Freak Engine

I remember going to see Pretty in Pink and feeling a little bit let down by the whole affair.  I actually thought that Some Kind of Wonderful was John Hughes’ attempt at fixing all the things that were wrong with PIP, and I liked it a lot more.  Nowadays, PIP is revered as one of the best “teen” movies ever.  Was it really good or has the presence of the shit “teen” fare that Hollywood’s pumping out these days given us lower standards?

I have to admit to having a genuine affinity for most of John Hughes’ early work.  Later on he made Curly Sue and started writing under the pseudonym Edmond Dantes and everything went to hell, but he made some films that are near and dear to my heart including Ferris Bueller, Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Some Kind of Wonderful, Uncle Buck, and the pinnacle of his career IMHO, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.  What’s interesting is the fact that his best movies all had to do with people finding themselves.  He obviously began his career with the opinion that finding yourself is something mainly teenagers do, but Uncle Buck and PT&A are about middle-aged folks finding themselves too.  I imagine that as he got older he realized that he didn’t really have everything figured out and he applied that knowledge to older characters.  Then, for some reason he made Home Alone and Beethoven.  Maybe he just needed the money.  We’ll be ignoring that phase from here on out.  I just have to keep reminding myself of it because it seems impossible that the man who wrote Breakfast Club also wrote Home Alone 3 and Flubber.

When you watch one of the better Hughes films you get the idea that these weren’t exactly the movies the studios thought they were green-lighting…at least not at first.  After John Hughes became a brand like Coke and Pepsi, sure, but I have a hard time believing that the screenplay for The Breakfast Club was expected to be the blueprint for a hit.  What happens in that movie?  Nothing external.  It’s practically a novella on screen.  It’s made of fantastic performances, great writing and a great soundtrack but nowadays a studio exec would never even get past page five of that one before shit-canning it.  Maybe the version Hughes passed around had an alien invasion in the middle of it…or maybe it was simply an age of risk-taking in the media.

TBC came out in 1985 right at the peak of MTV and New Wave music and Kiss without makeup.  It was an age of change.  Fake prosperity was everywhere and everyone was done with the dinosaurs of the seventies.  Everyone wanted something new.  Apparently there were even a few movie execs that wanted that too.  TBC was produced by A&M Films, a subsidiary of A&M Records.  That’s significant.  Why?  Because the A in A&M is Herb Alpert.

A&M Records was notorious for taking chances on talent because Alpert was an artist.  He wanted to make a buck but he also wanted to promote true talent through his label.  He often signed recording artists that any sane A&R guy would have left behind in a heartbeat.  He signed them because he liked them.  Imagine that…signing a recording artist based on the fact that he actually liked their music and thought they had promise!  None of the majors works this way today and I doubt they ever will again, IF any of the major labels survive.  But back to the point, A&M may have looked at screenplays the way they looked at music.  They saw artistry in The Breakfast Club and gave it the go-ahead.  The rest is history.

Sure, Hughes had written the hits Vacation and Mr. Mom before TBC but I daresay that even James Cameron couldn’t sell a talky pic about teens locked in a school library these days…even if it was going to be in 3D!  The closest thing we got in the nineties was Clerks, but it was more interested in being foul-mouthed than in pathos.  The 2000’s?  Maybe Wes Anderson?  The difference there, though, is that Anderson isn’t really a populist filmmaker.  He’s a Artist with a capital A.  Artiste.  I love his films but I’m talking about movies.  MOVIES…stuff teenagers will go see on Friday night in small towns where the only other thing to do is to get drunk or pregnant or both.

So were they really that good back then?  I think they were.  I think they were better than I thought at the time (except for Ferris – I LOVED that one from the word go) because I had taken their novelty for granted.  I don’t mean novelty like a novelty record or a novelty shop – cheap tricks that are here one moment and dumb the next.  I mean it in the sense of uniqueness that Hughes’ best films had.  I didn’t realize then how rare it was to see yourself and your friends reflected onscreen.  The reflections in those Hughes movies were true ones unlike the funhouse mirror movies teens are subjected to today.

I also miss those cheesy moments at the end of those pics when you feel like it’s okay to be moved a little bit.  That closing moment in PT&A when John Candy is welcomed into Dale Griffith’s home on Thanksgiving freeze-frames Candy’s face as he beams with pleasure.  It wasn’t ironic or goofy or funny.  It was real and it made you feel something even if you didn’t want to let it in.  Today’s movies don’t make it inside.  Hell, they hardly even try to reach the doorbell.

I miss John Hughes.

-Tom

This entry was posted by freakengine on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 10:04 pm and is filed under 80's Movies . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.