John Hughes’ Classic ‘The Breakfast Club’ Still Brings Fans Together 40 Years Later

After 40 years, John Hughes’ 1985 The Breakfast Club still stands as the ultimate coming-of-age film. It tells the story of five teenagers from different cliques who find out they have a lot in common while serving Saturday detention under an authoritarian vice principal.

The students include the stereotypical high school groups — princess Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald), jock Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez), delinquent John Bender (Judd Nelson), brainy Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall) and basket case Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy), supervised by Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason) from his office across the hall.

The five young actors had such an impact that they were dubbed “The Brat Pack,” a club of its own that includes Demi Moore and Rob Lowe from the slew of 1980s teen films.

Hughes says he penned the script in just two days but encouraged his young stars to improvise in many scenes — in particular, the one where the five students sit on the library floor and reveal why they are in detention, which was totally ad-libbed by the actors. Hall improvised his reason for having a fake ID — “so I can vote” — and Nelson did the same at the end of the film when Bender raises his fist in defiance.

In another scene, Nelson ad-libs as his character, Bender, crawls through an air duct and tells a joke about a blonde, a poodle and a six-foot salami — but Bender falls through the ceiling before getting to the punchline … and the joke remains unfinished to this day.

The director even listened to Sheedy and Ringwald and removed a planned misogynistic Porky’s-style scene where the boys sneak off to peek on the school’s synchronized swim team and stumble upon a topless P.E. teacher.

Ironically, Hughes had problems getting the film greenlit because studio execs complained there were no bare breasts, no guys drinking beer and no party scene — all things they believed a teen movie needed at that time. It turned out they were wrong.

Nelson stayed in character off-camera — and was nearly fired by Hughes for bullying Ringwald. Gleason defended Nelson for trying to get into character. At one point in the film, Bender’s flinch when Vernon fakes a punch was real — Nelson thought Gleason was really going to hit him.

At age 16, Hall and Ringwald were the only actors who were within their characters’ age group — Estevez and Sheedy were 23 and Nelson was the “old man” at 25, all playing high-school kids.

Hall had a growth spurt during production. Nelson recalls being two inches taller than Hall during auditions and just a half-inch taller during rehearsals. By the time filming started, Hall was taller than Nelson.

Even the library was improvised. Hughes wanted to use the school’s library, but it was too small so the crew built one in the gymnasium.

Shooting scenes in that library required extensive lighting that caused temperatures to soar to 110 degrees, triggering heat exhaustion that made the actors fall asleep.

“They often dozed off in the heat,” recalls director of photography Thomas Del Ruth. “They’d start snoring. We had to have the assistant directors go wake them up in the middle of the shots. We had to hire two additional assistant directors to just work the second floor and keep the crew awake so they wouldn’t snore and ruin the sound takes.”

The iconic scene in which the students dance to “We Are Not Alone” in the library is not how the sequence was written. Originally, only Claire was supposed to dance, but Ringwald told Hughes she had insecurities about dancing and he revised the scene to have all the characters participate.

Rare in filmmaking, the movie was shot in sequence at the abandoned Maine North High School in Des Plaines, Ill. In 2015, district school superintendent Ken Wallace was sorting through old files and found a script dated Sept. 21, 1983, that included papers that Universal had agreed to rent the school for $48,000.

The Breakfast Club raked in a whopping $51.5 million against a mere $1 million budget. As one of Hughes’ most memorable movies, the film in 2016 was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”