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In Hughes' second film, The Breakfast Club, the mood is edgier and more combative: you and you and you and you and me against the whole rotten adult world. Five high schoolers--a jock (Emilio Estevez), a rebel (Judd Nelson), a brain (Anthony Michael Hall), a beatnik (Ally Sheedy) and a princess (Molly)-- spend a Saturday in detention. All they have in common are secret sins, an ache for camaraderie and a festering resentment of parental and school domination. There is little music, not much action, just kids sitting around talking. Good talk, though. The brain, ragged by the rebel as "a neo-maxi zoom dweebie," explains that he faked the age on his I.D. "so I can vote." And before they bridge gaps of class and temperament, the rebel purrs the poetry of erotic menace in the virgin princess's ear: "Have you ever been felt up? Over the bra, under the blouse, shoes off, hopin' to God your parents don't walk in? . . . Over the panties, no bra, blouse unbuttoned, Calvins in a ball on the front seat, past 11 on a school night?"
Not since Noel Coward . . . well, has a comic dramatist written vernacular dialogue this smart this fast. Hughes has been known to bat out 74 script pages in a night; no first draft takes more than a week. Such informed, automatic writing demands that you live inside your subject, and for Hughes the bell is always ringing on the first day of class. "He has an incredible memory--visual, audio, emotional--of his own high school years," notes James Spader, who played the deliciously haughty preppie Steff in Pretty in Pink. "He's very much in touch with the adolescent part of himself," Sheedy says. It's a golden touch. Who wouldn't grab the chance to remake one's adolescence, in which the geek in one's closet now has the swagger of fearless charm, and a rock symphony swells in the parking lot on prom night? "I think he's still trying to be popular at school," says Jon Cryer, who played Duckie, the geeky dervish in Pretty in Pink. "And more power to him. I mean, he wound up marrying a cheerleader (Nancy, his wife of 16 years). And now he's got the Porsche."
But first he had to get the princess. Molly was in one of her door-slamming moods the day in 1983 that Hughes flew from his Chicago home with the Sixteen Candles script, which he had written for her and Michael Hall. Their first chat put her in better humor. She must have realized that in tastes and sensibilities, she and Hughes were about the same age: 15. "We each started to know what the other one was thinking," says Molly. "We would finish sentences for each other."
On the set as well, Hughes was both an overgrown kid, with spiky hair and high-top basketball shoes, and a big brother. He encouraged his bright young actors to improvise dialogue and make suggestions about the films' structures. Says Howard Deutch, who directed Hughes' screenplay of Pretty in Pink, "I've never seen a writer who is so willing to adapt his dialogue and script." (Thanks in part to urgings from his cast, a female-flesh scene was removed from The Breakfast Club.) Hughes took the youngsters to rock concerts, hosted cast dinners or simply made himself available to listen. But in this elite of young comers, it was Molly he coddled. "I figured we'd just make Sixteen Candles," she recalls, "but John said, 'It's going to be Hughes-Ringwald and Ringwald-Hughes in a whole string of movies!' "