@Tom. I know that. I was making a joke.
It was funny too Irvin :-).
@Irvin – ha ha :-)
My take on John Hughes: I really do not get the adoration for John Hughes. My apologies to his fans here. I’ve outgrown his later screenplay-only kiddie works (the Home Alone movies). I’ve seen only Sixteen Candles (which was just okay for me), Uncle Buck (which is kind of meh for me) and Curly Sue (which I hated) plus parts of Weird Science (which I never cared to see the rest of, I changed the channel after about half an hour). Based on what I’ve seen, I feel very little desire to see any of his other works. They all look kind of dated to me.
I’m with Roscoe and Anubhav Bist.
To compare him with John Ford or Gordon Willis or Stanley Kubrick or Ingmar Bergman seems to me to be missing the point. All those guys won Oscars in their lifetime. They weren’t exactly lacking in plaudits and recognition of their talents.
The tribute to John Hughes, like a lot of lifetime achievement awards, was clearly given in acknowledgement of the fact that he’d never won any awards. He’d not even been nominated for a single Oscar, for writing or for directing, so in fact even Eric Rohmer had been more recognised by the Academy than Hughes. And yet several of Hughes’ films are widely cherished even today, a quarter of a century later. They have meant a lot to a lot of people.
The po-faced Academy, like a lot of cineastes, has a tendency to overlook comedies. That’s why I feel the tribute was justified. To re-address the balance somewhat. I wouldn’t have thought that needed spelling out.
Of course if you like you can put some effort into thinking of other imbalances that need addressing, some even more urgently perhaps. But that doesn’t make this tribute unjustified.
PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES might not have altered cinematic form, but it is a masterpiece in my book. For me, the final sequence of the film is right up there with the ending of Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS. John Hughes was a master.
the final sequence is great but the scene in the hotel where John Candy has his speech is classic
I agree that AMPAS flat out ignores comedy, but I don’t think that justifies the 10 minute Hughes tribute. Hughes had a hand in two good comedies, “National Lampoon’s Vacation” and “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles”. Oddly, neither was a teen film and both were “road” films. I’d argue that other than those two films, Hughes’s comedies range from the flawed but good (“Sixteen Candles”, his best teen film) to the overrated (“Ferris Beuller’s Day Off”) to the awful (“Baby’s Day Out”, “Miracle on 34th Street”). Again, I think the better move for AMPAS would’ve been to give him a place in the “In Memoriam” segment and let Lauren Bacall, Roger Corman, and Gordon Willis have their moment in the sun in front of a worldwide audience as lifetime achievement award winners..
I stand by my statement that Hughes was on balance a middling director/screenwriter whose most popular work is dwarfed by Cameron Crowe’s teen dramedies. That being said, I can’t really say anything bad about “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles”. In its way, it’s a minor classic.
I’m very glad I’m not alone in appreciating P, T & A – which incidentally was woefully under-represented in the montage of clips in the tribute! If I was in charge of the Oscars that montage would have been made up solely of clips from that film, and it would have gone on for about 45 minutes.
I’m sure we can all agree that Bacall, Corman and Willis should have been given their awards on the big night. Each of them should have been given several minutes too – as well as, and not instead of, the posthumous tribute to Hughes. But I was pleasantly surprised to see that at least there was one segment of the ceremony dedicated to a non-competition tribute, instead of none at all. There should be MORE such tributes. Not fewer. I hope John Landis gets his before he dies.
Sadly it’s more about TV ratings now than actual recognition of excellence.
@Sam: I disagree. The Bacall, Corman and Willis tributes should’ve been there INSTEAD of the John Hughes tribute. John Hughes is, AT BEST, a minor cult filmmaker, with all due respect. Sure, he made a bunch of beloved films but there are tons of other directors who have had similar impact (to be honest I think the show “Freaks and Geeks” is WAY, WAY, WAY, WAY, WAY, WAY better than any of the works I’ve seen of John Hughes’) so singling him out is absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary at least for the Oscars.
Now, if the MTV Movie Awards wanna do a tribute, I wouldn’t be against. The John Hughes tribute BELONGS there.
I was American, Caucasian, and in my teens and early twenties in the 1980’s… the exact “target” for the Hughes films.
