Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) by Hadley Freeman
Authors: Hadley Freeman
Ads: Link
and most of all, Veronica in Heathers , the film that didn’t just make female aggression scary, Carrie -style, but also triumphant, and really, really cool. By the end of the decade, audiences had become so used to teenage girls getting the good parts that Cameron Crowe was able to make one of the most sophisticated and feminist teen films of them all, Say Anything , in which the teenage boy, Lloyd (John Cusack), says specifically all he wants to do with his life is to support his brilliant girlfriend so she can shine. ‘This is a very different kind of knight and white horse. It’s not, “I’ll take you away”, it’s “I’ll enable you to be you.” If you’re a terrific girl and you’re brilliant, that’s what you’d hope for,’ said Say Anything ’s executive producer, James L. Brooks.
Thanks at least partly to Hughes, young actresses enjoyed lead roles in teen movies for a brief period in the nineties, such as Julia Stiles as the fuming feminist in 10 Things I Hate About You and Alicia Silverstone in Clueless , as well as a brief flurry of independent films about tough girl heroines, such as 1996’s Girls Town , 1998’s The Opposite of Sex and 2000’s Girlfight and Bring it On . But the return of raunchy comedies and superhero films pushed them to the back again. There have been occasional teen films starring young women in the twenty-first century, such as, most obviously, 2004’s Mean Girls , but these are the exceptions. From a Hollywood studio’s point of view, it makes more sense to have a male lead in the belief that they’re more likely to attract a wider audience. (The closest raunchy nineties teen movies came to creating an Andie-like character is Michelle in American Pie , Alyson Hannigan, the goofy flute player who is always utterly herself, even when consumed with lust. But she is played in the movie for laughs, and is really just a side character to the male lead.)
But Ringwald herself would never get to play another great Hughesian heroine because by the time Pretty in Pink came out, she and Hughes were barely talking. During the making of Pretty in Pink , Hughes told Deutch to ask Ringwald if she would appear in their next film, Some Kind of Wonderful , which Deutch also directed, as Watts, another awkward girl. But Ringwald felt it was time to grow up. She knew the film was just too similar to ones she’d done before, as Some Kind of Wonderful is really just a gender-reversed Pretty in Pink , with the original ending reinstated. (Deutch insists that Hughes didn’t write it as a reaction to having had to rewrite Pretty in Pink and somewhat improbably suggests that Hughes didn’t see a connection between the two films.) So she turned it down, and Hughes stopped speaking to her and, after Some Kind of Wonderful , he never made another teen film. It turned out there was a downside to working with a director so in touch with his inner teenager: sometimes he really acted like a teenager.
‘John could be very sullen – if his feelings were hurt, he’d shut down and not speak to you for days,’ says Matthew Broderick, the star of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off .
Ringwald later wrote in the New York Times : ‘We were like the Darling children when they made the decision to leave Neverland. And John was Peter Pan, warning us that if we left we could never come back. And, true to his word, not only were we unable to return, but he went one step further. He did away with Neverland itself.’
‘There was a tremendous sense of loss for him when she moved on, as I think there was for her, too. They were very, very close and it was really sad to see that end,’ says Deutch.
Hughes died in 2009, at the ridiculously premature age of fifty-nine, of a heart attack: ‘When you grow up, your heart dies.’
Reporting his death, newspaper coverage barely mentioned Home Alone , which was his most financially successful film by a hefty mile. Instead, the media focused on his teen films, especially
Thanks at least partly to Hughes, young actresses enjoyed lead roles in teen movies for a brief period in the nineties, such as Julia Stiles as the fuming feminist in 10 Things I Hate About You and Alicia Silverstone in Clueless , as well as a brief flurry of independent films about tough girl heroines, such as 1996’s Girls Town , 1998’s The Opposite of Sex and 2000’s Girlfight and Bring it On . But the return of raunchy comedies and superhero films pushed them to the back again. There have been occasional teen films starring young women in the twenty-first century, such as, most obviously, 2004’s Mean Girls , but these are the exceptions. From a Hollywood studio’s point of view, it makes more sense to have a male lead in the belief that they’re more likely to attract a wider audience. (The closest raunchy nineties teen movies came to creating an Andie-like character is Michelle in American Pie , Alyson Hannigan, the goofy flute player who is always utterly herself, even when consumed with lust. But she is played in the movie for laughs, and is really just a side character to the male lead.)
But Ringwald herself would never get to play another great Hughesian heroine because by the time Pretty in Pink came out, she and Hughes were barely talking. During the making of Pretty in Pink , Hughes told Deutch to ask Ringwald if she would appear in their next film, Some Kind of Wonderful , which Deutch also directed, as Watts, another awkward girl. But Ringwald felt it was time to grow up. She knew the film was just too similar to ones she’d done before, as Some Kind of Wonderful is really just a gender-reversed Pretty in Pink , with the original ending reinstated. (Deutch insists that Hughes didn’t write it as a reaction to having had to rewrite Pretty in Pink and somewhat improbably suggests that Hughes didn’t see a connection between the two films.) So she turned it down, and Hughes stopped speaking to her and, after Some Kind of Wonderful , he never made another teen film. It turned out there was a downside to working with a director so in touch with his inner teenager: sometimes he really acted like a teenager.
‘John could be very sullen – if his feelings were hurt, he’d shut down and not speak to you for days,’ says Matthew Broderick, the star of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off .
Ringwald later wrote in the New York Times : ‘We were like the Darling children when they made the decision to leave Neverland. And John was Peter Pan, warning us that if we left we could never come back. And, true to his word, not only were we unable to return, but he went one step further. He did away with Neverland itself.’
‘There was a tremendous sense of loss for him when she moved on, as I think there was for her, too. They were very, very close and it was really sad to see that end,’ says Deutch.
Hughes died in 2009, at the ridiculously premature age of fifty-nine, of a heart attack: ‘When you grow up, your heart dies.’
Reporting his death, newspaper coverage barely mentioned Home Alone , which was his most financially successful film by a hefty mile. Instead, the media focused on his teen films, especially
Similar Books
