[Deathwatch] John Hughes, filmmaker, 59

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

John Hughes, Bard of Teen Angst, Dead at 59

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."

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary