For his heartfelt adaptation of Hinton’s popular study of class rivalry and youth gangs, Coppola assembled an incredible cast of newcomers - Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Diane Lane, Tom Cruise - who would all become major stars within a few years. The loving attention to the teenagers version of regional dialect and culture so important to Hinton’s first novel - written when she was only nineteen years old - is fully captured by Coppola’s typically detail-rich filmmaking, which uses its Oklahoma setting to suggest a world of slow change out of step with its anxious youth.