MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: John Hughes wanted Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald to be, in effect, his acting troupe and stopped doing teen films once they all stopped working together.
John Hughes' 1980s teen films are unusual in the sense that not only are they iconic films that defined an entire generation (heck, possibly multiple generations), but they also took place practically all at once. Starting with Sixteen Candles in 1984, Hughes made SIX teen movies between 1984 and 1987, writing all six and directing four of them. Then, after what I suppose you could call a "transition" film in 1988's She's Having a Baby (a film about a young married couple having their first child that Hughes wrote and directed), Hughes never made another teen movie in his career, doing instead both adult comedies (mostly with actor John Candy until Candy passed away in 1994) and kid-centered films (most famously, he wrote and produced Home Alone, which was by far the biggest hit he ever had in his career).
As Walt Whitman put it, "I am large. I contain multitudes," so it is essentially impossible to tell you without a shadow of a doubt why Hughes stopped making teen movies, and honestly, once Home Alone was a blockbuster, most filmmakers would be hard-pressed to NOT want to just do more movies like the one that became a sensation (Home Alone was the third-highest grossing film of 1990...but it was also the third-highest grossing film of 1991, as well, so combined, it made far more than the number one movies of either year). However, it does appear as though Hughes also was deeply affected by the loss of what he seemed to see as his teen movie acting troupe.
WHO DID JOHN HUGHES CONSIDER HIS ACTING TROUPE?
John Hughes first worked with Anthony Michael Hall while Hughes was still working on National Lampoon movies (Hughes started writing screenplays while actually still a staff writer at the National Lampoon), as Hall was the son in the hit film, National Lampoon's Vacation. However, Hall still had to go read for the role of the geeky Farmer Ted in Hughes' next film, Sixteen Candles, which starred Molly Ringwald as the girl turning sixteen whose family forgets her birthday in the chaos of her older sister getting married. At the time, Hughes reflected, "Every single kid who came in to read for the part... did the whole, stereotyped high school nerd thing. You know - thick glasses, ball point pens in the pocket, white socks. But when Michael came in he played it straight, like a real human being. I knew right at that moment that I'd found my geek." Hall noted then that, "Me and John are more like friends. We just hit it off, we're so much alike. It's bizarre, but sometimes we know exactly what the other is thinking. We don't have to say a word, we just nod at each other."
Hughes then cast both Hall and Ringwald in his next teen film, The Breakfast Club. While shooting that film, Hall recalled Hughes coming up to him with plans for their NEXT film together, “I was 16 but looked like a bobblehead of 12. And John goes: ‘Yeah, it’s gonna be you and another guy, and you’re gonna make a girl on the computer.’ I’m like, ‘What? What the hell’s he talking about?’ My head is spinning. We’re probably two or three weeks into The Breakfast Club and he’s already telling me about another film we’re going to do. But that’s how prolific he was.” That film, of course, was Weird Science, which came out later the same year as The Breakfast Club.
However, Hall was now a big enough star that he started getting offers for other movies and that led to a conflict with him and Hughes, as Hughes already had two other roles in mind for Hall, one of which would also involved Ringwald. The first was Pretty in Pink and the other one was Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Hall turned him down because he was doing an action movie. Hall later recalled, “It was, I think, upsetting for him. It wasn’t a spiteful thing on my part or anything, it was more that I was moving on to new work and new opportunities. I hope that didn’t offend him, but I don’t really know. We didn’t stay in close contact in the years ahead. I kind of lost touch with him … but I can just hold on to the great memories I have. He welcomed me like a son.”
While Ringwald did Pretty in Pink, she then turned down the fairly similar role of Watts in Hughes' last teen movie, Some Kind of Wonderful (which was sort of a gender-reversed version of Pretty in Pink).
HOW DID HUGHES HANDLE HALL AND RINGWALD TURNING HIS MOVIES DOWN?
Hughes and Hall only spoke once in 1987 after Hall turned down the roles of Duckie and Ferris, and Hall later spoke about how sad the whole thing was, "It's one of the saddest things of my life because I loved the guy. He was a big brother to me. I spent a lot of personal time with him, I was like his third kid. Back in the day when we did those films I would hang out with him and his wife and two kids so I was their third son in a way. I had a real close relationship with John. He still was a teenager in some regards because he would take things very personal."
In an opinion piece for the New York Times following Hughes' death in 2009, Ringwald wrote, "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. 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."
She noted the same was true for Hall (Ringwald and Hughes at least reconnected through a letter she wrote him in 1994 thanking him for all he did for her in her career, to which he responded by sending her a large bouquet of flowers). Ringwald noted that the loss of her and Hall changed his films, "None of the films that he made subsequently had the same kind of personal feeling to me. They were funny, yes, wildly successful, to be sure, but I recognized very little of the John I knew in them, of his youthful, urgent, unmistakable vulnerability. It was like his heart had closed, or at least was no longer open for public view."
That was something that the cast of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which was the first teen film Hughes did without either Hall or Ringwald, noticed. According to Susannah Gora's Hughes memoir, You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation, Hughes almost quit making Ferris Bueller's Day Off early into the filming because he just didn't like working with the new cast. Gora noted, "Making Ferris Bueller’s Day Off gave John Hughes more money. It gave him the chance to film in his hometown as a returning hero. It gave him even more power in Hollywood. But there was one thing it didn’t give him, something he’d grown to love on the set of his earlier teen films, perhaps even something he’d grown to need. 'In the previous films,' says Mia Sara (who plays Sloane,) 'he had developed very close relationships with a lot of those actors, and he really had created that environment that he sought to create, where he was one of them. And I think that didn’t happen with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.'”
Interestingly, though, Hughes tried to make one last teen movie with Ringwald and Broderick, in 1987, called Oil and Vineger, with Broderick as a traveling salesman about to be married who goes on a road trip with a free-spirited young woman played by Ringwald. Ringwald recalled that she and Broderick "were supposed to be in a John Hughes picture called Oil and Vinegar. The script needed some re-writes and John didn't want to meet and re-write. I ran out of time and had to go shoot another picture. It's too bad because it was a very funny script. The movie would have been fantastic."
So again, there were likely a number of different factors influencing Hughes' thought process in no longer making teen movies, but it certainly does sound like the loss of Hall and Ringwald, his acting troupe, was a big enough factor that I am going with the legend as...
STATUS: True Enough for a True
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