In the high school yearbook for his junior year, John Hughes appears only twice, and both times he is scowling and sullen -- a study in self-conscious insolence, or maybe he just didn't like having his picture taken. He was not in the band, or on the student council, or an editor of his school newspaper, the Torch; his only extracurricular activity, apparently, was German Club. In the high school yearbook for his senior year, he doesn’t appear at all.
The four years Hughes spent at Glenbrook North High School in the Chicago suburbs were not as formative as one might expect for the man who has been dubbed, "the teen-film king." It appears that he was not the geek of Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club, nor the confident class-cutter behind Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; he did not suffer the dating dilemmas of Some Kind of Wonderful or Pretty in Pink. One former classmate and neighbor describes him as a kind of quiet guy who favored corduroys, turtlenecks, and alpaca sweaters and mumbled sarcastic comments under his breath.
"High school was not this key point in my life," says Hughes. "It wasn’t traumatic. Basically, it was over real quick."
It has been said of John Hughes that he imbues a prom with the significance of a nuclear-freeze debate; recalling the vision of Molly Ringwald as the belle of the dance in her homemade dress at the climax of Pretty in Pink, one can’t help wondering whether Hughes’s own prom was so memorably romantic. As a matter of fact, he says, he and his girlfriend (and future wife), Nancy Ludwig, were refused admittance to the dance because he had on cowboy boots and she was wearing bell-bottom pants. Far from being disappointed, he says, he was quite relieved not to have to go.
"What I hated was that creepiness around town, the florist asking" -- Hughes’s voice lilts in imitation -- "’Who’re you taking?’ None of your business! They want you to act like a grown-up -- it’s at this hotel, they’re playing ballroom music, everybody’s pretending to be little adults -- and then they treat you like a child." He sounds not like a 38-year-old father of two, not like one of Hollywood’s most successful writer-producer-directors, but more like a scornful, rebellious teenager.
Hughes used to say that some of his teenage characters were based on himself: Ally Sheedy’s bizarre loner in The Breakfast Club, and Molly Ringwald’s neglected wallflower in Sixteen Candles; once he had laid claim toa touch of the roguish Ferris Bueller. Today he says, "People ask me, ‘Were you the geek?’ No, I wasn’t. ‘So which one were you?’ I don’t get it. Who was Alfred Hitchcock in his movies? Janet Leigh? Did anyone even ask him? But I get asked, so I make up an answer." Of course, Hughes says this now that he’s moving out of his high school movie phase and into his adult comedies.
He is testy. Now people assume that She’s Having a Baby is about the early years of his marriage, just because it’s about a guy (played by Kevin Bacon) who marries his high school sweetheart, drops out of college, takes a job in a warehouse, breaks into advertising, and writes on nights and weekends -- all of which Hughes did -- and just because the final credits end with this dedication: "Inspiration: Nancy Hughes."
"For one thing," says Hughes. "I was never as cool as Kevin."
Why should people want to know who he is anyway, he wonders; why should anyone care? People care because Hughes has power in Hollywood, the power to make any movie he wants, when and where he wants. He has managed to acquire this power with a minimum of scrutiny.
In barely six years, he has created his own genre -- the teenage comedy-drama -- and has accumulated an awesome string of film credits: thirteen as screenwriter, six as director, and sex as producer. By the end of June he will have added two more -- as writer and executive producer of The Great Outdoors, a comedy starring John Candy and Dan Aykroyd as incompatible brothers-in-law on vacation together. (It was inspired, Hughes allows, by his own family excursions when he was a child.)
To his audience, Hughes appears to be a keen observer of suburban life, someone with a sense of humor and great taste in music (his movie soundtracks frequently vault obscure songs into the Top 40) -- a pretty hip guy. But within the film community, his reputation is considerably more complicated. People who have worked with him, from his production-company staff to studio executives, describe Hughes as a reclusive, noncommunicative man who exercises his power in capricious ways. The question is: In Hollywood, does any of that matter?
