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.

Friend or FOE (fashion-obsessed entity)?

Mon, 12 Mar 2001 20:22:00 +0000

It was the little dog that did it. The little dog and the little baby. The dog was a wild-eyed pug squirming in his oblivious owner's lap at the show for the Fake London collection, terrified by the bright spotlights and pounding bass lines. The baby, so young his head still needed to be supported, was being oohed and ahhed over at a fashion party as if he were a Vuitton graffiti bag, earning his mother a comparable number of status accessory points. Who, I wondered, would bring these fragile creatures into a hot, crowded room unsuitable for nervous systems even more delicate than a designer's?

My colleagues, as it turns out. But only a subset of the group, a subset beset with FOD (fashion-obsessive disorder) and hereupon referred to as FOEs (fashion-obsessed entities), a subset that migrates in clouds of parfum that you cannot buy, to places you may not visit, for events that are probably meaningless -- to you.

Through my work I've met many like myself who toil in the fashion vineyards. They include journalists, publicists, stylists, makeup artists, buyers and designers. Most are not unduly obsessed people for whom it is occasionally important to look fashionable. They will often, however, settle for throwing on anything that is clean and not notably laugh-provoking.

Salon.com > Ellin Stein

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

Friend or FOE (fashion-obsessed entity)?