St. Elmo's Fire's 40th Anniversary and my unexpected reunion with one of the cast
who was also amazing in that great 80's movie "The Breakfast Club"
Today a student sent me this meme reminding me that it is the 40th anniversary of the release of “St. Elmo’s Fire.” Yikes! This past Thursday, Judd Nelson, who played the leader of the St. Elmo’s gang, Alec Newberry, surprised me and my students by coming to class as we finished up our 2025 Pitt in LA program. The classroom where I teach is across from Warner Brothers which in the 1980s shared the lot with Columbia Pictures. and where, on my 25th birthday, we had a table reading where Judd, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Mare Winningham and Andie MacDowell read the words of the script I had written with director Joel Schumacher.
The building where I teach is also across from the backlot of Universal where I myself first arrived in L.A. in the summer of 1982, having won a Duke University/MCA-Universal Studios Scholar Award which came with a ten week internship. That summer, I adapted a short story I had written in college about an infatuation I had developed on a waitress I met working as a bellhop at the St. Elmo Hotel into the first draft of a screenplay entitled “St. Elmo’s Fire: A Short Story That Got Out of Hand.” A year later, I became Joel Schumacher’s assistant on D.C. Cab, a movie he was directing starring Mr. T. When that stalled at the box office, Joel read my screenplay and suggested we collaborate on a new version about a group of friends right out of college experiencing their first jobs, their first apartments, their first loves.
Judd arrived in the class just after I had finished screening St. Elmo’s Fire to my students, most of whom had never seen the movie. True to his rebel nature that made him so amazing as Bender in The Breakfast Club, Judd stayed at the back of the class to talk with the students, but had amazing wisdom to share with them that made me feel it is he who truly should be the professor. He talked philosophical concepts with Jesus, the philosophy major; pontificated with Jon on how captains on pirate ships used to be elected; geeked out about wardrobe with the stylish Aleje (Aleje with cache) over his visit to the Universal costume shop that he got to visit courtesy of my friend Liz Bass, the costume designer from Saved By The Bell who was working on a show on that lot. Aleje was excited because he is getting to talk to St. Elmo’s fabulous costume designer Susan Becker who as he put it, put Judd and the rest of the cast in those timeless outfits. Judd mentioned for The Breakfast Club, he got to wear mostly his own clothes. He challenged the students to take on the world, quoting Pliny The Elder statement that “fortune favors the bold.” He shared with them how he had dropped out of Haverford his sophomore year where he was studying philosophy, and went to New York to study with Stella Adler who had taught Marlon Brando, Robert Di Niro and Emilio Estevez’s father Martin Sheen. Judd’s parents had been supportive, but his father, a Harvard-educated lawyer, had warned him that that acting profession was not always a meritocracy.
One of the things Judd mentioned in response to a question about vampires that somehow came up, was that vampires have no sense of their age because they can never see their reflection. I can’t recall if he was using that as a Hollywood metaphor or L.A. itself, but the truth is, inside I still feel the same age as my students, and as he spoke, Judd to me seemed exactly the person I had known when we were in our twenties. After graciously dispensing sage advice and cautionary tales to the students, Judd and I went down the street to The Smokehouse and had a conversation catching up that felt to me like something out of “ My Dinner with Andre.” I had last seen Judd years ago when our documentary My Tale of Two Cities, played the museum in Portland, Maine and Judd appeared and afterwards, invited me back to the stunning waterfront home where he was raised. Like the real-life person, my friend Shawn Flaherty, on whom Alec Newberry, Judd’s character in St. Elmo’s Fire was partly based, Judd also came from a political family as his mother was in Maine’s House of Representatives. (Alec’s first name came from actor Alec Baldwin who was in Joel’s acting class but on Knots Landing by the time we started casting.)
Judd and I had a spirited exchange around a sequel that is being developed by Sony, as I updated him on where the real-life counterparts of all the characters of the St. Elmo’s gang are doing today. The character Andrew McCarthy’s Kevin is based on my best friend Rob from Duke who I just saw a couple of weeks ago as he is now an entertainment attorney (and like Andrew is from Westfield, New Jersey.) I recently found some old tapes which Joel had me record while we were writing the new version of my old St. Elmo’s script. That first draft was mostly about me and the waitress who had moved to D.C. and was working for a Republican senator, but Joel suggested we split the two sides of my personality up into the roommates who became Kevin and Kirbo. On the tapes, I mention my friend Lori Levinson who was always socially conscious along with our mutual friend Wendy Jacobs, and together they helped inspire the do-gooder Wendy Beamish who Mare Winnngham would play. The “perfect girl” Leslie Newberry Ally Sheedy played so beautifully was partly inspired by another classmate Lori introduced me to named Patti who is now living in L.A. with her husband Michael (one of the people I knew who is not a character.) And last summer, I ran into the sister of the real life Billy (the Rob Lowe character) a reunion in the Chautauqua Institution where the St. Elmo Hotel is.
Chautauqua is also where I first saw Lynn Snyderman, who inspired the Dale Biberman character at the fountain that said “knowledge”, “art”, “religion,” “life.” Poor Emilio had to play my alter ego Kirbo Kager. He really wanted to play the wild Billy, or could have been Alec, as he was a natural leader (and is just now prepping to direct Young Guns III). Emilio is way cooler than me, but was a great sport about playing the stalker-esque Kirbo, and I still value his friendship to this day. (For the record, Lynn and I are still friends and lives blocks from each other in Pittsburgh.)
