John Hughes: Director Graduates to the Adult World

Directing a film that involved a large number of the title vehicles, not to mention the unpredictible caprices of both Mother Nature and corporate America, was a new journey into logistics for the director. "I've mostly done one-day, couple-of-people-in-a-room movie-making," Hughes said. "But climate was a big player in this film. It just always happens: When you want good weather, you get bad weather, and when you want bad weather, you get good weather. Production was set for Chicago last March, but there was no snow, and we needed snow. So we went to Buffalo, where we started shooting a four-day sequence in this beautiful blizzard. Gorgeous, big snowflakes for three days. We get the sequence three-quarters finished, next day the sun's out, and it's 70 degrees. So I had to start the sequence all over again."

But even unpredictable weather was easier to deal with than any travel-related business that the production crew approached for help. Hughes quickly learned that a spoof of the transportation industry was not appreciated by anybody's home office.

"We had no cooperation from any for of transportation," Hughes said. "We had to make up our own airline, build our own airport lobbies, supply 250 cars on our own for a rental car parking lot. We had to find a private railroad, because Amtrak wouldn't let us use any of their trains or rails. Then we had to come up with names for all of these companies and have logos designed, then have the names legally cleared. It was just a nightmare."

The enormous logistical problems of "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" were tough enough, but Hughes found a familiar challenge: getting the smaller human moments to play right. "None of it made me want to go back to six kids in a room," he said. "There were ways to handle the logistical things. But staging that stuff in the motel room where Steve [Neal] and John [Del] spend their first night together, that was the real nightmare. How do you reveal those two guys waking up [unconsciously arm-in-arm] in the morning? How fast should the camera pan? What details should it pick up? The timing's critical, and then how do you get out of a scene like that? Those kinds of things are what really took the work. Getting 300 people to walk across a field in below zero weather - there are a finite number of solutions to those kinds of problems. But staging a comic moment is the most difficult thing in the world."

Hughes, apparently, is the kind of guy who lives for such challenges. He was raised in north suburban Northbrook. ("Each script I've written starts out: EXTERIOR, CHIAGO--A four-bedroom colonial house," he noted. "Just for fun once, I wrote: EXTERIOR, MILAN--A four-bedroom colonial house in the suburbs of Milan"). He quit his comfortabnle advertising job in the late '70s to concentrate on breaking into the movies.

"It was real hard to leave. I had a kid and another one on the way. I was rising, doing great, but I just had to try this, and I needed primary access to my time. I couldn't bring myself to screw the agency by working on their time, so I took a severe cut in pay and gave myself three years to make it. I figured, in three years, if I blew it completely, I could still go beg my old job back."

Hughes supported himself during those years by writing features for the National Lampoon. Besides helping out with the mortgage, Hughes's well-received humor articles gave him an entree to the magazine's then-expanding film division. "Vacation," based on one of the most popular print pieces, became No. 1 at the box office when "Mr. Mom," a film made from Hughes's second screenplay, was No. 2. The unprecendented win-place performance soon earned Hughes his own production company at Paramount Studios (which he's recently moved to an even more lucrative berth at Universal), and that's enabled the prolific filmmaker to pump out movies at an average rate of two per year ever since.

"I was directing 'Sixteen Candles' at the time 'Vacation' and 'Mr. Mom' hit, and I was completely unaware of how much business they were doing," Hughes recalled. "I was so happy just to be working, the success side of it meant nothing to me. My only motivation is to be able to keep working. To me, the greatest pleasure, besides hanging out with my wife and kids, is writing a film, editing it, doing the music."

Hughes now is a one-man entertainment conglomerate that can probably claim assets equivalent to a mid-size airline. The recent launch of Hughes Music promises to give him even more control over the packaging of his movie soundtracks, and the opportunity to help nurture some of the many rock acts his pictures continue to feature.

But Hughes is convinced that the foundation of his success is his understanding of what the avereage movie-goer wants, and to keep in touch with that, he refuses to sever his Midwestern roots. He still spends summers and the holiday season in Chicago (ignoring the implicit warming of "PTA," he plans to fly into O'Hare before Thanksgiving), and the only moviemaking advice he takes seriously is what comes from his Chicago area friends and relatives.

"Chicago is the middle of the country: If it works there, it'll work anywhere," Hughes said. "One of the problems of living out here and getting into this community is that you lose contact with the people you're writing for. I like the industry and the people in it, but everybody out here screens a movie at their house. I'm interested in people who don't see it with perfect projection and excellent Dolby. When I mix the filjms, I assume they're going to be seen at the Cheyenne 'sixplex' where the systems probably haven't been maintained right. Now that's the way most people see them. Losing that contact is my biggest fear."