Odds are you didn't go to high school with John Hughes. Odds are it sure seemed like you did.
Hughes, the popular, almost-mythical filmmaker who made teen angst hurt so good in biting comedies such as Sixteen Candles, only to leave Generation Xers largely on their own as the Molly Ringwald-ruled 1980s ended, died after suffering a sudden heart attack during a walk this morning in Manhattan. He was 59.
"John Hughes wrote some of the great outsider characters of all time," Judd Apatow, the presently hot filmmaker from the Hughes mold, told the Los Angeles Times last year.
It probably would be quicker to list the 1980s movies Hughes wasn't responsible for as either a writer, director or producer.
His credits included: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, all starring Ringwald; Weird Science, Some Kind of Wonderful and She's Having a Baby, all quotable—and quoted—in their own right; and, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the signature Matthew Broderick, if not Hughes, comedy.
Though most associated with the 1980s, the 1990s brought Hughes his biggest box-office hits via the Home Alone franchise.
Hughes' quick mind and evidently even quicker typing fingers also produced the Michael Keaton hit, Mr. Mom, the John Candy-Steve Martin hit, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and the Chevy Chase blockbuster, National Lampoon's Vacation.
The secret to Hughes' success, especially in the 1980s, might have been as simple as his novel outlook on an oft-maligned species: the American teenager.
''I don't think of kids as a lower form of the human species,'' Hughes said in the New York Times in 1986.
Born in 1950 in Michigan, Hughes' writing career began in Chicago, the leafy suburbs of which served as future home to the Buellers, the detention gang at Shermer High—and nearly all his screenplay characters.
In 1979, the former ad copywriter and National Lampoon magazine staffer scored his first Hollywood credit on a short-lived sitcom version of Animal House. Within five years, Hughes was in the director's chair on Sixteen Candles.
''I stumbled into this business, I didn't train for it," Hughes told Entertainment Weekly in 1994. "I yelled 'Action!' on my first two movies before the camera was turned on."
