The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (201 page)

Hughes and cinema had two resounding confrontations. As a very young millionaire, he formed the Caddo Corporation and produced movies:
Two Arabian Knights
(27, Lewis Milestone);
The Mating Call
(28, James Cruze);
The Racket
(28, Milestone); and then spent two years over
Hell’s Angels
(30), which he directed personally.
Hell’s Angels
is dramatically commonplace, clumsily strung together, and without clear authorship, but the aerial photography is superb and the scenes with Jean Harlow are from another, much better picture. Hughes discovered Harlow when others had passed her by. She, too, had the slightly lazy sexual aggression that characterizes his discoveries. But, like a great romantic, he tired of her or found nothing that suited her. Instead he loaned her out to MGM at a colossal profit, and finally sold her altogether, reserving the right to produce one last picture with her, one of her very best,
Bombshell
(33, Victor Fleming). In the meantime, Hughes had produced the film of the Hecht-MacArthur play,
The Front Page
(31, Milestone), the fastest talking picture yet, and
Scarface
(32, Hawks), the most baroque of the early gangster pictures. After one more flying picture,
Sky Devils
(32, Edward Sutherland), he withdrew, intent on flying himself.

Several years before his second period, he discovered Jane Russell and put her in
The Outlaw
. Hawks began the film in 1940, but left when Hughes decided to shoot at night. Thus he had to finish the film himself, the first indoor Western. But he waited six years before releasing it, time to stir up a storm of puritan protest that duly clinched the film’s success. By 1946, he had a fresh interest in film: Faith Domergue. He concocted a film called
Vendetta
for her, made that year with himself filling in as he fired Preston Sturges, Max Ophuls, and Stuart Heisler, and finally credited it (when it was released in 1950) to Mel Ferrer. In the same year, he produced Harold Lloyd in
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
(46, Sturges). Neither film is a success,
Vendetta
is even bad, but stays in the memory for its bizarre manner of production.

In 1947, Hughes began to buy himself into RKO, that ailing outsider, which eventually he tired of and sold into the hands of TV in 1955. Head of the studio, he was often unavailable, occasionally intently involved on a film or actress that took his fancy. But he was good to such talents as Nicholas Ray, Robert Ryan, and Don Siegel. At the least, he retained RKO’s aversion to dullness; at best, he threw out the broken pieces of some fascinating films. Research still needs to ascertain where his hand fell, but he seems to have known about at least these:
The Big Steal
(49), for which he hired Don Siegel;
The Woman on Pier 13
(49, Robert Stevenson), which voiced his rabid anti-Communism;
The Racket
(51, John Cromwell);
Jet Pilot
(51, Josef von Sternberg, with several impeding hands);
Flying Leathernecks
(51, Nicholas Ray);
Second Chance
(53, Rudolph Maté); seven films starring Jane Russell—the amusing
His Kind of Woman
(51, John Farrow);
Double Dynamite
(51, Irving Cummings);
The Las Vegas Story
(52, Stevenson);
Macao
(52, von Sternberg);
Montana Belle
(52, Allan Dwan);
The French Line
(53, Lloyd Bacon);
Underwater
(54, John Sturges); and
Son of Sinbad
(55, Ted Tetzlaff).

He also consigned Jean Simmons to
Angel Face
(52, Otto Preminger) when she would not talk to him, and advised Robert Ryan on how to play the paranoid, vicious tycoon in
Caught
(49, Max Ophuls). It would be depressing to think that any of this will ever be sorted out as either fact or hokum. Hughes is one of those pioneers who saw how little difference there was between the two.

The Aviator
was paper-thin, and not worthy. Warren Beatty says he is ready, but there is only the old man left—are fingernails growing enough, when all else has stopped?

John Hughes
(1950–2009), b. Lansing, Michigan
1984:
Sixteen Candles
. 1985:
The Breakfast Club; Weird Science
. 1986:
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
. 1987:
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
. 1988:
She’s Having a Baby
. 1989:
Uncle Buck
. 1991:
Curly Sue
.

