Carl Kurlander
Last year, when she was nominated for an Oscar for The Substance, W Magazine called “reinvention” Demi Moore’s superpower. This February, Demi presented at the Academy Awards in a feathered Gucci gown while the orchestra played her on to the theme from St. Elmo’s Fire — the film which first made her a star. She’s the formidable heart of Landman, playing a widow with surprising grit when her oil tycoon husband dies and the whole operation falls to her. In Demi’s new movie I Love Boosters — coming off rave reviews at Cannes and scoring 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes — Demi plays a billionaire fashion mogul taken down by a band of shoplifters, which sounds about right for a woman who has spent forty years making sure no one could take her down.
Years ago, when Demi showed up on a Burbank soundstage for the table reading of St. Elmo’s Fire to read with a talented group of actors who would become known as “The Brat Pack,” Joel Schumacher, my mentor and collaborator, predicted that out of all the cast, Demi would become the biggest star of them all.
Demi first broke out playing Jules in St. Elmo’s Fire. In that W article, Demi mentioned how Joel spotted her in a hallway and sent me to race out and get her to read for the part. She almost lost the role when, two weeks before shooting, she showed up drunk and high to a costume fitting. But by force of will and a sense of destiny, she got clean and her star would continue to rise as she appeared with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men; with Patrick Swayze in that unforgettable pottery scene in Ghost, and as the woman Robert Redford is willing to spend a million dollars to sleep with in Indecent Proposal. A path few could have conceived when Demetria Gene Guynes was a middle schooler back in Charleroi PA.
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I still have the casting sheets from St. Elmo’s Fire and all the actresses we saw — producer Lauren Shuler Donner, casting director Marci Liroff, Joel, and myself. Writers are not normally in every casting session, but I had started as Joel’s assistant — getting him “gazpacho, no croutons, chopped egg, and sour cream on the side” — and so Joel let me be there just in case someone had to get lunch.
For Jules, we saw Lea Thompson, who would play Michael J. Fox’s mother/love interest in Back to the Future. I wrote in my notes: “I’m in love.” Linda Hamilton read who the world would soon know as Sarah Connor in The Terminator. Then Lori Singer, hot after the smash hit Footloose came in. It was a Saturday and Marci wasn’t available to feed her lines, so Joel had me play the part of Kevin (later played by Andrew McCarthy.)
St. Elmo’s is about a group of friends in D.C. just out of college going through their freshman year of life—first jobs, first apartments, first loves. In the audition scene, Jules invites Kevin to her chic, very pink place, with a Warhol style portrait of Billy Idol with pink neon hair over the fireplace. She offers Kevin a drink, changes into her robe, and sits next to him on the couch, dramatically tells him her theory that the reason he has no girlfriend is that he’s gay and secretly in love with their friend Alec (Judd Nelson.) Kevin smirks that this reminds him of the time she met his parents and decided he was adopted. Jules opens her robe and asks: “Are you hard?! No!” As Jules offers to fix him up with her gay neighbor Ron, Kevin hightails it out of there.
I was petrified reading opposite Lori, and my nervousness might have thrown her off. But she delivered the line about Kevin being gay with the sincerity of a doctor delivering a cancer diagnosis. It wasn’t her fault. Joel would lament how hard it was to find beautiful women who could also do comedy.
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Jules is fashionable, fabulous, and outrageous with her own unique humor. When she and Leslie (Ally Sheedy) visit Wendy (Mare Winningham) at the soup kitchen she works at, Jules who is bopping her boss at a highflying banking job, jokes she may end up homeless herself– but at least she’ll have alligator bags. Like much of the script, the character had come from a composite of people Joel and I knew.
At the time, I was living in the laundry room of an anarchist collective in a seedy section of Hollywood where one of my housemates, Jules was a wild party girl who would become my Holly Golightly. The scene where Jules does coke with Arab sheiks may have come from an actual incident or Joel’s imagination having spent his twenties as a star in the fashion world doing drugs with the Andy Warhol crowd. Some of Jules’ boldness came from Wendy Finerman, an ambitious Hollywood player we both knew with great style, prone to shock with her candor, and who spoke with a frenetic energy that made some wonder if she was on coke. Wendy was not, but would go on to produce mega-hits like Forrest Gump and The Devil Wears Prada.
I did spend a drunken evening making out with the real Jules above Mulholland drive. I am embarrassed to say the scene where Billy (Rob Lowe) and Jules are in her Black Jeep outside his house and he drunkenly sticks her keys in his pants came from that evening. Like Demi in the movie, Jules pushed me out of her car and kicked me to the curb.
The real Jules’s last name was Moore — not the famous Julianne Moore, but she was a dark-haired beauty who shared Demi’s raspy voice and had aura about her that when Demi ran out of John Hughes’s office, it was like I was seeing Jules’s real-life doppelganger. Joel’s offices were in a very Eighties bungalow with the suites for Michael Mann who created Miami Vice and producer Art Linson (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) on the first floor, and upstairs, John Hughes had his offices when he was not in his hometown of Chicago directing Breakfast Club. He and producer Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon) were casting Weird Science and Demi had just auditioned and was making a quick exit as Joel and I were standing outside his office. She ran by with that flowing raven black hair, leather jacket, carrying a motorcycle helmet.
In her memoir Inside Out, Demi recalls Joel’s assistant panting and running after her down a flight of stairs. But I remember chasing her a full block across the Universal backlot. When I caught up to her, I blurted out something like: “I-know-this-is-going-to sound-like a line — puff, puff– but could you come back and meet the director– puff puff puff– of a movie we’re making.” Thank goodness she came back, as it would change all our lives.
