Rocks In The Attic #1170: Various Artists – ‘Pretty In Pink (O.S.T.)’ (1986)

I knew there was something wrong when the Hollywood Avondale started advertising their screening of PRETTY IN PINK as a dress-up party. Talk about alarm bells. But I’ve been to screenings there before where there’s been a fancy-dress theme, and aside from a couple of overly self-aware people knocking about in the lobby, it’s usually mostly a normal crowd. 

So, I turn up at the Hollywood a few Sunday afternoons ago. There’s a couple of people dressed up in the lobby; so far so manageable. I take my seat in my usual spot, and the fire door out to the beer garden is flung open to show dozens of people in the middle of a party. Young kids, bored of the party, run in through the fire door, and start running around in the middle of the theatre while the pre-show trailers and music videos start. 

I immediately think about leaving. Cinema and alcohol doesn’t mix, and not only are there some annoying kids in here, there’s soon going to be dozens of obnoxiously drunk people trying to watch a film while still having conversations they just had outside in the beer garden. 

I figure out, with the help of social media, that the party is for Letterboxd Editor-In-Chief Gemma Gracewood. This makes me feel slightly better. Surely somebody who espouses her love of cinema 24/7 would make sure that the screening would be nice and quiet, right? Or maybe not…

The fire door eventually closes, the lights go dim, people rush to take their seat, and the birthday girl walks out on stage to do a speech. 

Gemma first thanks the 38 members of the public who have crashed her birthday party. She asks them to out their hands up, and I proudly hold mine aloft, while the gaggle of brightly dressed girls who’ve found a seat next to me look in my direction. 

(There’s a minor correction I should make here actually. I believe the screening was opened up to the general public, to make it cheaper for the organisers to rent for the party and film. So, really their party was crashing our cinema, not the other way around.)

Gemma goes on to talk about her love of PRETTY IN PINK. It’s something she loved during her teens, even before she was asked to study it at college, and it still exists as one of her four favourites on Letterboxd. 

She then mentions how the film was made during a different time. Some of the dialogue hasn’t aged very well and there are lots of things we can now look back on as problematic. It’s here that the screening takes a turn for the better. 

She actively asks the audience to participate in the screening, to boo at anything that sounds a bit iffy, and to call out any more appropriate words or phrases that would be better with a 21st century lens.

Sounds horrific, right? An audience participation screening. Like one of those sing-a-long screenings of THE SOUND OF MUSIC.

But fuck, it was funny. 

Lots of great comments from a crowd that was really on board with how the screening turned out. For example, whenever James Spader was on screen, being the douchebag that he always excels at, there’d be girls shouting out things like “Booo, James Spader, you sexy arsehole!”

And when Andrew McCarthy somehow sends Molly Ringwald a photo of herself, and then one of himself, on a dot-matrix computer screen, before revealing himself to be sat across from her in the library, there were calls of ‘Stalker! Call the police!”

We had a special guest cycling around the cinema in a sparkly jacket during Duckie’s cycling scene, and a shower of pink, white and black balloons unleashed from the circle when the Prom scene started. A heap of fun.

Shhh, don’t tell anyone, but I think it’s a pretty basic movie and I often wonder how different it would have turned out had John Hughes directed it instead of Howard Deutch. Still, at least it doesn’t have anything as problematic as the rape scene in SIXTEEN CANDLES…

As usual with John Hughes films, the PRETTY IN PINKsoundtrack is killer. But even the ten songs that were presented on the original soundtrack album don’t include some of the best needle-drops from the film. The recently released LIFE MOVES PRETTY FAST.boxset goes some way in righting this wrong by including tracks such as Otis Redding’s Try A Little Tenderness, Cherish by the Association, Rave Up/Shut Up by the Rave-Ups, and my particular favourite, the same band’s Positively Lost Me. 

Hit: Wouldn’t It Be Good – Danny Hutton Hitters

Hidden Gem: Bring On The Dancing Horses – Echo & The Bunnymen

Rocks In The Attic #1129: Various Artists – ‘Life Moves Pretty Fast: The John Hughes Mixtapes (O.S.T.)’ (2022)

A Christmas gift to myself, I really couldn’t afford this – especially at this time of year – but needs must. This brilliantly put-together trailer didn’t put me off the idea either, and a good friend then managed to help me secure one of only a few that came into the country.

