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Up to Eleven: John Hughes (1986)
Issue 12: The John Hughes Cinematic Universe
Hi friends,
Over the last decade, numerous new superhero movies have been hyped as 'a superhero movie in the style of John Hughes.' What they don’t realize is that John Hughes made a number of superhero movies; they just didn’t have spandex or capes. Welcome to Issue 12 of UP TO ELEVEN, featuring an interview in which Molly Ringwald interviewed John Hughes in 1986 (below).
It’s December, the holidays are here, and I’m almost certain that Home Alone is playing right now on cable. Prior to its release, little was known about Home Alone other than it featured a kid from Uncle Buck, the voice of The Wonder Years and a nearly made man from GoodFellas. At the beginning of 1990, screenwriting hero William Goldman mentioned Home Alone in his New York Magazine column stating, “No one knew anything about this except that it’s a John Hughes production, and John Hughes productions make money.” Fast forward to a few weeks before Home Alone’s November 1990 release, he added that Home Alone would be,“the unquestionable sleeper of the season. Another John Hughes hit. I just keep hearing better & better things about it.” Of course, we all know what happened next: Home Alone wasn’t just a hit; it was a grand slam. In his last column of 1990, Goldman wrote:
“People thought it might do well, maybe a "double," as they sometimes refer to pictures that take in a splendid $50 million. But one of the biggest pictures of all time? (Some people predict it may actually end up third, behind E.T. and Star Wars,) Now pundits are telling us why. "You see, it's every child's fantasy," they say. Or "It's so obvious—it's the dream of the child in all of us."
Total bulls—.
No one knows remotely why. It's John Hughes at his best. It can't hurt Rupert Murdoch. At the least, it added a new verb to Hollywoodese: "to be Home Aloned." More than one executive said to me, "My picture did 40, but it would have done 50 if we hadn't been Home Aloned."
William Goldman is known for saying that in Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.” Nobody knows when a movie will hit or bomb until it opens. You can have the highest paid cast or biggest concept with the greatest director, but nothing is certain, but Home Alone had John Hughes and “John Hughes productions make money.” Home Alone ended up taking in more than $476 million against a $17 million budget and just one year later, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York brought in another $359 million…with no superheroes in sight, except for Kevin McCallister—one of many young superheroes in the John Hughes Cinematic Universe.
Before we were inundated with capes, superpowers, and sequelitis, John Hughes built his own cinema universe centered in the suburbs of Chicago. While attending Shermer High School, it’s likely Ferris and Cameron knew of Bender, Claire, and Andy—maybe Brian and Allison. It’s unlikely they knew nearby Chicago suburbanites Andie or the Geek, but maybe? Who knows, perhaps they met at an event also attended by the McCallisters or Griswolds. Hughes built a world of vast possibilities and scenarios rooted in reality for teenagers, allowing them to see themselves in his movies by consistently treating them as adults.
My favorite scene in a John Hughes movie lacks parties, jokes, and dialogue, but says everything you need to know about John Hughes. Halfway into Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, there’s a scene at the Art Institute of Chicago where Hughes cuts back and forth as Cameron gets lost in Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and Ferris kisses Sloane with a beautiful stain glass window in the background—all while an instrumental cover of The Smith’s “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” plays. It’s filmmaking mastery and nothing about it says: teen movie. It's John Hughes saying, 'Yeah, this is movie with teenagers, but age is just a number. We all love art, and we all love love. These things matter, and I'm putting this scene in my movie, damnit.'
Minutes after the museum, Cameron complains that he’s seen “nothing good,” forcing an exasperated Ferris out of their taxi…only to reappear on a parade float holding a microphone to save the day by performing Danke Schoen and Twist and Shout to thousands of Von Steuben Day paraders, but most importantly to “a young man who doesn't think he's seen anything good today - Cameron Frye, this one's for you.”
For years, I’ve thought that Ferris Bueller was John Hughes’s idea of a superhero, and that we’re all Cameron Frye. When you think about it, Ferris’s superpower isn’t his fearlessness; it’s his ability to give his struggling friend the best day of his life.
When Molly Ringwald interviewed John Hughes for Seventeen magazine in 1986 (below), she was eighteen-years-old and he was thirty-seven. It’s a remarkable conversation. Just one year before, Hughes spoke with Interview magazine, saying, “I don’t want to be too cool. You get so caught up with whether you’re doing it right.”
Enjoy!
The John Hughes Interview
INTERVIEW BY MOLLY RINGWALD
SEVENTEEN | SPRING 1986
This interview has been curated from its original form and length to highlight eleven noteworthy passages. While we’ve curated this interview, we have not edited any words from the questions or responses in the passages below. What makes the eleven passages we curate ‘noteworthy’? We have our reasons for selecting everything, but we think it’s better for you to draw your own conclusions. It’s more fun that way, right? We highly recommend reading the full interview here. Enjoy!
MOLLY RINGWALD: So, which of your characters were you most like while growing up?
JOHN HUGHES: I was a little bit like Samantha. A lot of my feelings went into her character. I was also very much like Allison in Breakfast Club. I was a nobody. And I'm also a lot like Ferris Bueller.
RINGWALD: But of all the characters, which would you say is most like you?
HUGHES: Most like me? I'm a cross between Samantha and Ferris.
RINGWALD: Do you think you'll always work with young actors?
HUGHES: Not every time, maybe, but . . .
RINGWALD: You won't abandon them?
HUGHES: No, I won't abandon them.
RINGWALD: Do you think the Brat Pack's recent obnoxious image is deserved, or does the press just pick on them because of their age
HUGHES: I think that this clever moniker was slapped on these young actors, and I think it's unfair. It's a label.
RINGWALD: People my age were just beginning to be respected because of recent films such as yours, and now it's like someone had to bring them down a peg or two, don't you think?
