John Hughes (filmmaker)

Based on Wikipedia: John Hughes (filmmaker)

In the summer of 1990, a middle-aged screenwriter sat down and, in just nine days, banged out a script about a kid defending his house from burglars. That script became Home Alone, the highest-grossing film of the year and still the most successful live-action family comedy ever made. The writer was John Hughes, and by then he had already transformed how Hollywood thought about teenagers, suburban families, and the peculiar comedy of American middle-class life.

Hughes died of a heart attack on a Manhattan sidewalk in August 2009, at fifty-nine. He was taking a morning walk near his hotel, in town to visit his son and newborn grandson. The day before, his family had made plans for the next morning. Those plans never happened.

But in the quarter-century before that sidewalk, Hughes had created something remarkable: a body of work that made teenagers feel seen and adults feel nostalgic, that found humor in the indignities of holiday travel and the terrors of high school cafeterias. He made films that people watched every Thanksgiving and Christmas, films that launched careers and defined a decade.

The Lonely Boy from the Midwest

John Wilden Hughes Jr. was born in 1950 in Lansing, Michigan, the only boy among four children. His father worked in sales; his mother did charity work. The family moved frequently, which Hughes later identified as formative—every time life started getting good, they'd pack up and leave.

He spent his early childhood in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where he developed a lifelong devotion to the Detroit Red Wings, particularly their star right winger Gordie Howe. Decades later, Hughes would hang one of Howe's number nine jerseys—sent by Howe himself—prominently in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Hughes described himself as "kind of quiet," a solitary kid in a neighborhood of girls and elderly people. With no boys his age around, he spent enormous amounts of time alone, imagining things. This capacity for imagination, fed by isolation, would eventually power a prolific creative career.

Then, in 1963, the family moved to Northbrook, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. Hughes was thirteen, about to start seventh grade, and suddenly transplanted to an enormous high school where he knew absolutely no one.

What rescued him was music. The Beatles arrived, and Hughes felt transformed. Then Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home came out, and Hughes later said it changed him completely—Thursday he was one person, Friday he was another. His heroes became Dylan, John Lennon, and Picasso, artists who kept moving forward, who got comfortable and then deliberately made themselves uncomfortable again.

From Jokes to Ads to Hollywood

Hughes attended Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, the school that would later inspire his most famous films. He met Nancy Ludwig there, a cheerleader who would become his wife. They married in 1970, when Hughes was twenty, and stayed together until his death thirty-nine years later.

But first, Hughes needed to figure out what to do with his life. He enrolled at the University of Arizona, then dropped out. He started selling jokes to established comedians like Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers. This joke-writing served as his entrance into the professional world—he used it to land an entry-level copywriting job at a Chicago advertising agency in 1970.

Hughes turned out to be very good at advertising. He created the famous "Credit Card Shaving Test" campaign for Edge shaving gel. He moved to Leo Burnett Worldwide in 1974, one of the most prestigious agencies in the world. But advertising was a stepping stone, not a destination.

His work on the Virginia Slims cigarette account required frequent trips to New York City, to the Philip Morris headquarters. While there, Hughes started dropping by the offices of National Lampoon, the satirical magazine that had spawned the wildly successful Animal House in 1978.

He began contributing pieces. Editor P.J. O'Rourke later recalled that Hughes wrote "so fast and so well that it was hard for a monthly magazine to keep up with him." One of his early stories drew on childhood memories of family road trips. It was called "Vacation '58," and it would eventually become the basis for National Lampoon's Vacation.

Hughes also wrote two pieces for the magazine's April Fools' Day issue, titled "My Penis" and "My Vagina." These stories, crude as the titles suggest, revealed something important about Hughes: he had an ear for how teenagers actually talked. He understood their rhythms, their concerns, their particular humiliations.

The Teen Movie Revolution

Hughes' first produced screenplay was National Lampoon's Class Reunion in 1982, a disaster that tried to replicate Animal House's success. But his next two scripts, both released in 1983, were hits: National Lampoon's Vacation and Mr. Mom. The success earned him a three-film deal with Universal Pictures.

His directorial debut, Sixteen Candles, arrived in 1984 and immediately stood out from the teen comedies of its era. While other films were imitating Porky's—crude sex comedies treating teenagers as walking hormone jokes—Hughes wrote adolescents as actual human beings navigating real social dynamics. The film featured Molly Ringwald as Samantha Baker, a girl whose family forgets her sixteenth birthday, and Anthony Michael Hall as the geeky Farmer Ted.

