Greetings to the Class of '86

By John Skow

Ah there, middle-aged grouches! Bored by the youthquake? Not charmed by the teen flicks that every Cinema Half-a-Dozen seems to have five of? Think that children, including child actors, should be flash-frozen at twelve and thawed out again at 20? Well, help is on the way. Time's winged chariot is rumbling through the shopping mall. Maturity lurks; in a couple of years not one of the kids in The Breakfast Club will be young enough to impersonate a high schooler. Creeping adulthood may require more time to overtake the young male teen-flick actors who, with an exception or two, now look as if a casting director had wandered through a Taco Bell parking lot saying, "Okay, you, you and you." The best of the young women are far more promising. When there is a flash of bright acting, the kind that makes you look for a name in the credits and think that this one is going to be really good, it is likely to be one of them who strikes the fire.

The radiant Molly Ringwald is not the only such coming attraction. Ally Sheedy, who plays the sulky flake to Molly's good girl in The Breakfast Club, is one of a lively and sometimes dazzling handful of others. Sheedy is 23 now, and the leggy, earnest, puppy-cute teenager of WarGames shows up less frequently in her movements than it used to. Her looks have always pivoted at an intriguing point between plain and stunning, a balance that is bad for a movie star but lucky for an actress. She has a pointy nose, a shock of reddish-brown hair and a great, hello-world grin, but there is real beauty in her face. She could play anything from the hero's lovable kid sister to the dark lady of somebody's sonnets, although there have been no sonnets among her eight films so far.

Sheedy was a bright, well-organized and lucky child who danced with the American Ballet Theater in Manhattan when she was six. At twelve she wrote and, with the help of her mother, a literary agent, sold a children's book called She Was Nice to Mice. At 14 she began acting lessons and a few years later moved on her own to Los Angeles. After a short time in the minors (McDonald's and Pizza Hut commercials) she landed a role in a daytime TV special. She is anything but a gaga post-teen now, though she is counted a member of the group of kinda talented, kinda famous young actors somewhat unfairly called the Brat Pack. She needs only a few credits for her bachelor's degree at the University of Southern California. A partly written novel lies fallow. Good sense rules her life, though she has been known to wander off go- cart driving with Brat Packers Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson (respectively, the jock and the punk of The Breakfast Club, and the waiter and Sheedy's lover of the hanging-out-after-college film St. Elmo's Fire).

Acting captivates Sheedy, and she wants to play everything "from a nun to a safari adventurer to a peasant girl to Lady Macbeth." She can't, however, imagine herself trying something as difficult as Meryl Streep's tour de force in Sophie's Choice. "I don't think I could play a sex-starved rock singer," she speculates, pausing to see how that possibility strikes her listener. Then, grinning, she changes her mind: "But maybe I could." She is on view in two fairly routine films released this month, Blue City, a thriller in which she plays Judd Nelson's girlfriend, and Short Circuit, in which she befriends a robot. Blue City received bad reviews and is sinking out of sight. Short Circuit drew mixed notices but is a box-office smash. Neither required her to stretch much beyond the pretty post-high schooler she's already played several times. Is anyone listening out there in Hollywood?

At first thought the contrast between Sheedy and Helena Bonham Carter, 19, the English star of Lady Jane and A Room with a View, is roughly that between Los Angeles and London. Then the imagined gap narrows. Each young woman is exceptionally intelligent, and each knows that she was chosen for her first role mostly for her looks, to please the camera as a pretty teenager. Each is the daughter of a prosperous and secure upper-middle-class family that was shaken by trauma. Sheedy's parents separated when she was nine, and she spent the rest of her childhood shuttling between two households nine blocks apart in Manhattan, never knowing where she had left her sneakers. Bonham Carter's father, a merchant banker, suffered a brain tumor when she was 13, and was paralyzed when an operation to remove it went wrong. Her family rallied, and both her father and her mother, a psychotherapist, now take an amused pleasure in her success. But it was her own reaction at the time that is astonishing. Apparently feeling that it was time to prepare for independence, Helena took (pounds)25 she had won in a countrywide young-writers contest and, on her own, bought a quarter-page ad in Spotlight, a casting directory. An agent saw the ad and took on the cheeky teenager as a client.

