As many know by now, John Hughes died yesterday. Hughes wrote and directed such iconic 80s movies as Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Pretty In Pink, and Sixteen Candles. He essentially invented a genre: previous movies aimed at teenagers were pretty much confined to knock offs of "Rebel Without a Cause" (but not as good) or "Friday the 13th" (and just as bad). When Hughes started making movies, he had the audacity to write about teenagers who were real people with real issues.

I was just the right age in the 80s for those movies to speak to me, but, through not fault of their own, they didn't. Not then, anyway. It was later, in my late 20s, that I belatedly realized that these were not just dumb comedies. By then, I had grown out of their targeted demographic, and yet, even though by then I was out of school, married, and employed -- and yet they spoke to me all the same. Clearly Hughes understood something about people that others who followed in his footsteps (save Cameron Crowe, who made Say Anything) do not. Perhaps it is best summed up in a quote I read in Roger Ebert's tribute to the man: "People forget that when you're 16," he said, "you're probably more serious than you'll ever be again. You think seriously about the big questions."

Hughes is seldom mentioned in short lists of the great directors, and yet, when I read someone saying he was perhaps the most influential director for a whole generation, I realized just how hard it would be to argue against that.

The link below is a great and moving article written by a fan that wound up being his pen pal. Although the article is primarily and most importantly about their relationship, it also peripherally seems to show that Hughes withdrew from the Hollywood scene out of the same kind of compassion for humanity that drove him to create movies in the first place.