I blinked – hard – when I read the subject line in my email: John Hughes is dead.
“Stay tuned for multiple repeats of The Breakfast Club,” my main squeeze wrote. When someone you love dies, someone who loves you should be the one to break the news.
And I loved John Hughes.
Hughes, a writer, director and producer, constructed a universe of teen archetypes, so capably and reassuringly laid out in The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Pretty In Pink: The Princess, the Geek, the Loner, the Jock, the Freak, the Delinquent, the Richie, the Bitch, the Tomboy. He really “got” inside the heads of teenaged girls – and pencil-necked geeks.
Perhaps best known for a string of comic hits starring his eye-rolling, Gen X muse, the auburn-haired teen goddess, Molly Ringwald, Hughes was the first filmmaker, writer and director of the late 1980s I could actually name – outside of the usual gang of ’70s blockbuster filmmakers: Stephen Spielberg (Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders, E.T. and Poltergeist), George Lucas (American Graffiti, Star Wars), and John Landis (Animal House).
Although the once-prolific American filmmaker – best known for a string of successful comedies in the late ’80s and early ’90s – hadn’t produced anything approaching the quality of the angsty, conversationally-driven, “Brat Pack”-launching teen classic, The Breakfast Club, for years, I still held out hope that he would one day stage a brilliant comeback. Some day very soon.
So when I tried to absorb the news of Hughes’s premature passing (only 59, for chrissakes), all I could think was, Shit. SHIT. We won’t be seeing another Hughes move. Did he even know how much we loved his stuff?
Unless you’re a movie-blog/film review nut, you might not realize how often John Hughes’s name is invoked by people who write, blog or text about movies.
Seriously, just yesterday I was reading a post about how in recent years Hughes had been writing under a non de plume on various projects for other filmmakers. It even mentioned his actual alias. (Not Alan Smithee; Edmund Dantes, if you must know.).
It’s too soon to pen a career-spanning retrospective. Why not revisit a previous post to the only U.S. A.-American filmmaker to address the thorny issue of “class” in mainstream, teen-oriented films? Here it is.
