The curious case of… Edmond Dantès
John Hughes left an indelible mark on the teen film genre with the beloved trilogy Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (which celebrates its 30th birthday this year). He took a handful of young, "anti-star" actors and turned them into an unprecedented pop phenomenon that came to be known as the Brat Pack. He became the definitive cinematic exponent of an entire generation. And then, not quite suddenly, but not gradually either, he voluntarily left the world of images. How? And why? And who is Edmond Dantès, anyway?
Another kind of life
Hughes picked up on the pulse of the scorned adolescents of the 80s and transfused it intact onto the silver screen at age 34. Hence, many are those who argue that he remained forever stuck on the threshold of adulthood, never daring to cross it, and thus inevitably condemning his career to a short life. However, a more careful charting of his creative journey sheds light on a very different, much more exciting truth.
In fact, John Hughes lived his life backwards. He became a responsible adult, a family man and a professional at age 20. At 30, he went through the enthusiastic, post-adolescent phase of experimentation and new beginnings as a promising copy- and screenwriter. At 40 he had already left his mark on cinema by making films and hanging out with teenagers. By the age of 50 he was living as he pleased. You wouldn’t call him irresponsible, but certainly carefree.
But let’s start at the beginning. Or rather, the end… On the morning of August 6, 2009, John Hughes left Nancy, his wife/partner/companion of 39 years, sleeping in their room in a Manhattan hotel, and went out to take his regular morning stroll. They had arrived in New York the day before to visit their new – fourth – grandchild, the firstborn of their younger son, James. Even though he had never liked New York (“It would be the perfect city if you cleaned it up and moved everything ten feet further in”, he would say), he made sure he took along what were his life’s two most necessary tools: his notebook and his camera. Because of all the terms that could be used to describe him over the years (worker, printer’s clerk, joke writer, advertiser, humorous short story writer, screenwriter, filmmaker, producer, farmer…), there was only one that remained constant from his first to his very last breath: that of the persistent observer, religiously recording not only what he saw, but his interpretation of it or how it inspired him, filling up more than 300 notebooks with photographs, sketches and – primarily – texts.
But that morning in August he never got to pull out his pen. He only had time to take a few pictures before collapsing onto the sidewalk. The ambulance arrived immediately. But it was too late. He was already dead. Unexpectedly. From a heart attack. At the age of 59.
Far from the madding crowd
The last film that John Hughes shot – his ninth – was the cute, but inconsequential Curly Sue in 1991. At the time the film opened, its director had already turned his back on Hollywood, literally and metaphorically. The huge box office success Home Alone, which he had written and produced a year earlier, combined with the consistently high numbers (both in TV airings and DVD sales) of his classic trilogy, won him a solid financial freedom. He was no longer obliged to share all those thoughts and ideas he kept writing in his journals with anyone else other than his family and a few close friends. Through letters (at first) or e-mails (later), through intense conversations that lasted for hours, through cassettes (once upon a time) and through his iPod (recently), Hughes communicated with fearless honesty, but also imperishable adolescent narcissism, his passions, his wide and diverse knowledge and his big loves.
At the same time, his good friend John Candy, star of Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), The Great Outdoors (1988) and Uncle Buck (1989), and also a good family man, who owned a farm an hour from his hometown of Toronto, inspired Hughes to create his own Garden of Eden. After selling his home in Brentwood California, where he had moved at the request of the studios and where he had lasted for only four and a half years, steadily avoiding all social events, Hughes returned to the Midwest. He made his home in Lake Forest, in the greater Chicago area, he moved the headquarters of his company, Hughes Entertainment, to his old neighbourhood of Northbrook, and, near the Illinois/Wisconsin border he created an earthly paradise which he named Redwing Farms: gradually buying over one thousand hectares of barren land and, following extensive botanical research, reforesting the parts that used to be woodlands, cultivating the fields, establishing animal refuges and pastures, bringing in livestock, and designing and creating elaborate parks.
Hollywood wouldn’t leave him alone. And he responded as much and as often as he felt like it. But he was always motivated by his tireless faith in the idea of the – not necessarily conventional – family. As a screenwriter and producer, he participated in the sequels to Home Alone, co-wrote, among other films, the irresistible kid movies Dennis the Menace, 101 Dalmatians and Flubber, while, under the pseudonym of Edmond Dantès (a tribute to the literary protagonist of The Count of Montechristo), he thought up the screenplay for Beethoven, that anthem to the Saint Bernard, as well as, in the year 2002, the story of the last blockbuster to star Jennifer Lopez: a postmodern rendition of the egalitarian fairytale of Cinderella entitled Maid in Manhattan.
He never returned to directing films. "The sudden death of John Candy [in 1994, also of a heart attack] destroyed him," claims actor Vince Vaughn, also from Lake Forest and Hughes’ only friend from the Hollywood set in recent years. "He never missed the chance to confess his great love for Candy. If the latter had lived longer, I think that he (Hughes) would have made more films as a director".
