John Hughes, the Hollywood writer-director whose movies defined a generation and dominated a decade, died of a heart attack during a Thursday morning walk in New York City.
Hughes, who brought us Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Home Alone, among others, was 59.
So many people owe their fame to Hughes – Molly Ringwald, Matthew Broderick, Bill Paxton, John Cusack, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Macaulay Culkin, and of course the band Simple Minds, whose song “Don’t You Forget About Me” provided the soundtrack to his most epic work, The Breakfast Club.
Here’s what Entertainment Weekly had to say about Hughes’ masterpiece:
If Hughes made his mark with Sixteen Candles, then he upped the ante a year later with The Breakfast Club — an old script that he claimed he’d pulled out of his drawer, and you could believe it, because the handful of “types” in the movie (jock, brain, depressive raccoon-eyed misfit, etc.) almost seemed to be a variation on the overly schematic teen role-model sociology of something like American Graffiti. Judd Nelson’s mouthy delinquent, in particular, straddled eras; he was one part greaser, one part punk, with one foot in a sitcom. What was new in The Breakfast Club, and so, so fresh, was the way that that library setting looked and felt — like a comfy suburban prison, almost womblike in its concrete spaciousness — and what happened when the kids sitting around in it one long Saturday-morning detention finally dropped their guards and said what so many kids in high school, deep down, really want to say. Not so much “Can we be friends?” as “How, exactly, did we get to be enemies?” The Simple Minds song “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” may be the single most triumphant, and stirring, use of a pop song in any teen movie. It’s almost shocking in its humanity. And it became John Hughes’ ultimate “statement.”
Seriously, what teenage girl in the eighties didn’t want to be Molly Ringwald? And what teenage guy didn’t see himself in at least one of Hughes’ male protagonists?
Hughes, of course, largely dropped out of the public eye in 1991 after directing his eighth movie, Curly Sue.
His final screenplay was last year’s Drillbit Taylor.
By shaggy August 7, 2009 at 3:53 pm
so very sad
By Mab August 7, 2009 at 5:58 pm
We won’t forget you, Princess-maker!
By Really? August 8, 2009 at 10:31 am
What teenage girl or boy didn’t see themselves in his movie? That would be minorities. Hughes went out of his way to keep his movies lily white…
By No, Really August 8, 2009 at 12:33 pm
@ Really?,
Obviously, you have never been to the suburban Midwest. If you had, then you would have noticed that there arent’ very many black folks… well, anywhere. Especially in the 1980′s. Stop being a lil punk.
By Really? August 8, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Well I guess that’s the way you and Hughes like it. And I know there are black people there, you just choose to ignore them. Especially when making movies.
By Not Sayin', Just Sayin' August 8, 2009 at 5:09 pm
I thought she became famous on “The Facts of Life.”
By Mike August 9, 2009 at 1:21 am
More proof that raceniks can inject the issue into even the most benign and meaningless of situations. This is big stuff? Middle America teen angst films aren’t black enough? Really? No doubt if he had inserted a black character or two, the same ninnies would decry them as mere tokens and we’d be off on yet another silly tangent. This is one reason we just can’t seem to reach a serious level of debate on the race thing…