Remembering a ‘Sweet’ Little Birthday

by Leo Grin

“Wax on, wax off.” “He slimed me.” “Fortune and Glory, kid.” “I’ll be back.” “Don’t get him wet. Keep him out of bright light. And never feed him after midnight.”

It’s hard to believe that a quarter century has passed since that magical movie summer of 1984. The calender year of George Orwell’s dire dystopian nightmares had arrived, but instead of a nation writhing in servitude to Big Brother, America was delighting in the prosperity engineered by Big Gipper. Throughout the summer of ‘84, the greatest president of the twentieth century was cruising to the single largest electoral total ever amassed by a presidential candidate in our history, and “It’s Morning Again in America” commercials were playing on TV’s across the land to widespread approval.

In California, a cute little R2-D2 of a machine called the Apple Macintosh had been introduced, heralding the beginnings of a technological tsunami that has yet to abate. Meanwhile, across the world, the latest in the Soviet Union’s grotesque chorus line of cadaverous leaders had croaked, presaging the collapse of the whole miserable works in just a few short years. There was still a world-full of the usual problems, failures, and challenges, yes. But for those of us who spent that summer in gloriously air-conditioned, velvet-dark theaters — and sometimes, when we were lucky, in massive outdoor parking lots flanked by titanic movie screens glowing mystically in the dying light of the setting sun — times were good in America.

There’s much to say about that year from a film perspective, and in the coming months I’m sure those of us at Big Hollywood who had our minds permanently warped by ectoplasmic entities, unstoppable crane kicks, phased-plasma rifles in the forty-watt range, and the dreaded Black Sleep of Kali Ma will be saying it. I’d like to kick things off, however, with a short shout-out to a picture that didn’t rake in blockbuster profits, or fuel a billion-dollar toy industry, or get its characters immortalized on collectible Burger King cups, or spawn an assembly line of sequels and prequels. No, this film penetrated the cultural zeitgeist through an unassuming former editor of National Lampoon, directing his first movie on a shoestring budget, from a script filled with deathless lines like:

“Whatsa happenin’, hot stuff?”

“By night’s end, I predict: me and her will interface.”

“Chronologically, you’re sixteen today. Physically? You’re still fifteen.”

“What the hell are you bitchin’ about? I’ve gotta sleep underneath some Chinaman named after a duck’s dork.”

“I can’t believe my grandmother actually felt me up!”

“I can’t believe I gave my panties to a geek.”

“Sophomore, dude, sophomore! Fully aged sophomore meat.”

“Relax, would you? We have seventy dollars and a pair of girls’ underpants. We’re safe as kittens.”

“No more yankie my wankie! The Donger need food.”

“This information cannot leave this room — it would devastate my reputation as a dude.”

“C’mon, I don’t want to see it!”

“Fresh breath is the priority of my life.”

“I’m kinda like the leader, you know? Kinda like the King of the Dipshits.”

If you got through that list without some serious laughing accompanied by a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia, then in all likelihood you were a criminally sheltered child who was locked in a closet somewhere the day a small movie called Sixteen Candles (1984) debuted in theaters twenty-five years ago. The man who etched “They f***ing forgot my birthday!” into the permanent memory banks of a whole generation of teens was John Hughes, who had cut his comedy teeth writing thousands of jokes on spec, sending them to comedy club veterans like Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers and getting the princely sum of $7 whenever they condescended to buy one. He later weaseled his way onto the staff of Harvard’s National Lampoon, which left him well positioned when Hollywood eventually began looting that talent pool. His scripts for two successful pictures, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Mr. Mom (both 1983) netted him his first chance to direct.

Using a motley assortment of green unknowns, Hughes proceeded to invent an attractive new subgenre, the “teen comedy-drama,” defined by its clever whipsaws between silliness and seriousness until the audience is hard-pressed to decide whether they are supposed to be laughing or crying. And if that sounds like the perfect description of a typical teenager’s emotions, then you’re getting close to figuring out what made Hughes’ films so successful. “I’m not interested in psychotics,” he once said in a New York Times interview, “I’m interested in the person you don’t expect to have a story. I like Mr. Everyman.” In Sixteen Candles, we get not only an Everyman in the form of The Geek (Anthony Michael Hall, who out-auditioned a young Jim Carrey to land the role), but also an Everywoman in Sam, played by Molly Ringwald with the sort of effortless, winning, subdued charisma that would soon become a Hughes trademark. The kids in his films just plain acted better than the ones in other pictures, and it’s hard not to chalk that up to the instincts and human insight of Hughes, a guy who avoided the pitfalls of the Hollyweird lifestyle and stays safely secluded in the Midwest with his wife and kids, living a comparatively normal life.

