London Connect

Writer-producer-director John Hughes died today, at the age of 59. His directorial career was astonishingly brief: 8 years, 8 films, from ‘Sixteen Candles’ in 1984 to ‘Curly Sue’ in 1991. But in that time, and in the years as a hugely successful writer-producer that followed, Hughes came to define one subgenre – the high school teen angst comedy-drama – and make major contributions to several others, from the slapstick-road-movie antics of ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ and the ‘Vacation’ films to the cutesy-cuddly but hugely successful ‘Beethoven’ series.

Hughes’s influences were easily definable: his teen movies bolted the knockabout banter of fast-talking ’40s comedies to the wistful, celebratory childhood nostalgia of ‘American Graffiti’ and ‘The Outsiders’ (with a little dash of ‘Rebel Without A Cause’), while his kids movies like ‘Home Alone’ and ‘Beethoven’ channelled everything from Shirley Temple to Jerry Lewis via The Little Rascals. The films may not always have been classics, but they were, with surprisingly few exceptions, hugely successful.

There is absolutely no doubt that, without Hughes, Hollywood as we know it would be a very different place. Some of his influence has been positive, some dubious, some downright destructive. But it’s a tribute to this iconic talent that elements of his work can be found throughout the entertainment world. Time Out picks five things that just wouldn’t exist without John Hughes.

The entire High School subgenre

Using Cameron Crowe’s ‘Fast Times’ article and movie as a template, Hughes defined the American high school as a cinematic arena: every conflict that had ever taken place in just about any play, novel or movie ever made could be re-sited to a white-painted gym and still work (check out twin Shakespeare adaptations ‘O’ and ‘Ten Things I Hate About You’, not to mention Jane Austen’s ‘Clueless’). High School could now be a location for time travel adventures (‘Back to the Future’, ‘Pleasantville’), serial murder (‘Heathers’), and, in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, everything from cannibalism to demon worship.

Judd Apatow

It’s no longer a deniable fact that all half-decent mainstream American comedy now stems from Judd Apatow. But without Hughes, there would be no Apatow: from the funny-freaky-tragic high school traumas of the wonderful ‘Freaks and Geeks’ to the slapstick-with-soul of ‘Knocked Up’, there are little hints of Hughes twinkling throughout Apatow’s best work. They only professionally overlapped once – Hughes’s final writing credit was the story for ‘Drillbit Taylor’, under a pseudonym – but they remain creatively intertwined.

Twilight

Thanks to Hughes, teen angst became a serious business. No longer were teenagers just either spotty, hormonally imbalanced nerds or leggy jailbait (though both popped up regularly in Hughes’s work). Now they were Real People, with Dreams and Fears and Feelings, and boy, did they get a kick out of talking about those Feelings. By far the most successful modern proponent of the adults-taking-teenagers-as-seriously-as-they-take-themselves movement is Stephenie Meyer, whose ‘Twilight’ series of angsty-bloodsucker novels currently outsells every other work of kids’ literature.

The modern child star

For a long time before the Hughes-penned-and-produced ‘Home Alone’, child actors fell into two camps: rascally or righteous. With ‘Home Alone’, Hughes revived the silent-era tendency to cast children as both: think Jackie Coogan in Chaplin’s ‘The Kid’, angel-faced, but with the devil’s temperament. As Kevin MacAlister, Macauley Culkin’s blonde, blue-eyed exterior masked a mind of sharpened steel, ready to inflict unimaginable pain on anyone attempting to step over his threshold. And kid stars since, from Mason Gamble to Dakota Fanning, have followed the same template: adorable exterior, subversive intent.

The on-the-road comedy

There’d been road comedies before Hughes – ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ had defined the genre, with ‘Up in Smoke’ close behind – but the first two ‘Vacation’ films put a new spin on things, both by introducing the now-staple, ‘Deliverance’-inspired idea of ordinary Suburbanites rubbing shoulders with backward country folks and their nubile wives/daughters, and also by making the narrative not just a series of incidents, but a series of mounting disasters: this was road movie as white-collar nightmare, and it clearly struck a nerve.