Carl Kurlander
When people hear “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” and the line “all I need is a set of wheels,” they may think about Demi Moore driving around Georgetown in her black Jeep in the 1985 movie I co-wrote with director Joel Schumacher.
But John Parr actually wrote that song without ever seeing our movie, having been inspired by our soundtrack producer David Foster telling him about Rick Hansen, a Canadian paraplegic wheeling across 34 countries on his “Man In Motion World Tour.” On September 11, Man in Motion: The Rick Hansen Story, a new documentary, premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival.
While our film gave birth to that number one hit as well as to its group of actors—Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Demi Moore, Andrew McCarthy, and Ally Sheedy—being known as “The Brat Pack,” it wasn’t until this past summer, some four decades later, that I finally met Rick Hansen when he invited me to go fishing with him for sturgeon in his hometown of Vancouver. It was nothing less than a life-changing experience.
The Magic of St. Elmo’s Fire
St. Elmo’s Fire has been a mysterious force in my life. In the spring of 1980, while a sophomore at Duke University, I wrote a short story in an English class about a waitress I’d become infatuated with while working as a bellhop at the St. Elmo Hotel. That story would take me to Hollywood on a Duke/Universal Studios Scholar award and a few years later “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion) would become Rick’s anthem as he traveled across four continents over 40,000 Km, the equivalent of going around the equator.
On the flight to meet Rick, I read in his book about how he had been paralyzed at 15 in an accident coming home from a fishing trip. The same month I was writing my short story, he was watching his friend Terry Fox, who had lost a leg to cancer, on his Marathon of Hope run across Canada to raise money for cancer research and show people what a person with a disability could do. Terry had to stop when his cancer returned and died way too young at twenty-two. But Rick resolved to build on what Terry had begun on a global scale.
In July 1982, Rick won eight gold medals and broke nine world records at the Pan-American Wheelchair Games. That same summer I arrived in Los Angeles as an intern at Univeral where I adapted my short story into a screenplay and met director Joel Schumacher.
In 1984, Rick introduced Wheelchair Racing at the Los Angeles Olympics. By then, Joel and I had re-written my script into a movie about a group of friends right of college, navigating first jobs, first apartments, and first loves. As almost never happens, on October 1, my twenty-fifth birthday, I was sitting on a Burbank soundstage at a table reading with Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Andrew McCarthy, Mare Winningham, and Andie MacDowell, playing the fictional version of the St. Elmo’s waitress. Someone in Columbia Pictures’ marketing department wrote a memo about what a horrible title St. Elmo’s Fire was, wanting to call the film “Sparks” or “the Real World.”
Joel insisted on keeping the original title and had me meet with David Foster to talk about the music in our script. David asked me to describe the movie in one word. I said: “Passion,” which was a word that could be used to describe Rick Hansen.
At the time he was planning his “Man In Motion World Tour” to raise awareness about the potential of people with disabilities and to raise money to remove barriers, and demonstrate to the world that the only limitation of those in a wheelchair was the limitations others placed on them. In his book, Rick talks about setting an ambitious fundraising goal of $10 million and thinking to himself: “How about a hit record, a number-one single, a rock video?”
The Birth of an ’80s Anthem and The Brat Pack
Around the time Rick Hansen invited me to go fishing, Rob Lowe was going viral after telling Kelly Clarkson that he and the rest of the cast were on board for the St. Elmo’s Fire sequel Sony Pictures is developing in the wake of the success of Andrew McCarthy’s Brats documentary. A New York book agent I’m working with on an oral history of the movie who saw the movie in high school, explained for his generation The Breakfast Club was their Woodstock, a feel-good movie everyone loved; while St. Elmo’s was like Altamont– full of drama on and off-screen.
I was reminded of that last summer while teaching a program for the University of Pittsburgh in L.A., across from that same Burbank lot where we’d shot the movie forty years earlier, when I got a text from Judd Nelson offering to speak to my students. In true Bender fashion, he arrived on a motorcycle, sat in the back of the class, and told them that if they wanted their dreams badly enough, to go for it, quoting Pliny the Elder: “Fortune favors the bold.”
Over dinner afterward, Judd and I talked about the making of the movie, including the drama created by the New York magazine story that was supposed to profile Emilio Estevez. Emilio and I had become friends during production, and I watched him working on a script in Demi’s West Hollywood bungalow after they had started dating. Reporter David Blum was supposed to write about Emilio’s plans to direct, but instead, wrote about an off-the-record evening he had spent with Emilio, Judd, and Rob Lowe at the Hard Rock Cafe. The magazine used a still from St. Elmo’s with Rob holding a beer and Emilio horsing around, pulling on Judd’s collar and the headline “Hollywood’s Brat Pack.” That article and the term caused so much damage that Judd’s agent advised him not to work with the other actors from our movie because of the stigma.
