denied

Recently Unearthed Spy Magazine Hatchet Job Helps Explain Why John Hughes Won't Return Our Calls

After receiving a lawyerly talking to and even getting within one very, very close degree of separation from our target yesterday in the John Hughes Q&A Challenge, we're convinced that A) John Hughes knows about our quest for answers, and B) he has absolutely no intention of or interest in playing ball. While our feelings are slightly tweaked by Mr. Hughes' unwavering rejection, we can't take it too personally. After all, if one of the last experiences you had with the press — recently unearthed from the Spy Magazine archives by Jeffrey Wells — labeled you as an "impossible" and "capricious bully" who was responsible for "childlike rampages through [Hollywood's] playpen," then perhaps you would refuse even the most innocent of media inquiries as well:

"[I]t's not [worth it]," one former Hughesland resident concludes. 'Because his movies ultimately aren't that good. I don't think anyone should treat people like shit and get away with it just because they're a filmmaker. It would be different," he suggests, "if he were Martin Scorsese." ...

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britney spears

How I Met Your Bueller

Sometimes, two seemingly mismatched things from disparate backgrounds and decades can come together in unlikely harmony. Just tap Catherine Zeta-Jones on the shoulder the next time you spot her sucking face with Michael Douglas and ask her. Or, alternately, you can watch the video above: More »

investigations

Official Denials Aside, The John Hughes Q&A Challenge Rolls On

We're thrilled with the reaction so far to Defamer's John Hughes Q&A Challenge — or make that 99% thrilled, anyway, with a great outpouring of interest around the Web, some fabulous inquiries for our Reclusive Director Du Jour ("Was writing Weird Science the best two days of your life?") and, alas, a polite but firm response from his representative. More »

investigations

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.

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comebacks

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.

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