Molly Ringwald on the 'Neverland' of John Hughes
Molly Ringwald's tribute to John Hughes in the New York Times offers outsiders an enlightening look at what it was like to work with the writer and director who created the movies that not only shaped our teen years, but those of his stars.
While her essay is sentimental, it's not saccharine, and like Ms. Ringwald herself, it's beautiful. She offers us a rare glimpse into the reclusive director, "a sort of J.D. Salinger for Generation X" whom she compares to Peter Pan with a huge, open heart that eventually closed off to the world of Hollywood.
She writes, "Most people who knew John knew that he was able to hold a grudge longer than anyone - his grudges were almost supernatural things, enduring for years, even decades. Michael suspects that he was never forgiven for turning down parts in Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I turned down later films as well. Not because I didn't want to work with John anymore -- I loved working with him, more than anyone before or since...
Eventually, though, I felt that I needed to work with other people as well. I wanted to grow up, something I felt (rightly or wrongly) I couldn't do while working with John. Sometimes I wonder if that was what he found so unforgivable. We were like the Darling children when they made the decision to leave Neverland. And John was Peter Pan, warning us that if we left we could never come back. And, true to his word, not only were we unable to return, but he went one step further. He did away with Neverland itself."
And just like we all have our favorite memories of watching Hughes movies, so do his stars. Read her essay -- it will make you feel like you were there, crawling through the AC ducts above Maine North High School during detention.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-12-2009 @ 2:52PM
Michael said...
I've read this article by Molly Ringwald this morning and I was very moved. It's by far the best thing I've read on Hughes since he passed away - an a lot of thing have been written ;-)
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8-12-2009 @ 3:16PM
Mike said...
It's nice to read something about the man from someone who actually knew him. You gain a helluva lot more insight than from these glorified rundowns of his filmography.
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8-12-2009 @ 5:16PM
Alastair Foster said...
This is going to sound really wierd to some but..
I remember when Michael Jackson passed away (okay it wasnt long ago) and how everyone around me was in mourning.
I liked the guy as a entertainer but i didnt feel the emotional response that most people seemed to have at his passing.
John Hughes however... :-(
Now i feel like they did and no-one seems to understand. Out of my group of friends/colleagues i am the only one to mourn. Michael Jackson bought them all together in mourning, the death of John Hughes is just me on my lonesome.
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8-24-2009 @ 9:01PM
Dr. Steve Pesyk said...
At Juilliard, my composition teacher, Lawrence “Larry” Widdoes, walked in one day and started tearing away at “Holiday Road”, featured in “Vacation”, a John Hughes screenplay, starring Chevy Chase. For an hour Larry hacked away at the song, pounding the piano, offering up endless improvisational variations, all for the betterment of the song. Ostensibly Larry was trying to “improve” the ditty since, as he observed, it only had “two verses”. A chordal harmony repeating an imitation breve cycle of fifths in the chorus, introduced at the sub-dominant, progressing in order to the minor dominant-seventh, the dominant seventh of the sub-mediant, the sub-mediant, the re-ordered major dominant, the tonic, to the major dominant again, on to the tonic, where it was resolved. Or was the apparent tonic actually a dominant chord resolving into the renamed four chord, which was actually the real tonic, which entered into a re-named cycle of fifths, landing endlessly on fade on the unresolved dominant ?? Was “Holiday Road” like “Hey Jude”, featuring the same conundrum of un-resolution ? Larry flipped it forward, backward and upside down until the piano gave out it seemed. Finally he declared the song was “as good as anything Mozart ever wrote”, and Mozart never wrote a song which could be used as an “American anthem”, he opined. Larry is Chevy Chase’s step-dad, a fact Larry generously made clear with free tickets to Saturday Night Live.
Thanks Larry !
And here’s to you, John Hughes !!
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