Surveying his domain, stately, plump filmmaker John Hughes bestrides what he
claims is "the tallest hill in Illinois," the mini-Matterhorn he had erected
in his 600-acre backyard so he could ski. The bunny-slope hill is made of
earth, but it could be made of money: Twenty-seven movies with domestic
grosses exceeding $1.3 billion have enabled the standoffish box office
Superman to forsake Hollywood for his private Chicago soundstage and for
this,
his rustic Fortress of Solitude near Spring Grove. "I got my cows from a Mr.
Udder -- that's his real name," says Hughes, "and Mr. Sprinkle does my pond.
It's stocked with 56-inch pike that look like submarines. I had good hay
this year -- 7,000 bales!"
He also harvested two more movies: Baby's Day Out last summer and Miracle on
34th Street, starring Richard Attenborough and Mara Wilson, last week. Is
either flick another Home Alone, the 1990 Christmas miracle that reportedly
earned global grosses of $470 million and made Hughes the top comic
filmmaker of all time?
As Macaulay Culkin used to say, "I don't think so." Despite a pronounced
family resemblance to the Culkin farce, Baby's Day Out, reportedly a $50
million project, grossed a dismal $16.5 million. But this is a good thing,
Hughes mused on the eve of Miracle, which opened with a still grimmer $2.7
million gross. "It was like a big wake-up call saying, 'What are you doing,
where are you going, Mr. Home Alone?' Suddenly I'm in the gutter--and it was
great!"
To comprehend why Hughes considers disaster a blessing, you have to know
about
an experience in his Chicago boyhood that shaped his whole approach to
movies.
"When I was 16 I went to a Zen temple, and I thought I'd figured out the
koan, What is the sound of one hand clapping? I figured it was this--" He snaps
his fingers. "The monk went berserk, threw me out screaming, because I'd
logicked it."
Hughes feels he "logicked" Baby's Day Out by concentrating on
special-effects
technology and neglecting the emotions his non-F/X pix can tap. "It had no
soul," he says. Miracle may fail to sell tickets, but its Santa Claus theme
successfully expresses Hughes' stubborn belief in magic over logic. "I
really
believe if you think through it, you wreck it," he says. "We demand an
explanation for everything. We're just so bright, you know--Harvard has just
illuminated all of our lives."
Hughes, a University of Arizona dropout, loves to flout snobs and fly by the
seat of his own fancy pants. When his flicks hit, they're like a Zen
master's
unaimed arrow that nails the bull's-eye because it's shot from the heart. "I
change my mind all the time," he mumbles, chain-smoking in his living room.
"I
want to make it up as I go along. When I know what I'm doing, it generally
stinks."
"He wrote Sixteen Candles in two days," says its star, Molly Ringwald, now
living in Paris (but willing to relocate should Hughes call). "I may get in
a
lot of s--for this," he confides, "but the last 40 pages of Home Alone took
eight hours to write."
He's still writing as fast as he can, but he'd love to get a few more hands
clapping than he has lately. The directors of his self-produced scripts have
been striking out, and his own last try at directing, 1991's Curly Sue, ran
20
percent over its $25 million budget and still bombed. "I'm getting ready for
grandchildren. I really don't see doing [movies] past 50," muses Hughes, who
turns 45 in February. "When I've lost my voice, I'll know when to go. I'll
disappear in a puff."
Is he really about to take up alfalfa farming full-time, fishing for pike
with
his wife, Nancy (his high school sweetheart), sons John III, 18, and James,
15? Insiders don't think so. "I'm smelling a big Hughes deal brewing [with a
major studio]," one industry watcher says. "He's like C.B. De-Mille, like
Disney without the animation," says producer Jack Brodsky.
