By SHANNON O. WELLS
In the mid-1980s, fledgling screenwriter Carl Kurlander was suddenly riding high on the success of “St. Elmo’s Fire,” a movie based on Kurlander’s story about a waitress he once pursued and a fictionalized, motley crew of college buddies struggling to transition to the adult world.
Created from a screenplay by Kurlander and St. Elmo’s director Joel Schumacher, the film, and its trendy, young cast — Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy, among them — helped define Hollywood’s so-called “Brat Pack” of rising actors that populated iconic Gen X-celebrating movies like “The Breakfast Club” and “Sixteen Candles.”
Since that seemingly once-in-a-lifetime Hollywood triumph, Kurlander, who grew up in Pittsburgh, has balanced his professional life between the show business of writing and producing documentaries and teen-oriented TV shows, and the comparatively less glamorous world of academia.
As a teaching professor at Pitt, he balances the two with Pitt in L.A.: The American Film Industry. Part of the University’s Global Experiences Office, the immersive cinema-studies program takes Pitt students to the belly of the Hollywood beast, providing exposure to a range of film and television professionals and entertainment-industry career paths.
With the June release of “Brats,” actor/director Andrew McCarthy’s documentary about the “Brat Pack” label’s effect on the careers and lives of him and his fellow St. Elmo’s actors, Kurlander finds himself stepping back — metaphorically, at least — into St. Elmo’s Bar, the fictional Georgetown/D.C. watering hole the movie’s gang frequented.
The popularity of “Brats,” which is available for streaming on Hulu has both revitalized interest in the movie that helped inspire it, while giving Kurlander fresh fodder for his Film & Media Studies students.
“It was like going to a reunion myself, watching it, because I was watching it with my students,” he said of “Brats.” “I had a sense of humor about it.”
The week of June 13 saw both “Brats” and “St. Elmo’s Fire” in the top 10 of streamed shows, right up there with more contemporary hits like “Inside Out,” “Oppenheimer” and “Doom II.”
“The interest in this was insane,” Kurlander observed. “Whoever heard of a movie that was released 39 years ago and suddenly is in the top 10? What is going on?”
This sudden surge of interest in his best-known creation understandably sent the jovial Kurlander down the proverbial St. Elmo’s rabbit hole. He wrote a lengthy essay about the experience for Deadline, recounting how much fun he had working with Schumacher and the vibrant, attractive cast.
In the article, he recounted literally chasing the then-unknown Demi Moore down some stairs, “because with her flowing dark hair and leather jacket, she looked like a doppelganger for the real ‘Jules,’ who inspired the wild party girl character,” he wrote. “I had met that Jules while living in the laundry room of an anarchist collective in a seedy section of Hollywood, while I was writing the screenplay.
“When she came home drunk one night and discovered I was using her name in the script,” he added, “the real Jules went crazy and ripped the shirt off my back.”
Cautionary vs. aspirational
Obviously, reliving his youthful glory days wasn’t all fun and games. For one thing, “St. Elmo’s” was not a critical success upon its release. Venerable film critics Siskel & Ebert, in fact, gave it “two-thumbs down,” then the kiss of death for a new feature film.
“So, St. Elmo’s happens. It comes out in June of 1985 (and) gets pretty bad reviews, to be honest with you,” Kurlander recalled.
See, what Kurlander, who based some of the characters on people he knew while attending Duke University, envisioned was something of a satire, or “cautionary tale” about coming of age in the indulgent “Reagan Eighties.”
Because of the appealing stylization Schumacher incorporated — including the characters’ cool automobiles and casual-chic apartments — however, the story became more what Kurlander called an “aspirational tale.
The “Brat Pack” article, written by New York magazine reporter David Blum, who borrowed the moniker from the Frank Sinatra-led “Rat Pack” of the 1950s, helped change that. The article was based on the reporter’s Hollywood night out with Estevez, Rob Lowe and others.
As Blum described, the actors indulged in expected youthful hijinks mixed in with some entitled, star-like behavior, including mocking waitresses and strong-arming their way into a movie theater.
