Freeman - And Why We Dont Learn Them From Movies Any More: Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Movies

Table of Contents

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First published in Great Britain in 2015 by 4th Estate

This 4th Estate paperback edition first published 2016

Copyright Hadley Freeman 2015

Hadley Freeman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780007585618

Ebook Edition 2016 ISBN: 9780007585595

Version: 2016-05-20

For Andy, who is even better than Andrew McCarthy,
Michael J. Fox, Matthew Broderick, Eddie Murphy,
Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd.

Combined.

Contents

Whatever happened to chivalry? Does it only happen in eighties movies? I want John Cusack holding a boombox outside my window. I wanna ride off on a lawnmower with Patrick Dempsey. I want Jake from Sixteen Candles waiting outside the church for me. I want Judd Nelson thrusting his fist into the air because he knows he just got me. Just once, I want my life to be like an eighties movie, preferably one with a really awesome musical number for no apparent reason. But no, no, John Hughes did not direct my life.

I am not actually quoting myself here, though heaven knows I could be (except for the part about wanting the moronic Jake from Sixteen Candles for reasons that shall be explained soon enough). That monologue comes from the film Easy A , which was released in 2010, and is spoken by Olive, played by Emma Stone, an actress who was born years after most of the movies her character mentions came out. Two years after Easy A was released, Pitch Perfect arrived and, once again, a film made thirty years earlier was the inspiration and crucial plot point for a twenty-first-century teen film: The Breakfast Club , 1985, the greatest ending to any movie ever. [The Simple Minds] song perfectly sums up the movie in that its equally beautiful and sad, Jesse (Skyler Astin) tells a sceptical Beca (Anna Kendrick). But, of course, Becas scepticism is as misplaced as the assistant principals mistrust in Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson and the rest of the kids in the 1985 film, because it is only when she watches John Hughess The Breakfast Club that Beca learns to open up emotionally (moviespeak for stop being such a frigid cow and snog some dude) and, more importantly, win the a cappella competition. (Winning an a cappella competition. That is what teens have to live for today. To quote one of the greatest of all eighties teen films, I weep for the future.) Every week, it seems, its announced that another eighties film is being remade, sequelised or turned into a stage musical, from Top Gun to The Goonies to Dirty Dancing , invariably starring actors who werent even born when the originals came out. In 2013 the pop band The 1975 said of their newly released eponymous debut album, Were massive fans of John Hughes. We wanted to make a record [that] was almost a soundtrack to our teenage years. If he made a movie about us, this would be the soundtrack.Their lead singer was born in the nineties.

I was born in New York City in 1978 meaning that, while I did exist in the eighties as more than a zygote, I wasnt yet a teenager either. Instead, actual teenagehood for myself felt as distant and desirable as the moon. I was a typical older child from a middle-class Jewish family: well-behaved, anxious, bookish, and therefore especially curious about the vaguely imagined freedoms I fancied being a teenager would bring. My little sister and I werent allowed to watch television stations that showed commercials yes, I come from one of those families meaning that our viewing options were limited to Sesame Street and whatever our mother allowed us to rent from East 86th Street Video. When I was nine years old, she, for the first time, allowed me to rent something that featured neither animation nor starred Gene Kelly: Ferris Buellers Day Off . I couldnt believe it. How on earth could she the dorkiest mother EVER, who only ever gave us FRUIT for dessert, I mean I ask you let me watch such a film? This movie featured BOYS, actual real life BOYS! Kissing girls with their tongues! Within the extremely limited framework of my life experience on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, my mother had basically allowed me to rent hardcore porn (tongues!).

Ferris proved to be a mere gateway drug, and I became such a heavy user of East 86th Street Video that for my tenth birthday my parents gave me my own membership card. I was soon mainlining the classics: Mannequin , Romancing the Stone , Good Morning Vietnam , The Breakfast Club , Short Circuit , Indiana Jones , E.T. , Spaceballs , Coming to America , Three Amigos! , Planes, Trains and Automobiles , anything produced by Touchstone Pictures and absolutely everything featuring the two actors who I assured my little sister were the real talents of our era: Steve Guttenberg and Rick Moranis. My highbrow taste, which has lasted all my life, was forged then.

These movies, which were largely seen as junk when they came out, were deeply formative, and everyone I know in my generation feels exactly the same way. They provided the lifelong template for my perceptions of funniness (Eddie Murphy), coolness (Bill Murray) and sexiness (Kathleen Turner). They also taught me more about life than any library or teacher ever would. My parents could have saved literally thousands of dollars, jacked in the schools and kept the membership to East 86th Street Video and Id still be essentially the same person today.

But for a long time, these films had a terrible reputation, critically speaking. They were and largely still are dismissed as being as drecky as Ray, Egon, Winston and Peter at the beginning of the Ghostbusters sequel. Sold out and bloated, something faintly embarrassing from the past that has left an ugly legacy of franchises and superheroes. Eighties Hollywood, goes the popular critical thought, is when movies started to go wrong: they became obsessed with money and sequels and explosions and cheap gags as opposed to Art. Whereas the far more respected 1970s was the era of the auteur, when Hollywood directors like Robert Altman and Michael Cimino were allowed to pursue their creativity unhindered by studio meddling, the 1980s was the era of the producer, when entertainment took precedence and cartoonish figures like creepy Don Simpson and Jon Peters who started his career as Barbra Streisands hairdresser were the ones with the power.

Many have bemoaned this shift in power from the seventies to the eighties, aghast that the man who once permed Yentls hair commanded the kind of industry respect once accorded to Altman. But my personal feeling is, when working in the entertainment business, an emphasis on actual entertainment is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if it means producing something like Top Gun instead of Heavens Gate . After all, pretty much everyone, if theyre honest, is happy to watch some eighties Cruise on a Friday night, but only a very special few would kick off the weekend by cracking open a Cimino DVD.