Authors: Hadley Freeman
‘Some of the people who come up to me were teenagers when the movies originally came out, but the vast majority of the approaches I get on a daily basis come from eleven- to fifteen-year-old kids,’ says Alex Winter, who appeared in two of the most fun eighties teen films,
The Lost Boys
and, of course,
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
. ‘They come up to me and are like, “Hey, you’re Bill!” It’s amazing.’
I should probably pause here and explain what, precisely, I mean by ‘eighties movies’. When I started to think about writing this book, I spoke to a few film critics for their thoughts on eighties movies, including Peter Biskind, whose excellent book,
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
, is probably the best known example of the kind of dichotomy I just described: 1970s Hollywood good, 1980s Hollywood tacky hell. To his enormous credit, he didn’t slam the phone down on me when I told him my idea.
‘It’s true, I haven’t been very kind about eighties films, but they are ripe for revisionism,’ Biskind said.
I took a deep breath, gearing up to explain my deeply involved critical theory about
Three Men and a Baby
.
But Biskind spoke first: ‘Take
Salvador
, for example,’ he said, referring to Oliver Stone’s 1986 movie about leftist guerrillas in the Salvadoran Civil War. ‘That’s a fascinating film. You should really write about
Salvador
.’
Dear reader, I have not written about
Salvador
. As you might have gathered by now, my tastes lie in a different direction: an unabashedly, unremittingly mainstream direction. I’m sure there are plenty of eighties film aficionados out there who, when they think of the eighties, think of James Woods being terrorised by death squads in Central America. But when I think of the eighties, I think of the Giant Stay Puft Marshmallow man crushing New York cabs underfoot. I’m not saying one take is better than the other,
fn2
but I am saying, when was the last time you fancied watching
Salvador
? At ten past never, probably. And when did you last want to watch
Ghostbusters
? Two seconds ago, when I mentioned Mr Stay Puft, right? Popularity is never a guarantee of quality (just look at
Two and a Half Men
), but it is a sign of something when a movie made over thirty years ago is still regarded as one of the best comedies of all time (something, I guarantee, will not happen to
Two and a Half Men
). Anyway, no one needs telling that
Salvador
– or
Blade Runner
, or
Aliens
, or
Scarface
, or
Full Metal Jacket
– are Good Eighties Movies. Everyone knows that. I wanted to write about why the Fun Eighties Movies – like
Die Hard
,
Steel Magnolias
,
Pretty in Pink
and
Adventures in Babysitting
– are also Good Eighties Movies.
The eighties movies I watched as a kid are still the eighties movies I love today, and, yes, there is, inevitably, some sentimentality going on here. But there is something else, too, that lies behind my love of them and that of everyone else’s love of them: these movies offer something that equivalent movies today don’t.
Obviously, good movies get made today. Classics, even. Hell, I can name loads of movies
fn3
that I love that were made after 1990, so I’m certainly not saying that only in the eighties were good films forged, or that all films made in the eighties were stone-cold classics. (
Mannequin
, for a start, is absolute dross.) There were loads of things that were completely rubbish about eighties movies, but not the things that people generally talk about when they complain about eighties movies.
For a start, the social attitudes occasionally leave more than something to be desired. There was a weird tendency in some eighties films to treat rape as a comedic plot device. Tedious Jake in
Sixteen Candles
hoots about how his girlfriend Caroline is so drunk he ‘could violate her ten ways if I wanted to’. Did I mention this is the film’s romantic lead, the one we’re supposed to cheer on? I don’t think so, John Hughes. And then, just to prove Jake’s theory, the school geek (played by Anthony Michael Hall) has sex with Caroline when she’s pretty much comatose. There’s a similarly gruesome moment in
Revenge of the Nerds
, when one of the nerds tricks a girl into having sex with him by pretending he’s someone else. Finally in
Overboard
– a movie I enjoy way more than I know I should – a handyman (Kurt Russell) convinces a rich lady with amnesia (Goldie Hawn) that she’s his wife and has sex with her accordingly. In all these films, the women end up happily partnered with their rapists, which is just what happens in all rape scenarios, right?
