Sixteen Candles ushered in a new golden age of teen cinema, films that would forever change the way youth movies were made, marketed, and culturally absorbed. “The era,” says producer Sean Daniel, who worked as a young executive on Sixteen Candles and later on The Breakfast Club, “had been launched.” Endearing performances by naturalistic young actors were key, but so much of Sixteen Candles’s narrative power could be attributed to the emotional connection John Hughes had to the material. “I couldn’t speak after Sixteen Candles was over,” Hughes told Molly Ringwald when she interviewed him for Seventeen magazine. “I returned to the abandoned house, and they were tearing down your room. And I was just horrified, because I wanted to stay there forever.”
That last shot from Sixteen Candles—the one featuring Samantha and Jake kissing on the dining table—told you everything you needed to know about John Hughes as a filmmaker, and about what he was capable of making audiences feel. In that shot, it was clear that Sixteen Candles was like no teen film before. For here was a story that was filled with farce, in the form of chiming gongs and puberty jokes, yet came to a close with startling earnestness and rich sentiment, free of all irony, as a deserving girl and a dreamy boy lean in to each other against the haunting chords of the Thompson Twins’s “If You Were Here.” Illuminated by the flickering candles on the birthday cake, Jake Ryan asks Samantha to make a wish. She responds, “It already came true.” For the countless adolescent filmgoers who had been hungering for a movie that captured the teen experience with just the right balance of realism and wonder, Sixteen Candles was the wish, and by the time the closing credits flashed on the screen and the lights went up in the theater, it had already come true.
chapter three
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
The Breakfast Club “Breaks the Rules, Bares Their Souls,” and Revolutionizes the Teen Film Genre
Molly Ringwald remembers how she felt upon first reading John Hughes’s script about five very different high-schoolers who spend a day together in detention: “I was enthralled by it.”
Since the 1950s, archetypes such as brains, beauties, and jocks have existed in nearly every teen film. But The Breakfast Club looked beneath the shallow functions these characters served in other movies, and saw them as real, fully formed people. In doing so, the film was revelatory, and unlike any teen movie that came before it—or has come since, as time would prove. It was darker, richer, and deeper than Hughes’s directorial debut. “Sixteen Candles, as much fun as it is,” says Ringwald, “has all that goofy, teen party stuff. John came from the National Lampoon, so he still had a little bit of that kind of style that was suggested in there, and that was never my favorite part. The Breakfast Club doesn’t really have that. It’s just kind of smarter.” There, in the pages of the Breakfast script, were true drama and sharp dialogue that dazzled like the best playwriting. There, in a teen movie, was an organic, breathing story arc propelled by characters who gradually revealed their complicated hearts to one another. “It was so different, and so special,” says Ringwald. “It was monumental.”
It was also the film that Hughes had originally believed would be his directorial debut. Because he didn’t know how to maneuver a camera that well, he had decided to write a movie that took place in a single room. And because he worried that seasoned actors would see right through his inexperience, he thought it made sense to work with young actors who wouldn’t judge him so harshly. And so, setting the film in a high-school detention made perfect sense. Hughes came up with the name for his script after Bobby Richter, the teenage son of his advertising colleague Bob Richter, told him that the “Breakfast Club” was the slang term used for morning detention at New Trier, Richter’s high school in Winnetka. The script’s detention takes place in Shermer High in the fictional ’burb of Shermer, Illinois, an homage to Hughes’s hometown of Northbrook, whose original name was Shermerville, and to the street his own high school was on, Shermer Road.
In Hughes’s script, over the course of the day in detention the five characters reveal themselves to have more in common than they imagined, thus exposing the injustices of the high-school social system. It’s the classic “ship of fools” premise—the idea that if you throw very different people together in a situation they can’t get out of, they’ll discover emotional commonalities. Before The Breakfast Club came along, we’d seen this premise countless times in films, in books, and on television, with characters trapped together in a stuck elevator, in a snowed-in diner on Christmas Eve, on a jury, in a stalled subway car, or sometimes, literally, on a ship. We’d just never seen it in high school detention, and in that setting, Hughes discovered narrative gold. Because there is something about teenagers—their passion, their still-malleable outlook on life—that makes them perhaps the most fascinating subjects the “ship of fools” premise has ever known.
With its witty language, dark subplots, power plays between the key players, and poignant glimpses into their pained inner worlds, The Breakfast Club “seemed less like another Fast Times at Ridgemont High than an underage Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” as writer Douglas Brode put it. Some Universal execs felt that The Breakfast Club took kids a little too seriously. They insisted that the film was too heavy, and that kids wouldn’t sit through it. What the execs had forgotten, Hughes told an interviewer, was “at that age, it often feels just as good to feel bad as it does to feel good.”
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Other teen films might have been able to distract and excite their audiences with special effects and car chases. In contrast, the entertainment value of The Breakfast Club, as in a play, relied in large measure on the acting prowess of its cast, and the ways in which they interacted dramatically. The success of this film would depend almost completely upon its casting.
The script circulated around young Hollywood. Luckily, there were plenty of actors interested in the movie. “Everybody wanted to be in it; people were dying for just an audition,” says Loree Rodkin, then a manager of actors, including Judd Nelson (who was also her boyfriend of many years). “It was a great actors’ piece. And Hughes came with good buzz.”
Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall were the first to be offered roles in the film. Although the parts they would be playing (the “princess” and the “brain,” respectively) were different from those they portrayed in Candles, both actors “were the obvious choices,” said producer Ned Tanen. Ringwald would be playing a very different kind of teenager from Candles’s Samantha: Claire Standish, the gorgeous, rich, popular redhead who’s been voted prom queen.
Claire finds herself in detention that Saturday because she skipped class to go shopping. No doubt Claire, decked out in Ralph Lauren clothes and diamond earrings, is the kind of girl who would snub Candles’s heroine Samantha Baker. At least, that’s the kind of girl she seems to be at the beginning of the Breakfast story, when she’s dropped off at detention in her daddy’s BMW—before she reveals the pain she feels from her parents’ impending divorce and the never-ending peer pressure thrust upon her by her friends.
Like his Candles character, Anthony Michael Hall would once again play an undersexed nerd in Breakfast Club, Brian Johnson. But this time around, the nerd had a lot of darkness to him: he faces tremendous familial pressure to succeed academically, and he gives the film’s most heartbreaking and haunting monologue. “If you are not touched by that character,” said Tanen, “you’ve been dead for three days.” Brian Johnson’s gentle appearance—the sweet, shy laugh; the glinting braces (which a dedicated Hall kept on for the role long after his orthodontist had given him the okay to have them removed); the awkward, skinny body dressed unflatteringly in inexpensive, too-short khaki pants and a plain green sweatshirt—belied a deeply pained heart. Brian is in detention because a gun, which he was planning to kill himself with, went off in his locker. Johnson was, to put it mildly, a complex character, and a much greater challenge to an actor than any role in Sixteen Candles. Hall had been known only for comedic parts up to that point
, and had never given a dramatic performance on film. But casting director Jackie Burch wasn’t concerned. “There was no question that he would be able to do this,” she says. “He is that big of a talent.”
The group’s prototypical jock, the character Andy Clark, was originally written as a football player. But Hollywood had seen a lot of high-school football players (including Tom Cruise’s athlete in the recent All the Right Moves). “I said, let’s make him a wrestler,” recalls Burch. Like Brian and Claire, Andy faces pressure—in his case, to maintain his status as a star athlete in order to get a college scholarship and please his domineering father. But Andy is no typical one-dimensional high-school movie jock: his bravado hides a guilt-racked conscience. He’s in detention because, after being egged on by his father to show the world how tough he can be, Andy physically attacked Larry Lester, a weaker student, in the locker room. In one of the script’s more unsettling moments, Andy relates how he “taped Larry Lester’s buns together,” and then, in the process of ripping the tape off, had also removed some of Lester’s skin. (In any other teen movie, such an infraction would have occurred on-screen.)