Ultimately, the small-budget movie that cost $10.9 million to make, grossed $40 million. The title theme from the soundtrack, John Parr’s “Man in Motion (St. Elmo’s Fire),” became a No. 1 pop hit that summer.
“Joel (Schumacher) warned me, ‘Success: Better too late than too soon,’” Kurlander said. “So I, myself, was very trepidatious about watching this documentary. I knew everybody who was going to be in it, but it was very unsettling to me to go back and find this memory, you know? Andrew (McCarthy) felt left out because he wasn’t (necessarily) part of the Brat Pack.”
That sense of exclusion applies to some practical as well as literal senses. McCarthy, for example, was cropped out of the iconic cast photo taken at the “St. Elmo’s Bar” set on the Warner Bros. lot and used for the article.
“It was painful to watch,” Kurlander said of “Brats,” “because I knew the article was a great betrayal.”
The truth about ‘Brats’
On the positive side, Kurlander found a St. Elmo’s parallel in a screenplay one of his Pitt in L.A. students, Alaina McCall, wrote about life after college. “It’s a very different world in the post-COVID generation, but I think it’s brilliant,” he said of the work, which McCall has tentatively titled “Henry and Lydia Go to White Castle (or possibly Primanti’s).”
“She and some of the other students (watched “Brats”). I made popcorn (and) showed it in the screening room where I teach,” he added. “And it was very surreal to get their reaction on this movie.”
The students were entertained, if not a little perplexed, he noted. And they were not especially sympathetic for the sheen of self-pity that characterized McCarthy’s on-screen demeanor and primary thesis behind “Brats” — namely, that the childish label hijacked their careers and reputations.
“The students are great. They had a lot of sense of humor about it,” Kurlander said. “They couldn’t understand why Andrew had thought the Brat Pack article had ruined his life. These are kids that survived COVID, school shootings, 9/11, and they were born during (tumultuous times).
“At one point Andrew likens (his Brat Pack experience) to post-traumatic stress,” he added. “These students were like, ‘Really?’ But you know, obviously (McCarthy) struck a lot of chords.”
Alaina McCall said it was “really interesting to find out the origin of the term Brat Pack, as well as what it meant, as I had heard my parents mention it but didn’t know what it, or the Rat Pack, was. I’d seen the movies involved, of course, but didn’t know about the Brat Pack at all.
“To me, it seemed like Andrew McCarthy was trying to convince the audience and himself that he was over it all by the end of the documentary.”
But PTSD? From being a young star in ’80s Tinseltown, albeit with a snarky label?
“It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that could traumatize a person, or leave a mark on their career, as members of the Brat Pack still work to this day,” McCall observed. “But it was really entertaining to watch, especially with someone involved in the original Brat Pack story in the room.”
Tending the fire
Despite the critical drubbing “St. Elmo’s Fire” received, and his ambivalence about the tone of “Brats,” Kurlander said it felt good to find a connection between the long-ago pop-culture touchstone and what his own students are going through.
“Part of the Pitt in L.A. program is, I really want to see my students … do well,” he said, “and I’m proud that I have over two or three dozen students now working in L.A., in New York, and Pittsburgh in the entertainment industry. So it was kind of a full-circle moment.”
McCall called her time this summer with other Pitt students in Kurlander’s Pitt in L.A. program “just the coolest thing I’ve ever gotten to experience,” she said, “as we got to network with working business professionals as well as attend a taping of a pilot written by one of Carl’s former students.”
In what was her first visit to Southern California, McCall said she “loved it. I learned from the program that it really is doable to become a screenwriter if you work really hard and make good stuff, and all of the roles that go into making movies, on and off set, which was really helpful.”
And while Kurlander is reluctant to toot his own horn around his students regarding the resurgent interest in “St. Elmo’s Fire,” some of them took it upon themselves to explore their professor’s gilded past.
“After the “Brats” screening, some of us had a watch party for “St. Elmo’s Fire,” as they hadn’t seen it, and all of them loved it and got why it’s such a classic,” McCall said. “It’s still relatable to us as 20-something year olds, and rings true as a heartfelt, earnest movie, that’s also really funny and beautiful.
“Then it was on Hulu’s top-watched list the next week, so we all felt a bit responsible.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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