But I loathed ’em then…. and I loathe ’em now.
Sure we can all think of people we think are more deserving. I would have liked a big tribute to Jack Cardiff. I would have liked a moment’s silence in appreciation of Karl Malden. Or Jean Simmons.
But I don’t feel the need to insult John Hughes and go on about how much I disliked his films just because he got paid a special tribute and they didn’t. If he’d won lots of awards in his lifetime I would agree with you that such a tribute would have felt excessive. But he was never even nominated for any. Even a ‘minor cult filmmaker’ deserves some kind of ceremonial recognition, in my book. This was a posthumous compensation. And a gesture like that might encourage other ‘minor’ entertainers in feeling that the legacy of their work, though it might go ungarlanded in the big awards ceremonies, is nonetheless valued.
We shouldn’t be too precious with our backslapping. More tributes to minor cult filmmakers!
Let’s give this forum topic a positive twist with some suggestions of so-far under-nominated artists to whom you think the Academy should give a lifetime achievement award in the future.
Sam Booth
John Waters
Albert Brooks
Herchell Gordon Lewis
to name a few
@Sam – I don’t think it’s insulting to John Hughes to say he didn’t deserve a 10 minute tribute in front of a worldwide audience on the best-known film award show on the planet. If Mr. Hughes, wherever he is, takes umbrage at someone saying he deserved the same tribute Billy Wilder got when Wilder passed away, then Mr. Hughes has a very thin skin and a very big ego indeed.
That being said, I think it may be more than a bit of a sleight to use time that in past Oscarcasts would’ve gone to lifetime achievement award winners. Lauren Bacall deserved a chance to have the same experience Cary Grant and Charlie Chaplin, among others, had. Same goes for Roger Corman, and if Corman doesn’t fill the bill for underrecognized cult filmmakers, I don’t know who does.
@Den – Yes on Waters and Brooks, and I’ll add George Romero.
I think if we start cataloging the injustices of the Academy when it comes to appropriately recognizing talent, devoting a little too much time to John Hughes is pretty low on the list.
NOSTALGIA!
I don’t think Billy Wilder (or Stanley Kubrick or Katharine Hepburn or Paul Newman or Ingmar Bergman or Akira Kurosawa) got as an elaborate and extended tribute as John Hughes had. They didn’t have actors or people who worked with him stand up on the stage and said a few words. They didn’t have their widows and children in the audience with them.
@Sam Booth: Even a ‘minor cult filmmaker’ deserves some kind of ceremonial recognition, in my book.
Yes. I agree. In the “IN MEMORIAM” segment. That’s where John Hughes belonged in the Oscar telecast.
There is something wrong with this equation:
Writer of “Baby’s Day Out” = 10 minute tribute.
Co-writer of “8 1/2” = 5 second tribute.
It’s hogwash.
Part of the tribute can be directly associated with his young age when he died. The other is that a whole generation watched his films and loved them. Not every movie is going to be a Godfather. The Breakfast club was an excellent movie and could be considered a masterpiece considering the character study that went along with the movie. Planes, Traines, and Automobiles is another example of a comedy being more than just a comedy. Ferris Bueller turned into a cult favorite, and there are very few people who I meet that haven’t seen the movie and can’t quote a few lines. For teenagers during that time span, these were the movies we watched and enjoyed. Not too many 16 year olds are watching The Seventh Seal on a Friday night with their friends. To see a director/writer of Hughes’ caliber leave this earth is very sad, and his indelible mark left on Hollywood certainly deserved every second of script that went into the tribute. He was a great director and his movies will always be remembered with by my generation and generations to come.
@Andy: Part of the tribute can be directly associated with his young age when he died.
True but he wasn’t doing much. He has retired from directing and his later works consisted of writing shitty kiddie comedies (His last work is freakin’ DRILLBIT TAYLOR). In other words, hack work. I know he has fans and admirers and his movies mean a lot to a lot of people. Well, other filmmakers mean a lot to a lot of people too. Why should John Hughes get singled out when his work is OBJECTIVELY INFERIOR to other famous directors who actually matter more to the art of film?
@Andy Not too many 16 year olds are watching The Seventh Seal on a Friday night with their friends.
With your logic, Michael Bay and Brett Ratner both deserve a solo tribute reel over Ingmar Bergman, am I right?