Cinema as pen, ink, and paper
Cinema was never among his aspirations or his dreams. Hughes claimed that that he stumbled into the job. Actually, the job probably stumbled into him. Cinema... dreamt of John Hughes when Warner, not caring who would adapt it into a film, bought the rights to 'Vacation ’58', a short story Hughes had written for the – famous in the seventies – iconoclastic humor magazine The National Lampoon. Matty Simmons, the Lampoon’s editor, entrusted the story to Hughes, even though, up until then, as a screenwriter, Hughes only had failures to show for himself: a few episodes for the luckless TV series Delta House and the pointless horror parody Class Reunion, both produced by the National Lampoon. But 'Vacation ’58' became National Lampoon’s Vacation, directed by Harold Ramis and starring Chevy Chase, and proceeded to climb to the top rungs of the US box office in the summer of ’83. Cinema aspired to John Hughes when, during that summer, Mr. Mom, the first screenplay penned by him on his own and not under the aegis of the National Lampoon, was also a box office sensation. Hughes’ wish to direct his own films so that nothing would change or get lost on the way from page to screen could finally be granted.
With an aim to test his directorial prowess, Hughes wrote 'Detention', in which five high school kids from different social backgrounds have to spend Saturday in detention in the school library. The film cost next to nothing to make (one million dollars), and its title became much more alluring when Hughes heard a teenage friend of his son referring to detention as The Breakfast Club. But as the filming date approached, the director became more and more nervous. He felt that this bittersweet, not especially funny chamber piece was a risky debut. He needed something more light-hearted, more outgoing –a sure thing, which would offer the dynamic start behind the camera that would guarantee him creative independence, without which he had difficulty expressing himself. Looking through photos of actors that hoped to star in The Breakfast Club, Hughes discovered the porcelain, unusually beautiful face of the 15-year-old redhead Molly Ringwald and came up with an idea for the perfect debut: an eventful weekend in the life of a teenage girl whose birthday goes unnoticed because of her sister’s impending wedding.
Sixteen Candles, which Hughes wrote in a single weekend while staring at the photo of his young muse, premiered in May 1984 but did not achieve the anticipated ticket sales. However, the honesty and immediacy of the relationship between Ringwald’s Samantha and Anthony Michael Hall’s Geek, who desperately wants her to love him back, did not leave critics unmoved. Pauline Kael, for example, observed that it was a film that was "less coarse than most other teen films of the time" and that it was "very close to the tender British comedies of the forties and fifties." Nine months later, in February 1985, The Breakfast Club was a hit both at the box office (raking in 40 million dollars in ticket sales) and with film critics, who proclaimed Hughes the definitive auteur and exponent of the generation that was in its teens during the mid-eighties. This title was confirmed in the best way possible by the screenplays John Hughes went on to write, Weird Science (1985) and Pretty in Pink (1986), as well as by his last major (and hyper-cult) work as a director, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In one of his rare interviews, years later, John Hughes confessed the reasons for his love of these particular 15-year-olds. "My own generation [baby-boomers] received excessive attention, whereas these kids were struggling to find an identity when everyone had forgotten about them."
Each ending is a new beginning
John Hughes was born on 18 February 1950, in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. He was the only boy and the second born of four siblings. His family could barely make ends meet, in a neighbourhood where the middle class was flourishing. Twelve years later, hoping to improve their lot, the Hughes family moved to Northbrook Illinois, where John, a rebel and a Beatles fan but also an old-fashioned romantic, will meet his destiny: his schoolmate, Nancy Ludwig. In their senior year. At age 17.
John and Nancy made, what would turn out to be a lifelong relationship, official in 1970, when they married just as they turned 20. Very soon they had their own home and two sons, but they still felt like they had much more in common with their teenage neighbours than with their parents. Having quickly dropped out of Arizona State University, John took any job he could get (mainly in local factories), while at the same time he went after any chance to do what he was most passionate about: writing. He wrote jokes for famous comedians of the time, such as Roger Dangerfield and Joan Rivers, whom he never left alone, bombarding them with ideas and material that was custom made for them. Some of his most badly paid (5 to 10 dollars) but successful jokes ended up on TV’s 'The Tonight Show' and drew the attention of advertising companies. Needham, Harper & Steers was the first to hire him, on probation, before the all-powerful multinational Leo Burnett welcomed him to its demanding and highly competitive creative department in 1974. He did so well there (creating, among others, two long-running and indeed classic ad campaigns for Edge shaving gel and Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops), that his boss entrusted him with one of the company’s biggest contracts with a major tobacco company, which required Hughes to travel often to New York. He agreed for one reason only: it was in New York that the National Lampoon had its offices. He applied for a job there and was hired as an external contributor. Soon, he began to spend more time at the offices of his beloved magazine than at Leo Burnett. Finally, in 1979, he felt financially secure enough to give in to the magazine’s pressure and become a permanent member of its editorial team. His new job coincided with the unexpectedly big box office success of Animal House – the National Lampoon’s first foray into cinema...
