All of the great John Hughes tribute stories that have come out after his death got those of us at The Playlist talking about his legacy and its impact on the way teen movies were made since the 1980s. There are innumerable movies that owe a debt to the Hughes legacy, from “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” to “Mean Girls” to “Rushmore,” to the early works of Cameron Crowe, but here’s an in-depth look at five teen movies that absolutely could not have existed as we know them without the Hughes teen Shermer-verse movie legacy to draw from.
1. “Superbad”
Writer/director Judd Apatow is a well-known Hughes fan and has done an excellent job bringing the awkward outsider character type from Hughes films (see every single Anthony Michael Hall role) and making them central figures in the Apatow universe. Like Apatow’s quote in the Huffington Post says, “It’s pretty ridiculous to hear people talk about the movies we’ve been doing, with outrageous humor and sweetness all combined, as if they were an original idea. I mean, it was all there first in John Hughes’ films. Whether it’s ‘Freaks and Geeks’ or ‘Superbad,’ the whole idea of having outsiders as the lead characters, that all started with Hughes.”
In short, without The Geek in “Sixteen Candles” or the geekscapades that made up “Weird Science” there would be no McLovin and his crew of nerds to root for in “Superbad.”
2. “Clueless”
Amy Heckerling, writer and director of “Clueless” was in the teen movie game before John Hughes – she directed the seminal teen flick “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” way back in 1982. However, 1995’s “Clueless” was her first pass at writing a movie for teenagers, a genre that disappeared from theaters entirely in the early ’90s after a flock of terrible Hughes wannabes in the late 80s flopped, and she ended up penning a huge hit that revived the format. While the direct inspiration for “Clueless” is Jane Austen’s “Emma,” the movie has several shades of Hughesian influence. From it’s heavily integrated use of teen slang to the class divisions in high school to the ‘Ferris Bueller’-esque voice overs of main character Cher Horowitz. One of the biggest similarities was the soundtrack, which took the Hughes track of using songs to punctuate funny moments and even reprises General Public’s “Tenderness” which Hughes used in “Weird Science.”
“Clueless” manages to reprise all the high moments of every John Hughes film: from the somewhat improbable romantic ending (a la “Sixteen Candles”) to the befriending of someone in a lower social class (a la “Pretty In Pink” and “Some Kind of Wonderful”) to the annoyingly perfect but utterly empathetic main character who lives in a sheltered, white bread world (a la “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) all of the Hughes hallmarks are here.
3. “Chasing Amy”
Even Kevin Smith admits you could pluck almost any movie from his oeuvre and find the John Hughes influence. The LA Times quotes Smith saying, “If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be doing what I do. Basically my stuff is just John Hughes films with four-letter words.” We’d pick “Chasing Amy” as his closest Hughes homage since it is Smith’s only romance based movie (and the only picture of his that’s remotely tolerable). The characters in this movie come off like what might have happened if we kept following the characters of “Some Kind of Wonderful” into their early 20s while they have some new romantic disasters. Much like Hughes, Smith focuses on writing a character driven romance which makes you feel invested in them as people and therefore the outcome of their relationship — although Smith specializes in 20-somethings who still act like teenagers, possibly as a reflection of his own mindset early in his career.
The bittersweet ending of “Chasing Amy,” with the unclear and somewhat unsatisfying but real outcome, reminds us of “Pretty In Pink.” The entirely human characters make stupid choices that are fully believable and relatable. Even the actors are personally invested in these movies — to this day Molly Ringwald insists her character’s choice of Andrew McCarthy’s Blaine over John Cryer’s Duckie was the right ending because she, in her real life, had a crush on McCarthy. Plus, she instinctively knew that in high school, Duckies never get the girl. In that same way Smith stands by his “Chasing Amy” ending, which was written based on his real life crash and burn relationship with lead actress Joey Lauren Adams. It couldn’t have ended in an any less depressing way because it truly did end that way – leading both movies to present us with more “real” love story endings than we’re used to seeing on the silver screen.
4. “Dazed and Confused”
There’s no way Richard Linklater could have written “Dazed and Confused” if “The Breakfast Club” wasn’t there to inspire it. Both are microscopic looks at the ins and outs of cliques in high school, covering all sorts of personalities and levels of popularity who are trying to escape the eyes of grown ups and the pressure from other kids. They’ve both got their own version of the super skinny, cool/uncool freshman (constant Hughes player Hall again and Willy Wiggins), the princess/bitch you love to hate (Molly Ringwald and Parker Posey), the jock(s) (Emilio Estevez and most of the dudes in ‘Dazed’), the weird likable girl (Ally Sheedy as the freak and Marissa Ribisi as the brain) and the asshole (Judd Nelson with a heart of gold and Ben Affleck, the one without).
In the shortest possible description, both ‘Dazed’ and ‘Breakfast Club’ are entirely character driven movies that happen to take place in high school but are really portable guides to the personality types you’ll find all through your life. The movies both end with a message of tolerance and extol the virtues of being yourself against the everyday bullshit that adds up to feel like great odds.
5. “Heathers”
The main debt “Heathers” scriptwriter Daniel Waters owes to John Hughes is the idea of the female muse. Prior to Hughes, the vast majority of classic teen films focused on the inner life of the teenage boy (see “American Graffiti,” “Rebel Without A Cause,” “The Graduate” and the entire ‘Porkys’ franchise). Hughes and Waters brought us some of the most vivid, interesting female heroines in the teen movie genre. As Waters tells women in horror blog Pretty Scary, “As far as a female protagonist is concerned, adult white men may rule the world, but in high school, they’re a bunch of clueless goofballs. The high school power center is female-at that age, boys are checkers and girls are chess. Anybody can do ‘nerd trying to get laid.’ The politics and psychology of a teenage female — now that’s an exhilarating challenge!”
Waters also wanted to write an anti-Hughes movie, something darker and grittier but not necessarily real – more indebted to Shakespeare’s”MacBeth” and significantly less likely to end with the dream boy having a crush on an unlikely girl. However, in order to write an anti-Hughes teen movie you still have to possess the Hughesian ideal to measure yourself against. There’s no chance “Heathers” could have existed without the Hughes template as a foil to write against.
*****
Look for Hughes’ generational influence to be memorialized soon in a forthcoming documentary, “Don’t You Forget About Me” in which a group of kids go looking for the hermetic director, who disappeared from Hollywood in the ’90s, began refusing all interview requests and started writing movies under a pseudonym. As Molly Ringwald aptly says in the doc footage from the MTV Movie Awards reunion of the cast of “The Breakfast Club”: “John Hughes, without whom we wouldn’t be here.”
