John Hughes' unmade films...

Hello! My name's Beth and I'm a media production student. I'm currently doing an adaptation unit, creating a film based on any pre-existing material of our choice, and I've been reading a book about John Hughes, the 1980s writer/director (The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Some Kind Of Wonderful, etc.), whose films were one of the main reasons I wanted to work in film in the first place.

Anyway, the book - Susannah Gora's You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried - talks about some of Hughes' lost screenplays, and there's one in particular that I've decided to take on for this unit. This and the short paragraph in the book, so far, is all the information I have about it:

“John Hughes and I had the same agent. One day he called and sent over a script John had written and wanted me to direct (it was during the period when there were two John Hughes films being made each year, one he directed and the other he wrote and produced). It was about a guy (Mathew Broderick?) driving across the country on the way to his wedding. He picks up a girl hitchhiking (Molly Ringwald?) and they wind up in a moral dilemma, stranded in a motel room in the middle of nowhere, talking all night about every single thing that’s important to anyone coming of age. Like Breakfast Club it was a magnificent dialogue piece — a cinematic play. I turned it down because no matter who directed John’s annual ‘B’ film, it was a John Hughes film. A year earlier my movie, Back To School, had opened the same weekend as Ferris Bueller and beat it at the box office. I didn’t want to take a back seat to John Hughes now. So this great John Hughes movie never got made. And I was never offered a script this good again. I never even got to meet the man. As career moves go, this was the greatest mistake of my life. Maybe someone will dig it up and be smart enough to make one last John Hughes film.” – Filmmaker Alan Metter, 2009.

I want to adapt this screenplay in particular as Howard Deutch (dir. Pretty In Pink and Some Kind Of Wonderful) has previously talked about how this was John's favourite work-in-progress, and that he'd attempted to get it together numerous times, but it had failed for one reason or another.

I'm currently writing the screenplay, but I feel like I really need more than just my own insight onto what this film should be.

I want the film to be a credible tribute to such a fantastic filmmaker, so I'd love to hear what other fans of John Hughes' work would have liked to see if this was ever made. It's really important to me to get this right.

Thank you very much!

Well, all I can help you with is John Hugues' existing material, so don't forget Plane, Train and Automobiles, Uncle Buck and Home Alone. And if this is going to be a tribute to John Hugues then John Candy must be a predominant ingredient.

Yeah, know about him, he is popular in my country also. When a kid, i liked Home Alone

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