John Hughes Dies at 59

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Friday, 07 August 2009 11:04

By a cosmic coincidence I was stuck on a matter of trivia concerning the film Pretty in Pink the other day. I was trying to remember the name of the song that plays during the final scene at the prom, the one that plays for 17 minutes, which is a duration nearly four-times as long as the song really is. As you’ll remember, the ending to Pretty in Pink sees Andy (Molly Ringwald), the girl from the wrong side of the tracks, reunite with her BFF Duckie (Jon Cryer) before admitting to the uppercrust Blane (Andrew McCarthy) that she really does love him amongst the romantic mist of the school parking lot. But that was originally not meant to be. 48506870

It’s been said that in the original script that Andy ends up with Duckie, but when the film was screened for test audiences they balked and the studio forced screenwriter John Hughes and director Howard Deutch to partner up Andy and Blaine in the end. Slighted, Hughes and Deutch went on to make Some Kind of Wonderful, a film that was also about a love triangle and class warfare. Hughes even wanted Ringwald for the role of Amanda, but she turned it down, ending her highly successful working relationship with Hughes in the process. Looking back, you can almost see the signs that this was the beginning of the end. Four years later Hughes would direct his final film.

John Hughes, the man whose name in the 80s was synonymous with teen angst and high school drama, died in Manhattan yesterday at the relatively young age of 59. He was out for a walk when he suffered a heart attack. Hughes started out as a comedy writer, penning jokes for the likes of Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers. He later went on to write for National Lampoon, where he created the Griswold family, later spun off into a popular series of films starring Chevy Chase.

After the release of National Lampoon’s Vacation, the sky was the limit for Hughes. Between 1984 and 1991 he wrote 16 screenplays, produced 14 films and directed 8. Some contributed Hughes post-’91 “retirement” to burnout, and that maybe so, but the fact of the matter is that Hughes had become something of a recluse in his

later years. Unreliably photographed in about 10 years, and only sparingly giving out interviews – the last one for a special edition DVD of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – he lived on an Illinois farm, only occasionally writing scripts under a pen name.

Hughes will primarily be remembered for the three year stretch between 1984 and 1986 where he wrote and directed Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Weird Science (1985), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Sixteen Candles (1986) and wrote Pretty in Pink (1985) and the sequel National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985). In that short time, Hughes became the authoritative voice of a generation. No one had written teenagers like Hughes before, his more complex characterization in stark contrast to Disney films like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, or movies about well meaning hoodlums like American Graffiti or The Outsiders.

Hughes’ work continues to inform how teen characters are written on both the small screen and big screen. His influence highly informed the work of Kevin Williamson, who dedicated an entire episode of his WB series Dawson’s Creek to a parody of The Breakfast Club. Hughes success on TV was not as great, his movies Ferris Bueller and Uncle Buck turned into short-lived series devoid of the original’s charm and humour. Many wondered if these bastardizations of his work exacerbated Hughes’ flight from Hollywood. But probably it was burnout with the box office failure of his last film Curly Sue (1991) that was the double-whammy that got him out of the game.

His name most closely related to writing the continuing Home Alone sequels and remakes of Disney classics like 101 Dalmatians and Flubber, Hughes didn’t need to get back behind the camera to secure his legacy, but it was always hoped that he would do so. After all, Terrence Malick took 20 years off between films, George Lucas 22, so I suppose it could have been possible. But without it, Hughes’ impact as “The Bard of Teen Angst” secures his place in the annals of filmmaking. He launched the careers of Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Matthew Broderick, John Cusack, Macaulay Culkin and Steve Carell. He popularized “Save Ferris,” Simple Minds, and even coined the phrase “Mr. Mom,” the film for which he wrote the screenplay. The man will be missed, but his voice will stay with us forever.

And the song? "If You Leave" by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. And now you know the rest of the story.