onthisday Secret Admirer released in theatres. June 14, #1985 American teen romantic comedy film co-written and directed by David Greenwalt in his feature film directorial debut, and starring C. Thomas Howell, Lori Loughlin, Kelly Preston and Fred Ward. The original music score was composed by Jan Hammer. The film was produced at the height of the teen sex comedy cinema craze in the mid-1980s.
Corey Haim’s first name is misspelled in the ending credits. It is incorrectly spelled Cory
Kelly Preston is four years older than C. Thomas Howell, and Lori Loughlin is two and a half years older.
Five years after this film’s release, Lori Loughlin appeared in the Full House episode Secret Admirer (1990), which also had a plot about a love letter falling into the wrong hands and causing familial distress.
Paul Gleason was considered for the role of Lou Fimple before Fred Ward was cast.
Julianne Phillips was originally cast as Deborah Anne Fimple and spent four days filming. Producer Steve Roth decided she was wrong for the part and replaced her with Kelly Preston. Roth would later say of his decision to fire Phillips, “She looked too sophisticated. She was terrific, but she just didn’t look right with the other kids.”
C. Thomas Howell and Dee Wallace both appeared in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).
Casey Siemaszko and J.J. Cohen would later appear together in the Back to the Future trilogy as 3-D and Skinhead. This is the only other movie that they have shared together.
This film was part of an intense, front-page-of-newspapers controversy in Puerto Rico in early March of 2016 when it was revealed that writer-director Eduardo Ortíz had basically plagiarized it almost in its entirety – word-for-word, scene-for-scene, and shot-for-shot – when he did his film Vasos De Papel (2016), and had tried to make everybody believe that the screenplay had been created and written by himself. The film had only been playing at Puerto Rican cinemas for a few days when the first articles pointing out the similarities between the two films, and pointing out that there was no mention anywhere of it being based on ‘Secret Admirer’, arose.
