Fact Check: About the Rumor John Hughes Supposedly Wrote 'The Breakfast Club' Script In Just 2 Days
Claim:
Filmmaker John Hughes wrote the script for the 1985 comedy-drama "The Breakfast Club" in two days.
Rating:
Context:
Hughes himself once told a journalist that he wrote the script "on July 4th and 5th of '82," and people in his orbit recalled him saying that to them contemporaneously. But, as with many scripts, it underwent rounds of editing after Hughes completed his initial draft.
John Hughes, the director, screenwriter and producer of comedies and teen films in the 1980s and early-1990s — including "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" — is rumored to have written his screenplays prolifically fast, supposedly in a matter of days.
For instance, fan pages and various accounts on platforms like Reddit, Instagram and X have long circulated the claim that Hughes wrote the script for his 1985 teenage comedy-drama "The Breakfast Club" in just two days.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C58ocDrrTga/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Even after Hughes died of a heart attack in 2009 at age 59, rumors about his writing speed lingered. For example, in 2015, the X account The Breakfast Club posted, "Director John Hughes wrote the script in two days, during the weekend of July 4, 1982." And years later, in June 2024, someone made the claim again on the r/todayilearned subreddit:
TIL John Hughes wrote the script for film The Breakfast Club (1985) in just two days.
by u/tyrion2024 in todayilearned
Hughes indeed once told a journalist that he wrote the script in just a couple of days, and people in his orbit recalled him repeating that story to them contemporaneously. The script did undergo rounds of editing, however, after Hughes completed his initial copy.
Snopes reached out to the Hughes estate, but the group did not immediately respond to our inquiry. We will update this report when, or if, it does.
Hughes Made the Claim Himself
Hughes himself said he wrote "The Breakfast Club" script in two days during an interview with Premiere that published in 1999. In that feature story titled, "Teen Days That Shook the World," the interviewer not only spoke with Hughes but also "The Breakfast Club" production crew and actors to unpack the movie's history.
At one point, when the interviewer asked about Hughes' transition from writing to directing, Hughes said of "The Breakfast Club" script (emphasis ours):
I wrote it on July 4th and 5th of '82. I asked Bobby Richter [the son of a friend] what they called detention at New Trier High School [in Winnetka, Illinois]. He said it was called the Breakfast Club. It actually referred to morning detention, not Saturday detention, but I figured nobody would call me on it.
Actor Judd Nelson, who played the bad-boy character, John Bender, in "The Breakfast Club," corroborated Hughes' account in an interview that was shared to the Fandango YouTube page in 2014:
John said something like, that he wrote the first draft in a weekend. And both Emilio [Estevez, who also starred in the film] and I — it was almost simultaneously — I was like, 'First draft? Okay, how many drafts do you have?' And he said, 'Well, I got a few, why?' And Emilio and I were, 'Can we read them?' This [conversation] was during the rehearsal process.
Secondhand Sources Support the Claim
The entertainment media outlet ScreenRant also noted Hughes' writing speed in a 2020 piece claiming "10 behind-the-scenes facts about the Breakfast Club." That piece claimed his early career writing ad copy helped him gain skills to complete screenplays in a matter of days. According to the outlet — which cited Movie Mistakes, a website that reports mistakes, interesting facts and continuity errors in film and television — he reportedly wrote in "20-hour binges," and wrote the script for "The Breakfast Club" over just two days from "July 4 and 5, 1982."
In the 2015 biography "John Hughes: A Life in Film: The Genius Behind Ferris Bueller, The Breakfast Club, Home Alone, and more," author Kurt Honeycutt explained Hughes' writing process (emphasis our own):
What fueled this empire of the Teen King was a writer unique not just to Hollywood, but to the understood norms of any kind of writing. His preferred method of working was late at night and into the early hours of the morning, blasting the latest music of the British rock and punk scene while drinking coffee and chain-smoking.
This M.O. produced completed screenplays in such a rapid fire manner that it became the stuff of Hollywood legend. The number of days tends to fluctuate but he claims he wrote the first draft of the Breakfast Club in two days.
Similarly, author Susannah Gora, in her 2010 book "You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation," highlighted Hughes' writing prowess — though Gora did not mention "The Breakfast Club" by name. "Hughes's speed as a writer was becoming legendary. He could write an entire script in two days. When he got going, he liked to say he felt he was 'inside the script' — that it just flowed out of him, in an almost spiritual flood of creativity that he was somehow tapping into."
IMDb also supported the alleged timeline of Hughes' writing for "The Breakfast Club," noting he wrote the screenplay "in just two days," on July 4 and July 5, in 1982.
Snopes previously fact-checked the true claim that country music legend Dolly Parton wrote "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" in one day.
Sources:
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