Studio executives don’t seem to think so -- all they need to know is that Hughes’s movies make money. Most of them do; he has been known to take a fairly modest budget -- say, $7 million for Pretty in Pink, or $21.5 million for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off -- and more than quintuple it at the box office. (Pretty in Pink earned $39 million; Ferris Bueller, more than $70 million.)
"he is a certifiable genius," says Dawn Steel, president of Columbia Pictures, who knew Hughes when both were at Paramount Pictures.
"I think he’s an enormously gifted man, very possibly a genius," says Ned Tanen, president of Paramount’s motion picture group.
"Look," says one executive, who asked not to be identified. "There is no such thing in Hollywood as a person who’s always nice and does whatever you want and turns movies in on time and on budget, and if there was, he would probably be a very mediocre filmmaker. The highly talented ones, and that would include John Hughes, are usually very opinionated or insecure -- they’re all difficult in some way. But I don’t think you’d find a studio in town that wouldn’t be willing to make a movie with him."
That may be true, but there seem to be plenty of former employees who wouldn’t want to work with him again. He can be charming, they say. Several report that he gave them generous salary increases over their previous jobs. Other describe temporarily feeling as if they were his best friend. They tell of being summoned from their offices to spend lazy afternoons by his pool, listening to music, laughing at his stories. But they say that working for Hughes was ultimately a frustrating -- and in some cases humiliating -- experience.
Hughes says he know she isn’t the most popular guy in town, that he has "a million enemies," but he doesn’t see it as any fault of his own. "Any time you have any degree of success, there’s the building up and then there’s the tearing down. It happens with everybody. Look, I go fast. I’ve gotten a lot of movies made. Other people have to sit and struggle and struggle and struggle. Well, I wrote fifteen screenplays before I got one made. I’ve spent three years on a project. I’ve been in development hell. But apparently that’s not enough for some people."
Above all, John Hughes says, he is a family man. A boring man who doesn’t have many friends, doesn’t like to do lunch or take meetings or attend premieres -- any of that Hollywood stuff. A private man. His closest friends, the ones he admits to having, confirm this. Kevin Bacon was asked, "If a person who had never met John Hughes asked you what he was really like, what would you say?" Bacon’s answer: "I wouldn’t tell you." A friend from Hughes’s high school days declined to be interviewed, saying it would be an invasion of Hughes’s privacy. Hughes himself says there simply isn’t much to know. He’s just a guy whose job is making movies. No more or less respectable than running the local pharmacy. The sort of guy Norman Rockwell might have been if he’d lived in Hollywood.
In fact, Norman Rockwell figures prominently in Hughes’s vision of himself. When he describes his earliest memory -- of getting hit on the head with a piece of concrete by Happy Betcher, a kid who lived in the neighborhood -- Hughes marvels at the Rockwell-ish name of his tormentor. Years later, when Hughes was working on Sixteen Candles, Rockwell’s painting of a young girl staring at herself in a mirror inspired him to cast Molly Ringwald because of her lanky, freckle-faced, Rockwell quality.
But what he likes most of all about Rockwell is that "he was a very, very modest guy who took his enormous achievements and just said, ‘Aw, shucks,’" says Hughes. "He was never taken seriously. I identify with that. I don’t think I’m making any great statements, and I certainly don’t think I’m making art." Most people apparently agree with him. Hughes’s work is rarely acclaimed critically, and no one ever complains that his movies have always been ignored at Oscar time.
Clearly, it’s hard to reconcile the various impressions of John Hughes; his own disingenuous appraisal doesn’t quite mesh with others’ descriptions of him as the temperamental genius or the unpredictable boss. There is, however, at least one point on which there is no disagreement: John Hughes is an uncommonly gifted and prolific writer.
"You know that assignment you always get in high school when you’re reading Walden, to keep a journal?" he says. "Well, I just kept doing that." Words always had a profound influence on him. He can still recite all of Andy Griffith’s routine "What It Was Was Football," one of the first records he ever bought. Woody Allen’s humor pieces in The New Yorker inspired him to try his hand at similar essays, but at first he despaired that his midwestern Presbyterian upbringing wasn’t the stuff of comedy.
