It's difficult to explain, to those who weren’t teenagers in the eighties, just how large Molly Ringwald once loomed in our lives, and why, even now, she must be coy about where she picks up her coffee. For many of us, she was the first real teen we watched at the movies. Graced with what Pauline Kael described as a “charismatic normality,” Ringwald appeared in three films with the writer-director Hughes—Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink—that were period-correct fusions of high-school fashion, music, and slang. If you were white and suburban and insecure, you came to the theater and saw yourself.
And lately she's been writing:
Ringwald has plans for a novel, but “it’s not really far enough along yet to, like, even talk about really,” and she resisted the pressure of getting an advance from a publisher. In the meantime, she’s found work as a book reviewer for the Hartford Courant, and she writes entertainment profiles for the Westchester Journal News...Stephin Merritt, the singer-songwriter of Magnetic Fields, for one, was a bit thrown by sitting across from Ringwald as she set up her tape recorder and notebook. “Excuse me for saying,” he told her, “that I’m surprised you’re doing this at all.”
If you saw her hit movies, you'd understand that the role of a writer isn't what people expect. Well, that was, like, 20 years ago. People change.
No comments:
Post a Comment