John Hughes

April 14, 1997

Born in Chicago (where many of his films take place) in 1950, Hughes has directed fare that is geared to younger audiences under 18. Many of his stories take place in the stomping grounds of angst-ridden teens and adolescents, who share the same difficulty of the gap between generations that their baby boomer parents had to deal with. Hughes was originally a writer for National Lampoon magazine, then as a screenwriter for such comedy hits as National Lampoon's Vacation and Mr. Mom (both 1983).

Because of his earlier success as a screenwriter, he earned his first job as a director with the teen comedy, Sixteen Candles (1984). 1985 was a golden year for Hughes, with the box-office coming-of-age drama The Breakfast Club and the cult classic Weird Science, which transfered the tale of Frankenstein to the 1980's. His crowning achievement came with Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), about the ultimate slacker (portrayed with a winning charm by Matthew Broderick). Much of Hughes later work has consisted of films loaded with unrealistic, slapstick fare, full of Three Stooges clones.

As a producer, he had his biggest success with Home Alone (1990), a $100 million juggernaut that wiped out most of the competition during the 1990-1991 holiday season. Hughes has spent most of the 1990's attempting to recreate the slapshtick he pulled off in the first Home Alone. Credits to his career as a producer have included the bloated productions Dennis the Menace (1993), Baby's Day Out (1994) and the live-action version of 101 Dalmatians (1996). I guess if there is any reason to take Hughes' films seriously, it's because most of his work does consist of teenagers who are far from perfect, but are also a very far cry from the brain-dead teens of Clueless and Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

My rating on a scale of 1 to 10: 6

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