Hughes, who currently has a nonexclusive agreement with Fox, hasn't scored
any
deals by winning Hollywood's heart. He gleefully broke Warner's by taking
Home
Alone to Fox after Warner demanded a last-minute $700,000 budget cut, says
one
insider. "He thinks studio execs are all know-nothing geeks," says one
studio
exec who has worked with him. "He's volatile, impetuous, and spoiled," says
a screenwriter. "Where someone like [producer] Joel Silver yells at you," says
one of Hughes' publicists, "John stonewalls you."
"Yeah, I'm real testy," says Hughes, not at all testily. "I'm just as nuts
as
the actors are. [Moviemaking] is not the most comfortable thing in the world
for me to do." When Matthew Broderick said Hughes wasn't being clear about a
scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, "he shut down like a rock," recalls
Broderick, who would gladly work with him again. "When he gets quiet, it's
hard to know what you've done to bother him."
Perhaps Hughes learned the silent treatment from his first showbiz
employers,
the cold Harvard grads at National Lampoon magazine. In the mid-'70s, he
shuttled between Chicago and New York, writing ads for Philip Morris. "I
tried
to finish my business by noon, and then I'd hang out at the Lampoon. No one
would talk to me for months." Finally a Hughes joke about a maimed baseball
player earned him a laugh and a place on the masthead. "Vacation '58," a
Lampoon tale of a family trip to Disneyland, later became his second and
most seditious film, 1983's National Lampoon's Vacation.
"With Vacation, I was actually deconstructing Disney," Hughes explains. "I
used to watch The Mickey Mouse Club, those obnoxious, spoiled Mouseketeers
you
just wanted to beat the tar out of." As Hughes recalls it, "They could do
anything! Disneyland after hours? Whatever you want! They'd wear these
hourse
things, and they'd give away giant Tootsie Rolls. My grandmother was
diabetic;
there was a fear of sugar in my house. I wanted one of those goddamn Tootsie
Rolls, I wanted to dance with that horse for a while, I wanted to go to
Disneyland. I never got there as a kid and knew I never would." Says
Ringwald,
"I think at the core he was like my Breakfast Club character, intelligent,
extremely sensitive, and didn't quite fit in."
Hughes' salesman dad and charity-worker mom earned less than some of their
ritzy neighbors, and their Detroit and Chicago homes were pop-culture
fun-free
zones. "I really like my family [he has three younger sisters], but Jesus, I
don't think I saw a movie till I was 10. We didn't even have TV, so I'd
watch
Walt Disney by sneaking into somebody's backyard and watching it through
their
picture window on their color TV. My [story's] first sentence was, 'It
would've been the best vacation ever if Dad hadn't shot Walt Disney in the
leg.' Which is really saying, Our life would be so much better if you
wouldn't
shove these phony fantasies down our throats!"
Hughes prides himself on giving his frothy fantasies a dark edge, but his
nastiness is offset by an adman's calculated perkiness. This came in handy
when National Lampoon's Animal House opened Hollywood's doors to the
Lampooner
in 1978. After such entry-level screenwriting jobs as National Lampoon's
Class
Reunion and an encounter with an exec who screamed at him, "You'll rewrite
that script until the director likes it, you dumb little s--," Hughes
decided
he wanted more control. Mr. Mom (1983), based on Hughes' life after he quit
the ad game to write at home, hit big and gave him a shot, and The Breakfast
Club made him a mogul.
He freely admits to his own boners. "I stumbled into this business, I didn't
train for it. I yelled 'Action!' on my first two movies before the camera
was
turned on. They're not perfect movies, they're flawed. They're not
cappuccino
pictures, they're sort of Maxwell House instant coffee out of the machine at
the car wash."
Next to run through the Hughes percolator is The Bee, a film for Disney.
After
that Hughes, typically, won't--or can't--say where his career might head.
Retirement, The Breakfast Club 2, and Home Alone 3 are possibilities. But
he's
determined to wing it, trusting his gut to break his losing streak. "Home
Alone made me think I knew something! The worst thing I can do is think I
know
anything. That's just the end of you." Is John Hughes over? Don't be too
sure.
"He'll have the last laugh," says Ringwald. "He always does."
