Inside 80s Classic ‘Pretty In Pink’ With Director Howard Deutch

“The stakes for me were through the roof. I’d given up my business and moved to LA. I pretty much sacrificed my future to gamble and take a risk, and there was thankfully a reward. The reward was that it worked,” recalled Howard Deutch.

The movie he risked it all for was Pretty in Pink. However, he wasn’t the only one with significant skin in the game.

“It was very important for John Hughes too. He was very entrepreneurial; he had great success as a director, but Pretty in Pink was the first movie he produced. I’m so grateful to this day because Paramount wanted him to hire someone else, someone more experienced. He fought for me, and so he had a lot at stake too.”

Did the director ever consider stepping back and not taking the job with the stakes so high and so much at risk?

“Every day. Every single day,” he confirmed. “I was at John’s house one evening, we were having dinner, and a call came in from Dawn Steel, who was the head of production under Ned Tanen, the president of Paramount, and she was on the phone saying, ‘We really have to go with this other person.’ She was trying to convince John to do what she wanted. Anyway, he was on one of those phones with the long cord, and he walked out of the kitchen away from me into the hallway where he thought I couldn’t hear, but I could.”

“He just told her that I was directing the movie, and that was it, end of conversation. He was amazing as a producer, not only because he stood up for me but also in every way you could hope creatively. He understood those characters and themes that he’d written better than anyone, and was able to be open and available to me to interpret them. We spent every moment together. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, let’s meet at four o’clock.’ We were together 24-7.”

He added, “I was part of the family. I did everything but sleep in their house. I was there from morning till night, and when he wrote, I would fall asleep on the couch right in front of him. We would write at his writing-table in his little office; there was music blasting; I was chain-smoking. I remember once I woke up at something like five in the morning, and we were working on Some Kind of Wonderful. He handed me what I thought was rewrite, and it was something like 50 pages. I said, ‘What did you do? It was supposed to be two pages?’ He just turned to me and said, ‘Oh, I didn’t do that. I wrote this thing instead, tell me what you think.’ What he’d written was the first half of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

Paramount Pictures gave Deutch a $7 million budget to make Pretty in Pink, which is now available on Blu-ray for the first time.

“I’ve seen people say that it cost $9 million, but it was only $7 million. It was a small undertaking for the studio; it wasn’t a big deal. I just wanted to make a movie that we were proud of,” he explained. “It wasn’t like some kind of high concept blockbuster movie. I’ve never heard anybody say, ‘I knew we had a big hit.’ In my experience, I just think there’s something that happens once in a while where people get lucky, that there’s a little magic, and that’s what happened here.”

“I remember Dawn Steel walking on the set and saying, ‘We can’t lose. It’s impossible for us to lose money on this movie.’ Like with all studios, that’s the bottom line. The pressure for them wasn’t there because they would make money. The pressure certainly was there for me even though I’ve never thought of things in those terms. But, no, it was not an expensive movie.”

Pretty in Pink grossed $40.4 million at the domestic box office.

“It was a huge relief when the numbers came in. I wanted it to work so much for John, who gave me that chance, and Pretty in Pink’s success allowed us to go right into working on another movie together,” Deutch recalled. “It was validation, which I desperately needed because I didn’t know anything, and I didn’t consider myself a director. I just wanted to take the chance and see if I could do it. It meant a lot.”

As the filmmaker mentioned, the other movie Deutch and Hughes worked on together was Some Kind of Wonderful.

“For Some Kind of Wonderful, the studio wanted to consider Jon Cryer for the lead male role that went to Eric Stoltz, but it didn’t make sense,” he said. “There wasn’t a logic to it.”

Cryer’s Duckie in Pretty in Pink proved particularly popular, so did Paramount Pictures ever consider a sequel or a spin-off?

“You’re right to think that. The studio wanted to explore that,” the filmmaker confirmed. “They were definitely interested in that or some version of Duckie in other stuff.”

Considered to be a classic and vintage John Hughes, the reviews at the time were a disappointment.

“I remember being devastated by all reviews. In retrospect, I think of what Mike Nichols, one of my favorite directors, said, that critics are the guys who come down from the hill after the battle and shoot the wounded. I always think about that, because what they said didn’t matter,” Deutch mused. “Look at how it has endured and how it means so much to so many people. Now that devastation has faded away. People say they don’t care about what the critics think, but of course, they do. I just had to find a way to deal with it.” 

Deutch famously shot two endings to the movie. There was the one that made it to the final cut, and there was a version where Cryer’s Duckie and Ringwald’s Andie get together. However, the beginning of the film could also have been very different.

“At one point, I even tampered with the idea of starting the movie with the score rather than the Psychedelic Furs track, Pretty in Pink,” he said. “To show you how John and I worked together on stuff, we previewed the movie both ways, one opening with the track, his way, and another opening with the score, my way, and it turned out I was wrong. But he listened to me, and that meant everything.”

And what about the theory that Duckie was secretly gay?

“That was never something that was considered to be the case when we were doing it,” Deutch remembered. “It was always this sense of true love; he would do anything for her, idolized her, and put her on a pedestal. He devoted his life to her. There’s a line in the movie where he says, ‘I live for you, and now I can’t do that anymore.’ That was kind of what the character was all about.”

“The interpretation of the character was pretty authentic and original. It wasn’t like you’d seen that character before. Jon Cryer made choices as an actor when we talked about everything, ad infinitum, he built that character based on what John wrote, but he made something out of it that has endured. I never felt that Duckie was gay. I always felt like his sensibility was about his whole life adoring Andie.”

The finale of Pretty In Pink famously had to be reshot months after the original production had wrapped. One major problem was that Andrew McCarthy, who played the love interest, Blane, looked considerably physically different. He’d lost a significant amount of weight and chopped his hair off for a play, The Boys of Winter. Because of that, the actor had no other option than to wear a bad wig.

But what happened to the infamous hairpiece?

“That thing was a nightmare,” Deutch laughed. “Honestly, I don’t know what happened to it. When I saw Andrew had a crew cut, we almost had a heart attack, so we had to come up with a way to solve the problem quickly. We only had one day to reshoot that scene. It was our only option, but it was awful, just awful.”

Pretty in Pink is now available on Blu-ray for the first time as part of the Paramount Presents series.