John Hughes gave Jeffrey Jones the most iconic role of his career — Edward Rooney, the dean of students who is always one step behind Mathew Broderick’s hooky-playing high school senior in 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

JEFFREY JONES:

He had a really great recollection of what it was like to be in high school, and it wasn’t bitter. It was a fun recollection of what it was like to be that age and what the aspirations were of kids that age. I was always surprised at how affectionate and accurate it was.

During our rehearsal process in Chicago, we were driving around in this Lincoln towncar. John was driving and I was sitting in the passenger seat, and Matthew and [costars] Alan Ruck and Mia Sara were sitting in the back seat. And he was slamming cassettes into the dash, saying this is the music we’re going to use for—he’d describe a scene and say this is the music we’re going to use. He was showing us Highland Park, which was where he was from. Driving around in this great big car. And he said, We have to come up with some kind of music for a parade sequence. I want to use something like Elvis and then something else. So I suggested this Wayne Newton song. And he’d never heard of Wayne Newton. So we pulled into a music store. We sat in the car and he went inside. He came back out with some Wayne Newton and slammed it in, and said “Perfect, That’s great.” He was great to work with and I really enjoyed John.

I’m just shocked and surprised and really sad that John is gone, because I know that he had more in him.

PHOTO CREDIT: Everett Collection

More John Hughes Remembered:

JON CRYER (Duckie from ‘Pretty in Pink’)

KEVIN BACON (Jake from ‘She’s Having a Baby’)

BILL PAXTON (Chet from ‘Weird Science’)

ALAN RUCK (Cameron from ‘Ferris Bueller’)

LEA THOMPSON (Amanda from ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’)

KELLY LYNCH (Grey from ‘Curly Sue’)

HAROLD RAMIS: (director of Hughes-penned ‘Vacation’)

BEVERLY D’ANGELO (Ellen Griswold in ‘Vacation’)

DANIEL STERN (burglar in Hughes-penned ‘Home Alone’)

CHRIS COLUMBUS (director of ‘Home Alone’)

KELLY LYNCH:

John Hughes was sort of our J.D. Salinger, in a way. He was very much mysterious and yet very accessible. For my age group, those ’80s movies –  Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller – were huge. Not only were the films about people my age that I could actually relate to, they were very moving, and very kind of real and hysterically funny. He wrote all these misfit kids, and yet every one of them is adorable and you love them, from the biggest geek to the cool girl in school. He didn’t do it with a hammer. It was delicate and lovely.

I worked with Jim Belushi, and Jim kind of had his armor up and was protecting himself. So during Jim’s really poignant monologue, John started playing a CD of embarrassing sound effects: toilets flushing, a horn honking, people farting. John wanted Jim to feel a little more angry and vulnerable in the scene, so he was totally f—ing with him to get him more raw and more open as an actor. Jimmy was so angry. Later in the day, Jimmy stopped production because he wanted more masculine hand towels and softer toilet paper in his dressing room. It was like being at camp.

John used to play music on the set a lot. He owned a school there that he turned into a soundstage. I think my dressing room was in the girls’ locker room. He liked that atmosphere, the ghosts of all those kids. You would come on the set and there would be trays of polish sausages, giant platters of pizza and stuff. The crew seemed to really love him. He wanted everyone to have a good time, although he was quite serious about his work. I’ve never seen a director burn more film in my life.

Home Alone came out while we were shooting, and every day the hugest people in Hollywood were on the set — the heads of every studio. Everybody wanted to be in business with him. I’d never seen that kind of attention paid to a director.

He made everyone who worked with him a better actor, there’s no doubt about it. You felt like you had to step up for him. I’m so proud that I got a chance to work with him. It’s so odd that it was the last film he directed.

We shot for six months — usually a long movie would be like three, four months –  and he became aware of the fact that I was basically working for free. He came into my dressing room and wrote me the hugest check any human being has ever written for me. I won’t even say the amount of money because it’s embarrassing. And he insisted that I have that. He said, “You don’t work for me for free.” And he just walked out of the room.