Lady Jane, her first film, is no formula flick, but an ambitious costume melodrama about the violent period after the deaths of Henry VIII (in 1547) and, six years later, his sickly young son Edward VI. Nevertheless--castles, moats, 16th century costumes and all--the film sinks at its worst moments to the level of teenage fantasy. Bonham Carter, small and dark haired, with huge brown eyes and a face that suggests a miniature in an antique locket, plays the doomed Lady Jane Grey, who lost her life at 16 in an attempt to prevent Henry's Catholic daughter Mary Tudor from succeeding to the throne of newly Protestant England. The actress, who was 18 when the film was shot, projects an astonishing intensity as the unworldly Jane. Her own aristocratic background may have given her some assurance; it certainly assured endless publicity: she is the great-granddaughter of the Liberal Prime Minister Lord Asquith, and the granddaughter of the eloquent orator and member of the House of Lords, Lady Violet Bonham Carter.

Bonham Carter has no patience with the fuss made over her sweet beauty. "Prettiness has this connotation of passivity and innocuousness," she says. "Even 'actress' is irritating because it has overtones of glamour and stresses the female bit rather than acting. I don't want to be constricted and limited." But prettiness is only part of what the camera sees. Her formidable will is just as evident as those big eyes, and it is the contrast, the steel- butterfly effect, that is fascinating. She is, possibly, a shade too composed and cerebral in her thoroughly adult second film, the delightful period comedy % A Room with a View. Her character, a properly brought-up young person who allows herself to become engaged to a twit, is supposed to be slightly silly, but Bonham Carter does not quite succeed in counterfeiting nitwittedness. She needs to study acting, she knows, and to find time for a university education. She needs to stop being 19. "At the moment I don't have much to impart to the world, and I wish this attention would come at a time when I did," she says. Reminded that when she has years, she will wish for youth, this winning young woman agrees, and adds gravely, "It is so badly designed, isn't it, this whole process?"

Bonham Carter is so exquisite a period piece that it is jarring to imagine her as a jukebox Juliet in some 1980s T shirt ripper. The reverse is just as emphatically true for most of the young American actresses. Try seeing Laura Dern's superior performance as a hormone-fogged California adolescent in Smooth Talk, for instance, and then envision her in a Victorian corset and long skirt. Fuses blow; imagination does not stretch that far. Dern, for starters, has too much Pacific Ocean salt in her blond hair, and her lanky good looks are too much a matter of knees and shoulders and elbows. She looks as if she should be playing power forward on the UCLA women's basketball team. That's obvious. But what is on view is not merely the result of 19 years of good groceries. Connie, the girl seduced by the Treat Williams character in Smooth Talk, is supposed to be physical, a fretful, yearning high school sophomore whose lush, gawky body has outgrown the controls of fear and reason. In Mask, Dern was equally convincing as a very different type, the shy, innocent blind girl.

She has been acting almost since she could walk. Her parents, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, are actors, and she was seven when she played her first movie role, a kid eating a banana ice-cream cone in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Not much emoting was necessary, but subtle stuff was going on among the other actors, and 19 retakes were required. That meant licking 19 banana cones. Yuck! Acting was tougher than she had thought.

She auditioned for The Breakfast Club but was turned down, and since then has avoided most films that she calls "teen junk." The extravagant praise she has heard for Smooth Talk makes her uneasy, and she has tried to deflate expectations for her next role, an inquisitive girl next door who gets involved in a murder mystery, in the thriller Blue Velvet, to be released in September.

Dern does not seem to worry much about whether she is, or is on the point of becoming, a star. What she and the others fret about constantly is being accepted as adult, professional actresses. No one has yet asked them to play a role that Meryl Streep has turned down, and maybe no one will. Demi Moore, a pretty, slightly wistful brunette of 23, is one of a dozen or two former teenagers whose careers have paid the rent comfortably without catching fire yet. Not quite enough hey-look-at-me comes through her rather pleasant good looks, though she is always solid and believable. She has not always been lucky in roles. Through no fault of her own, she found herself playing Michael Caine's dim daughter in a theater-emptier called Blame It on Rio.

