Superb story on John Hughes in Vanity Fair

Great piece in this month's Vanity Fair on late filmmaker John Hughes. Some good stuff in here, especially from his sons.

I was particularly interested in how the writer unearthed some of what made Hughes tick, via interviews from stars Molly Ringwald, Matthew Broderick and Anthony Michael Hall, to whom the director became close.

A few excerpts:

“He was so easily slighted and hurt,” Ringwald says. “He would always go to the place that somebody didn’t care about him.” She recalls a mortifying episode in which she extended a trip home to Los Angeles by one day to visit her gynecologist. At her age, she was too embarrassed to tell Hughes the reason for her extra day out West, “and John was sure that I was meeting with someone for another movie. He flipped out. He thought that I was not committed to him. And this was somebody who adored me. It was really terrifying.”

“You had to be careful with him,” says Broderick. “I remember him taking me to one location, the Art Institute, and him saying, ‘This is where you and Mia kiss.’ And I had not been reading the stage directions carefully, and I was like, ‘Oh, we kiss at the museum?’ — something I thought was pretty innocent. But to him it meant that I was not prepared, and he took that as a personal affront, that I didn’t care about him: ‘O.K., so we won’t be friends. We’ll just do our work.’ But he also had the ability, by that evening, to take you to dinner with a bunch of people and tell you what a genius you were.”

And later in the piece ....

"Near the end of the filming of The Breakfast Club, (Ringwald) and Hall began dating. ... In her s perception, their little romance upset Hughes. “He did not like it at all,” she says. ...

Publicly, Hughes remained gracious, speaking complimentarily of her ... But Ringwald was surprised when he deputized his protégé, Howard Deutch, to direct her in Pretty in Pink. And though Hughes spent time on that film’s set as its writer and executive producer, he rarely spoke to her. “It was very hurtful,” she says, “and it still hurts. I cared very, very deeply for him, and he had a huge impact on my life — not just in terms of my career but my development as a person, as a woman.”

Hall recalls no cross words with Hughes, about Ringwald or any other subject. Immediately after The Breakfast Club, he and Hughes happily made another film together, Weird Science ... yet another chapter in what looked to be an enduring, fruitful collaboration. No less an authority than Stanley Kubrick compared the Hall-Hughes partnership to that of Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra. (Indeed, Hall was offered the lead part in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket before Matthew Modine, but withdrew from consideration after protracted negotiations between his camp and the director’s bogged down.)

"But Hall, too, saw his relationship with Hughes come to an abrupt and puzzling end, at least in his eyes. It’s (Hall's) belief that both the Duckie part in Pretty in Pink and the title part of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off were conceived with him in mind. He suspects that he, like Ringwald, inadvertently poisoned the well with Hughes by expressing a desire to work with other filmmakers. After Weird Science, Hall simply couldn’t get Hughes on the phone anymore."


The entire story: http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2010/03/john-hughes-201003[/url].

 

Wow, if those excerpts are reflective of the man, he was a bit of an a-hole who didn't have much of a reservoir of good will when the worm turned, as it almost always does in Hollywood.

 

It's probably unfair to think those excerpts alone defined him, but those jumped out as the most interesting to me. Hughes strikes me as sort of a reclusive genius of sorts, yet also fashioned himself a pretty good family man, according to the story.