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John Hughes wrote and directed some of my favorite childhood movies.  Movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, Uncle Buck and more.  I was pretty sad to hear about his death last year.   There is a good article in Vanity Fair this month with quotes from actors from his movies including Matthew Broderick, Anthony Michael Hall, and Molly Ringwald.  Some good excerpts:

Ringwald: I remember the first thing that I saw of him—I didn’t know what he looked like; I didn’t know anything—were his tennis shoes. He was really into sneakers. It was not what I really thought of as a film director. His hair was spiky. He looked kind of relatable to me.

Hall: The word “dweebie”? Gotta credit Judd Nelson for that. I was on the Breakfast Clubset when he ad-libbed that. I think Judd’s responsible for that being part of our vernacular: him yelling, “You’re a neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie!” I remember John laughing.

Broderick: It was extremely pleasing to make John laugh. He had a quiet, very real, uncontrollable laugh: an eyes-closed, head-half-down, bent-over-quiet thing.

Hall: There’s a scene in The Breakfast Club between the principal and the janitor, Paul Gleason and John Kapelos, where one asks, “Who’d you want to be when you grow up?” and the other says, “John Lennon.” I think that was really John to some extent. He was such a Beatles fan.

Hall: When I was doing Weird Science, I got a call from my agent on a Wednesday, saying, “Stanley Kubrick is interested in you for a role in his Vietnam drama that he’s doing, Full Metal Jacket.” Got a call back on a Friday saying, “Well, now he wants you for the lead, as Private Joker. He’s gonna call you tomorrow.”  All I can compare this to is waiting for Oz to call. The stories preceded him: his privacy, living in London, sort of extricating himself from Hollywood, all that shit. I was shaking in my boots. The phone rings. Stanley Kubrick gets on and says, “I want you to know: I just screened Sixteen Candles three times … and you’re my favorite actor since I saw Jack in Easy Rider!” I’m like, “Whaaa? Am I fucking hearing this?”

The long and short of it was, it was such a drawn-out, wild process of negotiating with Kubrick, via his attorneys, that it had a real effect on my family. [Hall ultimately withdrew from the negotiations.] But my point in telling this story is, had I not had this collaboration with this great guy, I never would have gotten that call from Kubrick. I received the greatest compliment of my life, and I owe that to John Hughes.

I watched An Education this weekend and thought it was a great movie.   The film tells the story of a 16-year-old girl who is the target of a sophisticated seduction by a 35-year-old man. This happens in 1961, when 16-year-old girls were more naive and were actually (sort of) looking for older men to take care of them.

The movie has a good script, but the real story is the job played by British actress Carey Mulligan who plays the 16-year old girl.  Watching the movie with the Kesners, we all couldn’t help but comment how she reminds us of Audrey Hepburn.  There’s no one else that came to mind.  The movie could have been sad or creepy but because of Carey’s lightness and joy of character, it is instead it is a romance.  In 1998, I remember watching the movie Playing By Heart which has a few small roles for a little-known actress named Angelina Jolie.  I remember and seeing her absolutely kill every scene. I knew i was watching someone who was going to be a star.  Although two completely different actresses, I felt the same way about An Education and Carey.

Check it out – it’s a good movie.

Wes Anderson was rumored to be directing the new Spider-Man. Here’s a take of what that’d look like

I was listening today to an NPR podcast with George Lucas (download). He has a new book out where he discusses the 300 most influential and impressive blockbuster movies to him. For each film, he does some significant research into the casting, the shooting schedule, the budget, and the result. He adjusts for inflation so you can see the true impact older films had. Some interesting tidbits:

• The average ticket price in 1910 was $6 and the average ticket price today is $6. I find that amazing.
• The music licensing for Lucas’ first film American Graffiti cost him 70k because he was instructed to keep his costs under 10% of his 700k budget. He licensed 2 albums worth of rock. People told him that he was insane to do that. Every other film prior to that had be scored. Nobody had thrown music on top of film. First, it’s amazing that this is the film that changed that. Second, a year later the studio was trying to license all the music for an album to be released and it cost them $1 million. In one year, the industry changed that much. Wow
• Jurrasic Park was the one movie that really changed the digital landscape.  Prior to that everything looked like an effect. After JP he knew you could make anything
• Star Wars was revolutionary to Lucas in that you could make a 2 foot green person seem lifelike. That was the first time there had been an imaginary life-like character in film. Really changed the game. 2001 was the biggest movie at the time and was seen as the best, most creative sci-fi film ever. However, Lucas saw it as a set of still shots and wanted to introduce energy into special effects shot. He wanted to be able to pan the camera through space and not just have one shot.
• 3D is new and Lucas looked at using it for Episode I but the techology wasn’t there.
• He and Spielberg used to trade equity points in their films.  Lucas always thought Spielberg’s films were better than his and Spielberg thought the opposite so each trades a few points of equity in each of their films before they were released.  For example, Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind came out when Star Wars came out and Lucas preferred Close Encounters and Spielberg thought Star Wars would crush it.  Guess Steven knew better