The heartless jock has been a Hollywood staple for decades, usually good for a cruel stunt just like the off-camera one Clark pulled. But Breakfast would, rather inventively, ask its audience to consider that the jock may be just as misunderstood as his prey. The combination of sporty machismo and self-loathing remorse makes Andy a layered, challenging character to portray. “A lot of actors read for it,” says Burch, “but once I thought of Emilio Estevez, it was pretty fast.”
Arguably, Estevez had the most impressive résumé of the young cast. He had appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 period drama The Outsiders, and had starred in the 1984 punk cult favorite Repo Man. Plus, Estevez was, as director Joel Schumacher puts it, “Hollywood royalty.” Estevez’s father, Martin Sheen, had starred in such groundbreaking films as Badlands, Gandhi, and Apocalypse Now, and his little brother, Charlie Sheen, was already starting to make a name for himself in films like 1984’s Red Dawn. Estevez, who kept his father’s real last name, was born May 12, 1962, in New York City, but grew up in Los Angeles, where as a teenager he wrote and directed plays and home movies with friends such as Sean Penn, Rob Lowe, and Nicolas Cage. As a kid, “Emilio was the serious type,” says actress Holly Robinson Peete, who grew up with him. (They both attended Malibu Park Junior High School and then Santa Monica High.) “I kept fighting for Emilio because he had been in The Outsiders,” says Breakfast producer Michelle Manning (who had earlier worked with Estevez on that film). Maybe at first “Emilio was not an obvious choice” for the role of Andy Clark, said Tanen, “but he became one,” and soon enough it was Estevez, sporting an intense stare, tightly wound energy, and a letterman jacket, who would bring Andy to life on-screen.
For the role of Allison Reynolds, the recluse of the group, filmmakers thought of Ally Sheedy, the young actress who’d costarred with Matthew Broderick in the hit 1983 Cold War computer thriller WarGames, and opposite Sean Penn in Bad Boys. She had originally auditioned in front of the casting team for a part in Sixteen Candles, where she made quite an impression. Sheedy, then a student studying drama at USC, recalls that “luckily,” the night before her Candles audition, “I had been building a set, and a board hit me between the eyes. So I had two black eyes when I went in. It changed the way I looked on the outside.” That dark, almost gothic image of her stayed with John Hughes, and when it came time to cast the role of the brooding, soulful, shadowy Allison in The Breakfast Club, something clicked in Hughes’s mind.
Alexandra Elizabeth Sheedy, born June 13, 1962, was, like Hall, raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “She is from a very intelligent family,” says Joel Schumacher, “and she grew up in a very intellectual world.” Sheedy’s mother is renowned literary agent Charlotte Sheedy. Ally’s mother’s circle of friends included the likes of Gloria Steinem, who gave Ally a copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves when she was beginning to go through puberty. By the age of twelve, Ally was a published author. Her children’s book, She Was Nice to Mice: The Other Side of Elizabeth I’s Character Never Before Revealed by Previous Historians, described Queen Elizabeth I through the eyes of a mouse who lived in her court and was privy to the queen’s secrets.
The role Sheedy was up for in Breakfast, the loner Allison, presented many challenges, even though Ally had already been acting for years. Hiding under heavy eye makeup, long bangs that partially cover her eyes, and layer upon layer of dark clothing, Allison is the freak of the group, the misunderstood weirdo. She doesn’t talk much for the first half of the story, rather, she’s an intent observer of the others. When she does finally speak up, she reveals that she keeps her purse packed as full as a suitcase, because she dreams of running away from her parents, who continually break her heart. “What do they do to you?” asks the jock Andy, after the conversational barriers have been broken down. “They ignore me,” Allison says quietly, steadfastly, tears brimming at the edges of her dark brown eyes. She’s ignored at school, too, when she’s not being ridiculed. So lonely is Allison that she spends the Saturday in detention, we later learn, because she didn’t have anything better to do. The character carries a world of pain around inside her, and her loneliness and self-reflection lend her a kind of knowingness. With her flowing clothes and heavily painted eyes, she looks like some sort of ancient oracle, and fittingly, she professes some of the film’s most profound messages.
After meeting with her to discuss the role of Allison in The Breakfast Club, says Sheedy, Hughes “thought about it for a while. Then he called me and told me to go to sleep that night and to wake up as Allison.” Says Sheedy—who related deeply to the character, not just in name but in spirit—“I felt like, I don’t have to wake up as Allison. I am Allison.”
