John Hughes: How National Lampoon led to “The Breakfast Club” and “Ferris Bueller”

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

If P.J. O’Rourke was in fact dedicated to returning the National Lampoon to solid Middle American (as opposed to snotty Ivy League) values, he found a strong ally in John Hughes, a Lampoon writer so rooted in Middle America he never actually left his base in the Chicago suburbs even after he was put on the Lampoon staff, instead flying in for meetings at the magazine’s expense.

Like Alan Zweibel and Lorne Michaels, Hughes had slogged as a gag writer in his youth, selling jokes to the likes of Rodney Dangerfield, Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller. Like Chris Miller, he had been a copywriter and became an agency vice president by the time he was twenty-five while freelancing for Playboy. In fact, it was Miller’s work that had inspired Hughes to contact the Lampoon. “I read all of Chris Miller’s stuff and a couple of things by Doug Kenney and the stuff drove me insane,” he recalled, and in late 1977, he called and ended up talking to cartoonist Shary Flenniken, who told him to get in touch with Tony Hendra, at that point incubating his own satire magazine. But the socialist-leaning, literary Hendra and the basically apolitical-though-Republican-if-anything Hughes (who would make his name in 1985 as writer and director of "The Breakfast Club," a movie in which five high school kids are confined to a library and generally avoid reading, bored stiff though they are) were not a good fit.

I don’t hate millennials anymore!

Sat, 25 May 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Like many of my colleagues in the American academy, each fall I consult the Mindset List for entering college freshmen produced annually by Beloit College of Wisconsin. Designed to identify “the experiences and event horizons of students and . . . not meant to reflect on their preparatory education,” the list is marked by a frequent use of “always” and “never,” reminding us that many cultural and experiential commonplaces for those writing syllabi are foreign, inscrutable, and sometimes ancient history to the syllabi’s intended audience. On the list for the class of 2013, three facts controverting my own early experience catch the eye: one demographic, one geographic, and one pedagogic. First, in these students’ lifetime, “Smokers have never been promoted as an economic force that deserves respect.” The Marlboro Man never galloped across their television screens, nor will they recall Virginia Slims’ women’s-lib-hijacking “You’ve come a long way, baby!” advertising campaign. On the geographic front, the Soviet Union never appeared on their map, and thus “Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Latvia, Georgia, Lithuania, and Estonia have always been independent nations.” No Cold War–era living in the shadow of the bomb, no anxiety of "The Day After" variety for these students; they have lived instead with the horrifying shadow of 9/11 falling over half of their lives.

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John Hughes: How National Lampoon led to “The Breakfast Club” and “Ferris Bueller”

I don’t hate millennials anymore!