Don’t you forget about him

On the 6th August this year, American film director, producer and writer John Hughes, died tragically of a heart attack whilst walking in Manhattan, New York. Best known for the 1980’s coming-of-age drama’s Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Hughes was undoubtedly the linchpin of the Brat Pack film movement of this period. Incorporating quirky, heart-felt comedy scripts with distinctly indie/alternative soundtracks, his films have been noted as an inspiration for many artists within the film industry today, including Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma) and Wes Anderson (Rushmore, Fantastic Mr. Fox).

Hughes’ films will primarily be remembered as creating an idealized version of youth that appealed to an entire generation. Although he only directed eight feature films in his albeit brief period as the go-to guy for teenage film drama, his films, in the words of Kevin Smith, ‘touched a generation’. Hughes left a generation of teenagers with a nostalgic impulse for a world of suburban American high schools (take for example the excellent Breakfast Club), and in his script writing, managed to tap into a teenage filmgoer’s worries and insecurities with his angst-afflicted teenage protagonists.

{{ quote Notably, his films articulated the fantasies of young people, in particular the bucking of authority and the sexual politics }}

Capturing the zeitgeist of the 80s MTV generation, Hughes’s early movies also offered distilled parables of the social and sexual politics of suburban adolescence. Sixteen Candles is a fable about being overlooked, and the envy and longing this engenders. The Breakfast Club found in its structure a perfect metaphor for an overwhelming sense of entrapment that defines a majority of adolescents, whilst Ferris Bueller’s Day Off reversed that dynamic, offering to its audience a straightforward consolatory revenge fantasy in which kids rule the world.

Notably, his films articulated the fantasies of young people, in particular the bucking of authority and the sexual politics that play significance in the lives of teenagers. Along with this, the anti-establishment values that typify his work paralleled the apathetic MTV generation, appealing to both men and women alike, with the frequently returning actors Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall (Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club).

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As a result of Hughes’s death, the 75-minute documentary, Don’t You Forget About Me, by Canadian director Matt Austin-Sadowski has been picked up for worldwide distribution by Montreal-based Alliance Films.

Sadowski’s low-budget documentary about a group of John Hughes fans who travel to suburban Illinois in search of the reclusive film-maker is to reach a wider audience following Hughes’s death in August. The documentary follows the director and producers Kari Hollend, Mike Facciolo and Lenny Panzer as they set off on a road trip to find Hughes. Austin Sadowski, 31, said Hughes’s films inspired him through an awkward adolescence. “He took affairs of the heart seriously, and no other director gave teenagers that sort of treatment at that time.”

In his work, Hughes had managed to create a collection of films that typified a generation and yet still continue to maintain social resonance to this day.