Ultimately, Hughes’s uncanny ability to remember everything he’s heard, and to retell it to entertaining effect, became the main source for his writing. For instance, alternating between the authoritative baritone of a bully and the panicky tremor of a third-grade boy, he relates a familiar terror that fifteen-year-old boys used to perpetrate on their younger brothers:
"‘You know, when you get to high school, you have to swim naked.’"
"‘Nahhh, you don’t.’"
"‘Yes, you do.’"
"‘What about the girls?’"
"‘They get to wear bathing suits.’"
"‘But they’re not in the same class, right?’"
"‘Yeah. Same class. Same pool.’" Then he describes the big kids walking away, snickering: "‘That’s gonna bother them till sixth grade.’"
Hughes married young, at the age of twenty, and dropped out of the University of Arizona soon after. His first job was processing form requests for a Chicago insurance firm; his second was a gofer in a direct-mail advertising office. All the time, he was writing on the side: novels, short stories, poems, but mostly jokes. He wouldn’t go to bed unless he’d written 100 jokes that day, though he allows that probably only 3 or 4 of those were worthwhile. at the end of the week, he’d assemble the best 50 -- five typed pages, 10 jokes to a page -- and send them to the clubs where Joan Rivers or Rodney Dangerfield or Phyllis Diller were performing. Every once in a while, a comedian would buy one of the jokes; Rivers paid $7 for each, he recalls.
By the time he was 22, Hughes was working as an advertising copywriter, using his jokes as writing samples. He moved up swiftly. "If I heard about an account, I just wrote about it; didn’t matter who it was assigned to." He was also selling freelance articles to Playboy and National Lampoon. In 1979, when he was 29 and the father of a two-year-old son, John III (his second son, Jamie, was born the following year), he quit his job in advertising to become an editor of the Lampoon. It was then that Lampoon chairman Matty Simmons, who had already produced National Lampoon’s Animal House, gave Hughes his shot at writing scripts.
Hughes was not instantly successful in Hollywood. He wrote episodes of a television spin-off of Animal House that lasted only four months and cowrote a Jaws sequel, Jaws: 3, People: 0, that was shelved at Universal. He also collaborated on a script with fellow Lampoon editor P.J. O’Rourke called The History of Ohio from the Beginning of Time to the End of the Universe, which was never made.
Still, Hughes did impress those he met, including Ned Tanen, who was then Universal Pictures’ head of production -- and he was given assignments to punch up the jokes in other people’s scripts. He quickly achieved a reputation as a top-notch rewrite man, extremely fast and eager to please. "If you had one week to get a script in shape, John Hughes was your gun for hire," says one studio executive.
His first produced screenplay was National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, a movie so wretched it had only a token theatrical release in 1982 before going to videocassette. But Hughes relishes the experience in a way, because it’s proof that he’s been through the same wringer that every other writer in Hollywood has endured.
His original script, he says, was about a ten-year high school reunion and how you always revert to your adolescent persona. But the final product was a horror-movie spoof about a psycho who as teased and tortured by his classmates and attends the reunion intent on killing them all.
"The guy that directed it," says Hughes, "told me he was gonna lock me in a room until I got the script right. They flew me out once. I went to dailies, and I didn’t laugh, and he got mad and sent me home again."
"I’m very, very glad it happened that way, because I got cut down to size real fast. I went to the Gulf Mill Theater in Miles [near Chicago] and watched that movie, and it was just horrendous. Jeez, this is what can happen to a writer."
Michael Miller, the movie’s director, refuses to comment on Hughes’s recollections, except to send four drafts of the script, all written by Hughes. One has a cover page that reads: "Reunion at Horror High, First Draft Screenplay by John Hughes, 12-15-1980." Aside from some minor details, its plot is the same as that of the movie Hughes now disowns.
