Molly Ringwald Is the Reason Why ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ Is in ‘The Breakfast Club’
John Hughes’ exploration of the teenage caste system, The Breakfast Club, is a stone-cold classic. It’s packed from tip to tail with iconic characters and moments. Two of those seminal legacies belong to Molly Ringwald’s character and the unstoppable earworm that’s the movie’s de facto theme, Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me.” Now, Simple Minds are getting a documentary in their own right, and in an interview with Ringwald, she casually drops that without her, the song might never have existed at all.
In further universal truth that hindsight is 20/20, the process of hiring someone to write a song for what would be one of the most beloved movies of the 1980s if not all time wasn’t easy. Simple Minds weren’t the first band to be asked to write a song for the movie (though I’m sure now, they’re glad they were the last.) Requests and denials had already been exchanged between the Breakfast Club crew and musicians including Billy Idol, the Psychedelic Furs and Bryan Ferry.
With, at the very least, plans A through C exhausted, they continued searching. According to Ringwald, she might be the one responsible for getting Simple Minds added to the list. She says in the interview that she was already a fan of the band before the movie was made, and that “I think I recommended them to John Hughes. I like to take a little responsibility for that.”
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In retrospect, the move itself made a lot of sense. If that’s the case, credit’s due both to Ringwald and to Hughes for listening. After all, this was a movie about teenagers, and Ringwald herself was one of two cast members who were, in fact, teenagers. Instead of a think-tank of middle-aged executives trying to identify something that would resonate with teens, why not ask the ones that are showing up to set?
All in all, though we can’t know what song graces The Breakfast Club in other timelines, smart money wouldn’t bet on anything being more spot-on and successful in the circumstances than “Don’t You Forget About Me.” Thanks to a suggestion by Ringwald and an ear willing to hear it, instead of what would likely have been a flat, soulless, reverse-engineered attempt at a teenage anthem, we got something that it actually felt like the characters might be listening to.
