I was really trying to find a deeper human underneath what could have just been one color.” “I was a really strong feminist as a young person and I always tried to break down the barriers of the female stereotypes in interesting ways, and I’ve always been really conscious of that even when I was creating Lorraine McFly in Back to the Future. “Her life is not perfect and actually you realize everybody has problems,” she told Brightest Young Things. THOMPSON DIDN’T WANT AMANDA TO BE JUST ANOTHER “PRETTY GIRL.”Īt first Amanda seems like her sole purpose is to break Keith’s heart, but Thompson pushed for Amanda to be more than that. In a way, it was like getting on a bicycle after you fall down.” 5. “I was so afraid to even look the crew in the eyes. “I was so freaked out because Howard the Duck was such a brutal bloodbath,” said Thompson. Stoltz agreed to deliver the script to her house and she finally agreed to do it. Deutch asked Stoltz if he knew Thompson, which he did (they’d worked on Back to the Future together before Stoltz got fired). When Howard the Duck came out in 1986 and tanked at the box office, Thompson felt she needed to do damage control on her career. I was very jealous,” she said in You Couldn’t Ignore Me if You Tried. Lea Thompson was offered the part of Amanda Jones but turned it down because “I didn’t want to play second banana, and the Mary Stuart Masterson part was better.
LEA THOMPSON SAID “YES” TO THE MOVIE BECAUSE HOWARD THE DUCK BOMBED. “It seemed like we just kept making the same movie.” Deutch also offered a role to Michael J. I had just made, like, three of those movies in a row,” he said in You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried. “He wanted me to play the role of a character called Watts, which went to Mary Stuart Masterson, but I was ready to graduate from high school.” “I declined because I felt like the script wasn’t strong enough and was too derivative of the other films I’d already made with John,” Ringwald told The Atlantic. Hughes offered his frequent collaborator Molly Ringwald a role in Some Kind of Wonderful, but she rejected it. MOLLY RINGWALD AND ANDREW MCCARTHY TURNED DOWN ROLES. He wrote the first half of the movie in, like, eight hours, and then finished it a couple days later.” 3.
Tell me what you think?’ And it was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I said, ‘What did you do?! What is this?’ and he said, ‘Oh, I didn’t do that. “We needed five pages, and it was 50 pages. “He would stay up all night, music blasting, and at like 5:30 or 6 a.m., he’d hand me what was supposed to be a rewrite on Some Kind of Wonderful,” Deutch told Vulture. HUGHES WROTE FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF WHEN HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE REWRITING SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL.ĭeutch and Hughes would work on the Some Kind of Wonderful script late at night, and Deutch would fall asleep on the couch in their office while Hughes typed up rewrites of the script. So he’s struggling with it, which, of course, looks even worse.” 2. He tries to pull his hand out of his shorts, but his digital watch gets stuck on the inside seam of his shorts. “There was the first draft that was sort of like a broader sex comedy,” Mary Stuart Masterson told Entertainment Weekly, explaining that “ my character was named Keith and she wanted to be male.” In Susannah Gora’s book, You Couldn’t Ignore Me if You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation, Jon Cryer-who auditioned for the movie-remembered a subversive scene where Keith’s (then named Garth) watch gets stuck in his gym shorts in front of Amanda. THE SCRIPT WAS ORIGINALLY CONCEIVED AS A SEX COMEDY. Here are 12 wonderful facts about the 1987 movie. But Some Kind of Wonderful remains a touchstone in Hughes’ oeuvre and in the pantheon of adored teen movies.
Later on, he realizes he’s actually in love with Watts (Masterson), his tomboy percussionist best friend.Īfter writing and producing Some Kind of Wonderful, Hughes left the teen world behind and moved on to more adult fare with Planes, Trains and Automobiles and She’s Having a Baby. But non-Brat Packers Eric Stoltz, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Lea Thompson told a convincing story about a high school misfit named Keith Nelson (Stoltz) who manages to snag a date with Amanda Jones (Thompson), the most popular girl in school. Some Kind of Wonderful, which re-teamed Pretty in Pink director Howard Deutch with John Hughes, wasn’t a hit at the box office (it grossed just over $18.5 million), and it’s often described as a gender reversal of Pretty in Pink.