No celebrating without a hall pass

Next month is the 20th Anniversary of The Breakfast Club.

Five things you might not know about the movie:

1. Before filming, Ally Sheedy (The Basket Case) and Molly Ringwald (The Princess) were to switch roles and Emilio Estevez (The Athlete) was to play the criminal.

2. John Cusack was one of the finalists for The Criminal (Judd Nelson) role, and Nicolas Cage read for it as well. Rick Moranis was originally cast for the role of Carl the janitor.

3. In the opening scene panning around the school, one of the shots shows Carl the janitor as man of the year, many years earlier.

4. When Bender (Nelson) is crawling through the rafters, he begins a joke about a woman walking into a bar. What's the punch line? There is none. Nelson ad-libbed.

5. The original cut of "The Breakfast Club" ran almost 2 1/2 hours. Universal Pictures cut nearly an hour off the film and destroyed the negatives - Hughes recently said he has the only complete copy in existence.

I want that complete copy! Name your price, Mr. Hughes.

I still love this movie. It's just dead-on the way we thought about ourselves and each other in high school. My brother and I used to be able to quote large swaths.

Comments

[Dan]

Odd coincidence. I just saw "The Breakfast Club" for the first time a couple weeks ago (with my 17-year-old son, who was watching it as part of his self-outlined cultural education). My excuse for not seeing "The Breakfast Club" till now is that I'm a of the previous generation -- I guess that would be the "American Graffiti" generation -- and was busy getting in all sorts of semi-adult trouble by the time it came out.

[Jo]

I LOVE that movie. Which one were you? I was Ally Sheedy in high school. "They IGNORE me!" *sob* And all my boyfriends were (or tried to be) Judd Nelson (and ended up being the loser instead...)

[Jo]

So wow, if it's the 20 year anniversary, it really did come out when I was in high school. A year before I graduated. Dang. I remember when it came out thinking, oh my god, this movie, it's about ME.

[Anthony]

It must show my mutant quotient that I identified with NONE of the teen ansgt movies of any generation. "American Grafitti" exists for me only as a prelude to "Star Wars" (or a more commercial postlude to "THX 1138"--and I ended up living very near Modesto CA barely a year after the film came out). "Breakfast Club" came as I was weathering my first year in Grad school so their problems were NOTHING compared to mine and at the time I was utterly reprelled by Judd Nelson and wished him a painful and prolonged death. "Heathers" to me is great black comedy and little else. When I was a teen the only movies that "spoke" to me were "2001," "Cabaret," and ""THX 1138" (and the James Bond film "Live and Let Die" because McCartney's theme song was so cool, and the film did have the lovely Paula Kelley in a small role and--even better--the velvet basso presence of Geoffrey Holder as the Baron Samedei who, as it turns out at the end, really IS the Baron Samadei [maybe the best Bond movie ending ever])!
I'd be interested knowing if anyone else shared/shares my mainstream alientation...

[pam]

I was part 'Brain', part 'Basketcase'.

[snowball]

I'm afraid I'm with Anthony. I'm a little too old for being taken with The Breakfast Club. I think it came out about the time I was due with my daughter. As a knocked up 21-year-old just graduating from college, it felt pretty far from where I was at.

Mystic Pizza, on the other hand...

[maya]

Holy cow. Don't shoot me when I say this, but I was in 2nd grade when this came out. Even so, I identified. They skipped my generation when it came to HS movies. Unless you count Dazed and Confused, which I DON'T.

I will say that I was more of an amalgam than any of those movie archetypes ever are. Part Brain, part Athlete (captain of the tennis team, and manager of the boys' team), and part Basketcase (growing up with a crazy mom will do that to anyone).

[pam]

Second grade?! Geez, Maya!

[Roxanne]

Okay. That's for making me feel extra super old.

[Anthony]

"Dazed and Confused" doesn't count as a teen angst/coming of age movie because (IMHO) Richard Linklater (the director) isn't concentrating on teen angst and instead, is concentrating on behavior in general. The film is about, literally, a "day in the life" of a small Texas town. Narrative interest in the movie is generated from Linklater's sly deflection of typical teen crises moments into moments of either comedy or quotidian existence. In the end, what emerges from the movie is a rather objective, humorously distanced look at a moment in time, rather than a subjective playing out of adolescent traumas. IMHO that is. But it IS a work of genius AND it has Parker Posey, so it's AOK in my book!

[Jo]

And a rawkin' soundtrack!

[Savvy]

I won't say how old I was when this movie came out-lest I offend!! I'll say that I was a part of the Dazed and Confused generation. While I loved the Breakfast Club; I could never relate. I went to an all girl highschool for one (so that might the reason). I have always wondered what the punch line was for Bender's joke!!!

[scorpy]

One of my all-time favorite teenage movies!

[Ms. Jane]

Not to split hairs Jo, but our 20th reunion was last year, so this movie came out the year after we graduated. I was the Basketcase too. So much ANGST!!!

[pam]

The movie came out after high school for me, too. But some characters are timeless.

[BB]

I was thirty going on 18 in emotional depth. I related a bit to every Male character. I had a letter in training, so most jocks accepted me, was the lead in most musicals and sang many solos with the High School choir, was part of the drama crowd and the stoner crowd. I was way to sneaky in HS to get a detention- from 70 to 74, Pot and almost very other drug was openly sold a lunch in the feild. The dealers actually paid off the yard duties and one vice Principal. It was hard to be too bad-real violence seemed to be the only way to get suspended.

[Anthony]

"Pot and almost very other drug was openly sold a lunch in the feild." --
And it looks like, from the extrmely strange grammatical shape of that sentence, that it still is, and certain people are still buying it in droves!
Dude, don't bogart that spell check....
And kids, lest we think we're dealing with some inner-city crack zone here, we're talking about a lily white haute-bourgeoise CA highschool, one that the lower-middleclass kids of my deprived highschool seriously envied for its accumulation of $$$!! At my school, you had to go a block or two off campus before you could get drugs, and they were never very good ones cause all the rich-kid schools (such as BBs stoner-paradise) got dibs on the primo goods....