TBT: 

 St. Elmo’s Fire Turns 30: A Perfect Portrait of Friendship that Outlived the Brat Pack  

 

from vanity fair

“All I can remember is the seven of us, always together.” 

The first shot of Joel Schumacher’s St. Elmo’s Fire features the film’s seven stars—Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Mare Winningham, Judd Nelson, and Andrew McCarthy—all clad in college graduation robes and mortarboards and cheerfully walking straight into the future, together. St. Elmo’s Fire boasts the most stacked cast of all the Brat Pack features, and was the first to move past high school and college to tell a story about college graduates.


As the film turns 30, its unique ability to portray friendships as being just as compelling, important, and fraught as any other big-screen-set romance remains its defining trait—and it’s still one that feels unexpectedly progressive when it comes to its views on the inner working of human relationships.

“I really think St. Elmo’s Fire does, arguably, the best job I’ve ever seen in a film of portraying friendship with the kind of passion and cinematic poignancy that is normally reserved for portraying romantic love,” says Susannah Gora, author of You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried, the definitive book on the Brat Pack, their filmography, and their cultural impact. It’s a passionate film, but it’s passionate about the kind of thing that still isn’t put on the big screen nearly often enough: the depth and power of friendship.  

Although the film has plenty of romantic intrigue—McCarthy’s Kevin issues a stunning admission of affection for Sheedy’s Leslie that rivals just about everything he did in Pretty in Pink, and Estevez’s character, Kirby, is bonkers in love with Andie MacDowell’s Dale—the emphasis is placed on the friendships between its core characters. It’s more reflective of something like The Outsiders, rather than Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club, which were more concerned with the romantic entanglements that drove their story lines.  

This group is mismatched, too, obviously so, what with preppy Wendy (Winningham herself not considered an official Brat Pack member) and the perpetually saxophone-toting Billy (Lowe), sulky Kevin and party-girl Jules (Moore), and the bashful Kirby and yuppies-in-training Alec (Nelson) and Leslie—but their chemistry is strong enough to convince their audience that they’re all best pals and have been for some time.

“We see this clique of friends, and just the chemistry they have with each other—the arms around each other’s shoulders, and the inside jokes and the laughter—that incredible connection that they have with each other,” Gara says. “It translates to the audience with a kind of passion and cinematic excitement that normally is reserved for when you’re watching romantic love portrayed on-screen.”

More than anything, it feels like they have a history together, an idea perpetuated by plenty of tossed-off in-jokes and easy mentions of past events (Kevin reminiscences about the time he introduced Jules to his parents, while the feckless Billy seems to be a fixture at Wendy’s parents’ mansion). Although the group is often together (especially when it comes time to drink at their favorite local watering hole, St. Elmo’s Bar, from which the film takes its title), Schumacher and co-writer Carl Kurlander’s script pays plenty of attention to fleshing out individual loyalties and relationships.

Their bonds crisscross believably, and viewers would be hard-pressed to pinpoint who exactly is whose “best friend.” Leslie and Jules initially seem like best pals, but it’s Alec that Jules calls in a crisis; and Alec seems to be Kevin’s best friend even though Kevin and Kirby are roommates—it goes on and on.

The bonds of friendship extended, crucially, to the film’s marketing, as well. Weeks before St. Elmo’s Fire’s June 28 premiere, the nickname “Brat Pack” was first coined in New York writer David Blum’s piece “Hollywood’s Brat Pack.” Originally imagined as a story about Emilio Estevez and his burgeoning career (at the time, the actor was starting to make his move behind the camera: he penned 1985’s That Was Then . . . This Is Now, a follow-up to The Outsiders, and later wrote and directed the Brat Pack film Wisdom just a year later), Blum found his real story in the behind-the-scenes friendships that bonded the so-called Brat Pack.   

It was a fitting story to sell St. Elmo’s Fire, one that presented the stars of the film as a brand new breed of close pals. (Most of them at least: the piece includes a weirdly derisive bit about Andrew McCarthy that makes him sound as if he’s not really part of the Pack, though his filmography would speak otherwise.) The women, perhaps unsurprisingly, are not mentioned at all. Though the cover story, which even included a publicity shot from St. Elmo’s Fire, built a key narrative around the film, it had a disastrous effect on the real-life friendships behind it. 

“The people who made films together, including the cast of St. Elmo’s Fire, they were really great friends,” says Gora. “They were young actors, just kind of figuring out Hollywood together, and they truly were each other’s friends, and a lot of them told me that when that article did come out, that the saddest thing was that the article sort of made it that they weren’t comfortable hanging out as friends anymore.”

“Ally Sheedy told me she thought it was heartbreaking, [that] was the word she used,” Gora remembers. “That she had finally found this group of friends who she felt totally at home with, totally at peace with, comfortable with these wonderful fellow actor friends, and then this article’s out, and that was basically the end of it.”   

The Brat Pack has long since dissolved and come to mean much more than the New York article intended, but St. Elmo’s Fire lives on. The film ends with the group gathered outside their old haunt (sans bus-riding Billy, off to conquer New York City on his own terms, man), making plans for the future, healing old wounds, and growing up—just the six of them, always together.