John Candy
Has John Hughes Left The Building?
Has John
Hughes Left The Building?
The Vanishing Act of America’s 80’s Teen Titan and 90’s Kid Com Kingpin.
By Mike Attebery
Contrary to popular belief, the studio system of film production did not die out in the 1950’s. Well before Harvey Weinstein and Miramax began launching fleets of carefully calibrated award machines in the early 90’s, using a seeming stable of contract players, including: Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin Smith, and Quentin Tarantino, a self-professed Hollywood outsider and former ad man in the Chicago suburbs entered the scene. Using the tricks of Madison Avenue, John Hughes taught Hollywood some new twists on its old routines, while grinding out a series of highly successful films in a short, prolific period of time. In the process, he not only created an entertainment empire, but discovered some of the industry’s favorite and youngest new stars, and placed them in many of the defining films of the 1980’s. If Miramax and the independent film movement shaped the cinema of the last decade, John Hughes and the shopping mall crowd unquestionably dominated the silver screen of the Reagan years.
Hollywood is about product. Product and money. Quality is beside the point; theres a game plan for everything. If a film is a solid, top-quality production, the studio pulls out all the stops: a blizzard of TV ads, movie trailers, glossy magazine spreads, and a prime spot in the summer or fall season, with an eye towards audiences, awards, and money. If a film’s chances seem less promising, but it retains a clear audience: twice the TV ads, twice the trailers, the star’s face on popcorn buckets, and glossier, sexier print ads. It’s all about image and closing the deal -- pure advertising -- and what better man to oil the Hollywood machine with fresh, marketable product than a transplant from the ad world, who himself entered the game with a resume and portfolio fashioned from smoke and mirrors? Like Ferris Bueller, Hughes had a magic touch and a salesman’s way with words that eventually got him a position with a Chicago agency, despite his lack of a college degree, or any experience in the field.
From there, just as in his movies, circumstances began working in his favor: first, a contact with National Lampoon, then a freelance job as one of the magazine’s editors, then, upon the release of Animal House, one of numerous Hollywood development deals forged with anyone possessing a Lampoon credit. After a few early lessons on getting burned in showbiz, Hughes started in on one of the industry’s legendary winning streaks, frequently accomplished by breaking the rules of conventional success. Early Hughes productions were often saddled with a midwinter release date, widely viewed as the dumping ground for low-grade films with less than hopeful box office forecasts, but as a Midwestern suburbanite, Hughes saw the bleak stretch from Christmas to Spring Break as the perfect time to bring out a film aimed at the high school crowd, who he felt saw joy and sorrow as “equally pleasant.” It worked, and within a year of the releases of Mr. Mom and Vacation, Hughes began writing and directing his own films. His goal was simple: to shoot as many films as possible in the shortest amount of time, working with relatively small budgets, and positioning each to grow his audience at each stage of release. This business plan, combined with the repeated use of an ever growing gallery of young actors, including: Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, and John Candy, only increased the similarities between the studio practices of the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s, and Hughes’ own suburban Chicago movie machine. One look at the closing credits for 1988’s She’s Having a Baby reveals the scope of the Hughes production bonanza. As the credits roll, one star after another stands front and center, often in their costume for another Hughes production, and gives their suggestion for the new baby’s name. When comparing the number of actors and the years over which each individual’s Hughes collaboration was released, the sheer number of films in production and already in release is astounding.
By 1986, the steamroller was under way, and with the help of director Howard Deutch, a John Hughes film began rolling out every six months, carefully timed to coincide with the VHS release of the previous theatrical title. Home video, still a relatively new, somewhat untapped resource, became for Hughes an invaluable tool in keeping his name and productions continually on viewers’ minds. More importantly, it played a key role in making his characters a part of audiences’ lives. With the release of each film, a new phenomenon seemed to be developing; the characters were not only striking a chord with fans, they were also becoming people audiences wished to hang out with on a regular basis. Through theater showings and repeated appearances on video, characters like Clark Griswold, Andie, Ducky, Del Griffith, and Jefferson ‘Jake’ Edward Briggs became members of an ever broadening circle of friends, and a comforting group of individuals that maturing audiences felt they could turn to for comic relief, advice, and support. Many high school outsiders came to view The Breakfast Club as a manifesto for their own experiences, related to the sting of unrequited love in Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, then found comfort in the rocky transition to adulthood undergone by the newlyweds in She’s Having a Baby.
