A Victory Lap with Producer and Raconteur Andy Meyer

Tell me you’re Gen X without telling me you’re Gen X.

I’ll go first: You wore a house key around your neck on a shoelace in third grade because both your parents worked and you had to let yourself in after school. Bonus points if you had to start dinner.

You claimed you were having a sleepover at your friend’s house then rode untethered in the back of a Datsun pick-up truck to a keg party at the river bottom (or creepy warehouse, vacant lot, or abandoned mental institution).

The phrases I want my two dollars! and Could you describe the ruckus, sir? immediately send you into a nostalgic swoon of giggles—followed by a snort of jaded disbelief that the 1980s are now considered “the good old days.”

The films that spawned those quotes—1985’s Better Off Dead and The Breakfast Club, respectively—have become cultural classics, regularly hitting top streaming lists and “all-time-favorite” lists.

Of course, we saw them in movie theaters with gum-encrusted floors after being dropped off in some other mom’s station wagon with a five dollar bill that covered our ticket and snacks, plus a dime for the payphone when it was time to be picked up.

We had no idea we were witnessing the birth of a moviemaking era that defined a generation; we were just glad to see characters that felt just as ignored, insecure, and horny as we were.

What if I told you the mastermind behind this pinpoint in the zeitgeist walks among us on Savannah’s cobblestones?

No, not seminal director John Hughes, who sadly passed away in 2009 from a heart attack before he could deliver a hilarious, heart-piercing send-up of GenX adulthood. (50-Something Candles? Pretty On Prozac? Ferris Bueller’s Colonoscopy?)

I’m talking about the guy who hired him.

In the early 80s, producer Andy Meyer read an article written by Hughes in National Lampoon magazine that tickled his funny bone. Brand new to the film business and looking to prove himself, he sought out the Chicago writer to see if he might have any movie scripts lying around.

Turns out Hughes had a whole cadre ready to go, but the one that stood out to Andy was a quirky story about five teenagers in detention. Hughes insisted on directing, and the new executive got the whole deal approved for a million-dollar budget—skimpy even back then. And that's the origin story of one of the most iconic and profitable films of the decade.

“We had no idea. There were no algorithms, no focus groups,” recalls Andy over a recent rooftop coffee at Bar Julian, one of his favorite local haunts.

“It was a little movie with unknown actors that would’ve gone straight to Netflix today.”

Now 75, this white-haired gent with the mischievous grin is far more Boomer than Gen X, but back then he had a gut feeling that we latch-key kids could handle sardonic humor and dark themes. I guess the fact that we found a certain humor in suicidal ideation speaks volumes.

Andy’s knack for trusting his audience served his career well, and he went on to produce the award-winning Birdy starring Matthew Modine and a nascently-psycho Nicolas Cage, the renegade LGBT classic Fried Green Tomatoes, and Bring On The Night, the 1985 rockumentary featuring an unforgettable scene of Sting’s wife Trudie Styler giving birth.

Andy will be the first to tell you he had no idea what he was doing—not that anyone else did, either.

“Nobody knows anything in Hollywood,” he shrugs, echoing his mentor William Goldman, the screenwriter behind multigenerational must-sees Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride.

“Even today, everyone is just guessing what will be a hit.”

Andy at A&M

Steadfast in his claims of ordinariness, Andy credits his career to a childhood competitive streak and a Zelig-like aptitude for being at the right place at the right time with the right people.

It all started in college, when the starving student balked at a request to contribute to the school scholarship fund. Instead he proposed a fundraising concert with one of his favorite New York bands, The Blues Project.

“In those days, the manager’s name was right on the album, so I just called him right up,” he says with a chuckle.

Such chutzpah drove him to pick up the phone again and again, billing more shows with huge names in the Bucknell University gym, including a blistering 1971 double set by the Grateful Dead, pristinely recorded for your listening pleasure.

After graduation, he sped across the country as fast as his VW bus would take him, scoring a job with A&M Records that cartwheeled him into movies after the company opened its film division. When Los Angeles proved to be too much, he moved to the Pacific Northwest to raise his family, commuting for projects until 2003, when PR superflack and Savannah son Bobby Zarem invited him to the newly-conceived Savannah Film Festival. Andy’s been teaching at SCAD and quietly living on the islands with his second wife, Gwin, ever since.

He recounts his accidental career arc and more in his new memoir, Walking in the Fast Lane, which is full of famous names and eccentric tales (he once served sitcom king Norman Lear homemade tuna salad for lunch.) But don’t expect a tell-all of the salacious, drug-fueled parties of the times.

“Yes, I was there, but that part of my life isn’t that interesting to me,” he says coyly, though he admits to co-writing an as-yet-to-be-made TV pilot called Vinyl that contains “all the drugs and debauchery you could ever want.”

Rather than exploit those years for cheap name drops, Walking in the Fast Lane focuses on Andy’s sabbatical around the world (paid for by A&M) and lessons learned working in show business—which often do come with impressive name drops. (Pro tip: When an ex-Beatle asks you to hang out in his living room, you should probably cancel your date.)

The book ties together the three main acts of his life—the college concerts, Hollywood movie career, and Southern academic harbor—from a perspective of someone who still can’t really believe it all happened to him.

Andy calls it “his victory lap.”

It wasn’t all triumphs—he passed on Madonna and Billy Joel before they caught fire, and then there’s the time he stood up George Harrison—but for him, the wins have been others’ careers he’s launched and the students he’s mentored.

“At my age, to look back on my life and feel like I did something good, that’s what matters,” he says thoughtfully, staring out the window towards the river.

“As much as the movies themselves, I’m proud of the people I’ve been able to help.”

He’s invited us all to walk that victory lap with him, starting with last year’s Better Off Dead cast and crew reunion at Trustees Theater, and has a slew of Breakfast Club events planned for 2025.

Believe it or not, we’re coming up on the 40th anniversary of those films—which means, my dear fellow Gen Xrs, that we survived our awkward adolescence and ended up tougher from the neglect and neuroses than the helicopter-parented ones who came after (hopefully none of you are the last American virgin.)

Though there does seem to be a lasting sense of anguish among us—see Andrew McCarthy’s introspective documentary BRATS—as if we never expected to make it quite this far. Maybe because we never wanted to fulfill the movie prophecy that “when you grow up, your heart dies.”

With apologies to long gone Boomer poet Allen Ginsberg, I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed not by “madness or starved hysteria” but by cynicism and apathy, the rest of us dazed and suspicious at how the world went so quickly from detention to school shootings, from not knowing where your kids were to tracking them on phones, from Atari to AI.

As much as we revel in the black humor of those blessedly incorrect and inappropriate 80s, perhaps the most important takeaway is Ferris Bueller’s admonition about life moving pretty fast and stopping to look around once in a while so we don’t miss it.

Talking with the man who helped define our youth made me do just that. We GenXrs have made it to our third act, and we’re just at the beginning.

I don’t think it’s too soon to take our own victory laps.

Find Andy Meyer’s Walking in the Fast Lane here.

We’ve been up and down this highway, haven’t seen a goddamn thing ~ JLL