On Feb. 15, “The Breakfast Club” turns 30 years old. What’s most important about the film, in addition to the way it encapsulates adolescence in the ’80s (along with two other John Hughes films, “Sixteen Candles” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”), is its role in pioneering that “kids from all around the lunchroom” ensemble format. Of course, that made the cast especially important. HuffPost Entertainment spoke to casting director Jackie Burch along with costume designer Marilyn Vance and director of photography Tom Del Ruth about what went on behind the scenes when they worked with the five high schoolers from most iconic detention session of all time.
1. It got so hot on the upper level of the set that cast and crew would often fall asleep and pass out in the heat.
Since “The Breakfast Club” was shot on a closed set it required a lot of lighting. According to Del Ruth, that meant that the upstairs portion of the library (where most of the cast and crew would wait between scenes) was sometimes 95 or even 110 degrees. “They often dozed off in the heat. They’d start snoring,” Del Ruth said. “We had to have the assistant directors go up and 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.”
2. The title was originally going to be “The Lunch Bunch.”
By the time Vance came onboard, the scripted film was called “The Breakfast Club,” though that wasn’t always the case. “It was going to be called ‘The Lunch Bunch,'” she said. “But a friend of John’s from another school had a detention class called ‘The Breakfast Club,’ so he decided to go with that.” (Thank you, John’s friend.)
–
14. The scene in which the students share their detention stories is partly improvised, as were a number of lines throughout the film.
Hughes was very open to his cast’s input, famously including the David Bowie quote after Ally Sheedy mentioned it to him. When the cast would riff off the script and add lines, Hughes often incorporated the changes they made to his dialogue. “John was very accepting of suggestions from the actors,” Del Ruth said. “He wanted them to feel free and that gave them a lot of latitude. If there was a line or two or even a paragraph that lent itself to the character or enhanced the story, John was would simply rewrite on the spot.”
15. The same year Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson and Emilio Estevez played high school students in “The Breakfast Club” they played college age in “St. Elmo’s Fire.” And that’s where the brat pack started.
“The Breakfast Club” was really a star-making movie for Nelson, and Burch was set on him the moment she saw his audition. It was her casting decision that helped launch Nelson’s career and pushed him, Sheedy and Estevez to star in “St. Elmo’s Fire” later that year. “What happened was that Joel Schumacher never hired me, but he would always call me and ask for help. He started to take my cast from ‘Breakfast Club’ and put it in there,” Burch said. “I told him he should put Judd in there. He ended up taking Ally and Emilio as well, and that’s where the brat pack came from. Before then, it was never called the brat pack. It all came about after combining ‘The Breakfast Club’ with ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ people.”
