- Don’t You Forget About Me
Four novice Canadian filmmakers created the documentary film Don’t You Forget About Me to act as both a tribute and a video letter to John Hughes, director of generation-defining films such as Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and The Breakfast Club. The filmmakers spent over two years collecting interviews from those who worked with, were inspired by, or were simply fans of the films that Hughes wrote and/or directed in the 1980s and early 1990s. According to the filmmakers, Hughes had not made a movie in fifteen years and had not granted an interview since 1999. After the filmmakers edited and saved the interviews, they traveled to Hughes’s suburban Chicago home to deliver a DVD containing the interviews. The filmmakers argued that the purpose of their delivery was either to encourage Hughes to create new movies or simply to thank him for his body of work. They were also hoping that Hughes would grant them an interview.
The documentary film follows the actual journey of the filmmakers and shares the many interviews collected. Clearly, the final product is not an oral history project, but a documentary film. Nonetheless, because the documentary is heavily steeped in interviews, the film serves as an interesting foundation for a discussion about how oral histories can add rich layers of cultural and historical commentary to the documentation of pop culture icons, which both Hughes and his films are. This film also demonstrates how not having a better understanding of the basic fundamentals of oral history can contribute to a lackluster media presentation.
Oral history, as a methodology, plays an unintended, but significant role in the documentary. The film’s mission, at the most rudimentary level, is to establish Hughes’s importance in his field. This mission poses a significant challenge to the four filmmakers. What defines importance? Why is it necessary to document this process? The four established a clear strategy to identify and document multiple perspectives on Hughes’s teen-centered films, which focus on teen angst and a sense of belonging. Hughes’s gift as a writer and director was his ability to create relatable characters in relatable situations, a gift that is absent in contemporary teen-focused films. The goal of Don’t You Forget About [End Page 312] Me is to create a documentary that acts as a voice for film community history, one that explains the conventions of a Hughes film and how contemporary filmmakers should understand those conventions.
The filmmakers’ strategy depends on their interviewees, who include film industry workers, contemporary teens, Hughes’s hometown residents, fans, and the filmmakers themselves. Although they do not interview notable stars, such as Matthew Broderick and Molly Ringwald, they do interview over a dozen actors who worked with Hughes, including Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy. The film also includes interviews with major film critics, such as Roger Ebert; current writer/directors, such as Kevin Smith; and film crew personnel who developed personal relationships with Hughes. The Hollywood interviews are well rounded and necessary. In addition, the filmmakers wisely conduct “person-on-the-street” interviews that include teens both at school and at a high school dance. They realized during their research that today’s teens related to the Hughes films more than teen films produced during the last decade. Learning of this seemingly timeless quality to Hughes’s films inspired the filmmakers to make a documentary about him in order to understand how teen films can become enduring. To examine this timeless quality, they interviewed contemporary teens to learn from their comparisons of Hughes films with recent teen films. Because the interviewers’ questions are not included in the film, it is a challenge to judge whether the filmmakers constructed questions that helped explain why Hughes became an iconic filmmaker or whether they simply got lucky at times by interviewing charismatic people. Nonetheless, the oral history interviews with teens provide a discussion on social...