Join the Quest For Answers in Defamer's John Hughes Q&A Challenge

Picking up on director John Hughes where our recent appreciations, laments and inquiries left off, Patrick Goldstein today has a more sweeping survey of the prolific filmmaker-turned-Great Lakes recluse. Of course we all know he's missed, as Goldstein's sources avowedly confirm (and despite his pseudonymous, decades-old contributions to Drillbit Taylor). But with little apparent likelihood for the director to return to work, we at Defamer are compelled to take matters into our own hands with our ambitious John Hughes Q&A Challenge. Allow us to explain after the jump.

Can 'Horton' Get A Woop Woop?

You wake up cold and confused, naked except for the half-singed bonnet on your head, and surrounded by hundreds of empty Peeps boxes and decapitated chocolate bunnies. Damn it: You've surrendered to another Easter weekend bender. Enjoy the last pulses of glucose shooting through your veins as you peruse the box office numbers:

1. Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! - $25.1 million
A second solid week atop the box office officially cements this all-CGI adaptation of the beloved children's verse as a bona fide blockbuster. Proving a perfectly successful Seuss adaptation can come from not veering too far from the source material, directors are now lining up to pitch their own faithful versions of works from his canon. First up: Oliver Stone's searing take on The Butter Battle Book, tweaked to better evoke the Iraq War with suicide-Eight-Nozzled Elephant-Toted Boom Blitz-bombing Zook-insurgents.

Reclusive John Hughes Returns! As the Man Responsible For 'Drillbit Taylor!' Kind of!

Arguably the Judd Apatow of the '80s and currently the movies' equivalent of J.D. Salinger, prolific writer-producer-director John Hughes dropped out of filmmaking in 1991 after helming eight movies and developing stories and characters for nearly two dozen more to come. But now, in a symbolic Easter-weekend resurrection perhaps possible only in Hollywood, the writer Hughes and producer Apatow share above-the-line credit for the latest doomed Owen Wilson vehicle, Drillbit Taylor:

[Drillbit] is based on a treatment Hughes wrote years ago for Paramount; he never turned it into a script. But two years ago, after Apatow's breakout hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the studio enticed him to develop Drillbit.

Owen Wilson's Absence Makes Studio Hearts Grow Impatient

The second Owen Wilson film to hit theaters since his suicide attempt last August, the new comedy Drillbit Taylor, is likewise the second consecutive — and for his employers, hopefully the last — film for which Wilson has skipped doing publicity and promotion. To wit, while John Horn and Gina Piccalo acknowledge in today's LA Times that the teen bully-bodyguard film will probably find its adolescent boy market without Wilson doing the print rounds or baring his soul to the likes of Barbara Walters, their Great Moments in Publicity Awkwardness timeline suggests that date may need to occur sooner than later: