Line #60 Creator/JohnHughes


1	[[quoteright:310:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/john_hughes.jpeg]]
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3	->''"It is thanks to him that not a day goes by when someone, somewhere does not come up to me, taps me on the shoulder and says, '[[IAmNotSpock Hey, Ferris]], [[Film/FerrisBuellersDayOff is this your day off?]]'"''
4	-->-- '''Creator/MatthewBroderick''' in his memorial speech for Hughes at the 82nd UsefulNotes/{{Academy Awards\|Ceremonies}}
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6	John Wilden Hughes Jr. (February 18, 1950 – August 6, 2009) was an American filmmaker best known for the teen comedies he wrote and directed in the mid-[[The80s 1980s]]: ''Film/SixteenCandles'', ''Film/TheBreakfastClub'', ''Film/WeirdScience'', and ''Film/FerrisBuellersDayOff''.
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8	Hughes grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan and then Northbrook, Illinois. He dropped out of the University of Arizona, then worked as an advertising copywriter before getting a job as a contributor for ''National Lampoon'' magazine. He was also one of the key developers of ''Delta House'', the TV spinoff of ''Film/AnimalHouse''. His first big successes as a screenwriter were ''Film/NationalLampoonsVacation'' and ''Film/MrMom''. (He got a rare shared screenplay (and sole story) credit for ''Film/NationalLampoonsEuropeanVacation'' when his script was rewritten by Robert Klane.) After ''Ferris Bueller'', he directed ''Film/PlanesTrainsAndAutomobiles'', ''She's Having a Baby'', ''Film/UncleBuck'', and ''Film/CurlySue'', and wrote and produced ''Film/PrettyInPink'', ''Film/SomeKindOfWonderful'', ''Film/NationalLampoonsChristmasVacation'', and the first three ''Film/HomeAlone'' movies. (He also produced ''Only the Lonely'' for ''Home Alone'' director Creator/ChrisColumbus, one of only two films he produced that he didn't write; the other was ''New Port South'', written and directed by his son James.)
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10	During the 1990s, he somehow ended up writing and producing a string of more family-oriented comedies, including the live-action versions of ''[[Film/OneHundredAndOneDalmatians1996 101 Dalmatians]]'' and ''Film/DennisTheMenace'', and the remake of ''Film/MiracleOnThirtyFourthStreet''. Experiencing a severe case of ArtistDisillusionment after the death of his friend, actor Creator/JohnCandy, in 1994, he would become a [[ReclusiveArtist recluse]], and the rest of his screenplays would be written under the pseudonym [[Literature/TheCountOfMonteCristo Edmond Dantes]] (also used for 1992's ''Film/{{Beethoven}}''). His last film was the 2008 comedy ''Film/DrillbitTaylor''. He died of a sudden heart attack in 2009 from living under stress and isolation. Shortly after his death, his friend Creator/VinceVaughn said in ''Variety'' that Hughes likely would have made more films as a director if Candy had lived longer.
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12	''The Breakfast Club'', ''Ferris Bueller's Day Off'', and ''Home Alone'' were later posthumously inducted into the UsefulNotes/NationalFilmRegistry by the Library of Congress.
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14	----
15	!!Teen Films
16	* ''Film/SixteenCandles'' (1984) wrote and directed
17	* ''Film/TheBreakfastClub'' (1985) wrote, directed and produced
18	* ''Film/WeirdScience'' (1985) wrote and directed
19	* ''Film/PrettyInPink'' (1986) wrote and produced
20	* ''Film/FerrisBuellersDayOff'' (1986) wrote, directed and produced
21	* ''Film/SomeKindOfWonderful'' (1987) wrote and produced
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23	!! Films featuring Creator/JohnCandy
24	* ''Film/PlanesTrainsAndAutomobiles'' (1987) wrote, directed and produced
25	* ''Film/TheGreatOutdoors'' (1988) wrote and produced
26	* ''Film/UncleBuck'' (1989) wrote, directed and produced
27	* ''Film/HomeAlone'' (1990) wrote and produced
28	* ''Film/CareerOpportunities'' (1991) wrote and produced
29	* ''Film/OnlyTheLonely'' (1991) produced only
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31	!! Other Films
32	* ''Film/NateAndHayes'' (1983) wrote
33	* ''Film/ShesHavingABaby'' (1988) wrote, directed and produced
34	* ''Film/{{Dutch}}'' (1991) wrote
35	* ''Film/CurlySue'' (1991) wrote, directed and produced
36	* ''Film/{{Beethoven}}'' (1992) wrote (under his Edmund Dantes pseudonym)
37	* ''Film/DennisTheMenace'' (1993) wrote and produced
38	* ''Film/BabysDayOut'' (1994) wrote and produced
39	* ''Film/MiracleOnThirtyFourthStreet'' (1994) wrote and produced
40	* ''[[Film/OneHundredAndOneDalmatians1996 101 Dalmatians]]'' (1996) wrote and produced
41	* ''Film/{{Flubber}}'' (1997) wrote and produced
42	* ''Film/ReachTheRock'' (1998) wrote and produced
43	* ''Film/JustVisiting'' (2001) wrote
44	* ''Film/NewPortSouth'' (2001) produced only
45	* ''Film/MaidInManhattan'' (2002) story (under his Edmund Dantes pseudonym)
46	* ''Film/DrillbitTaylor'' (2008) story and character (under his Edmund Dantes pseudonym)
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49	!!His films (those few that don't already have pages of their own) provide examples of:
50	* The80s: Most of his best-known and best-liked films were made this decade.
