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John Hughes Filmography

March 20, 2012 by · Comments Off on John Hughes Filmography 

John Hughes Filmography, John Wilden Hughes, Jr. (February 18, 1950 – August 6, 2009) was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He directed and/or scripted some of the most successful films of the 1980s and 1990s, including National Lampoon’s Vacation, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Weird Science, The Breakfast Club, Some Kind of Wonderful, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Beethoven, Uncle Buck, Career Opportunities, 101 Dalmatians, Home Alone, and its sequels, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and Home Alone 3.
Hughes was born in Lansing, Michigan, to a mother who volunteered in charity work and John Hughes, Sr., who worked in sales. He spent the first twelve years of his life in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Hughes described himself as “kind of quiet” as a kid.

“I grew up in a neighborhood that was mostly girls and old people. There weren’t any boys my age, so I spent a lot of time by myself, imagining things. And every time we would get established somewhere, we would move. Life just started to get good in seventh grade, and then we moved to Chicago. I ended up in a really big high school, and I didn’t know anybody. But then The Beatles came along (and) changed my whole life. And then Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home came out and really changed me. Thursday I was one person, and Friday I was another. My heroes were Dylan, John Lennon and Picasso, because they each moved their particular medium forward, and when they got to the point where they were comfortable, they always moved on.”
In 1963, Hughes’s family moved to Northbrook, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where Hughes’s father found work selling roofing materials. It was there that Hughes attended Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Illinois, the school that would provide inspiration for the films that would make his reputation in later years.

After dropping out of Arizona State University, Hughes began selling jokes to well-established performers such as Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers. Hughes used his jokes to get an entry-level job at Needham, Harper & Steers as an advertising copywriter in Chicago in 1970 and later in 1974 at Leo Burnett Worldwide. During this time, he created what became the famous Edge “Credit Card Shaving Test” ad campaign.

Hughes’s work on the Virginia Slims account frequently took him to the Philip Morris headquarters in New York City. This gave him the opportunity to hang around the offices of the National Lampoon Magazine. Hughes subsequently penned a story, inspired by his family trips as a child, that was to become his calling card and entry onto the staff of the magazine. That piece, “Vacation ’58”, later became the basis for the film Vacation. Among his other contributions to the Lampoon, the April Fool’s Day stories “My Penis” and “My Vagina” gave an early indication of Hughes’s ear for the particular rhythm of teen speak, as well as the various indignities of teen life in general.

His first credited screenplay, Class Reunion, was written while still on staff at the magazine. The resulting film became the second disastrous attempt by the flagship to duplicate the runaway success of Animal House. It was Hughes’s next screenplay for the imprint, National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), however, that would prove to be a major hit, putting the Lampoon back on the map.

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