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One morning two weeks before we were to start filming in Georgetown, Joel got a call from our costume designer Susan Becker informing him that Demi had shown up drunk and high at 9 a.m. for a fitting. Lauren and Joel met with Demi and gave her an ultimatum. Joel, a former drug addict himself, told Demi to “get clean or go kill yourself on someone else’s movie.” While Demi went to rehab, Joel considered replacing her with a singer he’d just met named Madonna. But to her credit, the day of the table reading, Demi appeared on that soundstage with her sober companion Chris beside her, ready to work. The soundstage filled with cast and crew fell quiet, and Demi opened her script and magically became Jules.
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The big climax of St. Elmo’s Fire is when Jules has her breakdown — fired by the boss she was seeing, her expensive furniture and fabulous black Jeep repossessed, feeling all is lost. Jules opens all the windows of her bare apartment and, wearing just a t-shirt, dramatically tries to freeze herself to death. When Demi heard that the scene had come from my own life– a melodramatic night in college after a girl broke my heart– she asked if maybe she should play it naked, to convey the raw emotion she would be feeling. I appreciated her commitment but suggested if her friends arrived and she was in the buff, it might be a bit distracting. Ironically, in The Substance, the part Demi would win her Golden Globe for, she was naked through much of the movie.
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During the course of the movie, Demi started dating Emilio Estevez, already an established star with tour de force performances in The Breakfast Club and Repo Man. He really wanted to play Billy, the wild man that went to his friend Rob Lowe, but was a good sport playing my nerdy alter ego Kirbo. Emilio was working on a screenplay he was preparing to direct which would eventually become a movie called Men at Work which Emilio would co-star in with his brother Charlie Sheen (his character would be named “Carl” as a nod to me, though it was also the English translation of Carlos Estevez’s name.). Emilio was writing the script on a giant Compaq luggable computer than he and John Hughes had. I remember spending an afternoon with them in a modest but cozy bungalow Demi had bought in West Hollywood — her first house. I had some sense that Demi had come from a hard-scrabbled, nomadic childhood, and that the home and dating Emilio may have been the first real stability she’d had.
After St. Elmo’s, I visited Demi and Emilio on the set of Wisdom, another film Emilio had written and was directing. I was in her trailer, and she was reading some version of a book about prophecies. Even then there was something spiritual about Demi, as if she knew she was destined for something great.
I received an invitation to Demi and Emilio’s wedding and then a card letting guests know it was postponed. Emilio was having a tough time as Demi started dating Bruce Willis, and to keep him distracted his friend Tom Cruise threw a 25th birthday party for Emilio at Ed Debevic’s in Beverly Hills. Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, and many others were there, including Susannah Hoffs of The Bangles, who was Emilio’s date. To keep the mood light, Tom had brought a blow-up doll dressed as Demi which was being passed around when Demi herself made a surprise entrance. She and Emilio went to a booth, and you could tell even though there was pain, there was a lot of affection between them.
I was there with a date, Natalie — who would later become my wife — and she accompanied me to Bruce and Demi’s star-studded wedding on a soundstage on the Fox lot with Little Richard performing the ceremony. We sat at Richard’s table and I still have the gold-plated rubber chicken that was the centerpiece.
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I ended up teaching screenwriting back in my hometown at the University of Pittsburgh. One day, after telling some Hollywood stories to my students, I went to my office to call Joel and thank him for giving me my start. Joel had gone on to direct Lost Boys, A Time to Kill, Falling Down, but his career had been derailed by one costume choice– putting nipples on George Clooney’s Bat suit. I tried to tell Joel how much his mentorship had meant to me, but he started dishing about the St. Elmo’s cast, bitter that some had not been more appreciative. But he singled out Demi as the one he was most proud of and still believed in.
When Joel passed away in 2020, the New York Times headline read: “Joel Schumacher, director of St. Elmo’s Fire, Is Dead at 80.” They couldn’t resist mentioning the bat nipples.
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Demi’s spiritual side was on display in Andrew McCarthy’s documentary Brats, as she seemed to have this glow about her– someone wise who had lived through a lot and come through the other side. That documentary led to St. Elmo’s Fire being one of the top ten most-streamed movies for a week in June 2024, and Sony announced a sequel was being developed with the original cast.
Pretty astounding considering Joel often joked when the film opened in June 1985, it didn’t get one positive review in the United States of America. Siskel and Ebert gave us two thumbs down on back-to-back shows. I remember being at Joel’s house after Siskel said these characters did not resemble anyone he went to college with. Joel shouted back at the TV: “Yeah, these guys got laid!”
One of the St. Elmo’s haters is a writer named Aude White, who wrote a piece for The Cut’s “I Think About This A Lot” column about how much she detested the characters in the movie. But she made an exception for Jules. She wrote about how Jules is effortlessly charming, effortlessly bold– while her life is actually falling apart around her. Watching Demi play that contradiction, Aude wrote that thanks to Demi Moore and “one crappy ‘80s movie, I can take comfort in the fact I’m not alone.” That’s the thing about Demi– on screen and off, she has never pretended the mess wasn’t there. She has just always found a way through it.
The woman who played Jules freezing herself to death in that empty apartment is the same woman walking out at the Oscars in a Gucci gown forty years later. She survived. She thrived. And somehow, watching her, we feel like we can too.
Watching her walk out at those Oscars, I could hear John Parr singing. “I can climb the highest mountain, cross the wildest sea. I can feel St. Elmo’s Fire burning in me.” I thought about Joel’s prediction on that Burbank soundstage and smiled. After all these years, Demi Moore’s star is still burning bright.
