I am so sorry to report today that legendary 80s director and screenwriter John Hughes, responsible for such teen classics as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, and Sixteen Candles, has passed away at the age of 59. Hughes died after suffering a heart attack while taking a walk in NY yesterday morning, where he was visiting family. For the past 15 years, Hughes has lived a reclusive life with his family on their farm in Harvard, Illinois outside of Chicago. He has not directed a film since 1991 and has not granted an interview since 1994. Last year, the LA Times ran a piece on Hughes in which directors Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow heaped praise on his work, and credited Hughes for introducing them to the outsider adolescent genre that characterizes their films. Smith called Hughes “our generation’s J.D. Salinger,” and said he’d love to sit down and talk to him at some point but that he’d never been able to find someone who knew how to get in touch with him:

Writer-director John Hughes, Hollywood’s youth impresario of the 1980s and ’90s who captured the teen and preteen market with such favorites as “The Breakfast Club,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Home Alone, died Thursday, a spokeswoman said. He was 59.

Hughes died of a heart attack during a morning walk in Manhattan, Michelle Bega said. He was in New York to visit family.

A native of Lansing, Mich., who later moved to suburban Chicago and set much of his work there, Hughes rose from comedy writer to ad writer to silver screen champ with his affectionate and idealized portraits of teens, whether the romantic and sexual insecurity of “Sixteen Candles,” or the J.D. Salinger-esque rebellion against conformity in “The Breakfast Club.”

Hughes’ ensemble comedies helped make stars out of Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy and many other young performers. He also scripted the phenomenally popular “Home Alone,” which made little-known Macaulay Culkin a sensation as the 8-year-old accidentally abandoned by his vacationing family, and wrote or directed such hits as “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” “Pretty in Pink,” “Planes, Trains & Automobiles” and “Uncle Buck.”

“I was a fan of both his work and a fan of him as a person,” Culkin said. “The world has lost not only a quintessential filmmaker whose influence will be felt for generations, but a great and decent man.”

Other actors who got early breaks from Hughes included John Cusack (“Sixteen Candles”), Judd Nelson (“The Breakfast Club”), Steve Carell (“Curly Sue”) and Lili Taylor (“She’s Having a Baby”).

Actor and director Bill Paxton credited Hughes for launching his career by casting him as bullying older brother Chet in the 1985 film “Weird Science.”
“He took a tremendous chance on me,” Paxton said. “Like Orson Welles, he was a boy wonder, a director’s director, a writer’s writer, a filmmaker’s filmmaker. He was one of the giants.”

Hughes films, especially “Home Alone,” were among the most popular of their time and the director was openly involved in marketing them. But, with his ever-handy “idea books,” Hughes worked as much from personal life as from commercial instinct. His “National Lampoon” scripts were inspired by his own family’s vacations. “Sixteen Candles,” in which Ringwald plays a teen whose 16th birthday is forgotten, was based on a similar event in a friend’s life.

In a statement quoted on People.com, Ringwald said she was “stunned and incredibly sad” to hear about Hughes’ death.

“He will be missed — by me and by everyone that he has touched,” she said. “My heart and all my thoughts are with his family now.”

Tall and pale, with a high head of hair and owlish glasses, Hughes caught on just a couple of years after MTV was launched. MTV teens were drawn to his stories, innocent compared to the films and world events of the 1960s’ and ’70s. The conflicts were about self-discovery and fitting in rather than hard drugs, political protest or race.

[AP via News.google.com]

I don’t often admit this, but I’m 36 years old. Hughes’ films came out when I was in high school and I’ve easily seen some of them dozens of times, namely Weird Science, Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club. His movies characterized my adolescence and became part of my history. Hughes came into our lives and through deft storytelling and quirky characters he captured and helped define what we were going through. He slipped out before we really had a chance to thank him.

John Hughes is survived by his wife and high school sweetheart, Nancy, by two sons, John Hughes III, 33, and James Hughes, 30, and by four grandchildren.

The Sixteen Candles trailer:

The trailer for The Breakfast Club

And Weird Science. (NSFW boobies)