Another Sad Day for Hollywood

It's been a tragic year for Hollywood. So many of the industries luminaries have been passing away at such a steady clip that I sometimes wonder when this will end. The latest loss was one that particularly saddened me and that was the loss of writer/director John Hughes. Now for those of you who don't know, John Hughes was the man whose teen films and comedies in general helped form the nucleus of the 80's movie output. To give you a smattering of his films, they include: "The Breakfast Club", "Sixteen Candles", "National Lampoons Vacation", and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" to name a few. What set him apart, at least in my mind, was the fact that though the teen movie is nothing new, what Hughes did with the genre was make it honest and enjoyable and something most of us could relate to.

Hughes wasn't what you would consider a 'Hollywood insider'. He lived and worked in Illinois close to his Chicago roots. Though he was often mis-characterized as a recluse who preferred to live and work in Chicago, Hughes was very much prevalent in the Hollywood scene. When asked why he preferred Chicago to the typical Hollywood locations he explained that it allowed his teen actors (and actors in general) to focus on the work they needed to do. It allowed them to concentrate on the roles and characters they were taking on and it often showed in the films he created. I remember seeing "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club" long before I was in high school and I simply remember thinking that if this was what high school was going to be like then I had better be on my toes.

Though "Sixteen Candles" was more of the out and out comedic of the two films, it nonetheless tackled some of the issues that many teens go through in those awkward high school years. Not that I was the Geek (Anthony Michael Hall) though I came pretty darn close at times. Similarly with "The Breakfast Club" (a film that has been making the rounds again recently on HBO and such on cable) it dealt with the issues of social norms and character types in high school and how none of us can really fit into the roles people assume for us. As the movie concludes, though outwardly we may fit a certain character-type, on the inside we are all one and the same. It was a powerful message that resonated with me when i first saw the film but continues to resonate with me even so many years after my high school days.

Despite the fact that most of his films are now at least 20 years old, they still hold relevance to what is happening today. I also find them to be a lot more honest and the characters in them to be less superficial than many of the characters we see in many of the current crop of teen films. Though there may be the occasional film that relates the stories of teens in an honest manner these days, it doesn't occur without some comparison to a Hughes film. Even when his films didn't deal with teens directly but rather with the everyday person, they managed to do so in a manner that didn't try to be blatantly hilarious or over the top. The humor in Hughes films came from the fact that much of what was happening could actually happen in real life.

"Planes, Trains and Automobiles" is one movie that comes to mind. The road trip that Steve Martin and the late John Candy take across the United States is made all the more funnier because you could imagine these types of things happening to someone. Perhaps it's nostalgia at having lived part of my life in that era or perhaps it is just a fondness from having grown up with those films but there's definitely something different about those films versus what we get today. Someone once compared Ferris Bueller to a teen James Bond and what made that appealing to many of us who grew up with that film was the fact that unlike James Bond, whatever Bueller did was at least someone plausible (though I grant you the karaoke scene during the parade is a bit more than I would believe) but it was a sign that teens could be equals to adults in the real world.

Perhaps I'm reading more into these films than I should. Perhaps it's just that I feel bad that we lost Hughes at the relatively young age of 59 from a sudden heart attack but whatever it is, I know that his movies will be a legacy that will live on for many years to come. Though we continue to move past the decade he so epitomized in his films, we can still look back on them and laugh. Not just at the hair or the clothes or the phrases that they used but at the situations; because those situations are as funny today as they were back in the 80's. John Hughes will sorely be missed and my one hope is that the way to remember him will be to remember his films, not by jumping on the current Hollywood trend of simply remaking it, but seeing the original films themselves. They will stand the test of time.