Teen classic ‘The Breakfast Club’ still resonates at 30

“The Breakfast Club,” that classic film about angsty teenagers struggling with pressures their clueless parents are oblivious to, has officially become an adult.

“There hadn’t been a movie like it before; I don’t know if you could get away with doing that movie today,” actress Ally Sheedy told Variety during a “repremiere” at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

Georgia boasts a unique connection to the movie, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a rollout in theaters and a new DVD/Blu-ray release. Andy Meyer, a film and TV professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design, served as the movie’s executive producer. He and co-producer Michelle Manning are the only two surviving members of the creative team behind “The Breakfast Club.”

“It’s such a relatable movie,” Meyer said during a recent interview at SCAD in Savannah. “It was one of the first movies which treated kids seriously, with respect. John made a career of ‘kids against parents.’ That’s a big theme in this movie. No one plays that instrument better than John Hughes.”

Hughes, also known for iconic projects such as “Pretty in Pink,” “Sixteen Candles,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and the “Home Alone” movies, died in 2009 following a heart attack. Executive producer Gil Friesen and producer Ned Tanen have passed away as well.

The movie — starring Molly Ringwald, Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall, Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson as the princess, oddball, brain, jock and rebel thrown together for a day of detention — will be screened in theaters across America on Thursday and on March 31.

For some fans, it’s coming out again with perfect timing.

Jennifer Saylors was a middle school student growing up outside Chicago (where the movie was filmed) when it was released the first time. College, sorority life, marriage and motherhood were in her future at the time.

Now the Acworth mom of two is preparing to move back to the Chicago area following the end of her marriage just as the teen classic is coming around again. She announced the move to her friends by posting a T-shirt printed with “Let’s See A John Hughes Movie” along with a message spelling out the details on her social media accounts.

“I think it will be nostalgic of course,” Saylors said of the re-release. A fashionable beauty never far from a tube of lip gloss, she would seem closest to Ringwald’s character, “Claire,” but identifies with Sheedy’s awkward character, “Allison,” as well.

“The difference was that she was confident enough to be a wreck for everyone to see,” Saylors said. “She didn’t try to hide her crazy, which is basically what the rest of us become exhausted from doing.”

Paula Haggard Bechtler, of Hiram, may take her 12-year-old daughter to the film. (They’ve already seen it together on the small screen.)

“It’s such a great film to teach us to see each other for who we really are, not just random labels,” Bechtler said. “I also think that while many of John Hughes’ ’80s movies were about relationships and snapshots of our culture at that time, the kids today are primarily caught up in futuristic dystopian films that don’t reflect us as much or point out anything significant about our culture. What does that say about us and the next generation?”

Meyer, who recently appeared at the SXSW re-premiere of “The Breakfast Club” with Sheedy and Ringwald, lectures all over the world and notes the movie’s international, indelible appeal.

“I could show this movie to anybody in any country,” he said. “It’s a universal theme.”

He cringed at the idea of a remake, noting “the kids would be sitting around texting and not talking to each other. It could be a fool’s errand to try.”

Three decades ago, Meyer was president of A&M Films, and he came across Hughes’ screenplay for “National Lampoon’s Vacation” (the modern reboot of which, coincidentally, recently filmed in Atlanta).

“I called my agent and said, ‘Who is this guy? This is really funny,’” Meyer recalled. “They said, ‘His name is John Hughes.’ I said, ‘I gotta meet this guy.’”

When the two met, Meyer asked Hughes if he had anything else cooking. Meyer read “The Breakfast Club” script and was sold immediately.

Then Universal called. Its offer to buy the film came with a $12 million budget, still relatively modest but rich enough to build the high school library set from scratch. Nearly the entire movie takes place in that one room, so designing it with filmmaking in mind was key.

“It was the perfect design,” Meyer said.

The production went smoothly, he said, “because everybody was going to one location and because everyone was the best in the business. There weren’t a lot of script changes. (Hughes) didn’t take notes.”

The actors, who would become known as part of Hollywood’s “Brat Pack,” worked together beautifully. Meyer’s favorite scene in the movie is when the characters let their guards down and tearfully discuss the stresses they’re dealing with. As moving as that scene is, it was hard to forecast how deeply it would resonate with audiences.

“This is the thing about making movies: You can go on set and have the best time and have everybody love each other and the movie doesn’t work at all, or you can go on set and it’s a disaster but it’s a huge hit,” Meyer said. “There’s no way when you’re in that (movie-set) bubble to know what’s going to happen.”

He doesn’t recall much being left on the cutting-room floor.

“John wrote a script and shot a script,” he said.

All these years later, Meyer appreciates the movie’s timeless appeal, even if nobody associated with the project could have predicted its incredible staying power.

“Watching John work and watching John write, watching the way he was able to write such original content” are memories he treasures. “He had a run like nobody’s had a run. That kind of genius you’re not around very often. It’ll never happen again in my lifetime.”