John Hughes' Tales of Teens

Eye View - John Hughes
Written by Louise Farr
Full Text Copyright (Source Unknown), 1986

Director John Hughes leaps up from a hulking black leather sofa in his Paramount office to perform an impromptu dance step. Then he waves his hands and makes little doo-wop back-up singer movements. He's excited because a radio station he grew up listening to is calling for a phone interview about his latest movie, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," which he shot in his hometown of Chicago, WBBM territory. "W-B-B-M," Hughes sings, parodying an announcer's voice.

Hughes, 36, is wearing a black Gianna Versace outfit set off with a blue splash of a tie. He has a round face and shaggy beige hair, steel-rim glasses and a reputation for being prolific but somewhat difficult. He used to listen eagerly to WBBM in the mornings to see if hishigh school had closed because of snow. It rarely had.

"I love this," says Hughes, who only minutes before had ushered out a TV news crew. "I chat," he says gleefully, "and people listen to me. I used to have to call up my friends."

He tells WBBM that "Ferris Bueller" expresses his "unabashed love of Chicago." He also tells them that he was so naive when he started as a Hollywood director that he demanded more control than he was entitled to. "Not knowing Hollywood etiquette, I just assumed that as the director I would do everything," he says when he gets off the phone. "So I just did it, you know."

What Hughes did was write and direct "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club," and "Weird Science." He's also generaly credited with making stars of Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson and Anthony Michael Hall. But for everyone who admires Hughes's ear for teenage language, his humor, his ability to identify with young people and wring sensitive performances from them, there seems to be someone else waiting to call his movies shallow or accuse him of treating his teenage subjects too seriously.

"True. I'll continue to do that," says Hughes, who refuses to scoff at adolescence, and whose budget for "Pretty In Pink," which he wrote and produced, was $7 million - less than half the industry average. So far it's grossed $39 million.

"Ferris Bueller," which he hopes will appeal to adults as well as to teenagers, was budgeted at $12,500,000 and grossed more than $18 millin in its first 12 days. "I know what I'm doing, y'know," says Hughes, who managed all this after teenage movies were pronounced dead last summer.

"They didn't look at the movies themselves," he says of the teen-genre doomsayers. "You can't exploit anybody for very long. It gets to be too much, and they say no."

NOt surprisingly, Paramount's old building C has been unofficially christened the Hughes Building. Outside Hughes' office, the reception room is decked out in Memphis-Italianate, in black, white and gray with flashes of peacock blue, silver and yellow. Inside, his desk is a slab of gray marble, his coffee table fake cement. Amid all this hipness, Hughes swears he's changed little besides his Brooks Bros. image since he moved west.

He first missed Chicago in 1968 when he went to college in Arizona, a tie-dyed flower chid let loose among tennis-sweatered Southwestern jocks and pickup trucks with rifle racks. "In the spring, I'd sit there in the dorm and hallucinate forsythias," he says. He also desperately missed his high school sweetheart, Nancy. After surviving four different majors, he returned to Chicago and married her. He was 20 and happy; his parents were panicked. "It was, like...Oh God, you know. I was doing everything wrong," he says, lapsing into one of his frequent bouts of teenspeak.

College may have made him miserable, but by necessity he had found a sense of humor. Back home he wrote for Joan Rivers and Rodney Dangerfield, and his portfolio of a thousand one-liners - with copies of checks so that people wouldn't think he was lying - gave him an entry to advertising at Needham, Harper & Steers.

At 22, he was given his boss's job. At 27, he was creative director at the Leo Burnett agency. Then seven years ago he realized he was set for life, and he was scared. "I thought, what if I'm 65 and retired with all my stocks, my profit-sharing, my money, and I'm sitting on the porch, thinking, 'I should have been a writer - I wonder if I could have done it.'" He took advantage of a snowstorm and stayed home for a week to write. It changed his life. "I got to look around and say, 'I like being at home.'" He said to his wife, who was expecting their second son, "I've got to do this." She agreed, and he went to work at the National Lampoon magazine for a salary that was about half the size of his Leo Burnett Christmas bonus.

His first staff-written piece turned into "Vacation," starring Chevy Chase. It was released in 1983, within a few weeks of another of his screenplays, "Mr. Mom." But by then, Hughes, still wanting to move fast, wanted to direct. Ned Tanen, now president of Paramount's motion picture group, gave him that chance with "Sixteen Candles" for Universal.

"He got the rudiments of directing down very quickly," says Tanen. "Directing is not brain surgery, though many directors wouild have you believe it is. He soaked it up like a sponge, which is the way he does everything."

Last year he fellout with Universal, with whom he had a much-publicized $30 million deal to create a studio comedy wing. He last Universal movie, "Weird Science," in which two high school geeks create the woman of their dreams with a computer, failed. One critic called it "a catastrophe." Hughes admits it was "a mess" that got made because he was in what he describes as "a feeding frenzy. - bang-bang-bang, let's go." He left Universal and came to Paramount. In "a business where a lot of hearts are cold and small," Tanen, he says, understands him. "We get along," says Tanen. "I'm not sure why."

Hughes seems not to get along too well these days with his teenage star Molly Ringwald. He did not cooperate with Time magazine for a recent story about her and is annoyed that she quoted him "liberally." "She said that I said she is a box-office draw. I didn't say any of that stuff," he says. He also didn't approve of her being on the cover. "I mean, God. There are so many things going on around the world." For her part, Ringwald told Time she would not rush to work with him again. "There's a sort of natural rebellion," says Hughes.

Although Hughes's projects would seem the most commercial of Hollywood vehicles - he zaps them out sometimes in days - he becomes fierce about them and their place in the movie business. "I have always had a certain cloud of controversy over me because I have never let people buy me," he says. "A lot of people in town call up and want things real fast. They say, 'Well, why can't you? You can write this in a week.' Pople get angry...I will not sell out. I will blow myself up rather than do something I don't believe in."

He believes in upbeat endings. "Life doesn't come out right - or very seldom does. Everybody knows that. What's the point of watching it? I think there's more to be learned by seeing how it cam come out than seeing it the way it always comes out."

He also believes in "benchmarkmoments" - birth, graduation, death - during which life is changed. His next project, which he wrote and will produce, is "Some Kind of Wonderful," to be directed by Martha Coolidge. It has a college setting and features a heroine with "a gender identification problem." After that, "The Underlying Principle," renamed from "She's Having a Baby," but he doesn't want to talk about it. He's also interested in working with the idea of women approaching 40.

"Most of my material," Hughes says, "is about life getting changed, or realizing something. Ferris says, 'Life moves pretty fast - if you don't stop and look around, you could miss it.' That's the thing I most fear - missing my life."

PHOTO CAPTION: John Hughes, hipness personified, with his Versace clothes and up-to-the-minute office decor.

PHOTO CAPTION: Hughes on the set of "Weird Science," made in what he calls "a feeding frenzy."