Julia Marchese is a filmmaker, actor, podcaster, cinephile and film programmer living in Hollywood, California. Her first film was the award-winning documentary Out of Print, about the importance of revival cinema and 35 mm exhibition to culture, and she is currently the co-host of the popular horror podcast Horror Movie Survival Guide. She recently crowdfunded on IndieGoGo for her forthcoming Dollar Baby short film I Know What You Need, based on Stephen King’s story of the same name from Night Shift. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @juliacmarchese.
Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, The Breakfast Club has long been my favorite film of all time, because for me it is the ultimate proof that all a movie needs to be brilliant is a good script, a good director and good actors.
John Hughes was in a fever pitch of genius during the mid ’80s and he knocked it out of the park with his raw, honest screenplay and poignant, sharp and warm directing in The Breakfast Club. The performances given by the actors in this movie are some of the finest they ever filmed – baring their souls with a truth they weren’t always able to achieve in other roles.
When there are characters I care about deeply relating to each other on a profound level on screen – everything else is superfluous. I joke that my favorite kind of film is “people talking in rooms.” Give me a My Dinner with Andre or Cube or What Happened Was… and I am absolutely on board. That love started with this film (and studying theatre as a youth!).
Even as a young kid watching The Breakfast Club in 1985 (and I remember seeing it in the theater, so I would have been six years old), I was absolutely transfixed by it, never restless or bored. Back then, I could already connect with these characters; even though I wouldn’t experience the intricacies of high school interactions for a decade, they felt universal. This film is one everyone relates to differently as they grow along with it (even if it’s relating now only to the bitter dean complaining about the entitled students).
The Breakfast Club is not a film made for small children, so there were several jokes and moments that went over my head that first viewing, and having them click into play during my repeated viewings as I grew up was a delightful way to track my growing maturity. For a long time watching it, I was so confused about Bender’s behavior towards Claire and then their unexpected kiss and romance at the end. They clearly hated each other – he was so mean to her! – so why were they suddenly together? Weren’t you supposed to treat people you liked nicely? Clearly, the nuances of bad boy bravado were lost on me in my youth.
A VHS copy of The Breakfast Club was an early purchase for me, and it gave me the ability to rewatch the film an obsessive amount of times. But the joy in repetition is noticing the sound cues and camera movements, the tiny costume choices, music selections and background signs that make up the texture of the universe. (Actually a multiverse! Several other Hughes characters also attend Shermer High!)
It was recognizing myself in all of the characters on different viewings, depending on my age and mood.
Since I am a film programmer as well as a filmmaker, showing movies I love to people and watching their reactions is one of my great joys in life. I showed The Breakfast Club to every friend in junior high, high school and college who hadn’t seen it (and also to many who had seen it). I knew every line, every glance, every gesture.
If you’re someone who watches movies repeatedly in the way I do, you’ll know the comfort of watching a film you love and being able to live inside that space for two hours. But serendipitously, I was given the impossibly delicious opportunity to live inside of the film for six whole months.
I moved to Los Angeles in 2001, and in 2002 I found an ad in Backstage West announcing that a stage version of The Breakfast Club was to be performed in Hollywood. So I frantically wrote a long and rambling letter to the producers about what the film meant to me, and how I would give anything to audition for Claire (my favorite character since I was child – Molly Ringwald was the princess I wanted to be when I grew up).
That same day, I sent the letter and my 8×10 headshot (when black-and-white headshots were still in vogue!) and, after a few agonizing days waiting, received a call to come in for an audition. I prepared my two contrasting monologues, as asked, and wore my favorite Dracula T-shirt, for luck.
But I never ended up doing my monologues.
At the audition, I was, of course, in a state of Extreme Julia Excitement, which is pretty intense. I reiterated how much I loved The Breakfast Club and that I had the whole thing memorized already. I talked about wanting to be able to do my take on Claire and how excited I was to see the film transition to the stage. And then I ended up talking to James, the director, and Matt, the assistant director, about horror movies for a very long time. I was surprised when they told me at the end of the conversation that I didn’t need to do my monologues. I thought it was either a very good or a very bad sign.
The next day, I received a call from James offering me the part – not of Claire, but Alison, Ally Sheedy’s character in the film. I was momentarily speechless. I had never considered playing Alison – she could not be more fundamentally different than Claire, the part I had submitted for. But I accepted, of course, squealing and jumping up and down. As I mentioned in my first piece for Talkhouse, I have always felt like an outsider, so I believed I could bring a lot to the role.