Interestingly, at some earlier point it was Ringwald, not Sheedy, whom Universal had in mind for the role of Allison. “Before Ally was involved,” says Ringwald, “John had given me the script and originally the thought was, I was supposed to be looking at it for the role of Allison. And I did not want that part.” Ringwald felt that the role of the misunderstood Allison was too close to the Samantha Baker role she had just portrayed in Sixteen Candles. “To [then] go and play the part of somebody who was so clearly an outsider,” says Ringwald, “I didn’t really think that it was going to show my range. It wasn’t significantly different enough for me.” Ringwald wanted to tackle the role of the cool princess. “I really wanted to play the popular girl because it was so different from the way that I actually felt,” she explains. She told Hughes of her feelings, he talked it over with the studio, and “pretty soon,” says Ringwald, “it was decided that I could play that other part. It seems so unthinkable now that I would be playing the role of Allison.”
Others remember the Ringwald/Sheedy casting question differently: “All of a sudden I got a phone call from John that Molly wanted Ally Sheedy’s part,” says casting director Burch, “and I thought that was the worst idea I had ever heard. I said ‘John, don’t do it. She is not that girl, and Ally is not that [other girl]…It scared me,” says Burch, “because [Ringwald] did have a lot of power with John. But, thank God, it didn’t happen.” Remembers producer Michelle Manning, “Molly kept trying to persuade [Hughes], saying ‘I want to play [Allison],’ and he obviously won, and he said, ‘You’re going to be Claire.’” (When asked about the idea that Ringwald wanted to switch parts with Sheedy, Ringwald asserts, “That’s not true.”)
Regardless of how it all came to pass, Sheedy was particularly grateful that she and Ringwald ended up portraying the recluse and the popular girl, respectively. “I don’t know what I would’ve done with the princess part at that point in my life,” says Sheedy. “I would never have been able to do the job that Molly did. It wasn’t me, and I can’t even really imagine it.”
The part of the group’s rebel, John Bender, was the last to be cast, and as Burch remembers, it was also “the hardest.” Looking back, B
urch recalls, “I had seen everybody in L.A. I knew what the part had to be: the antithesis of all these other kids. And he had to be naturally a street kid, and that’s not so easy to find in L.A., and even in New York, I had trouble.” On the surface, Bender seems all sneer and swagger, the bad boy in leather, the kid who’s in detention for the umpteenth time that year, because he pulled the school’s fire alarm as a prank. If that’s all there was to Bender, it would’ve been a pretty easy role to cast. But what makes the character so deeply memorable, and what made it a hard role to fill, was Bender’s complexity. For underneath the bravado and the smart-ass comebacks was the real Bender: a scared, sad boy whose father beats him, whose mockery of happy family life reveals his deep desire for a loving home, who knows full well that the hand he’s been dealt is a lousy one, and yet who still dares to connect emotionally with the popular Claire Standish, who by superficial standards is out of his league, yet by standards of the heart, is his perfect match. The actor playing Bender had to possess a real edge, almost to the point of being frightening, while simultaneously being able to reveal deeply hidden layers of tenderness and longing.
Plenty of actors, including Nicolas Cage, were considered for the role of Bender, but one who got particularly close to it was John Cusack, who had a small role in Sixteen Candles. “John [Hughes] flew in John Cusack,” remembers Burch. “It was a big day of screen-testing. And at the time, no one knew Judd Nelson really, and Cusack was a bigger name.” Remembers Ringwald, “Cusack was originally supposed to play that character, and Joan Cusack was going to play Allison—that’s who the original cast was in Chicago.” But Burch strongly felt that John Cusack was “totally wrong” for the role of Bender, something “which I think he will never forgive me about. I was like, ‘We’ll pay for your plane ticket home,’ but John Cusack was like, ‘Grrr.’” Says Ringwald, “I think that was very upsetting for [him].” One after another, interesting young actors came in and tried out for the role of Bender. “I remember audition after audition,” says Manning. “And then, Judd was the last.”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 7