PHOTO CREDIT: Everett Collection

More John Hughes Remembered:

JON CRYER (Duckie from ‘Pretty in Pink’)

KEVIN BACON (Jake from ‘She’s Having a Baby’)

BILL PAXTON (Chet from ‘Weird Science’)

JEFFREY JONES (Principal Ed Rooney from ‘Ferris Bueller’)

ALAN RUCK (Cameron from ‘Ferris Bueller’)

LEA THOMPSON (Amanda from ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’)

HAROLD RAMIS: (director of Hughes-penned ‘Vacation’)

BEVERLY D’ANGELO (Ellen Griswold in ‘Vacation’)

DANIEL STERN (burglar in Hughes-penned ‘Home Alone’)

CHRIS COLUMBUS (director of ‘Home Alone’)

KEVIN BACON:

Leave it to me to be in the one John Hughes film that doesn’t explode at the box office. I was extremely proud of the movie. It’s without a doubt his most serious film. That some people had a difficult time with it critically was a very hard thing for him, because it was extremely personal. Whether it’s clear or not from the movie, it’s the closest that John ever came to putting himself in a film.

We spent a lot of time together. Not only were we working all day, every day, but then we spent time together every weekend. I kind of started to feel like I was him, or at least some version of him. We would always go for really long and really fun dinners with his family. He loved to just talk, sit and talk, laugh, joke, tell stories.

[The child birth sequence with the Kate Bush song, “This Woman’s Work”] was so intense. He’d picked that song already, so I listened to it again and again and again—he’d play it live on the set. I didn’t have kids then, so I was basically projecting and trying to figure out what that kind of pressure and fear could be. When my son was born, we had a really similar situation, where the cord was around his neck, and they moved [Bacon’s wife] Kyra [Sedgwick] from one room to another. I mean, it was, like, literally straight out of She’s Having A Baby. And the crazy thing was, my reaction was so similar. It’s such a lame thing to say, but it was almost as though I’d practiced for this moment by making this film. I was there going, “Holy s—, John Hughes already took me through this.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Everett Collection

More John Hughes Remembered:

JON CRYER (Duckie from ‘Pretty in Pink’)

BILL PAXTON (Chet from ‘Weird Science’)

JEFFREY JONES (Principal Ed Rooney from ‘Ferris Bueller’)

ALAN RUCK (Cameron from ‘Ferris Bueller’)

LEA THOMPSON (Amanda from ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’)

KELLY LYNCH (Grey from ‘Curly Sue’)

HAROLD RAMIS: (director of Hughes-penned ‘Vacation’)

BEVERLY D’ANGELO (Ellen Griswold in ‘Vacation’)

DANIEL STERN (burglar in Hughes-penned ‘Home Alone’)

CHRIS COLUMBUS (director of ‘Home Alone’)

Beverly D’Angelo starred as Ellen Griswold in National Lampoon’s Vacation, which kicked off Hughes’ career as a screenwriter.

BEVERLY D’ANGELO:

He took teenagers really seriously. He took childhood seriously. He certainly was responsible for communicating that in his films. There were things going on in the hearts of these suburban kids that were just as real as any drama. And he did it in a kind of Preston Sturges way.

What touched me was that John made movies from a human level. He wasn’t a guy who sat there and figured out the bottom line of the demographic and played to that. I think he really was an artist and that he had ideas and thoughts and feelings and he manifested those in his films. His films were massively popular, but they weren’t calculated to be popular. He just happened to be one of those people who was able to capture a zeitgeist.

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?

I don’t think there’s a parallel for him. I think that he is one of those unsung heroes, someone’s whose work wasn’t taken as seriously as it could have been because they were comedies. But as far as someone who set out to explore the challenges of being a middle-class white kid, he did it in a way that nobody else was doing it. And I really treasure the child-like heart that he had. It’s a shame that it broke, literally. But it’s kind of telling that his heart would go because I think he put his heart into his films, literally.

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.

PHOTO CREDIT: Everett Collection

More John Hughes Remembered:

JON CRYER (Duckie from ‘Pretty in Pink’)

KEVIN BACON (Jake from ‘She’s Having a Baby’)

BILL PAXTON (Chet from ‘Weird Science’)

JEFFREY JONES (Principal Ed Rooney from ‘Ferris Bueller’)

ALAN RUCK (Cameron from ‘Ferris Bueller’)

LEA THOMPSON (Amanda from ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’)

KELLY LYNCH (Grey from ‘Curly Sue’)

HAROLD RAMIS: (director of Hughes-penned ‘Vacation’)

DANIEL STERN (burglar in Hughes-penned ‘Home Alone’)

CHRIS COLUMBUS (director of ‘Home Alone’)

ALAN RUCK:

I probably hadn’t spoken with John for 20 years. But he gave me the best part I ever had in a movie, and any success that I’ve had since 1985 is because he took a big chance on me. I’ll be forever grateful.