What followed was an extraordinary streak. The Breakfast Club came out in 1985, confining five high school stereotypes—the jock, the princess, the brain, the criminal, the basket case—to Saturday detention and letting them discover their common humanity. Weird Science arrived that same year, a science-fiction comedy about two nerds who create a woman on their computer. Ferris Bueller's Day Off followed in 1986, a celebration of truancy and youthful confidence starring Matthew Broderick as the charming schemer who talks directly to the camera.

Hughes also wrote and produced Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, both directed by Howard Deutch. All these films shared a common DNA: they took teenage feelings seriously. The anxieties about fitting in, the desperate importance of romantic rejection, the way a single embarrassing moment could feel like the end of the world—Hughes validated these emotions rather than mocking them.

These weren't documentaries. The dialogue was sharper than real teenagers managed, the problems resolved more neatly than real life allowed. But they captured something true about the experience of being young: the intensity of it, the way everything felt like it mattered enormously.

Beyond the High School

Hughes worried about being pigeonholed. In 1987, he wrote, directed, and produced Planes, Trains and Automobiles, a comedy about holiday travel gone catastrophically wrong. Steve Martin played an uptight marketing executive trying to get home for Thanksgiving. John Candy played the chatty, annoying shower curtain ring salesman he keeps getting stuck with.

The film demonstrated that Hughes could do more than teenagers. It also showcased his gift for physical comedy—scene after scene of escalating disasters involving burned cars, destroyed hotel rooms, and a terrifying wrong-way drive on the highway. But underneath the slapstick was genuine emotion: Candy's character, it turns out, is alone in the world, and the revelation transforms the entire story.

John Candy became something like Hughes' muse for his post-teen-movie career. They worked together on The Great Outdoors, Uncle Buck, and Home Alone. Over the years, they developed a genuine friendship. When Candy died suddenly of a heart attack in 1994, Hughes was devastated. According to Vince Vaughn, a friend of Hughes, "He talked a lot about how much he loved Candy—if Candy had lived longer, I think John would have made more films as a director."

As it happened, Hughes directed his last film in 1991. Curly Sue was a mild comedy about a homeless con artist and her adorable young charge. It wasn't a disaster, but it wasn't The Breakfast Club either. Hughes retreated from directing, though he continued writing and producing.

The Home Alone Empire

Then came the phenomenon.

Home Alone had a simple premise: an eight-year-old boy named Kevin McCallister gets accidentally left behind when his enormous family rushes off to Paris for Christmas. Two burglars target his house. Kevin defends it with an elaborate series of booby traps involving paint cans, blowtorches, and ornaments on the floor.

Hughes wrote the first draft in nine days. The film, directed by Chris Columbus, earned nearly half a billion dollars worldwide in 1990, making it the top-grossing film of the year and establishing Macaulay Culkin as a child superstar. Hughes followed it with Home Alone 2: Lost in New York in 1992 and Home Alone 3 in 1997.

The Home Alone formula—plucky kid outwitting hapless criminals through elaborate physical comedy—got recycled through several more Hughes-written films, including Dennis the Menace in 1993. Some of these worked; others, like Baby's Day Out in 1994, flopped badly.

During this period, Hughes started using a pseudonym for some of his scripts: Edmond Dantès, after the protagonist of Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo. Under this name, he wrote Maid in Manhattan, Drillbit Taylor, and Beethoven. Why the secrecy? Perhaps he wanted to test whether his scripts could succeed without the John Hughes brand attached. Perhaps he was just tired of the publicity.

The Disappearing Director

In 1994, Hughes essentially retired from public life. He moved back to the Chicago area and stopped giving interviews. He briefly partnered with producer Ricardo Mestres to form Great Oaks Entertainment, a joint venture with Walt Disney Pictures, but the collaboration ended in 1997 after producing Jack, the live-action 101 Dalmatians, and Flubber.

Why did Hughes retreat? His longtime collaborator P.J. O'Rourke offered one clue. O'Rourke wrote that he and Hughes shared a certain political sensibility—not easily categorized as left or right, but deeply skeptical of the cultural establishment's contempt for middle-class American life. Where intellectuals saw suburban hell and passive consumerism, Hughes and O'Rourke saw something worth defending: families, communities, the ordinary pleasures of life in places like Northbrook, Illinois.

