Why ‘Pretty in Pink’s Original Ending Got Booed
Forty years ago, moviegoers watched a teenage love triangle play out in the comedy-drama film Pretty in Pink, as the working-class Andie (Molly Ringwald) weighed her romantic prospects with fellow outsider Duckie (Jon Cryer) or upper-class love interest Blane (Andrew McCarthy).
In the end — four-decade-old spoiler alert! — Andie chooses Blane, and Duckie sacrifices his own happy ending to support the new relationship. But John Hughes’ screenplay for the film — which hit U.S. theaters on February 28, 1986 — didn’t originally end that way. And a subsequent rewriting and reshoot gave us an OMD synth-pop anthem… and almost let Ringwald wear a dress she actually liked!
The original script had Andie ending up with Duckie
Hughes’ original Pretty in Pink screenplay surfaced online in 2010, according to the Tampa Bay Times, and showed fans how the Brat Pack filmmaker wanted the story to end.
In the original script, Andie leads Duckie onto the dance floor, where the crowd forms a large circle around them. As the band starts to play, Duckie looks terrified. He says he can’t dance, and Andie says she can’t either.
“Are we crazy?” Duckie asks.
“Completely,” Andie says.
The new couple starts dancing with abandon as the other high schoolers spectate. Andie and Duckie then “look at each other and smile,” Hughes wrote in the script. “Duckie laughs. Andie squeezes him tight and lifts him off his feet. FREEZE. MUSIC AND TITLES.”
Sadly, the film for Pretty in Pink’s original ending has been lost, a Paramount representative told British Vogue, but you can see B-roll footage of that ending in the clip here.
Test audiences ‘did not want Molly [Ringwald] to end up with Jon Cryer’
As Pretty in Pink director Howard Deutch explained to USA Today in 2021, the original ending to the film rewarded Duckie for his devotion, while Blane reaped the consequences of his classist fears of taking Andie to prom. But at a test screening, viewers panned Hughes’ vision.
“Up to that point, the screening had been like a rock concert. And we got to the ending, and they started to boo,” Deutch recalled. “That young audience, they did not want Molly to end up with Jon Cryer. The girls were like, ‘Forget the politics. We want her to get the cute boy.’”
Deutch and Hughes were both there for that screening and “both had a heart attack,” the former said.
John Hughes wrote a new ending, which was shot in one day
So Hughes got to work on a new ending, churning out five new script pages that concluded the love triangle in Blane’s favor. “We had one day to re-shoot the entire ending,” Deutch told USA Today. “There were all kinds of obstacles to overcome making that work.”
For starters, the crew had to recreate the ballroom at Los Angeles’ Biltmore Hotel — the original filming location of prom — on a soundstage. McCarthy had to wear a wig for the reshoot, since he had already shaved his head for a Broadway role. And future Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Kristy Swanson was enlisted for a non-speaking part: She played the “Duckette” who made eyes at Duckie, suggesting love was in his future after all. “John was like, ‘We have to protect Duckie’s character here. We have to get him a Duckette.’”
The reshoot worked: The audience “went crazy” for the revised ending, Deutch said. “They were satisfied, fulfilled, and delighted. And I agreed.”
Ringwald knew audiences would hate the original ending
Ringwald expected such an audience revolt to the original Pretty in Pink ending, as she told British Vogue in 2021. “It just didn’t make sense because of how the entire movie was structured and the way these characters were cast,” she said. ‘I could maybe understand Andie choosing Duckie if Blane had been portrayed as a vapid punk or if there had been no chemistry between me and Andrew. But it didn’t make sense to have the entire movie be this Cinderella story [yet] she doesn’t get to end up with the guy she wants. It would’ve been unsatisfying. Jon was fantastic in that role, but to me, in my mind, Duckie was clearly a gay boy with a fierce crush on his friend.”
Ringwald tried to wear a new prom dress for the reshoot
In the British Vogue interview, Ringwald also said Andie’s “Pepto-Bismol” prom dress was the one creation by costume designer Marilyn Vance she hated. She even burst into tears when she saw the dress, though now she wishes she kept and framed it.
“It was the time of Dynasty, with all these big shoulders and unusual silhouettes. But when the dress showed up, I thought, ‘What is this? How could anyone look good in that? It’s a triangle!’”
Before the ending reshoot, Ringwald enlisted her friend Colleen Atwood, a costume designer who’s now a four-time Oscar winner, to “design something really fabulous.” Ringwald then “begged” Deutch to let her wear the new dress for the reshoot, but the director refused, since the dress swap would necessitate the reshoot of other scenes, too.
OMD wrote a song for the new ending in 24 hours
The British synth-pop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark hit it big in America when their song “If You Leave” soundtracked the reshot Pretty in Pink ending. Hughes had asked them to write a song for the original finale, and so they offered up a track called “Goddess of Love,” according to The New York Times. Upon the reshoot, however, Pretty in Pink needed a new song, since the new ending “rendered the lyrics of [‘Goddess of Love’] redundant,” according to the band’s website.
OMD only had 24 hours to create the replacement, per the Times. “If You Leave,” born of that necessity, became a hit in the U.S., reaching No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Goddess of Love,” meanwhile, got “radically reworked” and re-written before it appeared on OMD’s 1986 album, The Pacific Age, and it perhaps soundtracked other, real-life proms…
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