the
breakfast
club
The Breakfast Club is a film that was created back in 1985. It stars five teenagers, all with drastically different personalities and cliques. They spend a Sunday in detention together. They start off not getting along with each other, but slowly reveal that they all have much more in common with each other than they initially thought.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Type of production: The Breakfast Club is a film. We know it’s a film because it lasts for ninety seven minutes long, longer than your average TV show episode. This is because movies have to be at least seventy minutes minimum. The Breakfast Club was also released in DVD form with a Cinema release on February 15th, 1985. Having a cinema release and a dvd release are both common traits of films at the time.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
We also know that the Breakfast Club is a Comedy Drama. Besides it’s actual, official classification. The film features jokes, verbal and visual, and those take up a lot of the script, considering that it’s the main genre, but it is also matched with drama from each character, from the secrets that they reveal throughout the movie.
The Breakfast CLub is also a coming of age film. A coming of age film is a film , which centres around the growth of the protagonists of the film from their youth to adulthood. While The Breakfast Club doesn't show the complete journey of the main cast of characters, the film focuses on the personal growth and change that they face when they finally open to each other. Like most coming of age films, it focuses on dialogue and emotion, rather than action.
Finance:
The Breakfast Club was given a budget of One million, due to it’s lack of risk, and that the entire film is shot in one setting (two, if you count the outdoors). While I couldn’t find actual costs for the movie, I can give you some general numbers.
From what I could tell from this film alone, except for that it was pretty cheap, the costs in this film had to be used for the set they used, film equipment, facility hire, and some extra materials.
​
According to Quora, The school should have been around 1000-2500 a day. Assuming the school cost 1000 dollars, at it’s minimum, and if filming went from march to may, that would go for about 60001 dollars.
"It all depends on the type of production and the type of home. It can range anywhere from $1,000 to $25,000 for one day of filming but this is a very broad range. Most homes can demand between $1,000 and $10,000 per day."
​
Camera equipment
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
A 35mm SLR (single lens reflex) camera is the mainstay of the film camera world aimed at serious amateurs and professionals alike. While the camera bodies and interchangeable lenses are usually sold separately, together they range in cost from about $200 to $4,000 or more.
​
Lighting
​
The lighting in The Breakfast Club cost basically nothing, aside from the money of the set. This is because the lighting in the film was the actual lighting in the library, and in the school.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
The Breakfast Club's budget was One million, which is usually the budget of an independent film. So to figure out how much each actor was paid, we gotta see the bare minimum of how much an average actor gets paid. According to hollywood reporter, the average member earns $52,000 a year, while the vast majority take home less than $1,000 a year from acting jobs. With this knowledge, we can assume that each actor got paid at least 1000-5000 dollars.
​
Time
In every film, there is usually a timeline to show the start and end of each stage of production. When filming begins, when the editing has to be finished, etcetera. Unfortunately, with the breakfast club, a copy of said timeline is practically non existant. However, we do have some details.
Casting started at 1984, when John Huges asked Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael to cast in their film. After casting and preproduction was finished, Principal photography began on the 18th of March in the same year, filming everything until May. At the same time, John Huges was filming Ferris Bueller's day off at the same location, filming both movies at the same time to save time and money.
​
Locations and Facilities
​
Due to it's small budget, The Breakfast Club was primarily filmed in one location; Marine North High School. It was used for the majority of the film, as it was used for exterior and interior hallways for the school. Marine North High school had only recently shut down at the time, closing in 1981, with the building being unused for a while. The gym of the school was used to create the library, by adding other set pieces to the area. This was because the original shooting location, the actual library of the place, was found to be too small. The same location was then used to film 'Ferris Bueller's Day off' in 1986.
​
Scenes that take place in the hallways were filmed in Glennbook North High School, and the football field, aka where that one scene where Brian fist pumps the air while 'Don't you forget about me' blasts in the background, was also filmed in the football field of Park Ridge Illinois.
Codes of Practice and Regulations. ​
​
Like all movies that get released in the USA, The breakfast club went through the Movie Picture Association of America film. The MPAOA is a group of people who judge a movie and give it an age rating. This system, like similar systems in different territories, exist to rate a movie’s maturity rating based on the content in said film. This could go from Completely family friendly (U, PG), to Teen with parental guidance (12, 12A), to Teen (15), to the Adults only R rating (18, R18).
Breakfast Club, like you’d expect, was rated an.
An R. ​
​
You know. The Breakfast Club! In the same camp as the Deadpool movies, The Nun, 300, Aliens, and Sausage Party.
It’s strange, but at the time, meaning the 1980s, this movie was considered very mature, for things that may be seen as a 15 rating today, and things that happened all the time in your average high school. The rating was given to the movie for mentions of sex, one scene where all the characters sit around smoking marijuana, excessive use of swear words, a sexist comment from one of the characters, and scenes that talk about of serious topics such as domestic abuse and suicide, which were talked about bluntly without beating behind the bush or censoring.
​
While the location is pretty harmless, The Breakfast club would have to check the location for any possible dangers, and come up with ways on how to avoid them. These are called risk assessments. They cover what problem might occur, what may be compromised because of it, and how they would prevent this problem or fix it, if it happens. If the worst comes to worst, The Breakfast Club would need an insurance company to cover for any damages or injuries that happen.