51	* AdultsAreUseless
52	** In a couple of his movies, the bad guys are people who take "just doing their job" too far.
53	** Parents are usually depicted as well-meaning, but generally out-of-touch and ignorant.
54	** This is played with in ''Ferris Bueller's Day Off'', where, yes, the adults are easily fooled and/or moronic...but the kids are easily fooled, too.
55	** ''The Breakfast Club'' hit this one in a somewhat dark way. Not only are there no positive adult characters in the movie (save Carl the janitor), almost all of them are downright cruel and abusive. That attitude is summed up pretty well in Allison's line, "When you grow up, your heart dies."
56	* AlanSmithee: Went under the name Edmund Dantes at least three times.
57	* AllThereInTheManual: Hughes apparently spent several years putting together a detailed history for the Shermer universe of his films (see below), but his stories and notes have never been released. A lot of it wouldn't match up, anyhow (see TheVerse below).
58	* AmusingInjuries: Hughes seems to have loved this trope, given that he used it in his 90s family comedies.
59	* AntiHero: A lot of his characters tend to be these, ranging from the [[ButtMonkey put-upon]], [[TheSnarkKnight cynical]] [[Film/SixteenCandles Samantha Baker]] to [[SociopathicHero bad boy]] [[Film/TheBreakfastClub John Bender]].
60	* TheAntiNihilist: Seems to be a running philosophy in his films, but he's been known to toy with idealism, morality, and the human condition in general.
61	* AuthorAppeal: Fine art, indie music, Music/TheBeatles, and UsefulNotes/{{Chicago}}.
62	* AuthorAvatar: Creator/AnthonyMichaelHall's characters in his films are based on him.
63	* BadCopIncompetentCop: Parents, authority figures, and institutions are portrayed as hopelessly bumbling at best or at worst, actively malicious and corrupt.
64	* BlackComedy: Sometimes, and it's '''black'''. The most notorious instance is Brian's confession in ''The Breakfast Club''.
65	* Creator/BratPack: He wrote and/or directed the most famous movies that the Brat Pack starred in.
66	* BrilliantButLazy: Quite a few of his characters, most notably Ferris Bueller and John Bender, are quite smart but refuse to use it for anything useful.
67	* ButtMonkey: Great at writing these, with Neal Page and Clark Griswold as his two biggest.
68	* UsefulNotes/{{Chicago}}: The suburbs of Chicago, actually.
69	* CrapsackWorld: His movies are frequently set in one. They're packed to the brim with {{Hate Sink}}s, {{Butt Monkey}}s and lots of angst.
70	* CreatorProvincialism: John Hughes' films are typically set in the UsefulNotes/{{Chicago}} North Shore where he grew up, to the point where residents of Northbrook and Evanston can still find intact areas that were used as filming locations. In ''Film/FerrisBuellersDayOff'' alone, you get the "Save Ferris" sign on the Northbrook water tower, the Glenbrook North High School auditorium entrance for Ferris' school's entrance, and Cameron's dad's Ferrari being parked in the Ben Rose House in Highland Park. The recurring suburban setting of Shermer is even named after Northbrook's original name, Shermerville.
71	* DeadpanSnarker: The usual style of humor his films provide given that they almost always revolved around teenage protagonists.
72	* DeanBitterman: Hughes explored this trope twice. In both cases, the principal takes administration a little ''too'' far, and becomes needlessly vindictive in dealing with a student.
