Sixteen Candles

John Hughes originally wrote Sixteen Candles in 1982 as a low-budget production which A&M Films agreed to finance for $1 million. The film went into turnaround, but Hughes attracted more interest in his screenplays after writing the successful film National Lampoon's Vacation (1983). After Hughes was fired from his next film Mr. Mom (1983), he decided to resume pre-production on Sixteen Candles as his directorial debut as he felt it had more commercial appeal to his teenage target audience than his other planned film The Breakfast Club (1985). After Hughes was rehired on Mr. Mom, Ned Tanen greenlit both films at Universal Pictures under a three-year $30 million contract on the condition that Hughes release Sixteen Candles first.[4]

John Hughes had asked his agent for headshots of young actresses, and among those he received were those of Robin Wright, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy. Sheedy had auditioned for the role of Sam, but was dropped because Hughes thought Ringwald was more fitting for the role. He called her a year later to give her a role in The Breakfast Club. Inspired by Ringwald's and Isabelle Fragata's appearance, he put it up over his desk and wrote the film just over a weekend with her in mind for the lead role.[5][6][7]

For the male lead in the film, it had come down to Schoeffling and Viggo Mortensen.[8] Ringwald pursued Mortensen to get the role.[9] For the part of Ted, Hughes saw a number of actors for the role including Jim Carrey, Keith Coogan and Ralph Macchio.[10][11][12] "Every single kid who came in to read for the part... did the whole, stereotyped high school nerd thing. You know—thick glasses, ball point pens in the pocket, white socks. But when Michael came in he played it straight, like a real human being. I knew right at that moment that I'd found my geek."[13]

Principal photography began on July 11, 1983.[4] Sixteen Candles was filmed primarily in and around the Chicago North Shore suburban communities of Evanston, Skokie, and Highland Park, Illinois during the summer of 1983, when leads Ringwald and Hall were 15 years old.[14] Most of the exterior scenes and some of the interior scenes were filmed at Niles East High School,[15] close to downtown Skokie, the setting for Hall's driving the Rolls-Royce.[16] A cafeteria scene and a gym scene were filmed at Niles North High School. The auto shop scene was filmed at Niles East High School in the auto shop. The Baker house is located at 3022 Payne Street in Evanston. The church (Glencoe Union Church at 263 Park Avenue) and parking lot where the final scenes take place are in Glencoe.[17]

The Motion Picture Association of America initially rated the film R, but Hughes won an appeal for it to be released as PG.[4]

In its opening weekend the film grossed $4,461,520 in 1,240 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking second. By the end of its run, Sixteen Candles grossed $23,686,027 against a budget of $6.5 million.[3]

Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 81% of critics gave it a positive rating, based on 43 reviews with an average rating of 7.1/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Significantly more mature than the teen raunch comedies that defined the era, Sixteen Candles is shot with compassion and clear respect for its characters and their hang-ups".[23] Metacritic gave the film a score of 61 based on 11 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[24]

Ringwald's performance was especially praised; Variety called her "engaging and credible"[25] while Roger Ebert wrote that she "provides a perfect center for the story" in "a sweet and funny movie".[26]

Janet Maslin of The New York Times called the film "a cuter and better-natured teen comedy than most, with the kinds of occasional lapses in taste that probably can't hurt it in the circles for which it is intended. The middle of the film wastes time on a bit more house-wrecking and car-crashing than is absolutely necessary, and there are some notably unfunny ethnic jokes. But most of the movie is cheerful and light, showcasing Mr. Hughes's knack for remembering all those aspects of middle-class American adolescent behavior that anyone else might want to forget."[27]

Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and called it "the best teenage comedy since last year's Risky Business", saying it was "certain to draw a lot of laughs, but the guess here is that it also will offer comfort to young girls and boys who feel awkward. And comfort and moments of recognition are in short supply in teenage movies, which often portray a world of violence and sexual mastery that is a lie."[28]

Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, "It doesn't amount to much, and it's certainly not to be confused with a work of art or a work of any depth, but the young writer-director John Hughes has a knack for making you like the high-school age characters better each time you hear them talk."[29] Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times stated that "Vacation worked, for all its raunchiness. Sixteen Candles' mixture of the sympathetic and the synthetic, the raucous and the racist, doesn't. At least not for me ... it flails about, substituting chaos and raunchy language for any semblance of wit."[30]

Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote, "Hughes isn't vigilant or deft enough to prevent the dramatic focus of attention from shifting at about the halfway point; he can't quite finesse the letdown that sets in when the engaging teen-age heroine, Samantha, delightfully embodied by Molly Ringwald, is allowed to become almost a subsidiary character in the second half of the story. Nevertheless, Sixteen Candles blends an idiosyncratic screwball imagination with a flair for updated domestic comedy and scenes of intimate, quirkily affectionate character interplay."[31]

A 1984 review in The New York Times criticized the character of Long Duk Dong for being "unfunny" and a "potentially offensive stereotype" of Asian people.[32] In 2008, Alison MacAdam of NPR wrote, "To some viewers, he represents one of the most offensive Asian stereotypes Hollywood ever gave America."[33] Asian Americans have complained that they were taunted with quotes of his stilted-English lines.[34] At the time of the film's release, Gedde Watanabe defended the character of Dong as being distinct from "submissive, smart" stereotypes of Asians at the time. Hughes argued that he was parodying foreign exchange students and their American host families in general rather than foreigners or Asians specifically.[4]

In an article published in Salon, Amy Benfer considers whether the film directly condones date rape even though no sexual activity is established, consensual or otherwise.[35] After the party scene, Jake tells Ted that his girlfriend Caroline is "in the bedroom right now, passed out cold. I could violate her ten different ways if I wanted to." He encourages Ted to drive her home saying, "She's so blitzed she won't know the difference." When Caroline and Ted wake up next to each other in the car, Caroline says she's fairly certain they had sex though neither of them remember it. Benfer writes, "The scene only works because people were stupid about date rape at the time. Even in a randy teen comedy, you would never see two sympathetic male characters conspiring to take advantage of a drunk chick these days."[35]

Author Anthony C. Bleach has argued that one possibility for Caroline's emotional and physical ruin in the film "might be that she is unappreciative of (or unreflective about) her class position", adding that, "What happens to Caroline in the narrative, whether her sloppy drunkenness, her scalping, or the potential for sexual coercion, seems to be both a projection of Samantha's desire to acquire Jake and become his girlfriend and a project of the film's desire to somehow harm the upper class."[36][37]

In December 1984, Ringwald and Hall both won Young Artist Awards as "Best Young Actress in a Motion Picture" and "Best Young Actor in a Motion Picture" for their roles in the film, respectively becoming the first and only juvenile performers in the history of the Young Artist Awards to win the Best Leading Actress and Best Leading Actor awards for the same film (a distinction the film still retains as of 2014).[38] The movie is ranked number 8 on Entertainment Weekly's list of "The 50 Best High School Movies".[39]