Molly Ringwald Still Struggles With Being John Hughes’ Teenage Muse
Before John Hughes ever met young Molly Ringwald, he wrote the screenplay for Sixteen Candles while staring at her headshot. Flattering? Yes. Creepy? Also yes.
The two shared an agent, and Hughes chose her picture to inspire his new script. “Over the Fourth of July weekend, he put that up on his bulletin board above his computer station,” Ringwald told Monica Lewinsky on a recent episode of her Reclaiming podcast. “And he wrote this movie. When it came time to cast it, they said, ‘Who do you want?’ He said, ‘The girl that I wrote this about.’ And so we met.”
How did the teenager feel about being a grown man’s muse? “He told me that story, but when you’re that age, I had nothing really to compare it to,” Ringwald said. “I mean, I’d done more movies actually than John had at that point. But I was still only 15 years old. I didn’t have a lot of life experience.”
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At the time, Ringwald explained, being Hughes’ muse didn’t seem that strange. “Now it does.”
Lewinsky asked her to clarify: Strange-complimentary or strange-weird-creepy?
“It always felt incredibly complimentary,” replied Ringwald. “But yeah, looking back on it, there was something a little peculiar.”
Lewinsky was on the side of strange-weird-creepy. “You think about the things that are in Sixteen Candles, and when you look at it as an adult through the prism of someone staring at your photo…”
Especially when you consider some of the script’s content. Ringwald penned an essay for The New Yorker in 2018 looking back on her Hughes comedies with some discomfort. “In Sixteen Candles, a character alternately called the Geek and Farmer Ted makes a bet with friends that he can score with my character, Samantha; by way of proof, he says, he will secure her underwear,” she wrote. “Later in the film, after Samantha agrees to help the Geek by loaning her underwear to him, she has a heartwarming scene with her father. It originally ended with the father asking, ‘Sam, what the hell happened to your underpants?’ My mom objected. ‘Why would a father know what happened to his daughter’s underwear?’ she asked. John squirmed uncomfortably. He didn’t mean it that way, he said — it was just a joke, a punch line. ‘But it’s not funny,’ my mother said. ‘It’s creepy.’”
There’s that word again. It gets worse in Sixteen Candles when Sam’s crush, Jake, trades his drunk girlfriend to the Geek (presumably for zonked-out sex) in exchange for Samantha’s underwear. Yeesh.
“It’s definitely complex,” Ringwald conceded to Lewinsky. “It’s something that I turn over in my head a lot and try to figure out how that all affected me. I feel like I’m still processing all of that, and I probably will until the day I die.”
