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, "
Hey Ferris,
is this your day off?"
—
Matthew Broderick,
Memorial Speech for Hughes at the 82nd Academy AwardsJohn Hughes (1950-2009) was an American filmmaker best known for the teen comedies he wrote and directed in the mid 1980s:
Sixteen Candles,
The Breakfast Club,
Weird Science and
Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
He started as a writer for National Lampoon Magazine, and was one of the key developers of
Delta House, the TV spinoff of
Animal House. His first big successes as a screenwriter (the year before
Sixteen Candles) were
National Lampoon's Vacation and
Mr. Mom. After
Ferris Bueller, he directed
Planes, Trains and Automobiles,
She's Having a Baby,
Uncle Buck, and
Curly Sue, and wrote and produced
Pretty In Pink,
Some Kind of Wonderful, the
Lampoon's Vacation sequel entitled
Christmas Vacation, and the first three
Home Alone movies. (He also produced
Only The Lonely for writer-director (and
Home Alone (and its sequel) director)
Chris Columbus, 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.)
During the 1990s, he somehow ended up writing and producing a string of more family-oriented comedies, including the live-action versions of
101 Dalmatians and
Dennis the Menace, and the remake of
Miracle on 34th Street. In the following decade he would become a
recluse, and the rest of his screenplays would be written under the pseudonym
Edmond Dantes. His last film was the Owen Wilson comedy
Drillbit Taylor.
Films he directed include:
His films (those few that don't already have pages of their own) provide examples of:
- Adults Are Useless
- In a couple of his movies, the bad guys are people who take "just doing their job" too far.
- Parents are usually depicted as well-meaning, but generally out-of-touch and ignorant.
- However, in The Breakfast Club, virtually all of the parents are portrayed as abusive, completely self-absorbed monsters.
- All There in the Manual: 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.
- Author Appeal: Fine art, indie music and Chicago.
- Dean Bitterman: 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.
- 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?
- 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 Humiliation Conga.
- The Eighties: Most of his best-known and best-liked films were made this decade.
- Monochrome Casting: Virtually none of his movies had a non-white lead. Justified, since most of his stories took place in American suburbia, which was still not quite integrated when he began writing.
- Something Completely Different: Weird Science is the odd man out among the teen pics, being much more fantasy-based and a little cruder in its humor than the others.
- The Stinger
- The Verse: In a 1999 Premiere article
, Hughes himself declared that Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles are all a part of the same universe. Sadly, the crossover possibilities were never explored in film. 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,
collecting its history.
- It's long been speculated that Pretty In Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, and Home Alone also take place in the Shermerverse, since those movies were written (but not directed) by Hughes and feature similar themes.
- Weird Science explicitly takes place in Shermer (Lisa is seen teaching the Shermer High gym class at the end), though it has its own Speculative Fiction internal logic that is inconsistent with the other canon Shermerverse movies.
- 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 Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
- The Windy City: The suburbs of Chicago, actually.
0 reviews