Then there are the casual racist epithets, homophobic slurs (it is deeply depressing to see actors as lovely as Michael J. Fox and Molly Ringwald using words like ‘faggot’ with gleeful abandon) and the forays into faintly deranged American patriotism. But in the main, I’ll defend eighties movies with the ferocity of Crocodile Dundee protecting his mullet-haired woman. THIS is a knife.
‘I still get stopped in the street by people who ask, “Why don’t they make movies like they did in the eighties?” And I don’t really know the answer,’ muses my thespian eighties icon, Rick Moranis.
The reason it feels as if they just don’t make fun movies today like they did in the 1980s is because they don’t, and this is down to three specific factors: economics, shifting social attitudes and (the following should be said in your deepest James Earl Jones voice, either as Darth Vader or as the angry author in
Field of Dreams
) the changing world order. When people talk about eighties movies, by which I mean the eighties movies I love, they tend to focus on the kitschiness of them: the outfits, the anachronistic jokes, the endlessly quotable quotes. And I do, too (I’ve tried to limit myself to just one quote in each chapter as otherwise this book would have become a massive quote-a-thon). I love the silliness of eighties movies, their sweetness, the stirring music (the theme music for
Back to the Future
,
Top Gun
,
Beverly Hills Cop
and
Indiana Jones
would all definitely be on my
Desert Island Discs
list), the power ballads, the formulae. But there is more to these movies than kitsch. Kitsch is fine but it tends not to have much longevity. These movies have certain qualities and feature particular lessons that you simply don’t see in films made today. That, for me at least, is a large part of what makes them feel so special.
To divide up anything by decade is, by nature, totally spurious – best nineties dance music! Best seventies hairstyles! – but in the case of eighties movies there is a point because movies made in Hollywood in the 1980s marked the beginning of a new era (the Producer Era) and, by 1989, the start of another (the corporate buyouts of the studios). As anyone who has ever watched an eighties film knows, or even is (gasp!) old enough to remember the eighties, life has changed a lot in the past thirty years: mobile phones aren’t the size of cars and men don’t tend to sport eighties Michael Douglas-style bouffant hair, more’s the pity. Movie-making in Hollywood has changed a lot in those years, too. The big studios are now owned by international conglomerates: Columbia has been owned by the Sony Corporation since 1989; Warner Brothers merged with Time Inc. and became Time Warner, also in 1989; 20th Century Fox has been owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation since the mid-1980s; Universal has gone through a series of owners in the past twenty years, including a French water and media company and General Electric and is now owned by cable provider Comcast; Paramount is owned by Viacom. Whereas once movie-making was the sole business of the studios, now it is a relatively tiny part of a big company.
fn4
‘There are a million reasons why movie-making is different now, but a big one is the conglomerates,’ says John Landis, who in the eighties alone directed
An American Werewolf in London
,
The Blues Brothers
,
Trading Places
,
Three Amigos!
and
Coming to America
. ‘Between Disney and Rupert Murdoch, only four or five companies own the media now, and they own everything. This means that management has become much more corporate. I had final cut on my movies for twenty years – now they never give you final cut. Of course we had arguments [with studios in the eighties], but not like it is now. Now if you make a studio picture it’s like – uh oh …’
‘The studios had been individually held entities that were focused on making movies. But when they were sold off and bought by multinational corporations, they became cogs in the wheels of these big corporations and the priority is never about making movies – the priority is about making money,’ says film writer Melissa Silverstein. ‘So those pressures took over and the people who were executives were more focused on the financial bottom line, not the artistic bottom line.’
‘The eighties,’ adds Landis, ‘is the last era of the studio system.’