HUGHES: There is definitely a little adult envy. The young actors get hit harder because of their age. Because "Rat Pack" - which Brat Pack is clearly a parody of - was not negative. "Brat Pack" is. It suggests unruly, arrogant young people, and that description isn't true of these people. And the label has been stuck on people who never even spoke to the reporter who coined it.
RINGWALD: A lot of people said in the reviews of The Breakfast Club, "Why should somebody make a movie about teen problems?" I couldn't believe that. I mean, we are a part of this society ...
HUGHES: I think it's wrong not to allow someone the right to have a problem because of their age. "People say, "Well, they're young. They have their whole lives ahead of them. What do they have to complain about?" They forget very quickly what it's like to be young.
RINGWALD: Who would want to remember? I'm tortured. People forget the feeling of having to go to school on Monday and take a test in physics that you don't understand at all. It's hard. Right now, I don't think I'll ever forget it.
HUGHES: Ferris has a line where he refers to his father's saying that high school was like a great party. Ferris knows what his father was like, and he knows that his father has just forgotten the bad parts. Adults ask me all sorts of baffling questions, like, "Your teenage dialogue - how do you do that?" and "Have you actually seen teens interact?" And I wonder if they think that people under twenty-one are a separate species. We shot Ferris at my old high school, and I talked with the students a lot. And I loved it, because it was easy to strike up a conversation with them. I can walk up to a seventeen-year-old and say, "How do you get along with your friends?" and he'll say, "Okay." You ask a thirty-five-year-old the same question, and he'll say, "Why do you want to know? What's wrong? Get away from me." All those walls built up.
RINGWALD: Do you think that society looks at teenagers differently today than when you were one?
HUGHES: Definitely. My generation had to be taken seriously because we were stopping things and burning things. We were able to initiate change, because we had such vast numbers. We were part of the baby boom, and when we moved, everything moved with us. But now, there are fewer teens, and they aren't taken as seriously as we were. You make a teenage movie, and critics say, "How dare you?" There's just a general lack of respect for young people now.
RINGWALD: What were you like growing up?
HUGHES: I was kind of quiet. I grew up in a neighborhood that was mostly girls and old people. There weren't any boys my age, so I spent a lot of time by myself, imagining things. And every time we would get established somewhere, we would move. Life just started to get good in seventh grade, and then we moved to Chicago. I ended up in a really big high school, and I didn't know anybody. But then The Beatles came along.
RINGWALD: Changed your whole life?
HUGHES: Changed my whole life. And then Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home came out and really changed me. Thursday I was one person, and Friday I was another. My heroes were Dylan, John Lennon and Picasso, because they each moved their particular medium forward, and when they got to the point where they were comfortable, they always moved on. I liked them at a time when I was in a pretty conventional high school, where the measure of your popularity was athletic ability. And I'm not athletic - I've always hated team sports.
I'd feel extremely self-conscious writing about something I don't know.
RINGWALD: You've been sticking pretty close to Chicago, but now that you and your family have made the transition to L.A., do you think you'll go back and film everything in Chicago?
HUGHES: I think I will. I'm very comfortable there. It's out of the Hollywood spotlight. And I like the seasons.
RINGWALD: What about what you were saying about the way Dylan and Lennon were constantly moving forward? Don't you think you've done a lot of movies about Chicago?
HUGHES: No, they weren't about Chicago. Chicago's a setting.
RINGWALD: But, they're about suburban life . . .
HUGHES: I think it's wise for people to concern themselves with the things they know about. I don't consider myself qualified to do a movie about international intrigue - I seldom leave the country. I'd really like to do something on gangs, but to do that, I've got to spend some time with gang members. I'd feel extremely self-conscious writing about something I don't know.
RINGWALD: I think one of the most admirable things about you is that you do write about the things you know and care about. I think that teen movies were getting a bad reputation because these fifty-year-old guys were writing about things they didn't care about.
HUGHES: I love writing. When I finish a script, it's a joy to sit down and go all the way through it. It's a very private thing, because a screenplay is not like a book. When a book is written, it's a final product. But, when a script is finished, it's really just a blueprint. And it's an extraordinary experience for me to watch someone take what I wrote and imagined and make it three-dimensional. And it's great if someone adds something I hadn't thought of.
RINGWALD: You wanted to be in a band at one point?
HUGHES: Yeah, but I'm too old for that now. Rock 'n' roll is a young form. People over twenty-five ruin it. This whole censorship thing has come about because old people are playing with a form that is essentially young and rebellious. Do you know how brilliant it was for The Beatles to break up when they did?
RINGWALD: Yes, it was great. But I don't think rock 'n' roll burnout has anything to do with age. I just think that people can go only so far. People reach a point.
HUGHES: I can't deny people their art form. But you have to be challenged, and you have to meet that challenge.
RINGWALD: What are your favorite bands?
HUGHES: The Beatles and The Clash are the greatest. I've listened to the Beatles' White Album for more than sixteen years, and when we were filming Ferris Bueller, I listened to the album every single day for fifty-six days.
RINGWALD: That's the album I listened to all during Pretty In Pink, remember?
HUGHES: Yeah, I know.
RINGWALD: How do you see yourself changing in the next fifteen years?
HUGHES: Growing older.
RINGWALD: I know.
HUGHES: It's a foregone conclusion. What's next for you?
RINGWALD: I don't know. I'd like to finish high school, and I'm totally late on everything to do with my SATs. I'm going to apply to colleges soon. So do you have anything you're dying to do?
HUGHES: I have a hundred things I'm dying to do. Make that a hundred and four. I'm going to write for a while. Going to see Pretty In Pink. Get to go sit in theaters and look at the film with great pride. I like watching you work - you know that.