You Break My Heart ... Then Again, You Break Everyone's Heart.

Hollywood must be worried we're not paying attention, so in a final, desperate act to let us know once and for all that it is officially out of ideas, apparently a "bidding war" just took place and ABC has "won" the rights to turn St. Elmo's Fire into a tv show. Of course, lest you think they're incapable of coming up with their own stuff, you should note that they're changing the name of the local watering hole from "St. Elmo's Bar & Restaurant" to "St. Elmo's Bar & Grill." Somewhere, Clark Kent is chuckling.

ABC's mistake will be trying to make this an earnest dramedy, which means it will last about 3 episodes; my idea is that instead of the same old nonsense, they take advantage of the fact that Billy Hicks had the highest percentage of oh-my-god eyerolling cringe-worthy lines in movie history, and make the show a quasi-reality show wherein each actor only gets paid according to how many of Billy's "classic" lines he/she somehow works into each week's episode. These beauties will include such lines as:

The wet look is in, asshole.
We're all going through this. It's our time at the edge.
I should have had a vasectomy at birth! Let me tell you something Al, you ever have boys, do them a favor and get them neutered straight away. If they ever knock up some little slut, they're the ones who're fucked!
So you lost your job? I've lost twenty of them since graduation. Plus a wife and kid. And, in a new development this morning, a handful of hair in the shower drain.
It ain't a party till something gets broken.
Let's rock!
I was thinking I could be, you know, some sort of adviser.
It's gonna be TOTALLY out of hand.
Don't you give up on me ... I'm gonna change.
Don't go changing just to please me.
DON'T YOU GIVE UP ON ME!!!!

and, of course, the triple-bonus winner:

Jules, y'know, honey... this isn't real. You know what it is? It's St. Elmo's Fire. Electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. Sailors would guide entire journeys by it, but the joke was on them... there was no fire. There wasn't even a St. Elmo. They made it up. They made it up because they thought they needed it to keep them going when times got tough, just like you're making up all of this.

Whatever genius works that little soliloquey in gets to start off the next week in Billy's Batman sleeveless tee a la each stage winner in the Tour de France, complete with saxophone dangling from their neck.

ABC: do the right thing!!!!

DEATH CASH-IN OPPORTUNITY DOUBLECHECK: Um, ABC...you...DO realize John Hughes had nothing to do with the movie, right?