The venue for the play was the Berubians Next Stage Theatre, two small stages impossibly wedged into the upper floor of a strip mall on Sunset and La Brea, above a laundromat. It became a venue for AA meetings every night after the shows were done, so there would always be a huge crowd of people standing outside smoking cigarettes when we were done for the night. It wasn’t glamorous by any means, but I wound up doing a few plays there and the theatre has immense nostalgia for me. I was sorry when it closed. (The space is now a tattoo parlor.)
Glamorous or not, when I floated into that first rehearsal, I was over the moon!
This version of The Breakfast Club had a bleached blonde Eminem wannabe for Bender, a slightly punk rock Claire, a computer nerd Brian, and two different Andrews – the first one dropped out the second he got a paying gig (so L.A.!), leaving the assistant director to step into the role, which he did very gracefully and well.
The challenge with playing Alison was that she doesn’t speak until quite a way into the show. In the film, they can cut away to her being strange and charming, but how could I signal to the audience that I was a weirdo, but harmless, and get them to be on my side without speaking or distracting from the other characters? It was such a fun problem to work through and I solved it by using a piece of her character featured in the film – her big bag of junk (“You never know when you may have to jam”).
While the beginning of the play spun out, I silently took items out of my bag – a jar of peanut butter that I would eat a stupidly huge blob out of, a toy gun shaped like a dog that squeaked, springy eyeball glasses, just oddball things to engage an oddball of a girl who has clearly had to entertain herself for a very long time.
To fill the long pause made by me laboriously creating my Pixy Stix and Cap’n Crunch sandwich onstage, I belted out Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” in the most off-key voice possible. (Eating that sandwich every performance was definitely the lowlight of the play for me – if you’ve never had one, especially one where not all of the warm American cheese slice came off the bread entirely, it’s truly nauseating.)
To transform myself physically, I went goth and dyed my long hair dark and gave it two pink streaks in the front. I wore gobs of black makeup and layers of gloves, jewelry and clothing (including that very same Dracula shirt I wore to the audition!), which came off during my third act makeover to reveal a girl in a simple black dress, hair pulled back and face clean of makeup. I didn’t change and soften her look entirely at the end like the film does, just revealed who she had been hiding all along.
Rehearsing and performing the play, becoming close to the cast and crew, is such a fond memory. James (who I worked with again as Vampira in a stage version of Plan 9 From Outer Space) burned us CD copies of his brilliantly curated soundtrack to the show and I listened to it constantly. (I still have it and always think of the show every time I hear “Brain Stew” by Green Day and “Criminal” by Eminem.)
The stage version we performed was drawn from the shooting script, which differed slightly and was a little bit extended from the filmed version, rounding out the characters a bit, but every word and scene in the film was there. We did the dance number, we ran around the audience to go to Bender’s locker – it really translated to the stage impeccably.
One of my fondest acting memories is when I emerged from the theatre after our opening night performance to a packed audience, flowers in my arms, glowing, and was greeted by two goth strangers, smiling from ear to ear, who held out their arms to me and yelled, “Freak!” at me, with great affection in delighted recognition of a kindred spirit. Their warm hugs confirmed I had passed the test of outsider authenticity, and it was the cherry on the cake of the evening.
The play was so well attended and so well received that we were extended to run twice as long as originally booked. Because of that, I truly got to live inside the material for a good amount of time, and I luxuriated in it, dreading the day the show would end. But end, it did. For years to come, I remained friends in real life with some of the folks involved, and am still friends online with most of them. And clearly I have very affectionate memories of our time together. I was so fortunate to get the opportunity to fulfill my ultimate John Hughes fantasy in a real and creative way.
The Breakfast Club lived inside my heart beforehand, but I think being in the stage production really brought the characters home to me and made them solidify in a new way. I will always carry inside me a little of Bender’s rebelliousness, Claire’s dance moves, Andrew’s self-awareness, Brian’s need to succeed, Alison’s weirdo otherness.
If you’ve never seen The Breakfast Club, please treat yourself. If you have, then watch it again. No matter where you are in your life, I can guarantee the film will hit you differently than it did the last time you watched it – not because it has changed, but because you have.
Happy 40th anniversary, The Breakfast Club. Your heart will never die.
