Unit
A red plan lay
ed case that
A reason must
ed H in
In operation
report and
at the cap
B mini
Instig
gist
SUPPLEMENT TO THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN, APRIL 30,1986
It's Leslie
AD GOOD 4-30-86 THRU 5-6-8 AT FOOD BARN IN LAWRENCE, KANSAS
By Ab Staff wi
Some or pri
image
moder-
"Kar
State
Lawrew to bri
centur
will ap
after a
the im
state.
Some state's
drink,
Consti
lobby
Si
By Pep
Staff we
Begin no,
Cafe me
it's not
day of
Resist
scholar
"Freak
custom
for the
have he
"The
we're
Jennife
Watk i
yestered
She's
in" wow
but at
ship his
frustra
FOOD BARN DECLARES
JOHN HUGHES Making the Movies Young People Love
unrestructor-writer-producer John Hughes, known for his uncanny sensibility and on-the-mark portals of high school teenagers in The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, cuts class for a day on the town in Ferris Bard's Day®. Off you go.
Ferris Bealler's Day Off, says John Hughes, "is about this high school kid who cuts class and goes to the big city for the day with his best friend and girlfriend. But, it really is about personal freedom and how different things are when you have decided for just one day to be free."
Hughes, world class creator and cutter of films ranging from *Mr. Mom* to *Sixteen Candles* and *The Breakfast Club*, is perched on the edge of a long grey coat at his offices at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. With the exception of Stephen Spielberg, no recent young filmmaker has enjoyed such speedy success. During the past three years or so, his efforts have made hundreds of millions of dollars and displayed the comic verse and range of a Charlie Chaplin or Woody Allen. Just by
making movies about kids.
BY MARK CHRISTENSEN
But, mostly, Hughes is work is ambitious, smart, riveting and funny. And no current movie maker is as good at mixing belly laughs with heart and compassion. Ferris Beuler is his latest.
Some, like The *Breakfast Club*, are tightly choreographed, literate ballets. One or two others, like the National Lampoon's Summer Vacation, may have had their most crucial scenes conjoined on the back of a cocktail napkin.
"It's about freedom from worry Ferry doesn't worry, doesn't sweat anything. It also about a change in reality. If you've ever stayed home from school or worked for reasons other than being sick, you're more likely to feel confident." Hughes looks far less like the stereo-
Hughes looks far less like the stereotypical tanned Hollywood mogul than,
sag, a rather bookish member of an English rock band. Tall. An explosive mane of long, dark blond hair. Glasses. A black cloth coat, thoroughly wrinkled silver slacks and a white shirt with sleeves so long that his cuffs touch his knuckles.
"I'd much rather be a musician than a movie maker, but I'm just about to tone deaf. To me, tuning a guitar correctly is one of the world's major mysteries." Nevertheless, his aggressive use of new music has become a stock in trade. "Simple Minds sold 50,000 albums until 'Don't You broke on Breakfast Club.'
"But there will be a change with the music on *Ferris*. What I want to do is use a big sound, a state of the art production using edge bands that press the envelope—or whatever the space people call it—bands like Zig Zag Spurnik, then, couple that with a more accessible sound.
Who can forget Anthony Michael Hall in *Staine Gates*, the kid with the spidery hands and concave chest who, while wooing Molly Ringwald, allows,么种 what parenthetically, that his social status in the school is insured by the fact that he is "king of the diphips" Or, later, when he wakes after a drunken night of evident debauchery and de virginizing with his high school's brassiest sexpot, the new, rather bitten unchained Hall ask her, "Did I enjoy it?"
"I want to focus my movies on bands who have the right to be heard by the great Top Forty masses. New stuff, because like, when I go to Chicago, I listen to three stations and get nothing but Santana and 'Laya'. It's like somebody fell asleep on the 1972 button."
A former writer for National Lampoon, Hughes left the magazine several years ago to write what are popularly perceived as "teen flicks," a realm previously dominated by big breasts, beer drinking and fart jokes. His efforts (usually) to elevate the genre have made for films that recreate adolescence with an energy, in venutiveness and exactitude that can be drop dead eerie.
ruftes' enthusiasm for these kinds of shenanigans is surprising in light of the fact that his own adolescent experience was not idyllic. "In high school, I was a serious outcast, a laughingstock I took. I took it and I thought, 'I will show you; I show you.' This was, like, in 1967
"I went to a jocky school. We had a serious dress code. I almost didn't graduate, because my hair touched my collar."
"Back then, I wanted to be Picasso. Mihchelangelo, James Joyce or Bob Dylan. That's where I took my solace. People would make fun of me, and I think, that's okay. Picasso would like me.' I'd come home at night, and I'd sit at my window and put on my albums and read my British music magazines. I didn't want to belong, because I couldn't belong."
"The guy who was the teacher in Breakfast Club was my gym teacher. He didn't like me because of my hair, so he flunked me senior year in gym, which meant, to graduate, I had to take double gym and health. You know, sit in class and look at VD-vared genitals and slide shows about how to brush your teeth."
Were other characters in his films taken directly from experience? "Yeah. The jerk rich kid in Pretty in Pink I had a guy like him haunt me all the way up high school. Money to burn. His older brother had an Alfa, the big nice one, and parked it outside with the top down in the rain. I would walk by and see the rose wood buckling on the dash. I couldn't understand how kids could live like that. I just wasn't part of that world."
And college was scarcely an improvement. "I hated it intensely. I was enormously homesick and felt completely displaced . . . I went to college in Arizona, a big party school, a big fraternity school. The anti war movement was very small, and the cops were very tough.
"I was desperately in love with my wife, who was then my girlfriend. She was still in high school. I spent $1,000 first semester just on phone bills.
Ampersand
"I had problems with the social nature
FOOD BARN FRONT FOR UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN - 4/30/66