You learn some funny things when researching a column dedicated to filmmakers who have mysteriously vacated the multiplex. As surprised as I was last week to find out that Michael Cimino was originally slated to direct Footloose, I am doubly stunned this week to discover that there are no less than five Beethoven movies. I’m not talking about the deaf composer idolized by Alex in A Clockwork Orange; I’m talking about the freakin’ St. Bernard of that name. And do you know what that fifth Beethoven movie is titled? That’s right, it’s Beethoven’s 5th! And why am I telling you this?
It’s because the first Beethoven movie was co-written by John Hughes, under the nom de garbage Edmond Dantès. Dantès, you may recall, was the Count of Monte Cristo, but it’s also the name Hughes has used on several occasions to disguise his involvement in films such as Maid in Manhattan. Looking over his body of work, you have to wonder if he wishes he’d started using the name earlier.
Hughes had a pretty good thing going for a while there, as almost anyone who was a teenager in the 1980s will tell you. Together, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off pretty much comprise the definitive portrait of teen angst in the Reagan era. But after a brief foray into the grown-up realm with She’s Having a Baby, Hughes regressed like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, churning out increasingly lame kiddie fare, from the Home Alone series to Curly Sue to (shudder) Baby’s Day Out. At some point, perhaps he realized his name was becoming shorthand for “prolific purveyor of puerile pap,” and made an abrupt course correction. Now he’s almost reclusive enough to consider changing his name to Howard.
The most recent project Hughes graced with his own name was the barely-released Reach the Rock, an uncharacteristically downbeat small-town dramedy he scripted in 1998. Around that time he gave one of last known interviews, conducted by High Hat co-founder and Screengrab confidant William Ham. In it, he does sound like a man who’s ready for an extended sabbatical. “The only sequels I was involved in were under duress,” he says. “I didn't even know about Vegas Vacation until I read about it in the trades!... I tried to talk them out of doing Ferris Bueller as a series…That's why I've stayed in Chicago, 'cause I never quite fit into L.A. It's easier to maintain a degree of innocence here, you're not playing the herd so much.”
It’s a little hard to buy the notion of John Hughes as anti-Hollywood renegade, especially since his alter ego Edmond Dantès is back at work. Did you catch the Drillbit Taylor trailer earlier today on the Screengrab? Well, Dantès is credited with the story on this latest export from the Judd Apatow conglomerate. Indeed, the increasingly overexposed and overextended Apatow could do worse that to regard his latest collaborator as a cautionary tale…before he ends up making his own Curly Sue.