The only one who I have lost touch with is the real Jules who was my housemate in the anarchist collective where I was living on Wilton and Franklin when Joel and I while were writing the script. When she saw her name in the script, the real Jules ripped my shirt off the back. We eventually became lovers or hooked up, as my students would say, but things ended messily, as I was in my twenties, and still learning how to navigate relationships. I would do anything to see her again and hear what she is up to as she was so wild, so full of life, stunning and stylish.
As Demi Moore recently recounted in this interview she did with W ahead of winning her Golden Globe, I had first seen Demi as she ran out of an audition she had just finished in John Hughes’ office. Joel and I both immediately thought “that’s Jules”, and in fact, she was almost a doppleganger for my former housemate who inspired the character. I remember Demo’s flowing raven black hair and her motorcycle jacketand embarrassingly, at Joel’s urging, I chased her across down the stairs of the Universal bungalow and across the lot. Out of breath, I panted what must have seemed like some crazy pick-up line— that we were making a movie and could she please come back and audition?
John Hughes’ office was next to Joel’s which is one of the reasons that Judd, Emilio, and Ally ended up in the movie besides that they were some of the most talented actors of their generation as our casting director Marci Liroff recognized. We saw hundreds of actors and I still have some of the casting sheets which I was showing the class as Judd walked in. Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson who would get cast in “Back to the Future” read as did Linda Hamilton who would saved the world in The Terminator. Emilio’s brother Charlie was scheduled to come in, and he canceled on us a couple of times. Anthony Edwards who was in Revenge of the Nerds (ah, the 80s)) and would go on to star on E.R. read for Kirbo, and who is today married to Mare Winningham.
As Joel and producer Lauren Shuler Donner addressed the cast on that Warner Brothers soundstage before the table read in October 1984, I remember them telling the cast how they had earned these parts out of the hundreds of actors— (Joel interjected “thousands!”) that we had seen for these roles. Joel once told me “it goes from the writer to the director to the actor to the audience” and by the end of that table reading, these characters were no longer the work of Joel and my imagination, but real people these actors would inhabit for the next 40 days of production.
The truth is, despite the few folks I am still friends with from college, I never had a close-knit group of friends like in the movie. In fact, I was pretty lonely at Duke (so lonely that I tried to freeze myself to death when a girl broke my heart, but that is another story that of course became the climax of the movie.) But it was the St. Elmo cast that became that group of friends for the forty days were were making the movie. It was not that the film did not have dramas in front of and behind the camera, particularly as Joel who was my mentor was also my tormentor and did not always treat the cast with the respect they deserved. When Greg Gorman was taking that photo of the St. Elmo gang in the bar, Emilio or Rob shouted out to me to get in the photo, but I didn’t because I was afraid Joel would yell at me.
Sadly, it was a still from that shoot, in that fake bar Bill Sandell constructed on a Burbank Soundstage where the beer was only ice tea, that a writer used his own recollections to write an article which would haunt the careers of many of the cast, as Andrew McCarthy’s Brats documentary explored. The real injustice to me as someone who was there was that the piece was supposed to be about a script that Emilio was writing that he was about to direct. What people forget about that article is that John Hughes is quoted as saying the screenplay was so good, he wished he had written it, and earlier this year, Emilio told me about a call he got from John saying it helped motivate him to write Ferris Buelller’s Day Off. I told Judd at dinner that if they do make the sequel, I hope it is not just about old friendship, but about healing and finding out more about who you are— which apparently is something that does not end just because you leave your twenties.
I was so happy to have that photo with Judd and my students, some of whom are about to be launched into the real world and have their own St. Elmo’s Fire “freshmen years of life,” To be honest, for years, I avoiding re-watching the movie, perhaps haunted by my early success, as I had thought I would go on to write more stories about “my generation” and ended up writing sitcoms for teens. And after talking with Judd and my students about what Hollywood was like back then, maybe some of it is what my students today would describe as trauma I experienced breaking into show business. (Back then, we called it “paying your dues.) But a funny thing happened when I showed my students the film which I had so often had mixed feelings about. Seeing it through their eyes, while they found the behavior of the characters in the movie at times appalling, they all said how they somehow related it, with all its flaws. They laughed more than any audience I have ever seen it with (when it went to video, I thought the movie was a comedy and was surprised to see it in the drama section.). But they did say what they found humorous was how seriously everyone seemed to take themselves. I felt busted, but finally was able to laugh at myself. I am very aware of all my students have gone through with the pandemic, school shootings, and the current politics of the country which makes the 80s seem almost innocent. Hearing my students talk about the film, I gained an appreciation for why St. Elmo’s Fire still lives on all these decades later.
As Judd and I left The Smokehouse, we hugged, and he got back on that motorcycle to head home. As Judd road off, I felt like I had just seen a close friend I had gone to college with and felt so grateful to have been part of the movie. Happy 40th, St. Elmo’s Fire! Cue David Foster’s Love Theme or John Parr’s “Man in Motion.”
The poster hung in our Chautauqua house for decades!