John Hughes, Chronicler of '80s Teens, Dies

Does any current teen out there know who John Hughes was? Anyone? Anyone? Adolescent fancies wax and wane at warp speed, but just for historical purposes, kids, you should know that in the 1980s Hughes was the intimate chronicler, confidant and cheerleader of a generation of young people. Writing scripts that could have come from inside their muddled hearts, monitoring their rampaging hormones, he built a smart shelf of adolescent zeitgeist films: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the movie etched in immortality by teacher Ben Stein's plaintive, froggy "Bueller? Anyone? Anyone?" (See TIME's list of the top 10 Hughes movie moments.)

To hear that the writer, producer and sometimes director had died Aug. 6, in Manhattan of a heart attack at 59, was a shock, and not just because he was taken at a relatively young age. Hughes was so close to the characters he created and to the young actors whose careers he established that he seemed a perpetual arrested adolescent. He would have to grow up before he could grow old. And as a film writer, that never happened — for which movie fans of all ages will always be grateful.

Born in Michigan and raised in Northbrook, Ill., Hughes never went Hollywood; the industry went to him. His signature movies were written and filmed where he grew up. As a copywriter and then as a contributor to National Lampoon magazine, where his "Vacation '58" humor piece led him into movies, he learned to deliver work that was fast and good and never slowed the pace. If his name didn't appear on recent films, that's because he wrote the Beethoven movies, Maid in Manhattan and last year's Drillbit Taylor under the pseudonym Edmond Dantes (taken from The Count of Monte Cristo). In his prime he was known for writing 74 script pages in a night and rarely taking more than five days to complete a first draft. (Read a 1986 TIME cover story on Molly Ringwald.)

Hughes generated successful movie-comedy franchises as fast as other people wrote postcards. First the National Lampoon's Vacation films, with Chevy Chase as the harried nincompoop dad on some disastrous trip with his family. Then the teen movies, not strictly a series but with more or less the same rep company of kids. And then the blockbuster Home Alone, about an 8-year-old boy (played by Macaulay Culkin) stranded solo at Christmas, and its two sequels. Note that the protagonists of these films kept getting younger; Hughes was writing his emotional autobiography backward, like a sitcom Benjamin Button. "Oh, why can't we start old and get younger?" 30-something Annie Potts cries in Pretty in Pink. That was Hughes' writing plan. And when he had exhausted the human family, from dad to teen to little kid, he moved down to canines: a bunch of slapdash farces about Beethoven the slobbering St. Bernard — climaxing, naturally, with Beethoven's Fifth.

Ned Tanen, a Paramount production boss in the '80s, called Hughes "the Steven Spielberg of youth comedy." Well, his movies were popular, with big grosses on spare budgets, but it's better to find literary analogues. In his facility for spinning the fullest comedy out of the frailest situation, he was the movies' version of playwright Alan Ayckbourn. The stay-at-home dad morphed into Mr. Mom; the annoying guy next to you became the Steve Martin–John Candy hit Planes, Trains and Automobiles. And as a portraitist of teen angst, he was a sunnier Salinger, a comedic S.E. Hinton. Anyway, Hughes was just what Hollywood needed and rarely got: somebody whose films weren't about teenagers but inside them. Almost never before had kids looking for wish fulfillment in the dark found movies that shed a little light on their own lives.

Hughes showed teenagers that light, with a rose-tinted glow. His Molly trilogy — Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, all starring actual teen Molly Ringwald — mined the emotional convulsions that make every kid feel he or she is the first lonely explorer on the dark side of the moon. In his mid-30s, Hughes got spookily in sync with the swooning narcissism of adolescence: that teachers are torturers; that parents are sweet but don't quite understand; that friends and lovers are two distinct species, one domestic, one alien; that I feel all these things I can never express; that there must be someone out there who will love me to pieces. Hughes gave the young what they wanted in life and movies: romance, passion, pleasure, commitment and a little sex. His pictures were like teen psychotherapy with a guaranteed happy ending. (See pictures of movie costumes.)