From 1985 through 1989, Hughes films came out twice a year, like clockwork, and it is this period that saw the release of his signature films, among them: The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, She’s Having a Baby, The Great Outdoors, Uncle Buck, and Christmas Vacation. It is also this collection of films that saw the development of Hughes’ defining themes and concerns, most notably: the struggles between the classes, the experiences of society’s outsiders, the clash between youth and adult expectations, the struggle against absurd outside forces, and the dynamics of family life. In the process, Hughes employed a series of recurring character types that often possessed some autobiographical element from his own life. These included brash, charismatic young men; scatterbrained eccentric odd balls; jilted lovers; shy, neglected outsiders; bumbling, but successful parents; and militant, self important authority figures.
By 1987. Hughes began shifting his attention towards more adult film material, beginning with Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and continuing with She’s Having a Baby, which stands as his most autobiographical film, despite his efforts to disguise similarities between Kevin Bacon’s character Jefferson ‘Jake’ Edward Briggs and himself. Aside from Jake‘s dropping out a graduate school in New Mexico, as opposed to Hughes’ own brief undergraduate stint at the University of Arizona, the similarities are striking, right up to Jake’s appearance in Plane’s, Train & Automobiles on a New York City business trip for his advertising firm which is remarkably similar to the trips Hughes’ himself took for six years until he left advertising to join the Lampoon. In retrospect, these later projects have enjoyed the same appeal and fondness with audiences as the teenage films, but at the time of their release they showed a marked change in box office draw, to the point that the studios began urging Hughes to write something that once again had greater commercial appeal. After Uncle Buck, his next film would not only mark his first collaboration with a new director, but also bring an end to the developing themes of the past seven years.
Home Alone was released on November 16, 1990 and quickly went on to gross more than half a billion dollars worldwide, making it the most successful theatrical release that year. Its director, Chris Columbus, had made his debut three years earlier with Adventures In Babysitting, a family comedy set in Chicago, whose storyline and characters could just as easily have been penned by Hughes himself. The idea for Home Alone came about during the filming of scenes with Macaulay Culkin for Uncle Buck, and Hughes, who frequently completed scripts in two-day writing sprees, quickly completed the first draft, bragging that he wrote the last 40 pages in just eight hours. The success of this common childhood fantasy would catapult Culkin, Columbus, and Hughes into the Hollywood stratosphere, and it would be years before any of them would come back to earth. Though a marked departure in terms of story and theme, the script is arguably the strongest, most well structured of Hughes writing efforts to that point, a fact that would ultimately set up his downfall as he went on to repackage and pilfer the script endlessy for the better part of the next decade.
By 1992, Hughes’ work was becoming alarmingly repetitive. Aside from the charming 1991 film Curly Sue, productions with the Hughes Entertainment logo were beginning to show far too many similarities to one another, and most notably to Home Alone. Hughes releases were beginning to resemble repackaged goods whose false labels were slowly peeling away from the cans. Career Opportunities was a clear attempt to recapture the magic of Ferris Bueller by casting Matthew Broderick’s Freshman co-star Frank Whaley in the lead, and sprinkling the script with elements all too reminiscent of Home Alone, including the inexplicable appearance of bumbling crooks in the films last ten minutes, and a series of gags seemingly dropped from Kevin McAllister’s home, directly into a midwest Target store.. The film tanked, as did Dutch and Curly Sue, Hughes’ final directorial effort. In 1992 came Home Alone 2: Lost In New York, an entirely implausible, scene-for-scene remake of the original film, which went on to make $280 million. This same year came the release of Beethoven, written by Hughes under the name Edmond Dantes, in homage to the character in The Count of Monte Cristo. By the end of1997, Hughes had written a series of films that marked a clear departure from his signature themes, and his audience for the past decade had shifted. Instead of aiming for audiences in high school or just embarking on life after college, Hughes began chasing the children’s audience for its box-office money. It is hard to believe that the writer and director of The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off could really have put much of his heart into the scripts for such films as Home Alone 2, Beethoven, Baby’s Day Out, Dennis the Menace Miracle On 34th Street, 101 Dalmatians, Home Alone 3 and most tellingly, Flubber.
For all appearances, the man who had ended his most famous short story by shooting Walt Disney in the leg, seemed to have become a puppet for the Walt Disney Studios, endlessly rewriting the same script for whichever company would ante up with the biggest check. Perhaps it is telling that the name under which Hughes began to ghostwrite such movies as the Beethoven series is that of a literary character who used a lost fortune to perpetrate a massive fraud for the purpose of revenge. Did Hughes feel that his audience had left him, or did he simply abandon them? Was he always just in it for the money? It would be several more years before anything new appeared from the Hughes film canon to argue otherwise.
