John Hughes Born: Architect of Teen Cinema

John Hughes wrote The Breakfast Club in two days. He was thirty-three. Born on February 18, 1950, in Lansing, Michigan, and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, he dropped out of the University of Arizona and worked in advertising before selling jokes to comedians and eventually joining the writing staff at National Lampoon magazine, where his humor ranged from absurdist sketches to surprisingly tender observations about American suburban life. His screenplay for "National Lampoon's Vacation" launched his Hollywood career. But it was the films he directed between 1984 and 1987 that made him a cultural figure. "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," and "Pretty in Pink" defined the American teen film genre. What made his work unusual was that it took teenagers seriously, treating them as people with interior lives rather than problems to be solved by adults. He set "The Breakfast Club" almost entirely in a school library, shot it in six weeks, and cast actors who were not yet famous. The film cost six million dollars and earned forty-five million. The dialogue was partly improvised, and Hughes encouraged the young actors to bring their own experiences to the roles. After this extraordinary creative burst, Hughes moved behind the camera less frequently. He wrote "Home Alone" in 1990, which became one of the highest-grossing comedies in history, and continued producing scripts and producing films through the 1990s. He largely withdrew from public life in the 2000s, moving back to the Chicago suburbs and avoiding interviews. He died of a heart attack on August 6, 2009, while walking in Manhattan. He was 59.