Most people consider 1983 to be the year John Hughes really arrived in Hollywood; National Lampoon’s Vacation and Mr. Mom, both of which he wrote, were huge hits. Universal promptly signed him to a three-year, $30 million deal and committed to letting him direct his next two scripts -- Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. "I have a lot of respect for Frank Price," Hughes said at the time about the then chairman of Universal’s motion picture group, "because I’ve always found him the toughest guy in town to sell an idea to. We hit it off -- he used to be a writer, and he’s from Michigan, my kind of guy." That opinion lasted only until Hughes invited Universal executives to screen a rough cut of The Breakfast Club, a movie about five very different students locked in detention for a day. "It was grim," says Hughes,
recalling the reaction. "‘Not much story, is there? Lotta character development, okay, but where’s the story?"
Hughes hired the prestigious entertainment law firm of Pollock, Bloom and Deckom to get him out of his contract. (Founding partner Thomas Pollock is now chairman of Universal’s motion picture group, which made The Great Outdoors.) Tanen was going to Paramount, and Hughes wanted to go with him.
"Working with John," says Tanen, "is very . . . odd. The way he works -- he calls me at any hour of the night, or he justs bursts into my office. He’s not always the easiest person to deal with; he’s kind of an island unto himself. Sometimes we can’t find him for days. Then I get so mad at him I think I’ll never speak to him again. Today I happen to be speaking to him.
"I know he can be nonconfrontational, but that’s not my experience with him. We got at it head-to-head. But as angry as he gets, I know it’s only because he cares so much. It’s hard not to respect someone, even when you’re screaming at him, if that’s his motivating factor."
At a cost of nearly $30 million, Planes, Trains and Automobiles was Tanen’s most expensive vote of confidence in Hughes. The deceptively simple story, about a businessman (Steve Martin) trying to make it from New York to his home in Chicago in time for Thanksgiving, became a logistical nightmare. For one thing, no transportation company would agree to cooperate with a movie that characterized it as inept or deficient in any way. So Hughes’s crews had to rent twenty miles of train track and refurbish old railroad cars, construct a set that looked like an airline terminal, design a rent-a-car company logo and uniforms, and then rent 250 cars.
On top of that, cast and crew traveled from the Midwest to the East Coast and back in perpetual search of snow, which perversely seemed to melt whenever they arrived. The shoot was hellish, and according to some who worked on it, Hughes only made it worse. He shot an enormous amount of film -- about 600,000 feet, almost twice the industry average. It was understood that he could never be disturbed in his trailer, but since he was not only the writer and director but also the producer of the movie, he had to approve every aspect of filming. Although Hughes denies that he was inaccessible, members of his crew claimed they would wait outside his door with questions -- what sort of wallpaper did he want for the foyer of Steve Martin’s home, which location they would be using the next day -- hoping for answers lest they risk his wrath by guessing wrong.
"He acted as if we were pests," says one crew member, "when we were only trying to make his movie the best it could be."
A set director spent five months and $100,000 on the seven-room set that was to be Martin’s home. She tried, she says, to grab Hughes between takes to show him fabric swatches and furniture photos, but he rarely expressed a definite opinion (he’s also color-blind). His instruction, when he gave them, were vague -- the only guidance she remembers getting on the dining room table, for instance, was that it should look like a hand-me-down from the character’s parents. When she showed him pictures of the finished rooms, she thought he liked them. But the day after Hughes walked through the set, one of his executive producers told the designer she was fired. Hughes said he was responsible for the film and had to approve everything in it; in this case, he says the set was furnished with junk and bric-a-brac that didn’t reflect Martin’s character. The decorator,
however, says she ordered top-of-the-line furniture, had fabrics imported from Paris and Rome, and had carpets custom-dyed.
It must be pointed out that most of the people who criticized Hughes did so under the condition that they not be identified by name; several had been fired by him.
Still, the filming of Planes, Trains and Automobiles wasn’t the first, or only, time that Hughes’s employees found his behavior inexplicable. One former employee relates that during the filming of She’s Having a Baby, Hughes had teamsters -- who are hired primarily to drive equipment and key personnel to and from the set -- spend weeks cruising Los Angeles, looking for a used car for Hughes to five to his maid as a Christmas gift. They brought back Polaroid pictures of many of them. But in the end, Hughes went to a Santa Monica dealership and bought her a new car off the lot a few days before Christmas. Hughes says he merely mentioned to the teamster captain that he was looking for a car, and that it was on the captain’s instructions that the teamsters took the Polaroid pictures.
