Tribute details Brat Pack's impact on a generation

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Director John Hughes with cast of the Breakfast Club.

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Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. (CP)

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Molly Ringwald

You Couldn't Ignore Me if You Tried

The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation

By Susannah Gora

Crown, 365 pages, $32

Talk about your exercise in nostalgia.

If you loved The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, you'll be fascinated by this laudatory and extremely exhaustive tribute to a series of '80s Hollywood teen comedies starring actors labelled the Brat Pack.

American film journalist Susannah Gora interviewed everyone from Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson to Rob Lowe and Matthew Broderick for her in-depth analysis of a bygone era whose films are still being rented and reminisced about more than two decades later.

Examining such classics as Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Sixteen Candles, Gora gives a behind-the-scenes tour of the late director/screenwriter John Hughes's cinematic creations.

She also discusses contemporaries of Hughes who took their lead from him (Gora says Hughes was the "godfather of the genre") and created their own: filmmakers such as Cameron Crowe, Joel Schumacher and Howard Deutch.

Although Hughes never consented to be interviewed for the book prior to his sudden death from a heart attack last August at age 59, almost everyone else associated with his movies agreed to talk to Gora about him and his legendary odes to teenage angst.

The book's somewhat vague and lengthy title is actually a line from The Breakfast Club. Gora might have been better served by calling it The Brat Pack Book, which is one of her on-line domain names and would have been far easier to remember.

The Brat Pack moniker resulted from a 1985 New York magazine story by writer David Blum.

Gora explains that the label limited the careers of such teen heartthrobs as Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall. Yet the title is now regarded as a compliment to the enduring success they achieved together.

One of the stars of that time, Andrew McCarthy describes the films as having "defined a generation."

"These melodramas gave dignity and a voice to that age of people (teenagers) who hadn't had a voice before."

Gora assesses the appeal of these films as "instilling a sense of optimism." At an age when young people were "struggling to find their way," these movies showed that "the nerd could get the babe, the jock could have a heart, that an awesome pink prom dress could be crafted from hand-me-downs, that anything was possible."

Gora gives readers every bit of analysis and minutiae possible, sometimes to the point of being redundant. To devotees of the productions, it will be highly informative and appealing.

She quotes film critics and sociologists as evidence of how widespread and long-lasting the fascination with these works has been.

After his final Brat Pack classic, Ferris Buehler's Day Off (1986), Hughes directed just four other films, the final being 1991's Curly Sue, which Gora calls "abysmal."

However, as a writer and producer, Hughes had several major hits, including the Home Alone and Beethoven comedy series.

Ringwald peaked with Pretty in Pink in 1986. A year later, she set Winnipeg on its ear when she came here to shoot the disappointing teen-pregnancy comedy For Keeps.

She and many of her Brat Pack cohorts are all still working in Hollywood, Hughes moved back to his hometown of Chicago in the mid-'90s and became a recluse who shunned his show-business colleagues.

He was compared with the late J.D. Salinger due to their mutual evasion of the spotlight.

Apart from the absence of a Hughes interview, this book is missing one other important element: any photographs, which would have helped to illustrate her work.

One suspects that an unco-operative Hughes and/or his movie studio refused to give Gora's publisher, an arm of the Random House empire, the rights to use any publicity images from the films.

Still, Gora has written a book that will form the basis of sociology and film studies courses as an important tribute to teenagers everywhere.

As Hughes himself once said about why his films have lasted: "I dealt primarily with the immutable things in human character, like belonging and loneliness. Those are all the things that are never going to change."

Brenlee Carrington, a Winnipeg lawyer, mediator and journalist, is the Law Society of Manitoba's equity ombudswoman.

Brat Pack charter members:

Matthew Broderick

Jon Cryer

John Cusack

Anthony Michael Hall

Rob Lowe

Andrew McCarthy

Demi Moore

Judd Nelson

Molly Ringwald

Ally Sheedy

Brat Pack movies:

Sixteen Candles -- 1984

The Breakfast Club -- 1985

St. Elmo's Fire -- 1985

Pretty in Pink -- 1986

Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- 1986

Some Kind of Wonderful -- 1987

Say Anything -- 1987

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 6, 2010 H10