Read This: Molly Ringwald publicly struggles with the many sides of her old friend John Hughes
32 years after their last collaboration—1986's Pretty In Pink, which Hughes wrote—Molly Ringwald and writer-director John Hughes are still firmly linked in the public mind. Nobody’s more aware of that than Ringwald herself, apparently; the actress, who currently appears on The CW’s Riverdale, published a new essay in The New Yorker today, attempting to square two of the conflicting sides of the man who helped kickstart her career: The thoughtful, empathetic man who brought authentic-sounding teen voices to mainstream movies, and the frequently puerile former National Lampoon writer who birthed characters like Sixteen Candles’ Geek and Long Duk Dong into the world.
Clear-eyed and well-researched, Ringwald’s essay digs back into Hughes’ early Lampoon writing, examining pieces with names like “My Penis,” “My Vagina,” and “Sexual Harassment And How To Do It!”She also recounts her own experiences with him, including times when she pushed back against his more sexualized instincts, as when she successfully protested a gratuitous nude scene featuring a female teacher in The Breakfast Club. “I’ve been called his muse,” she writes, “Which I believe I was, for a little while. But, more than that, I felt that he listened to me—though certainly not all the time. Coming out of the National Lampoon school of comedy, there was still a residue of crassness that clung, no matter how much I protested.”