In 1998, audiences in three Chicago area theaters were given little more than a week to see for themselves what had been on John Hughes’ mind for the better part of a decade, and the results would be quite familiar, if distinctly darker than they had remembered. With the very limited release of Reach The Rock, Hughes returned to small town America, more specifically to Shermer, Illinois, the fictional setting of virtually all of his earlier films, where white, middle class teenagers from large, two story brick houses staged teenaged rebellions as they tried to discover and define themselves. That their acts of rebellion were often largely benign, 1950’s style revolts were beside the point, the thrill in the films was the fun of leaving detention, skipping school on the first day of spring, or fighting against logic for the chance at true love. Shermer is a town where the fine details of daily life are what really count. More than 11 years after Steve Martin’s Neil Page had safely arrived home for Thanksgiving dinner, Hughes brought audiences back to Shermer for one hot summer night and the conclusion of another high school drama. The themes and the characters were again familiar, but the story was refreshingly different from anything he had written over the past decade, and the mood of the piece was strikingly somber. In a final attempt to escape small town life, Robin Fleming, a Shermer ‘townie’ four years out of high school, gets himself arrested and thrown in the local sheriff’s office. He then proceeds to taunt the police chief and sneak out of his cell, carrying out a series of elaborate pranks involving properties owned by his ex-girlfriend’s father. As Robin’s plan to lure his ex back to him becomes clear, the big questions of the 80’s Hughes film begin to play out again, and the audience is once more immersed in a story of the rich vs. the poor, and each individual’s struggle to define himself. Though Reach the Rock is an imperfect, slow-paced film, it is a shame that Universal, the studio producing it, did not make a greater effort to help the film find an audience, or more precisely, to help the film reclaim the Hughes audience that had so long ago given up on seeing any more of the films they enjoyed growing up with.
Since 1998, Hughes has only written two scripts, one entitled Just Visiting, an unsuccessful remake of a French time -traveling comedy, and the other the cookie cutter Jennifer Lopez vehicle Maid In Manhattan, tellingly written under the Edmond Dantes moniker. In that same period of time, filmdom has been blessed with Beethoven’s 3rd, Beethoven’s 4th, Home Alone 4, and Beethoven’s 5th, which for all purposes were not necessarily produced under Hughes’ watchful eye, but with nothing of real substance or credit to his name on the horizon, leave little to fight off the sour taste his career is beginning to leave in the mouths of fans everywhere.
The big question is whether Hughes ever had his heart in his work in the first place, or whether, coming from an advertising background and the cynical writing offices of National Lampoon, he was simply interested in lining his bank account, locking up his retirement, and padding his own ass. From 1983 to 1990, Hughes wrote some of the funniest, most insightful family and teenage comedies ever produced in Hollywood, and audiences clearly connected with the man and his work. Yet by the mid-80’s it was clear that Hughes had hit a rut. While he still had the ability to entertain and relate to the members of his audience, his recipes were growing thin. He recovered with the production of Planes, Train & Automobiles and She’s Having a Baby, and reached his pinnacle as an accomplished writer of family fare with Home Alone, but aside from one entertaining if manipulative film with Curly Sue, and a fine return to form with Reach the Rock, Hughes has done little to cement his reputation with his audience. His better films were always the more personal ones, the stories one could imagine Jake Briggs typing late into the night. He clearly had a connection with the teenagers growing up in the 80’s, one that continued with his transition towards adult fare and the trials of growing up in She’s Having a Baby, but from then on out he dropped the ball, abandoning the very people who made him a success. The members of The Breakfast Club complained that people saw them in “the simplest terms, the most convenient definitions.” Perhaps John Hughes also began seeing his characters this way, or even worse, as simple dollars and cents, and because of this he lost his connection, and his voice.
Since 1992, his box office has steadily decreased. Perhaps his fans found refuge in the works of another director, or found comfort in television shows like Friends, which in many ways picked up where Hughes left off in tracking the experiences of young adulthood. But now that Friends has taken its last bow, audiences are again ready to find a voice for their generation. Whether or not Hughes was ever writing in the pursuit of truth, or just for personal gain, the facts are simple, if he can find it in himself to again remember the experiences of young adulthood, he may reclaim his audience. At the very least, there's money to be made in it.