@Andy – John Hughes was 59 when he died. Not exactly “old” by most people’s standards and well under the average life expectancy for a man in the US. However, if Hughes had an Individual Retirement Account in the US and if he had lived another 12 days, he would’ve been able to cash it in without a tax penalty – not exactly “young”, either.
Francois Truffaut was 52 when he died, and not to be harsh, but I think the world will probably miss the work Truffaut didn’t produce much more than the work John Hughes didn’t produce because of his sudden and untimely death. The director of “The 400 Blows” and “Day for Night” didn’t get a 10 minute solo tribute, if I recall correctly. The writer/director of “Curly Sue” did.
The only other posthumous solo tribute anyone’s been able to come up with was Kubrick (a short, dignified speech by Steven Spielberg, much shorter than the “Brat Pack” eulogies for Hughes), so I think Irvin’s right to question who’s worthy of a solo reel tribute: Bay? Ratner? McG? Besides, if you’re going to give somebody time outside the In Memoriam segment, their work had better be earthshaking. I don’t think “Sixteen Candles”, let alone “The Breakfast Club” or “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” or “Baby’s Day Out”, qualifies.
@Matt – yes, there are almost certainly bigger AMPAS injustices than a tribute to John Hughes that was too long. But really, the bigger injustice on the whole thing isn’t Judd Nelson and Macaulay Culkin talking about how Hughes was a nice man and the voice of a generation (c’mon, he wasn’t John Lennon, fer cryin’ out loud). It’s that Lauren Bacall, Roger Corman, and Gordon Willis won lifetime achievement awards and weren’t recognized on a worldwide telecast. It probably would’ve been a highlight of a pretty bad Oscar show to see Bacall and Corman being honored.
“It probably would’ve been a highlight of a pretty bad Oscar show to see Bacall and Corman being honored.”
what’s frightening is that there is a major part of the public which not only loves Hughes’ films more than the above mentioned legends, they don’t even know of who Corman and / or Bacall are…..and i’m not just counting the U.S. citizens here.
“a major part of the public which not only loves Hughes’ films more than the above mentioned legends, they don’t even know of who Corman and / or Bacall are”
the highlight reeel they would have introduced them with would have helped. Kind of sad that Corman who is a genius self promoter was not celebrated in front of millions of viewers on the Oscar telecast; it certainly would have helped move product.
“Not too many 16 year olds are watching ‘The Seventh Seal’.”
…..Except ME at sixteen. Also pretty much force-feeding my friends Kubrick, Lynch, and Bergman. They hated it at first. But now (as ‘intellectual college-going 21 year olds’) they think the films are “so deep” and “awe inspiring”.
And what thanks do I get?!?!? Yeesh.
Oh well. I’m prettier.
@ Irvin Contreras: I think you’re still missing the point. All those people you named did in fact get plenty of Academy recognition.
Billy Wilder won 6 oscars. He’s the 2nd most nominated director in the history of the oscars, and was also nominated for 12 best screenplay oscars. He was also given the academy’s Irving Thalberg memorial award.
Katharine Hepburn won 4 best actress oscars, from 12 nominations. She also got a special tribute at the oscars the year after she died. Julia Roberts made a speech.
Stanley Kubrick never got a best director oscar but was nominated many times for directing and for writing and certainly won one for 2001’s special visual effects. He’s certainly the most under-recognised person you mentioned, but he did get a special tribute at the oscars the year after he died. Spielberg made a speech.
Paul Newman won the best actor oscar and was nominated several times. In addition he was given an honorary Academy Award in 1986 for his “many and memorable and compelling screen performances”.
Ingmar Bergman was many times Oscar-nominated. The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly and Fanny & Alexander all won the best foreign language film oscar. He was also given the Irving Thalberg memorial award in the early 70s.
Akira Kurosawa won the best foreign language oscar twice, for Rashomon and for Dersu Uzala. He was also given a lifetime achievement award at the 1990 oscars.
As for Fellini whom you claim only received a ‘5 second tribute’ : he was repeatedly up for screenwriting oscars since the mid 40s. La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, 8 1/2, Amarcord all won the best foreign language film oscar. And the academy gave him a lifetime achievement award in 1993.