Emilio had invited me to go with them that night to the Hard Rock, but instead, I had to go with Joel Schumacher to Palm Beach to rewrite a movie for Peter Falk. Meanwhile, with days left to lock our film and no “hit” single, David Foster had bet on a British singer whose one hit, “Naughty, Naughty,” had made it to a modest No. 40 on the Billboard charts. John Parr had been struggling with the lyrics because he didn’t relate to our movie’s theme of life after college, having dropped out at fifteen to go on the road. But his writer’s block got unstuck when David showed him clips of Rick on his Tour.
In Florida, Joel called me into his room and said David had something he wanted us to hear. The song wasn’t even over when Joel started shouting, “I love it! I love it! Just throw in more ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’!” John had wanted to call the song “Man in Motion.”
Fundraising had been challenging for Rick’s Tour up until then, but as the tune from our movie climbed the charts, donations started pouring in. I teared up when I read in Rick’s book how, when he entered China to wheel along the Great Wall, they greeted him playing St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion.)” By 1987, he had raised more than $26 million from supporters around the world.
A World Without Barriers
The sign that greeted Rick at the stadium in Vancouver when he finished his tour read “Welcome Home Rick: The End is Just the Beginning.” And as I would discover when I arrived in Vancouver, The Man in Motion had kept going—raising hundreds of millions more for the cause with his Foundation working to address barriers faced by people with disabilities—in education, the built environment, changing laws and attitudes, making more than 1,700 sites across Canada certified for meaningful accessibility through the Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Certification™ Program.
The invitation to go fishing with Rock came about in a way as mystical as everything else connected to St. Elmo’s fire. Last October, I was on Roosevelt Island speaking at World Polio Day event about The Shot Felt Round the World, a documentary I made about the Salk polio vaccine. After my talk, Ramesh Ferris, a polio survivor, took the stage and told the gathering of global health leaders movingly how he had been born in India with polio and might have become a crawler on the streets there, had he not been adopted by a family in the Yukon. Ramesh then showed slides of him hand-cycling across Canada to raise funds for the polio eradication effort. Later, I mention Rick to Ramesh who it turned out had become a friend and mentor. Ramesh connected us which led to Rick inviting us to go fishing as part of his foundation’s Accessible Outdoors Program.
At breakfast at the Holiday Inn where I was staying, I met Kevin from Ontario, who, upon hearing that I was going fishing with Rick Hansen, lit up and told me how Rick was a national hero and the high school in his hometown was named after him. The next day, the Uber driver taking me to the Steveston Fishing Wharf had actually graduated from a different Rick Hansen secondary school. He told me how Rick visited often and made sure the school was accessible. I smiled when I saw on the school’s website that its logo was “St. Elmo’s Fire.” It explained that the name comes from a mariner’s legend in which, at the height of a storm, sailors would be led to safety by a phenomenal light that guided them to safe harbor. The teams are “the Hurricanes” because those winds are “the problems we all face on our journey—and yet, we have St. Elmo’s fire,” the example and principles of Rick Hansen, “to see us through to safety.”
It was raining when Rick came rolling down the Steveston wharf toward me. I handed Rick the original short story and a pennant from the movie that read “This Is Our Time on the Edge.” Rick and I shook hands like old friends and joked about the storm and whether we might actually see St. Elmo’s fire.
After the accident that paralyzed him, Rick had continued fishing but had been frustrated by how hard it was for someone with a disability to do something as simple as get on a boat. So, he pulled together an innovative team of experts to build a fully accessible vessel to demonstrate possibility, one that erased barriers: a zero-entry deck for wheelchairs, a lift down to the hull, hydraulics that let someone in a wheelchair drive from the captain’s wheel. Rick believes that by sharing how the outdoors can be accessible to everyone, it will inspire others to replicate accessibility solutions within their own industries and services. Ramesh, who still walks on crutches from the polio he had as a child, noticed the non-slip floor right away. The night before I met a woman whose friend had gone fishing with Rick. Chloe Angus was a fashion designer who had been paralyzed by a tumor but now was designing exoskeletons so she and others could walk. A sign on the boat says “Anything Is Possible,” and being around Rick, it is hard not to believe.
