Remember cleaning out your locker at the end of the school year and finding all of that homework (and/or those lunches) you lost sometime in the preceding months? Well, employees of Park Ridge, Illinois’s Maine South High School had a similar experience while going through a filing cabinet in preparation for a move: a first draft of John Hughes’s screenplay for The Breakfast Club. The Chicago Tribune reports the discovered draft was dated September 21, 1983, months before the movie was filmed in the suburban high school building, which is now being used for other purposes. It includes what appears to be a signature of approval from the superintendent at the time, John Murphy, as well as a long-ago cafeteria relic. “In the upper left, there is what appears to be pizza grease,” current District 207 superintendent Ken Wallace told the paper. “I can imagine somebody taking this out over lunch and saying, ‘I wonder what this is all about.’”
The Tribune reports some other intriguing items of note for The Breakfast Club fans, including that the script calls Molly Ringwald’s character Cathy Douglas. Other documents found with the screenplay also indicate a possible alternate title for the film: Saturday Breakfast Club. But perhaps the neatest bit of ephemera comes in the form of a rather-prescient letter to Universal Studios’ unit production manager from a former school employee named Donald Stillwaugh: “We close with nothing but the fondest thoughts and memories of Universal Studios and The Breakfast Club,” he wrote at the time. “We trust the film will be a huge success.” Cue Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me).”