The Web (even the AP wire) is abuzz with the news that Molly Ringwald wants to make a sequel to the 1984 movie Sixteen Candles. She’s ready, she thinks she’s found the ideal script, isn’t it a wonderful idea, blah blah blah. And the crowd goes wild.
So I thought I would republish an entry that I wrote on my 32nd birthday. (Bear in mind that Molly Ringwald and I are around the same age.) I want to point out that I thought of this idea years before the rest of y’all, and this is the proof: from Nov. 2, 2000. Molly, feel free to call.
“So what have you got for me today?”
“Oh, you’re going to love this. You absolutely are. It’s a sequel/reunion movie, and it has marvelous cross-audience potential. And we have commitments from the principal actors involved in the original.”
“Hit me.”
“We’re calling it Sixteen Candles … Times Two. We meet the main character from the original movie, Samantha—”
“Molly Ringwald.”
“Yes, Molly Ringwald, who loves the idea, and in this movie, it’s her thirty-second birthday, and she’s back with her family, only this time she’s so busy that she forgets her birthday herself.”
“Mmm-hmmm…”
“It’s got retro appeal, it should draw in the Ally McBeal crowd, plus, the original movie is making a comeback with teenagers now, so lots of potential there. And—well, let me tell the story.
“Sam is returning home to her family. She’s nearly 32 years old. And, you know, nothing very special has been happening to her. She has an ordinary job—we’re thinking something with computers—she’s still never married, she doesn’t have any kids. She’s cute, but a little boring. Maybe we’ll give her glasses, but she loses them by the end of the movie.
“So her grandfather has died, which is sad and touching but not too sad, so we can still be funny when we want to be, and the whole family is back in town for the funeral. Her little brother is all grown up, he has a wife and kids, but he’s still pretty immature. And her older sister—she’s pregnant, and she and her husband have this scheme cooked up where they’re making a lot of money by broadcasting the birth live on the Web.
“And this is where we get Anthony Michael Hall, the geek character, because he’s a big Web entrepreneur now. He’s got all these porn sites that are making him a bundle, plus he’s running this real-life drama site where they’re going to show Sam’s sister having the baby. He’s following the sister around the whole time with all this equipment.
“So Sam’s caught up in the funeral preparations, and people deciding what to do about the grandmother, and she keeps running into all these people she knows, like Anthony Michael Hall—I don’t think his character actually had a name in the original movie besides The Geek—and what with one thing and another—”
“She misses her own birthday.”
“Right! Exactly.”
“She doesn’t fall in love with the geek guy, does she?”
“With Anthony Michael Hall? No. And that’s the best part of this whole movie. Because we bring in another one of the geek guys. You remember those two brothers, the really super geeky ones, from the original movie? Okay, do you know who was playing one of them? John Cusack.”
“Ahhh.”
“And we have a commitment from John Cusack, he’s willing to make time for this, very reasonable, no problems. Because his character—Bryce—he and his brother are these very successful software engineers now, and maybe his brother’s geekier than ever, but his character’s, you know—”
“He’s normal.”
“A little shy, but normal, yes. And he’s hanging out with Anthony Michael Hall, and they see Molly Ringwald again, and she can’t believe it. And she’s attracted to him, and so on, and they get together at the end of the movie.”
“For her birthday.”
“Yes, but there’s a big party before that, because her parents surprise her.”
“After a funeral?”
“It’s okay, it’s not the same day, it works. They all surprise her the day after her birthday, because that’s more surprising, right?”
“Hmmm.”
“And Anthony Michael Hall takes her picture, and he sticks the head onto another body, you know, some amazing naked chick, and he sends it out over the Web and—this is just like the underwear scene in the first movie—only all the geeks are looking on their computer screens from all over the country, and all at once they all say ‘Ohhhhhh’ just like in the original movie.”
“Nice touch.”
“But at the end of the movie he takes the picture down and he mellows out a little and realizes that he’s still the same geek he always was, and he changes for the better. In fact, we’re thinking we might pair him up with Joan Cusack, she was in the first movie, with the headgear, you remember?”
“Mm-hmm. But why 32? What’s so special about being 32?”
“Well, first of all, there’s the gimmick aspect, obviously—sixteen times two, and all that. But it’s a little different than the usual turning-30 movie. She’s already been 30, and nothing happened, just like it is in real life. She’s been stuck in a groove for years and years. She sits on her computer all day at work and she goes home and maybe she has a date or she goes to the gym or plays with her pet cat and that’s about it. And she’s finally starting to realize all this, because she’s not just turning 30, she’s going into her mid-thirties, and that’s even scarier.”
“I notice you have a lot of computer stuff running through this.”
“Yes, but that’s the way it is now with a lot of people that age. We’re thinking we might work it into the love story in a small way—John Cusack’s emailing her stuff, or that’s the only way they’re connecting because she’s running around crazy, that kind of thing. But it’s not really crucial. And then at the end everyone’s watching her sister give birth, either in person or on the Web… except for Sam. She’s out somewhere quiet with John Cusack, having a romantic birthday dinner, and that’s the end.”
“They’re not part of the hype.”
“No, they’re in their own world. She realizes where she wants to be.”
“I don’t know. I don’t see the audience here. There aren’t any younger characters, for one thing. And it’s not a landmark age. I mean, yeah, sixteen times two, that’s cute, but who cares? Thirty, yeah, people do wild and crazy things. Forty, maybe, with the right actors. But 32, that’s a big snooze to me. And for that character to still be alone, that’s kind of depressing.”
“Well, she’s not a hermit. She has dates. She has a life. She’s not married, that’s all. We could give her an obnoxious evil boyfriend if that would help, and then she could leave him for John Cusack.”
“Maybe. But it’s not a movie with an audience. Now, you make her a little older, she can have a daughter who’s 16, we can get one of those actresses from WB, she can be the star. The character’s almost old enough now to have a 16-year-old daughter.”
The hell she is.
[One final note from me in 2005: Can you tell the above entry was written before the US economy went down the toilet? It’s full of wealthy, successful Web entrepreneurs and software engineers. Heh. Also, my sister had her baby about three weeks after I wrote this, although the delivery was not Webcast.]