Most of the people you mention did in fact get lifetime achievement awards from the academy, so you’re plain wrong when you claim they “didn’t got as an elaborate [sic] and extended tribute as John Hughes had. They didn’t have actors or people who worked with him stand up on the stage and said [sic] a few words.” They did get just that, and more.
Whereas JOHN HUGHES WAS NEVER NOMINATED FOR ANY AWARDS AT ALL.
You would no doubt say this is exactly as it should be, as he was simply not in the same league as the artists in your list, and I would agree with you. (Although give me Planes, Trains & Automobiles over Bergman’s Winter Light any day of the week). However, given this total lack of ceremonial acknowledgement in his lifetime, I don’t have any problem with his receiving a few minutes’ posthumous attention of this kind, to say thanks and well done to his departed spirit.
I could understand your indignation if they’d gone a step further and given him the Thalberg memorial award posthumously, or something, which admittedly would have been disproportionate to his achievements. But they didn’t. Some people said a few words and everybody watched a clip montage. That’s all it was. So why on earth are you so deeply offended?
I was probably about 16 or 17 when I first saw “The Seventh Seal”. The local PBS affiliate would run films from the Janus collection (this was in the late 70s/early 80s, some introduced by a film historian whose name I can’t remember (he had traces of a southern US accent and I want to say his first name was Benjamin). Saw a lot of vintage films (Eisenstein’s “Potemkin” several times, Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast”, several Bergman films, and the Alec Guinness Ealing comedies).
Ah, memories…
@Tom : Truffaut won the best foreign language oscar for Day for Night, which I reckon is a pretty weak film and not worthy of cleaning Planes, Trains & Automobiles’ boots.
The insistence that the work of anybody who gets a tribute ought to have ‘changed the art form’ or ‘had better be earthshaking’ smacks of the snobbery and pretension that are the reasons why comedy is so consistently ignored at awards ceremonies, despite being notoriously difficult to pull off successfully (and despite being perhaps more important in our lives than anything else – see Sullivan’s Travels). I wonder if you’ve ever had a go at writing and directing comedy. It’s REALLY HARD.
>>CONTROVERSY WARNING<<
I’d argue that to make a funny film – let alone a really funny AND genuinely moving film such as P T & A – requires a talent rarer than Lauren Bacall’s, and rarer than Roger Corman’s entrepreneurial savvy. A skill greater even than the technical facility of Gordon Willis. Sure they’ve all made great contributions, and they all should have been awarded in the ceremony itself, but at the end of the day, Corman is a businessman, Willis is a technician and you’d never even have heard of Bacall if the great Howard Hawks hadn’t spotted her photograph in a magazine, summoned her, artificially lowered her voice and carefully and deliberately moulded a persona for her. John Hughes, on the other hand, was the artist behind at least one damn good film. That counts for more with me, because I admire auteurs.
I only know one of his films very well, but I do know that he wrote and directed films with heart and warmth, which made people laugh and are fondly recalled and still enjoyed 25 years later. All these qualities are pretty unusual. Add to that the fact that he was ignored by the academy throughout his career, and you have a case for a compensatory posthumous pat on the back. Why get so worked up about the academy giving this guy a few minutes attention just because we rate Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet more highly than The Breakfast Club?
Some cineastes seem to think cinema’s reason for existence is to advance the art of cinema. Whereas actually it exists to enrich people’s lives. Let’s not have earth-shaking or artform-changing as our criterion for validation. It should be enough to have entertained people and to have moved people – to laughter or tears. Bay, Ratner and McG are facetious examples, and you know it. We’ll see if their films continue to give pleasure for as long as Hughes’ have lasted.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles did shake my earth. I can watch the last six minutes totally out of context and it will make me weep.
And the tribute to Hughes was not 10 minutes long, as you state with certainty. It was about 6 minutes. Don’t round it up to the nearest 10 just to lend more weight to your argument.
That’s the demarcation line for this thread. Some of us were watching John Hughes films at 16 or 17 (and “The Seventh Seal” many years later, of course).