Most of all, members of his production-company staff and of his film crews say, they were stunned by Hughes’s unpredictable changes in affection. Those who thought they were his confidants suddenly found themselves frozen out, for no apparent reason. A former assistant to Hughes says that shortly before Planes, Trains and Automobiles was to start filming, an executive producer who had been solidly in the inner circle sat for hours outside Hughes’s office, waiting anxiously to discuss locations and shooting schedules. But Hughes did not emerge from his office all day. Finally, he had the assistant distract the producer so that he could slip out undetected. Hughes says this never happened.
During the shooting of Planes, Trains, Hughes was reportedly waging another battle. This one was with Paramount over a suite of offices the filmmaker wanted. According to a former employee, Hughes’s production company, Hughes Entertainment, already had space in two buildings at the Paramount lot. But he wanted more; specifically, he wanted the offices above those used by producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop and Cop II).
Initially, Paramount agreed to give him the space; it was unoccupied and had been renovated and furnished scarcely two years before. But Hughes instructed one of his assistants to re-renovate and refurbish -- at a cost of about $750,000, one source estimates.
Paramount executives balked at the figure. But Hughes apparently believed he would prevail. From the Planes, Trains location, one of his assistants fielded phone calls from a confused decorator and an angry studio. "I tried to tell John that things weren’t working out with the office," says the assistant, "and at first he’d say, ‘Oh, okay.’ But then a few days later he would say, ‘What’s going on with those offices?’"
Hughes did not get the space. Since then, his three-year-old arrangement with Paramount has ended. His nonexclusive, multipicture deal with Universal, which was announced last August, was finally signed in April.
Clearly, Hughes is not a Hollywood pariah; far from it. But his inexpensive comedies seem to be a thing of the past. His last three movies have cost between $20 million and $30 million each. And during negotiations to have Hughes set up shop at Universal, the people who could have explained his studio status were not particularly forthcoming. Pollock would not comment at all except to say, "We would want to make as many films with him as we can." Tanen does not rule out the possibility of Paramount’s financing more Hughes projects, but he adds: "Whether he makes another movie with us or not, we’ve made six, seven movies together, which is unusual today. Two or three and you’ve got a working relationship. We’ve had a long dance with the same partner."
Hughes offers this explanation: "I’m doing stuff at Universal, I’m doing stuff [at Paramount], I’ve got stuff all over town. A studio can only handle so much."
Nevertheless, he refuses to provide specific details about his forthcoming projects or to state exactly which studios might be making them. One cast member of the The Breakfast Club recently called him to ask if he would be interested in doing a sequel.
John Hughes sits on the leather couch in his office -- the one he’s had for years -- making fun of the fiberglass rocks in a bowl on his fiberglass coffee table. "These are decorator rocks," he says. "We paid, like, $1,000 for them. Go out to Magic Mountain, they’re a dime."
He’s wearing jeans, a white pullover, high-top sneakers; his hair is shaggy around his smooth, soft face. He is engaging, telling stories in which he frequently looks foolish: how all the kids stared at him in school one day because he was wearing mod clothes from England two years before they became fashionable; how he first tried to break into advertising by spending every Friday for two months sitting in the lobby of the largest agency in Chicago, hoping to get in to see the personnel director.
"I’m far more interested in other people than I am in myself," he is saying. "I’m most interested in the guy that comes in and puts the water softener in. I love those guys. They have the best stories. One of the things that I regret about Hollywood is that I don’t have that sort of daily contact. When the guy shows up, he knows who you are, what you do. In Chicago, they don’t give a damn who you are. ‘Oh, he makes movies. Who cares?’"
You want to know who I am? John Hughes is saying. I’m the guy who used to be your paperboy or borrowed your lawn mower and forgot to return it. My mom made tuna fish sandwiches just like yours did, the real thin kind. Don’t believe what anybody else tell you, John Hughes is saying. This is all I am.
