Fans turn to the Internet to memorialize John Hughes

By Sarah Sluis

It's been almost a week since John Hughes died, and the Internet has been filled with memorializing: he's currently one of the most-discussed people on the Web. Hughes' films are intimately linked to traumas and joys of adolescence. They took teen life seriously, but with a sense of humor and optimism. They were the answer to the dumb teen movies released every year because 'teens don't care and will come anyway.' Well, the films they bothered to see more than once were Hughes'. Millions watched his films in theatres, and the next generation rented his films at sleepovers and caught them on weekend and summer afternoons in syndication.

His most blogged-about movie, according to a Nielsen research report, was The Breakfast Club. I had a screenwriting professor use the first few minutes of the film (in which each person is dropped off--or not--by his/her parents) to show us an extremely economic form of characterization. With so little, Hughes was able to establish these students as the jock, princess, outcast, rebel, and nerd, and set them up for their later transformation.

Besides The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and Home Alone were the most-buzzed films after his death. If you look at Hughes' full IMDB resume, however, you're likely to find another gem outside of the teen genre he was known for. My eight-year-old self distinctly remembers watching Curly Sue, the tale of father-daughter

scammers, with my own father while my four-year-old brother and mom

were in the hospital after acquiring giardia on a family trip. I don't think I would have remembered the movie, amidst everything else going on, were it not for the personal connection it made with me. Hughes wrote, directed and produced that movie, one of 39 titles attached to his name.

In his later life, Hughes turned to more kid-oriented fare, and eventually withdrew from Hollywood entirely. It was a personal decision, never fully explained, though the recent acquisition of the documentary Don't You Forget About Me, in which a quartet of filmmakers attempted to track down Hughes in his hometown, might shed some light on the subject. Starting with Beethoven in 1992 (when he left the Hollywood scene), he's often credited as Edmond Dants. The literary character was the protagonist in Alexander Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. Dants has everything he could ever dream of, but is wrongly imprisoned for 19 years. Finally freed, he hunts down treasure hidden by a fellow prisoner, dubs himself a Count, and uses the money to seek his revenge. Could this be an allegory for how Hughes felt about Hollywood?

In an interview with Film Journal in December 1994, Hughes revealed his feelings about his sudden box-office prominence:

"The more privilege that I have been afforded in my life, the less privilege I want, because it can just destroy you. The greatest threat to a creative career is success. It's just horrible. You know, Home Alone was this big unexpected hit and it just completely derailed me. I can't get an honest opinion about my writing anymore. I turn a script into the studio, and �Yes, it's great, it's great!' And man, I know this thing's full of holes! And the minute I say I'm better than Joe Blow in the car there, I'm out of business. All I'm doing is staying close to the people I'm writing about."

Highlights from the coverage of Hughes' passing include a blogger's account of being John Hughes' pen pal, which became the most-linked to story after his death. The New York Times one-upped YouTube searches for Hughes' clips by compiling some of the most memorable scenes of Hughes' movies and linking to the newspaper's original reviews. Also, today in the WSJ, a writer who lived next door to Molly Ringwald's house in Sixteen Candles reveals his regrets about the experience. To memorialize Hughes, I, for, one, plan to check out some of his smaller, less successful films, and search my cable listings for the next screening of Sixteen Candles.