John Hughes, the writer, director, and producer whose movies defined adolescence for audiences who came of age in the 1980s and whose smart, sympathetic characters endure as icons of the "Brat Pack" generation, died yesterday at the age of 59.
The cause was a heart attack suffered during a morning walk in New York City. According to a spokesman for the late filmmaker, Mr. Hughes was visiting family.
The filmmaker found success in the entertainment industry by working his way through younger and younger protagonists, culminating in 1990's "Home Alone," still the most commercially successful live-action comedy of all time. He began as a writer for National Lampoon magazine, penning the 1983 hit film "National Lampoon's Vacation," and then embarked on a critically praised series of comedy-dramas about teenagers. Mr. Hughes wrote and directed "Sixteen Candles" (1984), "The Breakfast Club" (1985), "Weird Science" (1985), and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986), among others, and he wrote and produced "Pretty in Pink" (1986) and "Some Kind of Wonderful" (1987).
These films, scored to achingly emotive '80s pop-rock hits and featuring cast members who carried over from film to film, such as Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall, were more than box-office smashes. In their attention to the emotional realities and small crises of teenage America in the Reagan era, they captured the zeitgeist and the beat of teenage hearts, and they remain touchstones for those who were there. Ringwald, in particular, was Mr. Hughes's everygirl: smart, quietly pretty, exasperated with family and school, and hoping that the perfect boy would see her at last.
By the end of the 1980s, Mr. Hughes had changed direction again, writing and producing a series of broad yet bittersweet comedies featuring the late comedian John Candy.
Then he hit pay dirt with "Home Alone," the story of a moppet in suburban Chicago whose parents accidentally maroon him when they leave for vacation. The 10-year-old star, Macaulay Culkin, became an overnight sensation as the resourceful Kevin, battling a pair of comically inept burglars (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) with a series of Rube Goldberg booby traps. The image of Culkin in close-up, eyes popping and hands clapped to his cheeks, remains a pop-culture snapshot, a comic caricature of Munch's "The Scream."
Mr. Hughes did not direct "Home Alone" - Chris Columbus did - and after 1991's "Curly Sue," he stepped away from the director's chair for good. He continued to write and produce, but his output slowed by the end of the millennium, and by the early 2000s he had retreated from professional and public view.
In 1995, Mr. Hughes moved back to the Chicago area, his hometown and the psychic turf in which his characters were deeply rooted, dropped his agent, and ceased giving interviews. Eventually, he relocated to a farm in northern Illinois with his wife and former high school sweetheart, Nancy. She survives him, as do their two sons, James and John, and four grandchildren.
By the mid-2000s, Mr. Hughes had become an almost mythical figure to the new wave of writer-directors he was instrumental in creating.
"He's our generation's J.D. Salinger," director Kevin Smith ("Clerks") told a reporter last year. In the same article, Judd Apatow - arguably the Hughes of modern-day Hollywood - acknowledged that "it was all there first in John Hughes' films ... the whole idea of having outsiders as the lead characters."
John Hughes was born Feb. 18, 1950, in Lansing, Mich. His father was a salesman, and the family moved to Chicago when John was 13; in 1968, he graduated from Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Ill. He once recalled that his family never had a television set and that when he asked to go to the movies, his father would always send him instead to a book.
With three sisters and nine great-aunts, he was also surrounded by women, a fact that may explain the richly three-dimensional teenage heroines of his 80s films. "I was the only boy on a block of 22 girls; it was the greatest!" Mr. Hughes told the Sydney Sun Herald in 1991.
He dropped out of the University of Arizona after his junior year and returned to Chicago, where he tried his hand penning gags for Rodney Dangerfield and other comedians and worked at the DDB Needham advertising agency turning out copy for Johnson Floor Wax campaigns. After hours, he wrote short stories and comedy pieces.
One, a family memoir called "Vacation '58," served as his entry to National Lampoon. Mr. Hughes wrote a number of comic pieces for the magazine and was drafted into the effort to provide a big screen follow-up to "Animal House." He contributed to the short-lived 1979 television series spin-off "Delta House" and wrote the script for the generally reviled "National Lampoon's Class Reunion" (1982).
Mr. Hughes then struck gold with "National Lampoon's Vacation" (1983).
Updated from that original memoir, it was a hit that starred Chevy Chase and featured Randy Quaid's deathless line, "I don't know why they call this Hamburger Helper - it tastes jes' fine by itself."
Mr. Hughes's script for a second 1983 success, "Mr. Mom," proved he could work outside the Lampoon orbit, and with 1984's "Sixteen Candles," he got his chance to direct.
That film and the teen angst classics that followed are his enduring legacy. "The Breakfast Club" locked in the '80s high school stereotypes of princess (Ringwald), geek (Hall), jock (Emilio Estevez), thug (Judd Nelson), and freak (Ally Sheedy), marooning them in Saturday detention and welding them, by the end, into a defiant support group standing firm against their teachers and parents.
By contrast, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," Mr. Hughes's most infectious comedy, is about a high school prankster king who glories in his superiority over principals, older sisters, and other lesser mortals. Only Matthew Broderick's immense charm keeps the character from becoming a jerk.
In all his films, Mr. Hughes made a point to try to keep his thumb squarely on the pulse of Middle America. "I'm a guy who walks around malls that writes movies for other people who walk around malls," he told USA Today in 1992.
Mr. Hughes tried to branch out to more adult characters with the 1988 "She's Having a Baby," but the film was poorly received, a fact that deeply disappointed the filmmaker.
His John Hughes Co. had signed a multipicture deal with Paramount in 1985; in 1988, he switched to Universal. The success of his various films, especially "Home Alone," meant that he could do as he pleased and make what he wished.
Ironically, he wished to do other things than make movies and live in the public eye. In the last decade, he occasionally contributed story ideas and scripts under the pen name Edmund Dantes, wrote a pair of independent features, "Reach the Rock" (1999) and "Just Visiting" (2001), and produced "New Port South," a 2001 high school drama written by his son James.
Then he retreated from the stage he had built.
"I lived in California for four years, and I just ran out of ideas," he told Entertainment Weekly in the mid-1990s. "With Hollywood life, you get cut off from regular people."
In the end, Mr. Hughes vanished back into the heartland he portrayed on film. (NYT)
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