It’s a beautiful set: six opaque-red LPs featuring 73 needle drops from John Hughes’ 1980s movies; a staggering four-and-a-half-hours of music. Inside the white box – which features a cover photo of a bunch of Hughes’ actual cassettes, and a red, white and black design which is surely intended to echo the poster colour scheme of FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF – is a liner-notes booklet, and six individual inner sleeves with a graphic design that, when put together, appropriately forms a UK and USA flag.

Curated by Hughes’ long-time music supervisor (from FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF onwards) Tarquin Gotch, it’s the first official compilation of music from Hughes’ films, and everything about it feels like a labour of love – from the Matthew Broderick interview that opens the liner notes booklet, to the essays by Hughes’ son James, and Tarquin Gotch.

The track-by-track listing in the booklet details which film each song is taken from, a description of where it is used in the film, and a reminisces about how they secured the track from Gotch and fellow music supervisor Ron Payne, as well as a cast of assistants, editors and, in some cases, the musicians themselves.

Given Hughes’ love of making cassette mixtapes for friends and colleagues, the set is built around six mixes – one per disc. Everything is all over the place, you’ll get a song from SIXTEEN CANDLES, followed by something from PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES and then WEIRD SCIENCE. It still manages to sound cohesive though, with everything sounding effortlessly cool no matter what order they come in.

I do scratch my head around what they’ve included – and what they’ve excluded – though. Perhaps the biggest draw for the compilation is that it includes songs from the FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF soundtrack, which remains unreleased in any format. Hell, one of the tracks – the Flowerpot Men’s Beat City, which soundtracks Ferris, Cameron and Skye’s drive away from school – remains unreleased in any physical format (except for a limited 7” that Hughes put out to his fan-club), until now…

Not surprisingly, it isn’t a fair split across films either, with some represented significantly more than others:

SHE’S HAVING A BABY (12)
SIXTEEN CANDLES (11)
PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES (10)
FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF (9)
PRETTY IN PINK (9)
SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL (8)
WEIRD SCIENCE (6)
UNCLE BUCK (5)
NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION (1)
THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1)
THE GREAT OUTDOORS (1)

Of course, they couldn’t include everything, and licensing must be a bitch, but it’s strange how populist favourite THE BREAKFAST CLUB is represented by only one song – even though it’s perhaps the most well-known song on here – while the little-talked-about SHE’S HAVING A BABY has twelve, two more than the ten that appeared on its 1988 soundtrack release.

Also strange are the films that aren’t even considered. It’s an ‘80s compilation, so there’s nothing from the 1990s, which removes, among others, HOME ALONE and the only John Hughes-directed film of the 1990s, CURLY SUE. And while the boxset includes songs from films Hughes wrote (and/or produced) but didn’t direct – NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION, PRETTY IN PINK, SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL, and THE GREAT OUTDOORS – it ignores other films he wrote in the ‘80s: MR. MOM, NATE AND HAYES AKA SAVAGE ISLANDS (no, me neither), NATIONAL LAMPOON’S EUROPEAN VACATION and NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CHRISTMAS VACATION.

Some songs are included when only mere seconds of them are used onscreen – the digital squelch of Yello’s Lost Again as Neal and Del look at the hotel room’s solitary bed in PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES, for example – while other songs are excluded in their entirety. And even a film’s existing soundtrack release has no bearing on the tracks included here; Ray Charles’ Mess Around, which soundtracks Del’s night-time drive while Neal sleeps, was inexplicably absent from that film’s initial soundtrack release, yet it’s included here, as it should be.

I’m very happy that Lindsay Buckingham’s Holiday Road is included from the NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION soundtrack – a song so perfectly appropriate at the beginning of Hughes’ 1980s soundtrack journey, it should have been sequenced first on the set – but I’d love to have seen Buckingham’s Dancin’ Across The USA included here also.

And weirdly, there are some classic, established songs on here – Boston’s More Than A Feeling, Otis Redding’s Try A Little Tenderness – that might be a perfect fit when they’re used in their respective films, but feel out of place on a set that not only celebrates ‘80s music, but champions obscure ‘80s music.

Hit: Don’t You (Forget About Me) – Simple Minds

Hidden Gem: Beat City – The Flowerpot Men