The Vanishing Act of America’s 80’s Teen Titan and 90’s Kid Com Kingpin.
By Mike Attebery
Contrary to popular belief, the studio system of film production did not die out in the 1950’s. Well before Harvey Weinstein and Miramax began launching fleets of carefully calibrated award machines in the early 90’s, using a seeming stable of contract players, including: Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin Smith, and Quentin Tarantino, a self-professed Hollywood outsider and former ad man in the Chicago suburbs entered the scene. Using the tricks of Madison Avenue, John Hughes taught Hollywood some new twists on its old routines, while grinding out a series of highly successful films in a short, prolific period of time. In the process, he not only created an entertainment empire, but discovered some of the industry’s favorite and youngest new stars, and placed them in many of the defining films of the 1980’s. If Miramax and the independent film movement shaped the cinema of the last decade, John Hughes and the shopping mall crowd unquestionably dominated the silver screen of the Reagan years.
Hollywood is about product. Product and money. Quality is beside the point; theres a game plan for everything. If a film is a solid, top-quality production, the studio pulls out all the stops: a blizzard of TV ads, movie trailers, glossy magazine spreads, and a prime spot in the summer or fall season, with an eye towards audiences, awards, and money. If a film’s chances seem less promising, but it retains a clear audience: twice the TV ads, twice the trailers, the star’s face on popcorn buckets, and glossier, sexier print ads. It’s all about image and closing the deal -- pure advertising -- and what better man to oil the Hollywood machine with fresh, marketable product than a transplant from the ad world, who himself entered the game with a resume and portfolio fashioned from smoke and mirrors? Like Ferris Bueller, Hughes had a magic touch and a salesman’s way with words that eventually got him a position with a Chicago agency, despite his lack of a college degree, or any experience in the field.
From there, just as in his movies, circumstances began working in his favor: first, a contact with National Lampoon, then a freelance job as one of the magazine’s editors, then, upon the release of Animal House, one of numerous Hollywood development deals forged with anyone possessing a Lampoon credit. After a few early lessons on getting burned in showbiz, Hughes started in on one of the industry’s legendary winning streaks, frequently accomplished by breaking the rules of conventional success. Early Hughes productions were often saddled with a midwinter release date, widely viewed as the dumping ground for low-grade films with less than hopeful box office forecasts, but as a Midwestern suburbanite, Hughes saw the bleak stretch from Christmas to Spring Break as the perfect time to bring out a film aimed at the high school crowd, who he felt saw joy and sorrow as “equally pleasant.” It worked, and within a year of the releases of Mr. Mom and Vacation, Hughes began writing and directing his own films. His goal was simple: to shoot as many films as possible in the shortest amount of time, working with relatively small budgets, and positioning each to grow his audience at each stage of release. This business plan, combined with the repeated use of an ever growing gallery of young actors, including: Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, and John Candy, only increased the similarities between the studio practices of the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s, and Hughes’ own suburban Chicago movie machine. One look at the closing credits for 1988’s She’s Having a Baby reveals the scope of the Hughes production bonanza. As the credits roll, one star after another stands front and center, often in their costume for another Hughes production, and gives their suggestion for the new baby’s name. When comparing the number of actors and the years over which each individual’s Hughes collaboration was released, the sheer number of films in production and already in release is astounding.
By 1986, the steamroller was under way, and with the help of director Howard Deutch, a John Hughes film began rolling out every six months, carefully timed to coincide with the VHS release of the previous theatrical title. Home video, still a relatively new, somewhat untapped resource, became for Hughes an invaluable tool in keeping his name and productions continually on viewers’ minds. More importantly, it played a key role in making his characters a part of audiences’ lives. With the release of each film, a new phenomenon seemed to be developing; the characters were not only striking a chord with fans, they were also becoming people audiences wished to hang out with on a regular basis. Through theater showings and repeated appearances on video, characters like Clark Griswold, Andie, Ducky, Del Griffith, and Jefferson ‘Jake’ Edward Briggs became members of an ever broadening circle of friends, and a comforting group of individuals that maturing audiences felt they could turn to for comic relief, advice, and support. Many high school outsiders came to view The Breakfast Club as a manifesto for their own experiences, related to the sting of unrequited love in Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, then found comfort in the rocky transition to adulthood undergone by the newlyweds in She’s Having a Baby.
