Dear Gossips,

Let’s play Would You Rather:

Would you rather have been at Coachella this weekend or in Chicago on Saturday night at C2E2 (the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo) for the 40th anniversary reunion of The Breakfast Club?

Easy decision for me because outdoor festivals are not my thing (the bathroom situation is a dealbreaker) and I can only eat indoors. Also, I’m old. And The Breakfast Club is a defining film for many in my generation – not all, but many. It came out just as I was going into high school – and nothing was cooler, at the time, than those characters, making references to the movie, Molly Ringwald’s f-cking outfit in that movie, which I will never not love.

Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy

This was the first gathering of The Breakfast Club lead cast in public ever. Emilio Estevez was the holdout. As Molly said, it probably meant more to them than the audience:

“I feel really very emotional and moved to have us all together. We don’t have to use the cardboard cutout [for Emilio] anymore because he’s here. I feel really moved that we’re all together.”

Emilio generally keeps a pretty low profile – but the different this time was that it was happening in Chicago, where the film was shot. He became a filmmaker in his own right and when asked about whether not The Breakfast Club could get made today, Emilio said:

“Movies today are concept-driven, they’re not character-driven, and the beauty of John is that he focused on characters first. And when you think about trying to pitch this movie today — it’s about five kids sitting in a library all day in detention — the studio executives would march you right out the door and say where are the monsters? Where’s the car chases? Where are the big effects?”

He’s not wrong but it’s also not just the studio, it’s the audience itself. When The Breakfast Club came out, the people who went to see it were the characters’ contemporaries, or younger. And we followed the dialogue, the “non-action”, we didn’t need the car chases, we just needed what was happening in that library (which was actually a gym). Would that be enough for teenagers today? Teens aren’t going to the movies as much as they used to. Many of them say it’s because it’s too expensive. And for them to pay what it costs to go to a movie, in their minds, is a 90-minute film with mostly talking… worth it? I wish it was but I also understand if it isn’t.

And I guess one of the few bonuses to that is that they haven’t tried to remake it. Claire, Andrew, Brian, Allison, and Bender are still Molly, Emilio, Anthony, Ally, and Judd.

Yours in gossip,

Lainey

Anthony Hall Gossip

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