“Where you have the Smythson of Bond Street attaché case with multiple Moleskines within, and the Pentel fine-art pens he used.”
“This is extremely representative of what he was like in recent years,” James Hughes said. Sometimes his thoughts erupted into drawings: densely crosshatched caricatures of real-life figures such as Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor, or wiggy flights of fancy that variously evoked the styles of Saul Steinberg, Gahan Wilson, and R. In his later years, Hughes never went anywhere without one of these notebooks on his person, the better to record anything that popped into his head at any time he wished: observations, incidents, editorials, inventories, theories, vignettes, overheard conversations. Each page within was covered in their father’s neat, extraordinarily tiny handwriting-the cursive equivalent of three-point type. “Well, I just kept doing that.”Īmong the first things John and James showed me was a little red Moleskine pocket notebook, three and a half by five and a half inches in size.
“You know that assignment you always get in high school when you’re reading Walden, to keep a journal?” he said in a 1988 interview. It was a habit that dated back, appropriately enough, to his teen days. The one normal aspect of this period for him, consistent with the rest of his life, was the compulsive writing. And by 1990, with the release of his highest-grossing movie, the Macaulay Culkin sado-slapstick comedy Home Alone, which Hughes wrote and produced but did not direct, he had the means to put Hollywood and the movies behind him.įor all his success in pictures, Hughes’s directing years turned out to be an aberration in his life-a shortish stretch that required him to do uncharacteristic things like be in L.A. He wanted to be at liberty to spend as much time with his family as he pleased, to work the farm he owned 75 miles northwest of Chicago, and to exult in the resolutely uncoastal ethos of his beloved Midwest. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”Īt some point, Hughes stopped and looked around, and he realized that he didn’t want to make movies anymore. The answer, to some degree, lay in the wisdom of Ferris Bueller, who, as played by Matthew Broderick, delivered the most epigrammatic of Hughes-isms: “Life moves pretty fast. Somewhere in this time, he had also managed to write a further two teen pictures, Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, that were off-loaded to another director. By 1987, the year of Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Hughes had already written and directed the “teen trilogy” for which he would be most celebrated- Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off-as well as a lesser teen comedy, Weird Science, and the movie that would actually come after Planes, Trains & Automobiles on the release schedule, the expressly post-teen She’s Having a Baby.
The script for Sixteen Candles came forth in a two-day burst during the 1983 preparations for The Breakfast Club, so impressing his studio overseers that it jumped the line to become Hughes’s directorial debut, in 1984. He was notorious for this trait, especially in the 1980s, when he churned out screenplays faster than Hollywood could make them into movies. John Hughes (in white pants) with the cast of The Breakfast Club: Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, and Ally Sheedy.