People really love interconnected cinematic universes these days, but it turns out that classic comedy director John Hughes was way ahead of the game. There are a few obvious links between his filmswhich are largely coming-of-age tales set in the fictional town of Shermer, Illinois, but in a 1999 interview with FirstHughes revealed that some of his most beloved films are all deeply connected. Fans had already figured out that “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “The Breakfast Club” were related because they both took place at Shermer High School, and according to Hughes, there was much more. The only problem is that some of these connections have never made it to the big screen.
While Hughes spent more than a decade creating a sort of creative bible about Shermer and the people who inhabited it, only a small fraction of what he wrote there made it into his films. Fortunately, he revealed some of these connections with Premiere (archived here)and fans can extrapolate from there for themselves. It would have been interesting to read a published version of these notes, but hey, we at least have a few more clues to the extended Shermer verse.
The characters in John Hughes films apparently all knew each other
Much like author Stephen King’s connections through his novels using the fictional town of Castle Rock, MaineHughes believed he would interconnect his films through Shermer, as he explained:
“When I started making movies, I thought I was inventing a town where everything was happening. Everyone in all my movies is from Shermer, Illinois. Del Griffith from ‘Planes, Trains & Automobiles’ lives two doors down from John Bender. [from ‘The Breakfast Club’]. Ferris Bueller knew Samantha Baker from “Sixteen Candles.” For 15 years I have been writing my Shermer stories in prose, piecing together his story.”
Shermer was based on Hughes’ real-life hometown of Northbrook, a small town north of Chicago, and the neighboring towns and neighborhoods that made up the Midwestern suburbs. The characters who inhabit these films feel like they really could live just a few doors away from each other. Even some of the films that Hughes wrote but did not direct are part of this Shermer verse, as Shermer is present not only in his films “Sixteen Candles”, “The Breakfast Club”, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” and “Weird Science”, he is also part of “Reach the Rock”, “National Lampoon’s Vacation” written by Hughes, and even the Christmas classic “Home Alone.”
The Shermerverse’s cinematic impact extends beyond individual films
Interconnected fictional universes are nothing new, and Hughes certainly wasn’t the first screenwriter or director to do so, but his films had a huge impact on young creatives who would go on to do the same thing themselves. Kevin Smith is probably the best example, having created the interconnected View Askewniverse and even directly commenting on John Hughes in his film “Dogma” by having Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) try to find Shermer because they think it’s a real and wonderful place. Like Hughes, Smith’s films are connected and he sometimes hires the same actors to play new characters, and all mix humor and heart.
The only film that die-hard John Hughes fans tend to exclude from the Shermer-verse is “Weird Science”, although it is set in Shermer. Since the other films all feature real-world logic and very human characters and “Weird Science” is a wild sci-fi/fantasy film about a teenage couple who bring a doll to life to become the woman of their dreams, this differentiation is understandable. Then again, it’s kind of fun to imagine the stories the kids in “Breakfast Club” might tell about the crazy house party someone once threw that was crashed by mutant bikers. Why not?
