-padded jackets and coloured tights.

3 Molly Ringwald and Jon Cryer,
Pretty in Pink

God bless John Hughes and his belief that wearing weird clothes proves one is a sensitive soul. Extra points for Ringwald’s hat, golden stars for Cryer’s sunglasses.

2 Melanie Griffith and Joan Cusack,
Working Girl

Where to start? Melanie’s mullet and white trainers? Melanie’s extraordinary lingerie? Actually, let’s just say ‘absolutely everything Joan Cusack wears in this film’ and leave it at that.

1
Desperately Seeking Susan

The movie that proves everyone’s life is improved by eighties fashion.

TOP FIVE COMMENTS ABOUT FASHION

5 ‘This jacket used to belong to Jimi Hendrix.’

‘You bought a USED JACKET? What are we, poor?’ (Rosanna Arquette and Mark Blum,
Desperately Seeking Susan
)

4 ‘Pink is my signature colour.’ (Julia Roberts,
Steel Magnolias
)

3 ‘Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?’ (Judd Nelson,
The Breakfast Club
)

2 ‘This is a really volcanic ensemble you’re wearing.’ (Jon Cryer,
Pretty in Pink
)

1 ‘Six thousand dollars?! It’s nawt even leatha!’ (Joan Cusack,
Working Girl
)

Pretty in Pink
:

Awkward Girls Should Never Have Makeovers

Until Molly Ringwald met John Hughes, she’d always felt wrong.

‘I was growing up on the west coast and just so self-conscious about my looks,’ she recalls from her home in California, her two children shouting happily in the background. ‘Back then I was surrounded by images of Cheryl Tiegs and Farrah Fawcett, and that was the look then – that California blonde look, which was the opposite of what I was.’

But Hughes – unusually, perhaps, for a thirty-something male director – recognised the appeal of the then fifteen-year-old Ringwald’s looks from the start, and he saw something in her, something unconventional. As soon as he came across her headshot in his pack of photos while looking for young actresses for his next film, with her snub nose, slightly slack jaw and bright red hair, he stuck it up on his billboard and, without even meeting her, wrote
Sixteen Candles
for her in two days.

Hughes could see the value of Ringwald’s unfashionable looks for the same reason he was able to write films about teenagers that felt so true to young people at the time, and still do today: because, at heart, he was still the sensitive teenage outcast he loved to write about. ‘John was frozen in time emotionally in a way. He would not have been able to create the sense of truth in those characters had he not been so much like that himself,’ says director Howard Deutch, Hughes’s frequent collaborator.

This meant he didn’t see teen films as an easy means to get sexy girls in bikinis up on the screen, as screenwriters for the hugely successful
Porky’s
– which came out in 1982, two years before Hughes’s first teen film
Sixteen Candles
– did. Rather, what he loved about teenagers was their complications as opposed to their cleavages.

‘When I started to work with John, I realised my differences could work to my advantage because they made me stand out, but in a good way. So my skin got even paler and my hair got redder,’ Ringwald says. He wanted his teenage actors to stay totally true to their teenage selves, to the point that they were encouraged to pick out their own clothes for the films. One of the few times Hughes ever chided Ringwald was when she turned up on set wearing eyeshadow: ‘He thought I was trying to be someone else.’ She smiles.

Hughes, more than any other filmmaker, made the 1980s the golden age of teen films because he realised that the trick to making good films about teenagers was to take them as seriously as they take themselves. ‘One of the great wonders about that age is your emotions are so open and raw. That’s why I stuck around that genre for so long,’ he said in an interview. ‘At that age it feels as good to feel bad as it does to feel good.’ It’s only as a teenager, Hughes believed, that you have this capacity for deep feeling, which explains why his own work was divided between the swoonily soulful teen films, including
Sixteen Candles
,
The Breakfast Club
,
Pretty in Pink
,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
and
Some Kind of Wonderful
, and the slapstick ‘dopey-ass comedy,’ as he put it, such as
National Lampoon’s Vacation
,
The Great Outdoors
and, in the nineties,
Home Alone
.
^fn1
With the exception of
Weird Science
– which is a dopey-ass teen comedy and as a result is Hughes’s least memorable teen film – he kept these two sides to his filmmaking separate, even going so far as to fire Rick Moranis from
The Breakfast Club
as the janitor because he felt, rightly, that Moranis’s humour was too broad for that film, and that’s the only time I’ll ever say a word against Moranis. Teen films were about deep emotions, and deep emotions were reserved for his teenage characters alone. ‘When you grow up,’ one of his characters in
The Breakfast Club
says, ‘your heart dies.’

Even though Hughes wove plenty of autobiographical details into his films, he was a lot less interested in his own youth than he was in that of contemporary teenagers. Not many adults can say that. He would hang out with his teenage actors on the set, make them mix tapes, take them to concerts (Hughes genuinely loved music and, unlike a lot of eighties filmmakers, didn’t just see it as merely a means to sell soundtracks), and he would infuriate his crew by corpsing along with the kids during embarrassing scenes. Hughes’s teen films feel so heartfelt because they were written with such honest respect for his teenage actors, and the one with whom he felt the closest affinity was Ringwald: ‘We just instantly connected. He felt more like a friend than a director. We talked about everything,’ she says. So it is not surprising that the truest character Hughes ever wrote was one he created for her: Andie Walsh from
Pretty in Pink
.

By the time Hughes and Ringwald made
Pretty in Pink
, they knew each other pretty well after having already worked on
Sixteen Candles
and
The Breakfast Club
. Ringwald’s character, Sam, in the former is sparky, but the film is pretty unwatchable today due to being weirdly racist
^fn2
and a bit rapey.
^fn3
Hughes then cast Ringwald as popular and posh Claire in
The Breakfast Club
, because it amused him to cast her against type, and he gave the more interesting female character, Allison, to Ally Sheedy. It wasn’t until
Pretty in Pink
that he created for Ringwald the role she deserved. ‘John always wrote best when he was writing for someone, and his real muse was Molly,’ says Howard Deutch, who directed
Pretty in Pink
. ‘A lot of who Molly was became the character he wrote for her in
Pretty in Pink
. So Molly inspired John to write that character and the writing of the character also impacted on Molly.’

Like all Hughes’s teen films,
Pretty in Pink
has a laughably simple premise: Andie, a high school girl from the wrong side of the tracks (literally, she lives next to the train tracks – no one could ever accuse Hughes of subtlety), wants to go to the prom with a wealthy boy called Blane, to the horror of her lifelong and fellow lower-middle-class friend, Duckie.

‘When we were filming I remember thinking, This is about a girl going to a dance? Seriously? Who’s going to want to see this? Really had my finger on the pulse there!’ laughs Andrew McCarthy, who, thirty years on, has yet to escape the shadow of the film (although we fans of the 1989 comedy
Weekend at Bernie’s
also associate him with near necrophilia. But that’s a different story).

The Breakfast Club
is more original as an eighties teen film in that it pretty much takes place in just one room (truly, this is one eighties film that is begging to be turned into a play) and DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A PROM, whereas
Pretty in Pink
ticks off all the classic clichés: pop song title, scenes in crowded school hallways, big music number, climactic prom. But it is in many ways a more satisfying film, partly because it features some of the best acting ever to appear in any of Hughes’s films, especially from James Spader who nearly steals the whole movie, bringing his delicious Spaderish creepiness unlike anything seen in any other teen film ever. Jon Cryer as Andie’s heartsick and nerdy friend Duckie is great, too, full of frustration and fury that the girl he always revered turns out to lack the wisdom to fall for him, and who among us has not felt so let down by a love interest? But what really makes the film stand out is the character of Andie.