@Sam – Where do I start… I’d strongly disagree re: “Day for Night”, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it contains one of my four or five favorite scenes in any film, the scene in which the young Truffaut steals a “Citizen Kane” poster. There’s something about this film that celebrates not only movies as a part of people’s lives but also the art and craft of movies, even if the film the Truffaut character is making, “Introducing Pamela”, is just a standard studio production. No, it’s not Truffaut’s best film (that would be “The 400 Blows”), but it’s a joy to watch. And as a writer and as a director, Truffaut on his worst day kicked Hughes’s butt on Hughes’s best day.
As Mr. Kean said, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard”. Hughes’s comedy writing ranges from the very good (PT&A) to the awful (“Baby’s Day Out”), and even the ballyhooed teen dramedies have the writing quality of your average sitcom. “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” is an exception to Hughes’s other work and a very good comedy, and it’s a bit of a departure for Hughes as it was released just after his signature teen comedy period. To say that it occupies a place with a handful of very good comedies from roughly the same period is a very high compliment. But again, does it merit a tribute outside the In Memoriam segment? And how does Hughes’s work stack up against the giants of movie comedy (Chaplin and Keaton, Sturges, and the one who somehow keeps coming up, Wilder)? I’ll take those guys over Hughes any day.
I also couldn’t disagree more re: Willis, Corman, and Bacall. Taking it backward: Bacall may have been discovered by Hawks in a magazine, but how many starlets wash out after a brief shot at the big time? Bacall did some excellent work over the years, was never honored by AMPAS, and is one of the last remaining links to Hollywood’s golden age. Did she deserve a moment in front of a worldwide audience more than Hughes? Yep. As for Corman, yes, he was a businessman/producer much more than he was a filmmaker. But what an eye for talent – Coppola, Scorsese, Sayles, Demme. Compare this with Hughes, who gave us Howard Deutch and Les Mayfield. Calling Willis a “technician” is like calling Michelangelo a stone-cutter: Willis is arguably one of the three or four greatest cinematographers who ever lived, and I’d argue that a huge part of the success of the Godfather films is due to the visual stamp he put on them. Willis is an artist of the first order. Not only did these three people, who in past years would’ve been honored during the main telecast, deserve to share their moment with a worldwide audience, I’d bet they would’ve made the Oscar show more entertaining. I don’t know about anybody else, but I think Corman would’ve been more entertaining than Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Macaulay Culkin..
Bottom line: Hughes got exceptional treatment, one which has only gone to one other filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, and he got twice the time Kubrick did. Is it snobbery to suggest that exceptional treatment demands exceptional achievement? I don’t think so. Again, his tribute should have been in the In Memoriam section, where other luminaries like Altman and Wilder have had theirs in recent years. And, 6 minutes or 10, he still shouldn’t have gotten a solo tribute.
Tom Cavender
@Den – Hughes’s script for Miracle on 34th Street added a cartoonish bad guy played by Joss Ackland, with cartoonish henchmen played by James Remar and Jane Leeves. There’s a badly drawn subplot about Ackland’s conglomerate trying to buy out Cole’s Department Store (the Macy’s of the original). Worst of all, the clever conclusion of the trial of Kris Kringle in original involving the post office gives way to a thoroughly ham-handed and stupid revelation by the judge involving the use of “In God We Trust” on US coins, thrown together with huge crowds lining the streets chanting, “I believe!” Most of the acting isn’t bad – Attenborough is wonderful, Elizabeth Perkins is good, but Dylan McDermott is miscast. Still, it’s very inferior to the original, and the fault lies mainly with the script.
@Irving Contreras – Word is that Hughes loved Chicago (you can see this in his films) and didn’t like Hollywood very much. There have also been hints out there that Hughes was disappointed in the reception his films were getting, and that’s one reason why he began writing under the pseudonym Edmond Dantes (the name of the lead character in “The Count of Monte Cristo”). Whether he chose this name because of a love for Dumas’s book, or because he felt he was as wronged by the business as Dantes was in the book is an open question.
A couple of interesting points that strike me re: Hughes (and as I’ve said before, I’m not a fan): his signature work (teen dramedies) comprised six films over a three year period, four written and directed by him and the other two directed by others from his scripts. I think his best film, “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles”, came from the year he stopped making teen films, 1987. After a couple of forays into more adult-oriented fare (“Planes…”, “She’s Having a Baby”, “Only the Lonely”), his remaining films were kid-oriented comedies, including the “Edmond Dantes” scripts.