From 1985 through 1989, Hughes films came out twice a year, like clockwork, and it is this period that saw the release of his signature films, among them: The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, She’s Having a Baby, The Great Outdoors, Uncle Buck, and Christmas Vacation. It is also this collection of films that saw the development of Hughes’ defining themes and concerns, most notably: the struggles between the classes, the experiences of society’s outsiders, the clash between youth and adult expectations, the struggle against absurd outside forces, and the dynamics of family life. In the process, Hughes employed a series of recurring character types that often possessed some autobiographical element from his own life. These included brash, charismatic young men; scatterbrained eccentric odd balls; jilted lovers; shy, neglected outsiders; bumbling, but successful parents; and militant, self important authority figures.
By 1987. Hughes began shifting his attention towards more adult film material, beginning with Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and continuing with She’s Having a Baby, which stands as his most autobiographical film, despite his efforts to disguise similarities between Kevin Bacon’s character Jefferson ‘Jake’ Edward Briggs and himself. Aside from Jake‘s dropping out a graduate school in New Mexico, as opposed to Hughes’ own brief undergraduate stint at the University of Arizona, the similarities are striking, right up to Jake’s appearance in Plane’s, Train & Automobiles on a New York City business trip for his advertising firm which is remarkably similar to the trips Hughes’ himself took for six years until he left advertising to join the Lampoon. In retrospect, these later projects have enjoyed the same appeal and fondness with audiences as the teenage films, but at the time of their release they showed a marked change in box office draw, to the point that the studios began urging Hughes to write something that once again had greater commercial appeal. After Uncle Buck, his next film would not only mark his first collaboration with a new director, but also bring an end to the developing themes of the past seven years.
Home Alone was released on November 16, 1990 and quickly went on to gross more than half a billion dollars worldwide, making it the most successful theatrical release that year. Its director, Chris Columbus, had made his debut three years earlier with Adventures In Babysitting, a family comedy set in Chicago, whose storyline and characters could just as easily have been penned by Hughes himself. The idea for Home Alone came about during the filming of scenes with Macaulay Culkin for Uncle Buck, and Hughes, who frequently completed scripts in two-day writing sprees, quickly completed the first draft, bragging that he wrote the last 40 pages in just eight hours. The success of this common childhood fantasy would catapult Culkin, Columbus, and Hughes into the Hollywood stratosphere, and it would be years before any of them would come back to earth. Though a marked departure in terms of story and theme, the script is arguably the strongest, most well structured of Hughes writing efforts to that point, a fact that would ultimately set up his downfall as he went on to repackage and pilfer the script endlessy for the better part of the next decade.
By 1992, Hughes’ work was becoming alarmingly repetitive. Aside from the charming 1991 film Curly Sue, productions with the Hughes Entertainment logo were beginning to show far too many similarities to one another, and most notably to Home Alone. Hughes releases were beginning to resemble repackaged goods whose false labels were slowly peeling away from the cans. Career Opportunities was a clear attempt to recapture the magic of Ferris Bueller by casting Matthew Broderick’s Freshman co-star Frank Whaley in the lead, and sprinkling the script with elements all too reminiscent of Home Alone, including the inexplicable appearance of bumbling crooks in the films last ten minutes, and a series of gags seemingly dropped from Kevin McAllister’s home, directly into a midwest Target store.. The film tanked, as did Dutch and Curly Sue, Hughes’ final directorial effort. In 1992 came Home Alone 2: Lost In New York, an entirely implausible, scene-for-scene remake of the original film, which went on to make $280 million. This same year came the release of Beethoven, written by Hughes under the name Edmond Dantes, in homage to the character in The Count of Monte Cristo. By the end of1997, Hughes had written a series of films that marked a clear departure from his signature themes, and his audience for the past decade had shifted. Instead of aiming for audiences in high school or just embarking on life after college, Hughes began chasing the children’s audience for its box-office money. It is hard to believe that the writer and director of The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off could really have put much of his heart into the scripts for such films as Home Alone 2, Beethoven, Baby’s Day Out, Dennis the Menace Miracle On 34th Street, 101 Dalmatians, Home Alone 3 and most tellingly, Flubber.
For all appearances, the man who had ended his most famous short story by shooting Walt Disney in the leg, seemed to have become a puppet for the Walt Disney Studios, endlessly rewriting the same script for whichever company would ante up with the biggest check. Perhaps it is telling that the name under which Hughes began to ghostwrite such movies as the Beethoven series is that of a literary character who used a lost fortune to perpetrate a massive fraud for the purpose of revenge. Did Hughes feel that his audience had left him, or did he simply abandon them? Was he always just in it for the money? It would be several more years before anything new appeared from the Hughes film canon to argue otherwise.