73	** Principal Vernon from ''The Breakfast Club'' is the dramatic version of this trope. At his worst, he tells Bender to punch him, because who's going to believe a useless punk over a respected principal?
74	** Principal Rooney from ''Ferris Bueller's Day Off'' is the same thing, except played for comedy. Every time he oversteps the proper boundaries, he suffers a HumiliationConga.
75	** The Assistant Principal from ''Film/UncleBuck'' is a female example that works in an Elementary school. She is hard on the children and dislikes "silliness" and imagination. She gets called out by [[PapaWolf the titular character]].
76	* HumansAreFlawed / HumansAreBastards: The latter can qualify for some of the antagonists in his films. His protagonists are more flawed than outright bastardly.
77	* KnightTemplar: Dick Vernon from ''The Breakfast Club'' qualifies.
78	* LiveActionCartoon: His family comedies from ''Home Alone'' to ''Beethoven'' feel like Saturday morning cartoons with a large abundance of AmusingInjuries, physics and other writing elements that one might find in a Looney Tunes short.
79	* MonochromeCasting: Virtually none of his movies had a non-white lead. Justified, since most of his stories took place in the Chicago North Shore, which was still not quite integrated when he began writing and still has a majority-white population to this day.
80	* NothingButHits: Notably averted. Hughs was well-known to carefully curate his films' soundtracks with moderate pop hits by under-the-radar acts, resulting in each one being [[CultSoundtrack a nice time capsule of hidden gems from the era in which they were released]].
81	* RevisitingTheRoots: Attempted with ''Reach The Rock'', a dramedy that hearkened back to his Shermer films, to the point where the film took place in Shermer''ville''. Advertisements and the film's trailer played this up, saying "John Hughes makes a welcome return to his roots."
82	* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism: His films would arguably lean on the cynical side of the scale, to the point that some viewers have interpreted vaguely misanthrophic or nihilistic sentiments. Despite that, his films have toyed with idealism and are usually feel-good or heartfelt, treating love, friendship and kindness as admirable traits and those who maintain their idealism and sincerity, like Del, as worthy of respect.
83	* TheStinger: Occasionally showed up, as in ''Film/FerrisBuellersDayOff''.
84	* TheVerse: In a 1999 ''Premiere'' [[https://web.archive.org/web/20151002133031/http://home.comcast.net/~aimsters4/bclub.html article]], Hughes himself declared that ''Film/SixteenCandles'', ''Film/TheBreakfastClub'', ''Film/FerrisBuellersDayOff'', and ''Film/PlanesTrainsAndAutomobiles'' are all a part of the same universe, revolving around the fictitious suburb of Shermer (a fictionalization of Hughes' real-life hometown of Northbrook, Illinois, which was originally called Shermerville). Sadly, the crossover possibilities were never explored in film.
85	--> '''[[WordOfGod John Hughes]]:''' When I started making movies, I thought I would just invent a town where everything happened. Everybody, in all of my movies, is from Shermer, Illinois. Del Griffith from ''Planes, Trains & Automobiles'' lives two doors down from John Bender. Ferris Bueller knew Samantha Baker from ''Sixteen Candles''. For 15 years I've written my Shermer stories in prose, [[AllThereInTheManual collecting its history]].
86	** It's long been speculated that ''Film/PrettyInPink'', ''Film/SomeKindOfWonderful'', and ''Film/HomeAlone'' also take place in the Shermerverse, since those movies were written (but not directed) by Hughes and feature similar themes. Adding on to that, there is mixed evidence that ''Film/UncleBuck'' and ''Film/CurlySue'' (both directed by Hughes) might take place in the Shermerverse, but this hasn't been confirmed.
87	** ''Film/WeirdScience'' explicitly takes place in Shermer (Lisa is seen teaching the Shermer High gym class at the end), though it has its own SpeculativeFiction internal logic that is inconsistent with the other canon Shermerverse movies.
88	** ''She's Having A Baby'' does NOT take place in the Shermerverse, since Neal Page's wife is seen watching that movie on television in ''Film/PlanesTrainsAndAutomobiles''.
89	* UnsympatheticComedyProtagonist: Some of his films have them, [[AlternativeCharacterInterpretation depending on who you ask.]]
90	* WriteWhatYouKnow: The plots of ''Film/PlanesTrainsAndAutomobiles'' and ''Film/{{Dutch}}'' are similar enough to make one wonder if they might have been inspired by something that Hughes actually went through at some point. And as it turns out, yep, they were.

Context Creator / JohnHughes