LINCOLN PARK — The night Molly Ringwald spent dancing at famed Chicago blues club Kingston Mines sparked the creation of filmmaker John Hughes’ ’80s cult classic “Pretty In Pink,” the actress said in a new interview.
On a recent episode of the podcast “Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky,” Ringwald revealed that an impromptu dance at the historic club with co-star Matt Freeman inspired Hughes to write the film.
“John Hughes would always take us kids to Kingston Mines,” Ringwald said. “I was dancing with Matt, but it was this extended version that went on for 20 minutes. Based on the interaction of me and Matt on the dance floor, that’s what made John write ‘Pretty In Pink’ and my character.”
Kingston Mines opened at 2548 N. Halsted St. in 1968 and has hosted blues legends such as Magic Slim, Koko Taylor and Joanna Connor. The club nearly closed for good during the COVID-19 pandemic, but reopened in 2021.
Hughes set many of his most famous films in and around Chicago, often showcasing the North Shore suburbs where he grew up but also including notable city landmarks and events like Wrigley Field, Sears Tower, the Art Institute of Chicago and a German-American parade on Dearborn Street.
By the time Hughes took the actors to Kingston Mines, Ringwald was already one of the filmmaker’s muses. While writing “The Breakfast Club” in the early ‘80s, Hughes found a photo of 15-year-old Ringwald in a stack of headshots.
The legend goes that Hughes pinned Ringwald’s photo to a bulletin board and wrote “Sixteen Candles” over a weekend. The film, in which Ringwald starred, was shot in and around suburban Skokie, with the school scenes filmed at Niles East, a high school that has since closed.
Credit: Jake Wittich/Block Club Chicago
Hughes followed “Sixteen Candles” with “The Breakfast Club,” another cult classic and arguably the filmmaker’s most popular movie.
With two films behind them, Hughes and Ringwald formed a creative bond. A year later, when Ringwald was 16, Hughes took the actress and Freeman to Kingston Mines to hear Koko Taylor and Junior Wells perform.
“Ringwald, for her part, found common ground with Hughes in their shared taste for British-import pop,” David Kamp wrote in Vanity Fair in 2010. “A California girl, she gushed to Hughes about the post-punk and New Wave music that she heard on KROQ, the Anglophilic L.A. station to which she was devoted.”
The movie’s title, “Pretty in Pink,” was inspired by the Psychedelic Furs song of the same name, which Ringwald reportedly introduced to Hughes.
“There is the sense that Ringwald just might have that subtle magic that will allow her, like the young Elizabeth Taylor, to grow into an actress who will keep on breaking and mending boys’ hearts for a long time,” the late movie critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review of “Pretty in Pink.”
To listen to the full interview with Ringwald, visit the link here.
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