"The mystery of Molly Ringwald, the 80s star who abandoned her career because of ‘the other Weinsteins’"

https://english.elpais.com/culture/2022-10-12/the-mystery-of-molly-ringwald-the-80s-star-who-abandoned-her-career-because-of-the-other-weinsteins.html

But for many, the greatest mystery of Molly Ringwald’s career was why she left Hollywood and the United States and went to live in France for almost a decade at the height of her career. She returned from time to time to work on occasional projects that went practically unnoticed.

The actress never quite fit the stereotype of the classic Hollywood star, but why did she refuse to continue filming with Hughes? And why did she turn down the leading roles she was offered in Pretty Woman and Ghost, which would have definitively established her as a superstar? It took nearly 20 years for the actress to explain what happened.

The answer came in two articles that appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. The first was published in 2017 and was titled “All the Other Harvey Weinsteins.” In it, Ringwald recounted how she was sexually harassed at various times throughout her career. “When I was thirteen,” she wrote, “a 50-year-old crew member told me that he would teach me to dance, and then proceeded to push against me with an erection. When I was 14, a married film director stuck his tongue in my mouth on set.”

She then explains how, at age 20 and after a series of hits, she was forced to wear a dog collar in an audition. Ringwald hardly remembers the moment: she assures that she experienced it as an out-of-body experience. Once the test was over, she sat in her car and started crying. She called her agent to tell him, and he laughed, telling her that she now had material for her memoir. “I fired him and moved to Paris soon after,” the actress wrote.

A year later, in 2018, the actress published another article in the same magazine titled, “What About ‘The Breakfast Club’?” The piece reflected on what it had really been like to work with John Hughes and how she now felt about those long-mythologized films.

The relationship between Ringwald and Hughes was very close, almost symbiotic, for several years. In the piece, the actress says that he wrote the script for 16 Candles in a weekend after seeing a photo of the then 15-year-old in her agent’s office. He took the photo home, pinned it to the wall and wrote the story inspired by her face. “The studio loved the script, perhaps because, in form at least, it had more in common with proven successes – [teen comedy] Porky’s et al. – than it did with The Breakfast Club,” she wrote.

That film made them both famous. From then on, he only wrote with her in mind. The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, released in 1985 and 1986 respectively, were huge hits, but in 1987 the actress turned down the role Hughes had created for her in Some Kind of Wonderful. She wanted to do different things. The director took it poorly. He cut off almost all contact from then on. He passed away in 2009 at just 59 years of age.

But although she acknowledges that her career would have been very different had she not crossed paths with Hughes, today she does not feel particularly proud of those films. Nor has she watched them with her children. Today, she wrote in The New Yorker, they “could also be considered racist, misogynistic, and, at times, homophobic.” She cites specifically how in The Breakfast Club, the male lead, played by Judd Nelson, “Bender sexually harasses Claire throughout the film. When he’s not sexualizing her, he takes out his rage on her with vicious contempt. … He never apologizes for any of it, but, nevertheless, he gets the girl in the end.”

In the essay, Ringwald reflects on how Hughes was able to write sensitive scenes that still move women today, but at the same time, he mocked many of their problems. That trait, according to her, appears in the texts that the author published in the 1970s for the satirical magazine National Lampoon. The actress recounts how she came to buy old issues of the magazine on eBay, to discover with horror texts by Hughes that made fun of sexual harassment, violence against women and eugenics.

In her article, Ringwald is aware of all the contradictions she raises, as when she explains how The Breakfast Club has brought consolation to people whose lives little resembled those of the film’s white, heterosexual protagonists.

“How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose?” she writes. “What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it? Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art – change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go.”

The words reveal a mature Molly Ringwald who has come a long way since those teen movies. At 54, it seems that she still has an interesting road ahead of her.