The world has changed, too. Back in the mid-eighties, the international market would make up about 20 per cent of a film’s revenue. Now it’s 80 per cent because, while US audiences have gently fallen (although box office takings have generally remained steady due to rising ticket prices), the international market has grown exponentially, led by China. On the one hand it’s great that America – or Hollywood, at least – is acknowledging the importance of audiences outside its borders. But it’s less brilliant if that means it just makes more films like 2014’s mind-numbing
Transformers: Age of Extinction
, a film that was expressly made with the Chinese market in mind. If you wondered why there are so many big dumb franchises and mind-numbing blockbusters around these days, the answer is, simply, because they make an absolute tonne of money overseas, even when they lose money in the US, as they increasingly do.
fn5
Conversely, it has never been harder for smaller, original movies with good storylines to get made in today’s Hollywood studios.
‘I doubt very much I could get a studio to make
Cocoon
today – it would be seen too much as an oddity and too eccentric,’ says the not exactly clout-less Ron Howard. ‘I could probably get it made as an independent, but then it wouldn’t get the kind of distribution that made it a top ten box office hit [back in the eighties]. I think in a lot of ways, the system is less flexible and less open today.’
‘Half of my movies wouldn’t have been made today. Not in a million years would a studio make
The Blues Brothers
,’ says John Landis.
Instead, studios focus almost solely on big movies – or ‘tentpoles’, so called because they are intended to act as financial support for a whole studio – like
Twilight
,
Transformers
,
X-Men
,
Hunger Games
and superheroes that will work around the world (it’s easy to translate explosions for foreign markets; long dialogue about old people travelling to other planets? Not so much). Obviously big movies and blockbusters existed in the eighties – the seventies and eighties damn near invented them – but they were seen as annual one-offs by studios rather than the only interest. The ridiculous irony now is that the very filmmakers who coined the seventies and eighties blockbuster, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, can’t get studios to back their films. In June 2013 the directors gave a talk at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and discussed how studios ‘would rather spend $250m on a single film [rather] than make several, personal quirky projects’: ‘The studios are going for the gold,’ said Lucas. ‘But that isn’t going to work forever. And as a result they’re getting narrower and narrower in their focus. People are going to get tired of it. They’re not going to know how to do anything else … [Spielberg’s]
Lincoln
and [Lucas’s]
Red Tails
barely got into theatres. You’re talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can’t get their movies into theatres.’
The movie business itself is in what one producer describes as ‘chaos’, flummoxed by how to compete with the internet and on-demand TV, and how to make the most money possible from streaming. ‘It’s very much like when television started and the studios went reeling. We’re seeing that seismic shift again,’ says John Landis.
Also, movies and the marketing of movies have become insanely expensive (in 2012 the MPAA stopped revealing how much they spend on marketing movies but one studio chief told
Variety
that ‘$150–175m for global marketing costs’ is pretty standard). So now studios will only back films that are easy to sell and will work around the world because this then guarantees they will make their money back. This also means that they want movies that appeal to as many demographics as possible, or ‘quadrants’, as film marketing staff refer to people: men, women, old people and young people. This in turn has led to the demise of traditional women’s movies, because they wouldn’t appeal to enough quadrants (according to a Hollywood theory, that has only been around for the past thirty years, women will see movies starring men and women, but men will only see movies starring men). It also means that films become less interesting because whenever anyone says they want to make something appeal to everybody, they inevitably blandify it to such a degree that it is loved by nobody.
What studios don’t want any more is the kind of mid-budget movies that were made alongside the blockbusters and blockbuster franchises in the eighties, which is what John Hughes’s films were.
The Breakfast Club
, let alone
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
, would simply not get made today by a studio. The eighties invented the film franchise, and now it’s film franchises that are killing the best sort of movies that were made in the eighties. Teen actors who would have made for perfect sensitive teen stars – Elijah Wood, Tobey Maguire, Shia Laboeuf – instead get shuffled into blockbuster action McFranchises.