John Hughes’ movies inspire new memoir
To grow up on Chicago’s North Shore in the 1980s and 90s, Jason Diamond writes in his memoir, was to grow up in a world that looked an awful lot like a John Hughes’ movie.
Sixteen Candles, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, The Breakfast Club, Uncle Buck, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off were all filmed in Chicago’s wealthier suburbs to the north, where a discombobulated childhood like Diamond’s can be hidden from view behind an upscale facade.
The turbulence of his parents’ marriage and his difficult relationship with both takes up the first half of his book, Searching for John Hughes: Or Everything I Thought I Needed to Know about Life I Learned from Watching ‘80s Movies. In it, the stories he tells are a reminder that we never know what goes on behind closed doors.
In Diamond’s case, that meant his parents divorcing when he was young. A verbally and physically abusive father. And a mother who informed him as a teenager that she was moving out of state and preferred he not come with her.
Diamond was left homeless and fending for himself, couch-surfing through much of high school.
But the movies of John Hughes (who lived most of his adult life in the Chicago suburbs where he made his films) were instrumental in shaping Diamond’s expectations. ‘‘As a kid,’’ he says, ‘‘I was watching these movies and thinking, ‘This is what life is supposed to look like’, because if you live in any of those areas, you’re going to recognise it.’’
Hughes died in 2009, but a decade earlier, Diamond (who now lives in New York and is the sports editor at Rollingstone.com) was mulling over the idea of writing a Hughes biography and hoped to ‘‘run into’’ him despite the fact that by this point, Hughes had withdrawn from public life.
What kinds of conversations did Diamond want to have with Hughes?
‘‘I would have loved to ask him why he walked away. He kind of faded from view. It makes sense. He got super rich in the 90s. And when you look at how people treated him in the 80s when he was actually full-on writing, producing and directing these films, critics weren’t that kind to him. And my theory is that he was like, ‘Screw it, it’s not worth it’.
‘‘But I think deep down he still wanted to tell those stories. There’s a Vanity Fair article that came out the year after he died and it talks about how there is a whole town of Shermer that goes beyond those couple of movies.’’
Shermer, Illinois, was the fictitious setting of so many of his movies, with Shermer High School popping up in everything from The Breakfast Club to Weird Science to Sixteen Candles.
‘‘There are hundreds of notebooks that he left behind,’’ says Diamond, ‘‘and in them there are details like John Candy’s character from Planes, Trains and Automobiles is neighbours with John Bender, Judd Nelson’s character in The Breakfast Club. Shermer was its own little world to him, like Springfield on The Simpsons.’’’
Home Alone (directed by Chris Columbus but written by Hughes) seems eerily close to Diamond’s own experiences: A kid, absent the presence of one or both parents, is left to fend for himself.
‘‘I saw it in the theatre when I was 8,’’ he said, ‘‘and remember thinking, ‘Oh, I could absolutely do that. I could live on my own. I could make my own microwaved dinners and be fine’.
‘‘I do think it put something in the back of my head that a kid could live on [his] own and be selfsufficient. I’ve thought about that quite often.’’
In an email followup, Diamond had this to say about those Hughes movies from the 80s: ‘‘It’s silly to think about that now, but when I was a kid, I looked at those films and really figured that was how life was going to look one way or another. I’d get married, have a few kids, and live in a nice house in Glenview or Evanston or something and there would be ups and downs but nothing too crazy. As I started to get older I began to realise that maybe that wasn’t the life I totally wanted, that I wanted to write and live in a city, and that maybe things in the suburbs weren’t as nice and clean as I thought because of movies.’’