John Hughes made a very sweet business, and often a lovely entertainment, out of movies for high school kids that their parents would be happy to have them see. This is no common compromise, for many teenagers like to see pictures that their parents regard as unsuitable or alarming. Thus, in all of Hughes’s young people there is a faint air of premature middle age that sometimes seems true to life, and sometimes blankly depressing. Hughes was a smart director and a good writer, but he did not really expose those traits as much as he relished the larger role of entrepreneur or high school entertainment coordinator. Nothing he did has been quite as successful, or as gleeful and wicked, as the
Home Alone
pictures, which concern a far younger person and which were actually directed by Chris Columbus. In the original
Home Alone
, especially, Macaulay Culkin had a wild, pure narcissism such as, long ago, Mickey Rooney and Margaret O’Brien possessed. By contrast, Hughes’s best girl—Molly Ringwald—seemed the child of Freddie Bartholomew.

In the Ringwald pictures, the fidelity of observation, the wit, and the tenderness for kids never quite transcend the general air of problem-solving and putting on a piously cheerful face. No one has yet dared in America to portray the boredom or hopelessness of many teenage lives—think of Mike Leigh’s pictures to see what could be done.

Hughes dropped out of the University of Arizona and then tried to be an advertising copywriter, a novelist, and a joke writer. He joined
National Lampoon
magazine and that led him into pictures as a screenwriter:
National Lampoon’s Class Reunion
(82, Michael Miller);
Mr. Mom
(83, Stan Dragoti);
Nate and Hayes
(83, Ferdinand Fairfax); and
National Lampoon’s Vacation
(83, Harold Ramis).

On those films he directed, Hughes was always the screenwriter. But as he became successful, so he turned to writing and/or some producing role on others’ pictures:
National Lampoon’s European Vacation
(85, Amy Heckerling);
Pretty in Pink
(86, Howard Deutsch);
Some Kind of Wonderful
(87, Deutsch);
The Great Outdoors
(88, Deutsch);
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
(89, Jeremiah S. Chechik);
Home Alone
(90, Columbus);
Career Opportunities
(91, Bryan Gordon);
Only the Lonely
(91, Columbus);
Home Alone 2
(92, Columbus); and
Baby’s Day Out
(94, Patrick Read Johnson).

In his last few years he was an impresario writer-producer—and let’s note that such work interests some minds most; and almost certainly draws down more revenue. So he had written and produced
Miracle on 34th Street
(94, Les Mayfield);
101 Dalmatians
(96, Stephen Herek);
Flubber
(97, Mayfield);
Home Alone 3
(97, Raja Gosnell);
Reach the Rock
(98, William Ryan).

Helen Hunt
, b. Los Angeles, 1963
In hindsight, the Oscar awarded to Helen Hunt for her world-weary waitress and single mother in
As Good As It Gets
(97, James L. Brooks) looks generous. She was funny and touching, and she worked well with Jack Nicholson, but there she was beating out four Brits: Kate Winslet in
Titanic;
Judi Dench in
Mrs. Brown;
Julie Christie in
Afterglow;
and Helena Bonham Carter in
The Wings of the Dove
. OK, so you can see why she won: it was a thin year, and there she was, the nation’s sweetheart from the TV series
Mad About You
, for which she had three Emmys and a salary of $1 million per episode.

However, would she do more in film? Did she really have the range? Or was another TV series more likely, and more comfortable? For the fact is, before
As Good As It Gets
, Hunt had been trying to break through in movies for nearly twenty years:
Rollercoaster
(77, James Goldstone); as a brain-damaged teenager in
The Miracle of Kathy Miller
(81, Robert Lewis), for TV;
Girls Just Want to Have Fun
(85, Alan Metter); the girlfriend in
Trancers
(85, Charles Band);
Peggy Sue Got Married
(86, Francis Coppola);
Project X
(87, Jonathan Kaplan);
Stealing Home
(88, Steven Kampmann);
Miles from Home
(88, Gary Sinise);
Next of Kin
(89, John Irvin);
Queens Logic
(91, Steve Rash);
Trancers 2
(91, Band);
Bob Roberts
(92, Tim Robbins);
Only You
(92, Betty Thomas);
Mr. Saturday Night
(92, Billy Crystal);
The Water Dance
(92, Neal Jimenez);
Trancers III
(92, Courtney Joyner);
Kiss of Death
(95, Barbet Schroeder);
Twister
(96, Jan de Bont).

