Harold Ramis and Beverly D’Angelo remember John Hughes

These articles are old but I thought somehow relevant with the return of the Griswold’s, The John Hughes Vanity Fair article and NBC’s Community’s recurring Hughes references.


Here we see how Harold Ramis and Beverly D’Angelo remember John Hughes.

Ramis: I read the screenplay. I thought it was very good. And John and I had some meetings, and I guess I probably made some notes, and then Chevy [Chase] and I did a rewrite, which I’m not sure John was happy with [Laughs]. And I didn’t see him much, and then the ending of the film didn’t work at all when we tested it, so I had a notion for a new ending for the film, and John very quickly scripted that.


I ran into him once in Chicago. I moved back there like 12 years ago, and I went to our local multiplex. The usher said, “Hey, John Hughes is in the next theater.” So I walked over and John is standing there in the tunnel [entry hall outside the theater], not going in, but standing where he can see the screen. I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I want to see how my trailer plays.” I said, “John, you’ve got 100 million dollars. What do you care how this trailer plays?” [Laughs] And he said, “No, no, I care.” I thought, wow, that’s probably why he was so much more successful than I was—or at least productive. He really did care.

D’angelo: I always considered the Vacation movies a love story. I didn’t think of them as some kind of, you know, film with the fart as a punchline. There was a love story in every one of his movies, and the thing about those Vacation movies is that, he’s truly romantic. He told love stories. In Home Alone, it’s a love story: the parents and the child, ultimately. Boy loses girl, you know what I mean?


Chevy Chase [who played D’Angelo’s husband, Clark Griswold, in the Vacation movies] left Hollywood, too. Chevy left in the late ’80s. Hollywood’s not a place for the heart, unless you’ve got a really, really, really tough exterior. He never sold out. Never. Never. The key is that he considered the age of 12 to 21 sacred and kind of adult but without the power of [adulthood]. Cause that’s what those teenager characters struggled with: was being stuck in an adult world that they didn’t create and how to deal with that.


There aren’t any more Breakfast Clubs, there aren’t any more Ferris Buellers. We’ve gone a different way. John treated his teenage characters like the young adults that they were. They weren’t stupid and they weren’t useless. They powered the engine of his films.

Check out the full articles here:

http://popwatch.ew.com/2009/08/13/john-hughes-remembered-harold-ramis-director-of-vacation/

http://popwatch.ew.com/2009/08/13/john-hughes-remembered-beverly-dangelo-ellen-griswold-in-vacation/