"Family was the most conservative thing about John," O'Rourke wrote. "Walking across the family room in your stocking feet and stepping on a Lego (ouch!) was the fundamental building block of society."

Hughes and his wife Nancy had two sons: John III, born in 1976, and James, born in 1979. John III started a Chicago-based record label called Hefty Records, and in 1999, Hughes emerged briefly to promote the soundtrack album for Reach the Rock, which his son had compiled. He also recorded an audio commentary for the DVD release of Ferris Bueller's Day Off that year.

Then he disappeared again, into a private life in Chicago, emerging only for that fatal trip to New York in August 2009.

The Legacy

Hughes' death prompted an outpouring from the people whose careers he had launched. Molly Ringwald called herself "stunned and incredibly sad," saying Hughes would "always be such an important part of my life." Matthew Broderick described him as "a wonderful, very talented guy." At the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010, a retrospective of Hughes' films was followed by an on-stage gathering of his actors: Ringwald, Broderick, Culkin, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Jon Cryer.

Television shows paid tribute too. The pilot episode of Community, which aired a month after Hughes' death, was dedicated to him and included multiple Breakfast Club references. One Tree Hill recreated the famous ending of Sixteen Candles. The teen comedy Easy A had Emma Stone's character explicitly wish her life were a John Hughes movie.

But legacy is complicated. In 2018, Molly Ringwald wrote an article for The New Yorker examining Hughes' films through the lens of the #MeToo movement. She described explaining to her ten-year-old daughter a scene in The Breakfast Club where her character appears to be sexually assaulted under a desk. While expressing continued affection for Hughes and gratitude for what he did for her career, Ringwald called his sexualized depictions of young women "problematic" by modern standards.

This is the strange position Hughes now occupies: beloved enough that filmmakers still cite him as an influence (the directors of The Edge of Seventeen, Crazy Rich Asians, and Wicked have all mentioned him), yet also representative of attitudes that haven't aged well. His films captured something real about teenage experience while also reflecting the blind spots of their era.

The Unrealized Dreams

Hughes left behind a substantial collection of unproduced scripts, a testament to just how prolific he was. Some of these projects sound intriguing: Bartholomew vs. Neff would have starred Sylvester Stallone and John Candy as feuding neighbors. Black Cat Bone: The Return of Huckleberry Finn suggests Hughes had literary ambitions. Warner Bros. once acquired the rights for him to write and produce a live-action Peanuts film.

Other unmade films included musicals (The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees), a script about teens waiting overnight for concert tickets, and something called The Grigsbys Go Broke about a wealthy family forced to move to the wrong side of the tracks.

None of these got made. Hughes wrote compulsively—O'Rourke said the magazine couldn't keep up with him—but increasingly kept his work to himself. The nine-day Home Alone script was the work of someone who could generate ideas faster than the industry could produce them.

The Essential Hughes

What made John Hughes matter? Partly it was timing: he arrived at a moment when Hollywood had stopped taking teenagers seriously, and he took them very seriously indeed. Partly it was craft: he could write sharp dialogue and construct physical comedy sequences that still work decades later. Partly it was location: by setting his films in and around Chicago rather than Los Angeles or New York, he created a world that felt like most of America, suburban and midwestern and recognizably ordinary.

But mostly it was the combination of slapstick and sentiment. His films made you laugh at Steve Martin getting his rental car destroyed, then made you tear up when John Candy revealed his loneliness. They let you enjoy Ferris Bueller's outrageous schemes while also understanding why Cameron was so afraid of his father. They trapped five teenagers in a library and found genuine pathos in their discoveries about each other.

Hughes understood something essential: that comedy and emotion weren't opposites, that you could swing from one to the other within scenes, that audiences would follow if you gave them characters worth caring about. His best films don't just make you nostalgic for the 1980s. They make you nostalgic for being young enough to feel things that intensely.

The man who wrote all this, who created the template for countless teen movies and holiday comedies that followed, spent his final fifteen years in deliberate obscurity. He had said everything he wanted to say, apparently. Or perhaps he just wanted to step on Legos in his family room, far from cameras and interviews, living the ordinary suburban life he had spent his career celebrating.

Nancy Hughes outlived her husband by ten years, dying in September 2019. John Hughes is buried at Lake Forest Cemetery in Illinois, not far from the high school hallways and suburban streets he made famous.