Hughes influence goes beyond the 80s

It's amazing to note how much of an impact John Hughes had on the modern film industry, despite the fact that before his death last week, he hadn't set foot in Hollywood for years. The king of 80s comedy had been viewed as something of a recluse since his early self-imposed retirement from directing in 1991.

Hughes had a string of iconic 80s teen comedies, including Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club, a film which Courtney Love once described as "the defining moment of the alternative generation". He also directed the more adult comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles starring Steve Martin and launched Macauley Culkin on the world with the family film Home Alone.

Many prominent actors and directors are big fans of Hughes, including Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller and Wes Anderson.

The modern equivalent of Hughes, comedy movie mogul Judd Apatow, claims him as an influence. "John Hughes wrote some of the great outsider characters of all time," Apatow has said. Apatow even loosely based his Owen Wilson film Drillbit Taylor on an old Hughes story idea. (Hughes is credited under his writing pseudonym Edmond Dantes, which film buffs and French lit scholars will know is a reference to The Count of Monte Cristo...)

"He's our generation's J.D. Salinger," director Kevin Smith said in an interview last year. Smith's film Dogma shows its heroes, Jay and Silent Bob, on a pilgrimage to Shermer, Illinois, a mythical town that exists only in Hughes's films. "He touched a generation and then the dude checked out. If it weren't for him, I wouldn't be doing what I do. Basically my stuff is just John Hughes films with four-letter words."

Apatow says: "You see Hughes's influence on all TV comedy, especially the stylised single-camera comedy. His great film characters, starting with Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles, were big inspirations. When we were growing up, we were all like Hall - the goofy skinny kid who thinks he's cool, even if nobody else does. Superbad has that same attitude, that mix of total cockiness and insecurity."

Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin, who cites Planes, Trains and Automobiles as one of his fave films, says: "It's the great thing about Hughes's films. He made them for himself, but when you watch them, you always feel that he made them especially for you."

Here's a pictorial and film-clip-filled tribute to the late, great movie maker - 20 Reasons Why John Hughes Rocked the 80s.

Please feel free to reminisce about your favourite Hughes film moment below - possibly invoking the Yello soundtrack of "chicka chick-ah (oh yeah)" or Don’t You Forget About Me, or even Danke Schoen...

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Niri Tacen   #1   10:04 am Aug 11 2009

Having been born in the mid-eighties I wasn't aware of most of these films until a few years ago, when a friend began to introduce them to me one at a time as "classic eighties movies".

They have held up amazingly well - not so much the synthesiser music or shoulder-pads, but the characters and the way the films were put together.

There are several moments in The Breakfast Club in particular where the characters go through their personal breakdown moment - that time when they come to terms with who they are and their place in the world. Considering that these were "teen" films (albeit with 20-year-old actors), Hughes gave his actors the time and space to have that moment and turn what could have been weepy melodrama into something that made you (well, me at least) feel for the character and recognise what they were going through.

And this was done at a pace that today would be considered slow. These days, characters are only allowed to get half way through such a moment before some prat falls in the background.

Hughes knew what he was doing. In some ways I think it's almost a lost art.

samm   #2   09:47 am Aug 12 2009

I'm not sure I would class 'The Breakfast Club' as a comedy....Favourite Hughes memory is watching a heavily edited and redubbed version of the film on TV2 circa 1987 or so, "Flip you!", "Eat socks!", and knowing even at the tender age of 10 thats not what they were saying. It wasn't until last year or so that I saw the complete uncut version for the first time on DVD.

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