Sixteen Candles
John Hughes sets the stage for movie teens to be taken seriously
The late writer/ director/ producer John Hughes was born February 18, 1950 in Lansing, Michigan. He’d be celebrating his 75th birthday this month. Video Days kicks off its inaugural month with a retrospective of ten of the filmmaker’s pictures.
SIXTEEN CANDLES (1984) swings between being a good movie and a pretty bad one. The good movie is the sensitive story of a sixteen-year-old girl from the Chicago suburbs whose parents forget her birthday. Her schoolgirl crush seems hesitant to approach her, while a terminal geek won’t leave her alone. The casting of the teenage roles is transcendent. There are big laughs. The pretty bad movie is a grotesque farce, with offensive representations and moments of awful taste that have aged horribly. In other words, it’s a directorial debut, one of the most memorable of its era.
John Hughes was an advertising copywriter from Chicago, married with children in his mid-twenties. Instead of playing golf in his free time, he wrote humor pieces. A short story by Hughes titled Vacation ‘58, the first-person account of a family summer vacation gone awry, was published by National Lampoon magazine in 1979. With National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) a blockbuster for Universal Pictures, Hughes and the rest of the Lampoon staff met the studio’s then-president Ned Tanen, while a producer named Lauren Shuler who’d read Hughes’ work personally encouraged him to keep writing. This led to Hughes completing a script titled Mr. Mom on spec in 1981, which Shuler would produce with Michael Keaton in the title role. Vacation ‘58 was optioned by Warner Bros. and Hughes was commissioned to write the screenplay for what became National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983). When the studio landed Chevy Chase to play the patriarch, Hughes was instructed to shift focus away from the boy in his short story and toward the dad.
By the time the producers of Mr. Mom (1983) cast Teri Garr opposite Keaton as the female lead, they’d also tasked Hughes with retooling his script to give her character more screen time. Hughes could see that writers didn’t possess much in the way of creative control in Hollywood, if any. He decided he wanted to direct. Hughes wrote a script about a handful of teenagers spending Saturday afternoon in detention that he projected he could handle as a first-time director: seven characters and one location. After reading his script for Vacation, A&M Films agreed to give Hughes a shot at directing a $1 million production of The Breakfast Club. Leafing through headshots of actors his agency ICM had provided, Hughes came across an 8x10 of Molly Ringwald. Able to start and finish a script in a handful of days, Hughes took a weekend to write one for the person he imagined Ringwald to be, keeping her headshot on his desk. He titled it Sixteen Candles. With Hughes insisting on directing, Warner Bros. had zero interest.
Citing burnout, Ned Tanen had resigned from Universal in December 1982. He launched his own company, Channel Productions, and hired an executive assistant named Michelle Manning. Asking her if she knew of any good material, Manning knew her boss had taken risks on first-time or unproven directors of youth-oriented pictures: George Lucas with American Graffiti (1973), John Landis on Animal House, Amy Heckerling with Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Manning recalled hearing about John Hughes and a script that Warner Bros. didn’t trust him to direct. Tanen asked ICM for a copy of Sixteen Candles and shortly thereafter, was in business with Hughes. The screenwriter had one problem, the low budget drama he owed A&M Films. Tanen wanted to produce both, but thought The Breakfast Club with its stage play characteristics presented the risk of developing as a series of monologues. Hughes agreed, feeling a broad comedy along the lines of Vacation or Mr. Mom would be more palatable to audiences and reduce the risk of him becoming a first time director/ last time director. Tanen (executive producer) and Hughes (writer/ director) decided to make Sixteen Candles (1984) first.
Cast as Samantha Baker, Molly Ringwald was joined by Anthony Michael Hall (from Vacation) as the Geek, model Michael Schoeffling as the crush, Havilland Morris as the crush’s perfect girlfriend, John Cusack and Joan Cusack. Filming commenced in July 1983 in the Chicago area. Classroom scenes were shot at New Trier High School in Winnetka, while the dance was filmed in the gymnasium of Niles East High School in Skokie. Production went so well that Hughes not only penciled in Ringwald and Hall for roles in The Breakfast Club (1985)–as the Basket Case and the Geek–but in the fall of 1983, dashed off a script for them titled Pretty In Pink. Opening in 1,240 theaters in the U.S. the first weekend of May 1984, Sixteen Candles received plenty of derisive newspaper reviews, but landed endorsements from Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on their syndicated TV program Sneak Previews. They drew a contrast between Sixteen Candles and Porky’s (1981) which had launched what Ebert referred to as the Horny Teenager Movie. While Sixteen Candles would gross a third of what Vacation and Mr. Mom managed, its director and cast hadn’t cost anything. Universal offered Hughes a three-year deal, The Breakfast Club and another script Hughes had popped out, Weird Science (1985), falling into that agreement.
One of the enduring strengths of Sixteen Candles is the casting of its lead roles. Ringwald and Hall were fifteen years old for the duration of filming, teenage actors playing teenagers super rare in movies. Ringwald exhibits a star quality that combines beauty, passion and fashion forwardness, while Hall exudes confidence in the face of total ineptitude. Never before in a youth movie had a hapless misfit succeeded in sharing this much dialogue with the princess who’s clearly out of his league. It’s a credit to Hughes that his script gives both characters goals that are easily relatable. The joy is watching Ringwald and Hall’s characters use their charisma to work toward those. Had Hughes known how good Ringwald and Hall would be, he might’ve written a tighter script pairing Sam and the Geek on what she thinks is the worst day of her life, granting them both more screen time. Instead, Hughes overloads the movie with farce involving adults, particularly Sam’s grandparents (Edward Andrews, Billie Bird, Max Showalter, Carole Cook) and a dinner between her parents (Paul Dooley and Carlin Glynn) and their new in-laws from hell. These not only belong in another movie, but worse, they aren’t funny.
Classroom moments and Joan Cusack’s nearly-silent performance as a gangly teen wearing a neck brace are laugh-out-loud funny. Hughes trained his ear for New Wave music on this picture and while the soundtrack is weirdly eclectic, Kajagoogoo, Oingo Boingo, The Specials, and Billy Idol are featured, with The Stray Cats covering “Sixteen Candles.” The film came under fire immediately from Asian American groups for its depiction of exchange student “Long Duk Dong,” which actor Gedde Watanabe defended for being the hardest-partying character in the movie as opposed to a stereotype. Watanabe makes a solid point, but what was ignored at the time is Hughes’ loose attitude toward date rape, implying that catatonic women being taken advantage of is funny. The first time this occurs, it could be considered bad taste, but the second time establishes a pattern that even without the clownish adult characters, make the movie difficult to enjoy all the way through. Hughes would mature as both a writer and director, the iconic final shot of Ringwald and Schoeffling setting the stage for better work to come.
Video rental category: Romantic Comedy
Special interest: School Days
Great review Joe! I hadn't realized how quickly Hughes wrote all those scripts, or how much of his own unique vision was responsible for getting these actors started in such roles. Amazing how much influence one person can have on the field, or at least, could have back then.