John Hughes had the good fortune of being the Hollywood writer-director best able to measure the pulse of that all-important teen audience. His era was the ‘80s, when Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) ruled box offices on the strength of his ability to see through the eyes of his high school characters. “John couldn’t write adults,” says Michael Chinich, who ran Hughes’ production company. “He wasn’t an adult himself. He didn’t know how to be an adult.” And when he grew too old to be a kid, he lost his inspiration.
Veteran film critic Kirk Honeycutt quotes Chinich in his lively, informative account, John Hughes: A Life in Film (RacePoint Publishing). Honeycutt clearly enjoys his subject and his movies without being blind to failures and shortcomings. A phenomenal success in the ‘80s, Hughes ran out of good ideas in the ‘90s, Honeycutt acknowledges, and disappeared in the ‘00s. In 2009, he collapsed while out walking and was pronounced dead of a heart attack. He was 59.
Hughes began his career by pitching gags to Joan Collins and Rodney Dangerfield before a writing gig with National Lampoon lanced him into screenwriting for National Lampoon’s Class Reunion (1982). A committed Midwesterner, he loathed Hollywood and preferred to live and work in Chicago. An outsider in high school, Hughes identified with the frustrations of the kids in his movies, memorably played by Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, John Cusack and Anthony Michael Hall. His best movies were emotionally autobiographical and avoided chasing laughter with easy pop culture references. His work became the stuff of pop culture references. At his best, Hughes depicted a fully developed universe grounded in visual details and populated by characters speaking in a teen argot of his own invention. Adults were peripheral annoyances and the casts were chosen to insure that the actors really looked like teenagers.
Hughes was incredibly prolific, directing only eight films but writing no less than 46, producing 21 and leaving behind a file cabinet of unused screenplays. He may have grown tired. By all reports, he became erratic in the late ‘80s, hiring and firing and rehiring with little explanation and less tact. With Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), one of his few adult movies, he discovered a soul mate in John Candy. Hughes was devastated by the comedian’s death in 1994, which coincided with the release of his Baby’s Day Out, a comedy about a kidnapped infant that stumbled badly with audiences and was roundly condemned as just plain dumb. He retired to his mansion in Lake Forest, Illinois, and turned to gentleman farming, secure in the knowledge that he helped define an era.
