'What do you mean, they're remaking The Breakfast Club?' The information came a couple of weeks back from a Hollywood contact. I was a little shocked. The thought of revisiting John Hughes' artless 1980s teen film might offer an intriguing prospect in this age of countless, all too knowing high school movies.
But my generation of moviegoers is apt to be very protective of The Breakfast Club and its brother in angst St Elmo's Fire - they were the movies you had to see again and again. I was 15 years old when the two films were released in 1985, and they seemed to define the contemporary teen spirit. The stars of the two films spawned the Leonardo DiCaprios and Katie Holmes of their day, and came complete with the year's spin-off pop hits. (Simple Minds' Don't You Forget About Me was The Breakfast Club theme tune.) However, on reflection, and certainly on reviewing, perhaps any affection is misplaced. It was hardly a golden age to be a teen viewer. If you were lucky enough to be 15 in the mid to late 60s, you've got to have Bonny And Clyde or Easy Rider as your formative movie experiences. A decade later and it was the likes of Taxi Driver, Jaws and The Godfather that turned a generation on to film. And us? Well, we were the fortunate ones who had Tom Cruise prancing about in his underpants in Risky Business, and, of course, the glorious Brat Pack.
A few definitions first. The 'official' Brat Pack consists of the following nine actors, the combined casts of St Elmo's Fire and The Breakfast Club. They are: Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, Mare Winnigham, Andrew McCarthy and Judd Nelson. Purists may argue that, in fact, it is the cast of St Elmo's alone that comprises the pack. Incidentally, the term was coined by a New York magazine journalist after he spent an apparently unedifying evening in the company of Emilio Estevez during the shooting of Joel Schumacher's opus.
Over the years other actors have attempted to run with the pack. The casts of Francis Ford Coppola's arty angst-fests The Outsiders and Rumblefish (including Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise and the Karate Kid himself, Ralph Macchio) were often wrongly given Brat credentials - but those films were quite good. Probably because they were directed by Francis Ford Coppola and not Joel Schumacher.
The casts of Young Guns I and II (including Kiefer Sutherland, Patrick Swayze and Lou Diamond Phillips) may have considered themselves de facto members simply because of the presence of Emilio Estevez in both movies. But if simply being in a movie with Emilio some time during the 80s was enough we'd have to talk about Moon Unit Zappa (Nightmares, 1983), and obviously life's too short. No, it is St Elmo's and The Breakfast Club that provide the requisite credentials, mainly because of the similarities that yoked them and their youthful stars together. Both films, from any kind of objective viewpoint, are pretty bad - and in almost identical ways.
The Breakfast Club is a film about a bunch of self-obsessed teens in detention who spend their time together pondering their various lives, blaming their parents for everything, undergoing a cathartic moment of self-recognition before concluding that basically they're all right. St Elmo's Fire is about a bunch of self-obsessed 20-somethings in a bar who spend their time together pondering their various lives, blaming society for everything, undergoing a cathartic moment of self-recognition before concluding that basically they're all right.
In The Breakfast Club Emilio Estevez plays a jock with 'issues'. In St Elmo's Fire Rob Lowe plays a jock with 'issues'. The Breakfast Club has a horrible score by Simple Minds. St Elmo's Fire has a horrible score by John 'Man In Motion' Parr. The other major link was how cataclysmically the pack's careers crashed and burned immediately after 1985.