The film is in many ways the closest thing that my generation has to an American Graffiti (1973). Spandau Ballet’s “True,” playing at the school dance in Candles, has since become a perennial staple on wedding and prom playlists. Little details like the Heather Thomas bikini poster seen briefly on a bedroom door will bring back memories for any man of a certain age. And like Graffiti, Sixteen Candles jump-started the careers of a number of young actors, among the most prominent the brother-sister tandem of John and Joan Cusack. It was hardly a big hit (it ended up only the 44th top-grossing film of 1984), but the budget had been small, and its relative profitability allowed Hughes to continue directing. The films that followed, and that with Sixteen Candles constitute Hughes’ entire output as a director, were The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), She’s Having a Baby (1988), Uncle Buck (1989), and Curly Sue (1991). That last stumbled at the box office in a way that none of the previous ones ever did, after which Hughes abandoned directing and stuck to producing and writing. His notable producing successes include Pretty in Pink (1986) and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), and by far the most profitable movie of his career in any capacity was the enormously popular Home Alone (1990). By all accounts that film and its sequels left Hughes the Writer and Producer at the very peak of his fame, power, and influence.

And then, without explanation, John Hughes retreated into an inexplicable, baffling virtual retirement, where he remains to this day. No one knows exactly what sent him into seclusion. Perhaps, like so many artists, he had burned himself out with his decade of non-stop production (over twenty scripts flowed from his imagination during those years, not counting all of the directing and producing he was doing). Maybe the death of his close friend John Candy in 1994 sent him into an emotional/artistic tailspin from which he never truly recovered. Maybe age robbed him of the connection he used to feel to teens and their particular fears, hopes, and dreams. Or maybe he sensed that the world had changed, and that films like Sixteen Candles (which was PG, with the barest smattering of obligatory nudity and swearing) were becoming relics in the face of far seamier fare like the American Pie series (1999-present) and non-stop raunch-fests like Superbad (2007).

That last film is as good a benchmark as any to use. Its producer, Judd Apatow, is widely seen in Hollywood circles as the heir to the John Hughes teen mantle. It would be more accurate to say that a movie like Superbad is to Hughes what a wannabe snuff-film like Hostel (2005) is to classic, elegant horror like The Exorcist (1973) or The Shining (1980). Hughes could certainly be fantastically juvenile when looking for that all-important next laugh (Sixteen Candles, in its blasé treatment of Asians and the disabled, is in many ways a time capsule of political incorrectness), but nothing he ever foisted on audiences comes close to the wall-to-wall, one-note crassness and vulgarity of a film like Superbad. The problem with taking the lazy way out — using mere shock value to elicit Pavlovian, knee-jerk laughter — is that next time you always need something just a little more outrageous or cruel or perverse or shocking, until eventually you’ve hit bottom with nowhere else to go. To the hardcore, open-minded filmgoer, the affront isn’t so much moral as artistic — it’s bad storytelling, bad comedy, bad filmmaking. Super-bad, you might say. And the few times that Superbad tries to be clever (see the incongruous jokes the otherwise brain-dead youngsters are able to make about such non-teenybopper cultural touchstones as Orson Welles and Waylon Jennings) it only succeeds in sounding spectacularly phony, just a Hollywood comedy writer’s uninformed view of how teens talk and how much pop culture history they would reasonably know.

I get the feeling that when John Hughes wrote his movies, he had in mind the truth that all teen films eventually become cobwebbed and dated relics of a bygone age. The cool becomes cheese and the style old-fashioned. In the real world, both the stars and the target audience get old and balding and baggy-eyed and wrinkled and gray. When that happens, all that’s left of an old movie is what is universal and timeless. The question becomes: did it truly hit the zeitgeist of a generation, or did it just fake it?

By that criterion, I’m guessing that the Apatow and American Pie films are destined to someday be filed on a dusty back shelf along with mostly forgotten movies like The Last American Virgin (1982) and Private School (1983). Along with the cream of Hughes’ output, the modern teen comedies that I think have the best chance of surviving include House Party (1990), Swingers (1996) and Napoleon Dynamite (2004), all films that earn their laughs with far more than scatology and Tourette syndrome. In any case, no matter how it all shakes out, Sixteen Candles has assured itself a place at the head of the class, by blazing the way toward a more meaningful style of teen comedy that takes the emotions of kids seriously even in those spots when it doesn’t take itself seriously at all.

“I can’t believe this — they f***ing forgot my birthday!”

Well, we here at Big Hollywood didn’t. Happy Birthday, hot stuff. Chronologically you’re twenty-five now, but at the sunswept drive-ins of our imagination you’ll always be sweet sixteen.


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Posted May 5th 2009 at 8:07 am in Entertainment | 222 Comments