She was Viola on stage and televised, in
Twelfth Night
(98, Nicholas Hytner);
Dr. T & the Women
(00, Robert Altman); doing her best with the shlock called
Pay It Forward
(00, Mimi Leder); marginal in
Cast Away
(00, Robert Zemeckis); funny in
What Women Want
(00, Nancy Meyers);
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
(01, Woody Allen);
Timepiece
(02).

There was a marked break—as if taking stock—before Hunt redid Oscar Wilde in
A Good Woman
(04, Mike Barker). She followed this with
Bobby
(06, Emilio Estevez) and then, as writer, director, and actress,
Then She Found Me
(07), a signal failure.

Holly Hunter
, b. Conyers, Georgia, 1958
No wonder Jane Campion had some reservations when Holly Hunter sought the central role in
The Piano
(93). Hunter had established herself as a tiny fireball of energy, Southern abrasiveness, and talk, talk, talk. She was pretty, yet she easily offered the look of a modern Southern shoppingmall belle. But Hunter created the severe, less-than-dainty look of a nineteenth-century woman repressed in nearly everything except silent pride. She delivered a stunning performance, and in doing so she expanded her own horizons and won the Oscar. Can American film provide equal opportunities?

She came from rural Georgia (not far from Tara) and studied at Carnegie Mellon. Her debut was in
The Burning
(81, Tony Maylam), after which she played on TV in
Svengali
(83, Anthony Harvey);
With Intent to Kill
(84, Mike Robe);
Swing Shift
(84, Jonathan Demme);
Raising Arizona
(87, Joel Coen);
A Gathering of Old Men
(87, Volker Schlöndorff);
End of the Line
(87, Jay Russell); getting her first best actress nomination in
Broadcast News
(87, James L. Brooks); repeating a stage success in Beth Henley’s
Miss Firecracker
(89, Thomas Schlamme);
Animal Behavior
(89, H. Anne Roley); getting an Emmy as “Roe” in
Roe v. Wade
(89, Gregory Hoblit);
Always
(89, Steven Spielberg);
Once Around
(91, Lasse Hallstrom);
Crazy in Love
(92, Martha Coolidge); very funny and Oscar-nominated as the secretary in
The Firm
(93, Sydney Pollack); and brilliant in
The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom
(93, Michael Ritchie).

She continues to be adventurous, going from TV and provincial theatre to film—and even then few films in the mainstream. But she is one of several living examples that the American mainstream is now dysfunctional: the cop in
Copycat
(95, Jon Amiel);
Home for the Holidays
(95, Jodie Foster);
Crash
(96, David Cronenberg); from heaven in
A Life Less Ordinary
(97, Danny Boyle); excellent in
Living Out Loud
(98, Richard LaGravenese);
Jesus’ Son
(99, Alison Maclean); at her best in
Woman Wanted
(99, Kiefer Sutherland);
Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her
(00, Rodrigo Garcia);
Timecode
(00, Mike Figgis);
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(00, Coen); and then to TV for a pair of admirable real-life stories:
Harlan County War
(00, Tony Bill), and as Billie Jean King in
When Billie Beat Bobby
(01, Jane Anderson).

She was in
Moonlight Mile
(02, Brad Silberling);
Levity
(03, Ed Solomon); excellent as the mother in
Thirteen
(03, Catherine Hardwicke);
Little Black Book
(04, Nick Hurran);
The Incredibles
(04, Brad Bird);
Nine Lives
(05, Rodrigo García);
The Big White
(05, Mark Mylod); and in the TV series
Saving Grace
.

Ross Hunter
(Martin Fuss) (1920–96), b. Cleveland, Ohio
It was Douglas Sirk who said Ross Hunter was “like iron.” Take
Magnificent Obsession
(54). Hunter, an established producer but only just, came to Sirk and said that the studio, Universal, had some availability with Jane Wyman. Sirk was interested. And then Hunter gave him the Lloyd C. Douglas novel
Magnificent Obsession
to read. Sirk couldn’t get anywhere with it. So Hunter gave him a short treatment of the movie John Stahl had made from the same book in 1935, with Irene Dunne. Now Sirk got it. He liked it. He could see what he wanted to do with it. That’s fine, said Hunter, but he knew the way Sirk’s mind began to go gloomy. So here was the iron. “Just keep the ending happy,” said Hunter.