John Hughes and Writing

"I grew up outside Chicago. I went to one of the high schools where John Hughes set all of those iconic teen movies. I studied them as a religious scholar might study the Bible, searching for answers, clues. The Breakfast Club was not one of my favorites, but it was said to define my generation. In that movie, Hughes... says more than he probably intended, which is the way with art. Now and then, you are telling the future without meaning to."
     — Rich Cohen, Vanity Fair magazine

I'm from the same generation referred to above, and I grew up outside Chicago, and I loved and studied Hughes films, also. We watch Christmas Vacation every year, and so does everyone else; that's another screenplay written by John Hughes, based on his short story in National Lampoon magazine, Christmas '59. I didn't know what the word 'virgin' meant until I overheard its use in The Breakfast Club, which my parents were watching with my uncle at the time. I was listening from another room and 'virginity' was a hot topic in the film; you know this if you've seen it. Hughes's teen films are classics, but so are Planes, Trains, & Automobiles and Home Alone, and before those, Mr. Mom and National Lampoon's Vacation, the first in the series starring Chevy Chase.

At the young age of 59, Hughes had a severe heart attack and passed away. A long life isn't guaranteed. 

"John Hughes never stopped writing. He was notorious for this trait, especially in the 1980s, when he churned out screenplays faster than Hollywood could make them into movies. The script for Sixteen Candles came forth in a two-day burst during the 1983 preparations for The Breakfast Club, so impressing his studio overseers that it jumped the line to become Hughes’s directorial debut, in 1984.... Writing was, for Hughes, not so much a profession as a condition of life. The thoughts that germinated in his brain took a direct path to his hands, which filled notebooks, floppy disks, and hard drives with screenplays, stories, sketches, and jokes. When he wasn’t writing creatively, he was writing about how much writing he was doing. A spiral-bound logbook from 1985 finds Hughes keeping track of his progress on Ferris Bueller. The basic story line, he notes, was developed on February 25. It was successfully pitched the following day. And then he was off: “2-26 Night only 10 pages … 2-27 26 pages … 2-28 19 pages … 3-1 9 pages … 3-2 20 pages … 3-3 24 pages.” Wham-bam, script done. All in one week.... At some point, Hughes 'stopped and looked around,' and he realized that he didn’t want to make movies anymore. He wanted to be at liberty to spend as much time with his family as he pleased, to work the farm he owned 75 miles northwest of Chicago, and to exult in the resolutely uncoastal ethos of his beloved Midwest. And by 1990, with the release of his highest-grossing movie, the Macaulay Culkin sado-slapstick comedy Home Alone, which Hughes wrote and produced but did not direct, he had the means to put Hollywood and the movies behind him. For all his success in pictures, Hughes’s directing years turned out to be an aberration in his life - a shortish stretch that required him to do uncharacteristic things like be in L.A. and keep the company of actors. The one normal aspect of this period for him, consistent with the rest of his life, was the compulsive writing. It was a habit that dated back, appropriately enough, to his teen days. 'You know that assignment you always get in high school when you’re reading Walden, to keep a journal?' he said in a 1988 interview. 'Well, I just kept doing that.' ... Hughes, his sons say, reveled in grandfatherhood.... he now viewed it as his primary duty to be, in his younger son’s words, 'the curious, engaged grandpa in the seersucker.' The creative writing he continued to do was, therefore, not necessarily for public consumption. In recent years, he worked in a variety of formats: memoir, short fiction, and, yes, screenplays. But he was content, (his son) John III said, to 'pump the stuff out for his own satisfaction, comfortable with it never going anywhere.' He’d had his say, and it was time for others to have theirs. This mind-set was, as contradictory as it may sound, consistent with the one that led Hughes to become the sympathetic voice of teendom in the 1980s. One of his major hobbyhorses – 'a constant topic,' in (his son) James’s words – was the attention-hogging egotism of his own generation, the baby-boomers. In his view, the boomers did not know when to step aside and cede the stage. 'He was kind of upset not to see more people of his generation passing the baton,' John III said. 'He wanted to give youth a voice.'"
     — David Kamp, Vanity Fair magazine