Moore is, however, The One With The Voice, a rough, sexy rumble that can loosen a male viewer's necktie. The voice has been her distinction, and Moore is in demand. She stars with Rob Lowe and Jim Belushi in an upcoming romance that was called Sexual Perversity in Chicago until its producers had trouble buying ads and whose new name is About Last Night . . . She has just finished location shooting in Sacramento with her fiance Emilio Estevez for Wisdom, a film whose plot synopsis sounds like The Breakfast Club meeting, somewhat improbably, the farm-debt crisis. She broke into acting at 16 with no experience whatsoever--"Nothing, just pure desire," she says--and has played bit parts for TV, with a two-year stretch as Jackie on General Hospital and a let's-forget role in a 3-D horror called Parasite. She was most successful as the warm-hearted pop singer in No Small Affair, bopping cheerfully around San Francisco with a precocious teenage photographer played by Jon Cryer, who is Ringwald's pet nerd in Pretty in Pink. Moore played a neurotic in St. Elmo's Fire, a film whose entire inspiration seems to be, "Let's get the gang together and make a movie." She loves it all, though she knows she must look for better scripts. "You have to say no." But she is happy in show biz and at ease with herself. "I'm not as afraid to fail as I used to be, because I'm learning to accept myself for who I am."

Could the notion of having to accept her own shortcomings and limitations ever have occurred to Rebecca De Mornay, who played the cool, glossy, blond hooker in Risky Business? She and her mother were chronic, habitual travelers when she was little, and at one point they fetched up in Kitzbuhel, the Austrian ski resort. Rebecca, who did not speak German, nevertheless persuaded her mother to enroll her in school there. She graduated some years later with top honors; along the way, she wrote, directed and acted in a play the school put on. At 15 she also, somehow, wrote a song that was used in a Bruce Lee kung-fu movie. Was life to hold anything more? You bet. Some years later, she signed on as an apprentice with Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope group and got to say a whole line--"Excuse me, those are my waffles"--in Coppola's strange, airless film One from the Heart.

Her next onscreen line was harder to forget: "Are you ready for me, Ralph?" The movie was Paul Brickman's uproarious young-'n'-dumb flick Risky Business, and no one was ready for De Mornay. She was a call girl with a heart of Kevlar, growling seductively at the stupefied Tom Cruise, who played a suburban high school senior whose parents had gone off on vacation. The script managed to satirize kids, adults, greed, sex, Porsches and the Princeton admissions process in less than two hours, and De Mornay was easily best-of-show. Thousands cheered. De Mornay went on to play a rock singer opposite Michael O'Keefe's baseball player in The Slugger's Wife, a problem film written by Neil Simon that somehow failed to be funny about women's careers and self-realization. Then, shrewdly, she dropped down to a supporting role in The Trip to Bountiful, a film in which the redoubtable Geraldine Page, who won an Oscar for it this spring, does the bravura acting. Page is an old woman who wants to see her hometown before she dies. De Mornay plays the wife of a soldier, who meets Page in a bus station. She sits primly with her handbag in her lap and leaves the big, round gestures to Page. The contrast is expert moviemaking.

De Mornay, now 23, is beguiled by the notion of directing music videos, and she may spend all night, given any encouragement, watching a band lay down tracks in a Manhattan recording studio. She is studying acting with Geraldine Page, among others, and, yes, she is romantically involved. She does not want to talk about this condition, she says, because she does not know how to describe a complex personal relationship in two sentences. Her career is bubbling with offers. De Mornay is fully adult now, a professional actress, possibly the most mature of a promising new bunch. Hand out the diplomas and play the recessional: the class of '86 has graduated.

This is a comforting thought, and the moviegoer feels proud and almost parental for having seen these beguiling youngsters through their difficult teenage years. Good sense suggests, however, that it is prudent not to get too comfortable. Even now, with the battered fortress of adulthood in grave need of repairs, a fresh assault is gathering. Sure as Sony makes videotape, unknown young directors with the artistic sensibility of not-yet-great white sharks are prowling the Taco Bells. Movie-struck, semi-pubescent punks with their cigarette packs turned up in the sleeves of their T shirts are spotting them and shooting their best Judd Nelson looks. And 14-year-old girls in shouldn't-be-legal shorts are looking cute and plotting how to be Katharine Hepburn, or maybe even Ally Sheedy. The classes of '87 through '90 are already hard at work.

With reporting by Michael Riley/Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York