All About ‘Oil and Vinegar,’ The Lost ’80s John Hughes Comedy That Would’ve Starred Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick
See why the unproduced screenplay might've been one of the most memorable movies of the decade
When it comes to John Hughes movies starring Molly Ringwald, you likely already know and love Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, but have you heard of Oil and Vinegar? The film, which was written by Hughes in the ’80s but never made, would’ve starred Ringwald and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’s Matthew Broderick. Over the years, many fans have speculated about it, and ever since the writer-director died in 2009, the intrigue of the lost Hughes movie has only grown. Read on to learn about what might’ve been.
‘The Breakfast Club,’ road trip edition: The plot of ‘Oil and Vinegar’
Like all of Hughes’ best-loved work, Oil and Vinegar stood out for its funny, relatable dialogue. The deceptively simple plot centered on a traveling salesman (Broderick) who picks up a hitchhiking girl (Ringwald) shortly before his wedding, only for the odd couple to find themselves in a long conversation about their lives.
Similar to how The Breakfast Club unfolds over the course of a high school detention session, Oil and Vinegar would’ve taken place during a car trip. Hughes was a master of creating these small-scale scenarios, and intriguingly, Oil and Vinegar would’ve taken the Breakfast Club format outside of the high school library.
Two John Hughes movie stars, together at last: The cast of ‘Oil and Vinegar’
While Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick both starred in John Hughes movies and are considered ’80s icons, they never actually shared the screen. Ringwald was excited about the prospect of working with Broderick, and in a 2010 interview with The Atlantic, she said, “I feel a kindred spirit with him. I love Matthew, and we definitely have charisma together. And he’s one of the funniest people I think I’ve ever met.”
Broderick hasn’t spoken about Oil and Vinegar, but in her interview, Ringwald said, “We were supposed to be in a John Hughes picture called Oil and Vinegar. The script needed some rewrites, and John didn’t want to meet and rewrite. I ran out of time and had to go shoot another picture. It’s too bad because it was a very funny script. The movie would have been fantastic.”
The director’s take on ‘Oil and Vinegar’: ‘That was John’s favorite script’
Oil and Vinegar was likely going to be directed by Howard Deutch, who had previously directed Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful from scripts by Hughes. In a 2014 Vulture interview, Deutch recalled, “That was John’s favorite script and he was saving it for himself, and I convinced him to let me do it. It was the story of a traveling salesman that Matthew Broderick was going to play, and a rock-and-roll girl, a real rocker. Polar opposites. Molly was going to play that. And I had to make a personal decision about whether to go forward or not.”
At the time, Deutch was exhausted after working on multiple projects in a row, and while he loved Oil and Vinegar’s script, he said, “I think it was also sprinkled with the fact that I wanted to do one movie that was my movie, not necessarily in service to John, even though I loved John.” In the interview, the director held out hope that the movie could still be made one day, albeit with a different cast.
Alan Metter, the late director of ’80s comedies like Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Back to School, also had his name attached to Oil and Vinegar at one point. In a comment on a Vanity Fair article about Hughes published after his passing, he wrote, “John Hughes and I had the same agent. One day he called and sent over a script John had written and wanted me to direct (it was during the period when there were two John Hughes films being made each year, one he directed and the other he wrote and produced) . . . Like Breakfast Club, it was a magnificent dialogue piece—a cinematic play.”
Metter’s reason for turning down the film was similar to Deutch’s. “I turned it down because no matter who directed John’s annual ‘B’ film, it was a John Hughes film,” he wrote. “So this great John Hughes movie never got made. And I was never offered a script this good again. I never even got to meet the man. As career moves go, this was the greatest mistake of my life. Maybe someone will dig it up and be smart enough to make one last John Hughes film.”
The canon of lost John Hughes movies: ‘Even the stuff I fished out of the garbage was gold’
John Hughes was a wildly prolific writer, and Oil and Vinegar wasn’t his only lost movie. Hughes started his career as a humor writer for National Lampoon magazine, and had a number of Lampoon-related screenplays that never got off the ground.
After the success of The Breakfast Club, he worked on a script for another Ringwald vehicle called Lovecats (named after the song of the same title by the Cure—a favorite of the actress), as well as a film called The Last Good Year, which would’ve starred Anthony Michael Hall and taken place in 1962, shortly before the rise of the Beatles, but neither of these musically inspired films came to fruition.
Other unrealized Hughes screenplays include a comedy starring John Candy and Sylvester Stallone, a modern take on Huckleberry Finn, a Breakfast Club-esque ’90s teen movie and a live-action version of Peanuts, to name just a few. Ringwald and Broderick also said that there’d been talk of making sequels to Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but these never happened—and it’s probably for the best, given how hard it can be to make a successful sequel to a hit!
In his Vulture interview, Deutch marveled that when he worked with Hughes, “Even the stuff I fished out of the garbage was gold,” and we have no doubt that Oil and Vinegar would’ve been an ’80s classic.
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