In 1998, audiences in three Chicago area theaters were given little more than a week to see for themselves what had been on John Hughes’ mind for the better part of a decade, and the results would be quite familiar, if distinctly darker than they had remembered. With the very limited release of Reach The Rock, Hughes returned to small town America, more specifically to Shermer, Illinois, the fictional setting of virtually all of his earlier films, where white, middle class teenagers from large, two story brick houses staged teenaged rebellions as they tried to discover and define themselves. That their acts of rebellion were often largely benign, 1950’s style revolts were beside the point, the thrill in the films was the fun of leaving detention, skipping school on the first day of spring, or fighting against logic for the chance at true love. Shermer is a town where the fine details of daily life are what really count. More than 11 years after Steve Martin’s Neil Page had safely arrived home for Thanksgiving dinner, Hughes brought audiences back to Shermer for one hot summer night and the conclusion of another high school drama. The themes and the characters were again familiar, but the story was refreshingly different from anything he had written over the past decade, and the mood of the piece was strikingly somber. In a final attempt to escape small town life, Robin Fleming, a Shermer ‘townie’ four years out of high school, gets himself arrested and thrown in the local sheriff’s office. He then proceeds to taunt the police chief and sneak out of his cell, carrying out a series of elaborate pranks involving properties owned by his ex-girlfriend’s father. As Robin’s plan to lure his ex back to him becomes clear, the big questions of the 80’s Hughes film begin to play out again, and the audience is once more immersed in a story of the rich vs. the poor, and each individual’s struggle to define himself. Though Reach the Rock is an imperfect, slow-paced film, it is a shame that Universal, the studio producing it, did not make a greater effort to help the film find an audience, or more precisely, to help the film reclaim the Hughes audience that had so long ago given up on seeing any more of the films they enjoyed growing up with.
Since 1998, Hughes has only written two scripts, one entitled Just Visiting, an unsuccessful remake of a French time -traveling comedy, and the other the cookie cutter Jennifer Lopez vehicle Maid In Manhattan, tellingly written under the Edmond Dantes moniker. In that same period of time, filmdom has been blessed with Beethoven’s 3rd, Beethoven’s 4th, Home Alone 4, and Beethoven’s 5th, which for all purposes were not necessarily produced under Hughes’ watchful eye, but with nothing of real substance or credit to his name on the horizon, leave little to fight off the sour taste his career is beginning to leave in the mouths of fans everywhere.
The big question is whether Hughes ever had his heart in his work in the first place, or whether, coming from an advertising background and the cynical writing offices of National Lampoon, he was simply interested in lining his bank account, locking up his retirement, and padding his own ass. From 1983 to 1990, Hughes wrote some of the funniest, most insightful family and teenage comedies ever produced in Hollywood, and audiences clearly connected with the man and his work. Yet by the mid-80’s it was clear that Hughes had hit a rut. While he still had the ability to entertain and relate to the members of his audience, his recipes were growing thin. He recovered with the production of Planes, Train & Automobiles and She’s Having a Baby, and reached his pinnacle as an accomplished writer of family fare with Home Alone, but aside from one entertaining if manipulative film with Curly Sue, and a fine return to form with Reach the Rock, Hughes has done little to cement his reputation with his audience. His better films were always the more personal ones, the stories one could imagine Jake Briggs typing late into the night. He clearly had a connection with the teenagers growing up in the 80’s, one that continued with his transition towards adult fare and the trials of growing up in She’s Having a Baby, but from then on out he dropped the ball, abandoning the very people who made him a success. The members of The Breakfast Club complained that people saw them in “the simplest terms, the most convenient definitions.” Perhaps John Hughes also began seeing his characters this way, or even worse, as simple dollars and cents, and because of this he lost his connection, and his voice.
Since 1992, his box office has steadily decreased. Perhaps his fans found refuge in the works of another director, or found comfort in television shows like Friends, which in many ways picked up where Hughes left off in tracking the experiences of young adulthood. But now that Friends has taken its last bow, audiences are again ready to find a voice for their generation. Whether or not Hughes was ever writing in the pursuit of truth, or just for personal gain, the facts are simple, if he can find it in himself to again remember the experiences of young adulthood, he may reclaim his audience. At the very least, there's money to be made in it.