Kim Delaney and Kyle Maclachlan:
The "missing" John Hughes stars

Martha and Hughes worked together twice - the previous time being Paramount's "Joy of Sex" in 1983 (Martha as director, John as anonymous script re-writer), which became an embarassment for both of them. They believed in making respectable, heartfelt, intelligent teen comedies, but they were given only 8 days to put a script together and be ready to start filming - the studio forced cheap vulgarity and edited its own result. Joy of Sex was so bad that even National Lampoon removed its name from the final product.

John proved his ideals by blitzing a comeback in 1985, and Martha proved her capabilities that same year - competing against John when their rival teen science comedies went head-to-head = Weird Science & Real Genius opened the same week in August. Although WS did better at the box-office, Martha got better critical reviews. John respected Martha's accomplishment and kept her in mind for future collaboration.

1985's big winner of course was Back to the Future, another teen science comedy that originally starred Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, who was fired after 6 weeks of filming. Hughes liked Stoltz and wanted to give him a chance at teen hero stardom with SKOW. To "guarantee" its box office appeal, Stoltz would be paired with Hughes' pygmalion protege Molly Ringwald.

But before that could happen, Hughes got pissy over Pretty in Pink...

PiP was John's first production under his new deal at Paramount.

PiP was also Deutch's debut feature, having been hired by Paramount due only to Deutch's music videos on MTV.

Hughes wanted to shoot all of his movies in Chicago, but Paramount was firm on budget issues. Hughes compromised, agreeing to lens PiP and SKOW for lower budgets in LA, while hoarding resources for his priority teen epic in Northbrook - Ferris Bueller.

Deutch would be John's hired gun, filling in for him on the LA sets and obeying John's instructions, delivering a Reagan-era West Side Story in which Andie winds up not with Blane but with Duckie - proving that true love was more powerful than materialism. Test audiences complained about this finale and Howard Deutch argued in favor of a Blane reshoot.

John didn't warm to this notion of a music-video helmer instructing a better way to tell his own story. However, John was too busy overseeing FBDO to figure out a better way of making Andie-Duckie succeed, so he relented.

But this was not the end of frustrations - Molly Ringwald criticized to Time magazine that John had changed into a Yuppie producer - no longer who she'd admired when they'd first met. (He'd worn sneakers and T-shirts to attend concerts with her, but now he drove a BMW in his Brooks Brothers suits). After John wrote SKOW with her in mind, Molly now refused to play Amanda Jones and left behind her adoring Svengali to prove she could succeed without him.

Warren Beatty had personally developed "The Pick-Up Artist" for Molly at Fox, so now Beatty became her new benefactor instead of Hughes. (Beatty would later remove his name from the project.) While Molly's public criticisms disappointed Hughes, her departure to Warren Beatty hurt more, so John replaced Molly in SKOW with popular soap opera star Kim Delaney.

Since John was already upset with Deutch over the PiP reshoots and Blane-Duckie arguments, Hughes chose to give SKOW to Martha Coolidge (and her "Real Genius" designer Josan Russo). This enabled SKOW to have a fresh start, free of any bad baggage left from PiP.

This would free Hughes to focus his own energies on his follow-up to FBDO - his adult passion project for 1987, She's Having a Baby.

Now that Hughes and Martha were in charge of a teen romance (SKOW instead of "Joy of Sex"), they both knew they'd show Paramount the proper way to make such a movie. Martha and Kim Delaney got along with Eric Stoltz quite well, and rehearsals went smoothly with Kyle Maclachlan.

This of course brings us to Lea Thompson, not only the future Mrs. Deutch but also a would-be Brat Packer who'd co-starred with Hughes actors Charlie Sheen and Ilan Mitchell-Smith (in "Red Dawn" and "Wild Life"). Summer 1986 was particularly cruel to Lea, starring in back-to-back flops SpaceCamp and Howard the Duck. Briefly presumed to be a rising starlet with Back to the Future, Lea was now entering an embarassingly cold dip away from Hollywood sizzle.

By the end of summer `86 one of the few winners of the season was Hughes - the blazing 1986 box-office (particularly the record-breaking FBDO) proved Hughes the king of teen cinema even bigger than he'd been in 1985 - putting John on top in Hollywood's eyes, and boosting him to a good enough mood to admit that Howard Deutch had been correct all along to reshoot Pretty in Pink.

As a make-up gift, John decided to amend their friendship by giving Deutch a second movie - SKOW (even though it already had a director ready to start shooting), nimbly coaxing Paramount to send Martha up to Seattle. Of course, this sudden surprise move yanked a rug from under the cast, who were already into their last week of prep and ready to film.

Eric Stoltz appreciated Martha's awkwardness about the transition, himself having been replaced a year earlier on Back to the Future after 6 weeks of filming. No sooner did Martha pack her belongings, then Deutch fired Kim and Kyle as Amanda and Hardy for reasons unknown. Craig Sheffer had co-starred with Kim Delaney and Emilio Estevez in "That Was Then This Is Now." Lea Thompson was hired from her past collaborations with Eric - Back to the Future and 1984's The Wild Life.

Deutch began shooting SKOW with only 4 days' prep time, using all of the material Martha had spent weeks creating with her crew.

The March 1987 release of SKOW sold $18 million in tickets - which sounds decent until you realize no Hughes movie had performed so small since the 1983 flop Nate & Hayes. From production costs, distribution fees and marketing budget, SKOW did not recoup its investment theatrically, and would need years of video and cable earnings to break even. Thus the sudden lack of profitability ended Hughes' reign as the Teen King.

Summer 1987 might have redeemed both Hughes and Martha Coolidge, if Paramount had liked their next movies or felt they would be hits. But the studio sensed flops, and after mediocre test results, shelved both She's Having a Baby and Martha's Seattle movie ("Plain Clothes") for over a year.

The studio forced John to ramp up his next adult movie Planes Trains & Automobiles on a fast track to meet a holiday release date. Way overbudget and overschedule, Hughes cost Paramount a fortune. While PTA made John a mint and delighted audiences, its R rating severely limited its profit potential, delivering only a PiP-size box office despite a mammoth budget. Paramount got revenge by dumping John's pet project SHAB the following April.

They did the same with Martha Coolidge - after removing her from SKOW, her Seattle movie was released and yanked after a single weekend.

All's well that ends well.

Martha Coolidge since became the president of the DGA Director's Guild; she helmed Paramount's 2004 romance The Prince & Me, and is now making a Hilary Duff comedy for 2006. As for Martha's version of SKOW, Hughes never made up to Coolidge for her removal, leaving her with bittersweet memories of their past collaborations. Five years later, Hughes hired Patrick Read Johnson to direct Dennis the Menace, letting him prep and storyboard before Nick Castle was announced as the new director. Hughes later "apologized" to PRJ by offering him a consolation - Baby's Day Out - the most expensively overbudget Hughes movie ever, a flop so messy that last week's Variety article on the "Hughes enigma" is all the more poignantly appropriate.