While we were making the movie, I just knew I had a really good part. My realization of John’s impact on the teen-comedy genre crept in sometime later. Teen comedies tend to dwell on the ridiculous, as a rule. It’s always the preoccupation with sex and the self-involvement, and we kind of hold the kids up for ridicule in a way. Hughes added this element of dignity. He was an advocate for teenagers as complete human beings, and he honored their hopes and their dreams. That’s what you see in his movies.
In a way, John was a bigger kid than any of us. He had a great lust for life. He knew all the hip, current bands in 1985. He knew everybody. I didn’t know anything; my development stopped at REM. But John was up to the minute on anything musical. He got such a kick out of it. I remember we went to a record shop on the North Side of Chicago here, and just the glee he got out of going through records and discovering things. He had a great lust for life.

PHOTO CREDIT: Everett Collection

More John Hughes Remembered:

JON CRYER (Duckie from ‘Pretty in Pink’)

KEVIN BACON (Jake from ‘She’s Having a Baby’)

BILL PAXTON (Chet from ‘Weird Science’)

JEFFREY JONES (Principal Ed Rooney from ‘Ferris Bueller’)

LEA THOMPSON (Amanda from ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’)

KELLY LYNCH (Grey from ‘Curly Sue’)

HAROLD RAMIS: (director of Hughes-penned ‘Vacation’)

BEVERLY D’ANGELO (Ellen Griswold in ‘Vacation’)

DANIEL STERN (burglar in Hughes-penned ‘Home Alone’)

CHRIS COLUMBUS (director of ‘Home Alone’)

Daniel Stern played a bungling burglar along with Joe Pesci in two Home Alone movies.

DANIEL STERN:

He was a brilliant man but a big silly goofy guy underneath. Everybody made each other laugh on our silly movies. His writing style stands out to me because when you read the scripts, they’re so specifically funny. They’re almost storyboards. They’re shot-by-shot. With the Home Alone scripts, it wasn’t just, “The guys walk in and take a pie in the face.” It was a close-up of the pie. Shot of feet walking. Pan up to see me. Cut back to pie. His writing was brilliant that way. There was nothing left to chance. It taught me a ton about comedy in terms of how you set up a joke. Our silly slapstick routines in the Home Alone movies were just like perfect pieces of craftsmanship and how you build the anticipation in an audience to laugh. There was some sort of science that he caught onto. It was amazing. So when you read it you’re laughing out loud because you’re watching the movie.

On the second [Home Alone] we really started giggling together. He showed me the script for this other movie he’d written called The Bee. It was a guy – it was John really – an architect who was trying to finish his project that day and a bee comes into the house and the guy gets distracted by the bee. And the entire movie is the bee forcing the guy to destroy his own house and take his life apart. It was like this incredible dance he wrote. I was going to direct it but we never got to shoot it. So we got to be laughing friends.

He was cynical about the way the world works. He wasn’t naive. But there was all that humor there. I would consider him light when I knew him. I don’t know if he got the hell beat out of him after that. He seemed like an obsessive writer and compulsive worker and had a lot of ideas and was hitting walls along the way, I’m sure. At some point you just don’t want to hit the walls anymore. And if you’re big fat and happy and rich, it’s like wait a minute, what am I doing? I tried to find him a few years ago… every year I’d try to track him down but he kind of disappeared. His name wasn’t popping up in the movie ads. Then I called and didn’t have the right number. Then I tried to track him down and just lost touch. That was way too big a talent not to be tapping into.

PHOTO CREDIT: Everett Collection

More John Hughes Remembered:

JON CRYER (Duckie from ‘Pretty in Pink’)

KEVIN BACON (Jake from ‘She’s Having a Baby’)

BILL PAXTON (Chet from ‘Weird Science’)

JEFFREY JONES (Principal Ed Rooney from ‘Ferris Bueller’)

ALAN RUCK (Cameron from ‘Ferris Bueller’)

LEA THOMPSON (Amanda from ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’)

KELLY LYNCH (Grey from ‘Curly Sue’)

HAROLD RAMIS: (director of Hughes-penned ‘Vacation’)

BEVERLY D’ANGELO (Ellen Griswold in ‘Vacation’)

CHRIS COLUMBUS (director of ‘Home Alone’)