As we headed onto the Fraser River, our guide, Anthony—everyone calls him Murr—told us about the sturgeon: a prehistoric fish that survived the dinosaurs and the Ice Age. Rick had first seen a large sturgeon jumping out of the water when he was ten. It was easy to see how their resilience appealed to him. Years later, upon learning they were threatened by overfishing and a changing climate, Rick became the founding chair of the Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society, establishing catch-and-release practices to protect them.
On the boat I also met Mike Reid who worked with the foundation and had been with Rick on the “Man In Motion World Tour” in his twenties. He told me how fun it was at first, and how quickly it got hard: the logistics, the constant obstacles. Rick let slip that Mike’s parents had him join the tour to keep an eye on his sister Amanda, the physiotherapist who’d treated Rick after an injury. Rick and Amanda married and now have three children and grandchildren whom Rick takes fishing.
I felt a nibble on my line, and Rick told me to start reeling it in. For a moment I felt like the old man in the sea, as I had heard they had caught fish up to nine and ten feet. The one I pulled up was smaller, but still the biggest I’d ever caught. And just a couple of feet it was considered juvenile for a sturgeon, but that was a good thing, Rick and Murr explained– a sign the river was still making new life. They brought the fish into a blue sling, waved a wand over it to see if it had been caught before, and when it hadn’t, Murr tagged it so it could be tracked for the next two hundred years– as long as sturgeon can live. I joked that I’d name mine Elmo.
Between lulls when the fish weren’t biting, I listened to Ramesh talk to Rick about getting his hometown of Whitehorse to plow its sidewalks in winter so people with mobility issues could get around, and Rick offer to come up himself to help. Mike showed me a clip of Rick bungee jumping on a comedy show. The producers had wanted to send him off without his wheelchair, but Rick insisted on going over the bridge in it, to show again that the only limits are the ones in our heads. When I asked if he’d been afraid, he smiled and admitted he was. But the Man in Motion keeps moving forward.
Mike also showed me a clip from Man in Motion: The Rick Hansen Story, the documentary Canada’s own Ryan Reynolds produced with Derik Murray, founder of Network Entertainment. Rick and Amanda had turned down previous requests to make a film but felt that with the 40th anniversary of the Man In Motion World Tour, the timing was right. Ironically, Network Entertainment was the same company that made Brats.
I only met John Parr once– the day we filmed the music video for the song. The concept was that the bar had burned to the ground. It was raining, and the actors would gaze forlornly at the ruins while John, the troubadour they remembered, sang. He still hadn’t seen the movie and, trying to be helpful, offered the young actors acting tips from his own thespian days. It was months after we’d wrapped, the scene was set in winter, they were back in heavy coats, and you could tell their heads were elsewhere, having moved on to other projects. Joel wanted a photo of the cast to send to Craig Baumgarten, the executive who’d believed in the movie before being fired from Columbia. As he herded them in front of the awning reading “St. Elmo’s Bar,” they glared at the camera with the reticence of teenagers being made to pose for a Christmas photo for Grandma. That image became the poster: “The Heat This Summer Is at St. Elmo’s Fire.” Below it the tagline: “The Passion Burns Deep.”
I still have that St. Elmo’s poster in my basement, though it is fading. That music video now has over 40 million views so I can understand why people are excited about a sequel. The cast is now in their sixties, and I wonder if any of the characters will be in a wheelchair. I keep my old gold record of “St. Elmo’s Fire” by the bathroom. The gold cassette has fallen off. In my office, I have a photo of that St. Elmo waitress and me along with the photo of Emilio and Andie MacDowell who played us.
John Parr has said that he knows when people hear the lyric “just once in his life, a man has his time” they think of that moment where Emilio’s Kirbo kisses Andie’s Dale Biberman in the snow. But when he wrote it, he was thinking of Rick. (For the record, many of the crazy things Kirbo does in that movie were based on things I embarrassingly did in my youth, but that kiss was a re-write.)
But the next time I hear “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” in an elevator or a CVS, I will be thinking of Rick Hansen. For meeting him has taught me when John Parr sings “once in his life, a man has his time and my time is now” that is not just true for when you are in your twenties, but for the rest of your life. Rick is proof that it is up to all of us to live in the now and keep going.
I’m excited that soon, through this new documentary, the world will know more of his story. As we left the dock and Elmo swam off in that Fraser River, I once again believed in that mysterious force that helps us climb those highest mountains and cross the wildest seas. I could feel St. Elmo’s Fire burnin’ in me!
To learn more about the Rick Hansen Foundation, visit rickhansen.com. Man in Motion: The Rick Hansen Story premieres September 11th at the Toronto International Film Festival. Produced by Ryan Reynolds and Derik Murray and the team at Vancouver-based Network Entertainment in association with Maximum Effort.
