Last night, as I was writing about a now-defunct place in Las Vegas called Club Bingo, it got me thinking about other types of clubs as well. This is the way my mind works sometimes, for better or for worse. I thought of the Mickey Mouse Club, and Sam’s Club, and even about club sandwiches.
But the Club that really stuck in my mind was The Breakfast Club, the John Hughes movie that captured the zeitgeist of being a teenager in the 80s about as well as anything ever did. I remembered how, in a fit of teenage stupidity, I swiped a promotional standup for the movie from a video store, and as a result I had Judd Nelson and the rest of them perched on the dresser in my bedroom. I also had a cardboard standup for Rocky IV, which I got from a movie theater at some point. So I had Sly Stallone and the Brat Pack looking out at my room every day, at least until I went away to college in 1986. It’s very strange, the things you can remember sometimes.
When I started to think about The Breakfast Club, for the strangest and most tangential of reasons, I went onto Imdb to see what I could learn about the movie. And there were some interesting things which I had never known before. Of course, the truth of unattributed things found on the internet has to always be taken with a very large grain of salt, but it’s interesting to consider them anyway.
For example, I did not know that John Cusack was cast in the role of Bender, but John Hughes decided to cast Judd Nelson in the role instead. If it happened that way, it was a good move on his part because Bender is what made that movie work: he was intense, and stand-offish, and generally just a jerk. The rest of the ones who had detention that day were all repulsed by him, as I suppose everyone in the theater was, too. And there’s no way, that I can see, John Cusack would have pulled that off. I love John Cusack’s work, but he just seems like the anti-Bender to me.
But the edge that Judd Nelson brought to Bender wasn’t all good. Apparently, from what Imdb reported, Nelson was contemptuous of Molly Ringwald off camera, and Hughes considered firing him as a result. Paul Gleason, who played Vernor, the hardass disciplinarian who provoked Bender as much as he could, convinced Hughes that Nelson was just doing it to remain in character. So Hughes relented, and Nelson finished the movie. But he also swore to never work with Nelson again and this–if Imdb is to be believed–prevented any Breakfast Club sequels from ever being made. It would have been interesting to see what became of the different characters at some point in the future, but they’ll just have to remain etched in one place. like when Bender raises his fist at the end of the movie. Finis Bender, I suppose.
The most curious factoid that I learned–in case it’s actually true–was about the song “(Don’t You) Forget About Me.” That song is as much a part of the movie as anything else, and I can’t hear the song on the radio without thinking about the movie. There’s a symbiotic link between the song and the movie, and every movie should have something like that.
The song sounds like it could have–and should have–been sung by Billy Idol, who was a big star back in 1985. He turned down the chance to record it, and even the band that did record it, Simple Minds, wasn’t very keen on it, either. And yet the song was recorded, and it became a hit, and life was probably never again the same for Simple Minds after that. It just goes to show that things work out, whether or not we actually want them to.
And now, 27 years after the fact, I can look back at my promotional cardboard standup, and the movie that it was promoting, and the song that was made for it, and think to myself “Chicks cannot hold they smoke. That’s what it is.” That’s just one of the things I learned from The Breakfast Club. Does that answer your question?
Blue Batting Helmet 
No film captures the high school experience for me like this one. Check out my review http://amandalovesmovies.com/2012/03/20/the-breakfast-club/
Thanks for reading. I appreciate your site, too. All the best to you.
There’s a lot of TV and movie roles where my wife and I have said “this show would be nothing if they had put someone else in that role.” Casting directors don’t get near enough credit. Then again, usually someone else has turned down the role and somebody else fell into the roll. Funny how that seems to work. Imagine some of those movies that you thought were going to be good, but didn’t just quite have it. I think some of those mediocre movies could have been better had the casting been better. It works both ways I guess.
And I can’t think of that song without thinking of the movie either.