John Hughes – How To Write Your Favorite Movie

Home Alone Poster

How to Write Home Alone

by L.A. Zvirbulis

1 – The Inspiration. Plan a vacation with your spouse. List off all the things you need to pack, and realize how funny it would be if you forgot to pack one of your children. Hilarious. Write a movie about it because you’ve already written several other successful films and let some guy named Chris Columbus direct it. Not the guy that initiated the destruction of the Native Americans, but the guy that wrote Gremlins, The Goonies, and goes on to direct Mrs. Doubtfire and two Harry Potter films. Very different Chris.

2 – The Genre. Family Holiday movie. Make sure every frame of the movie looks like a Christmas card. Place it in the same suburb that you use in all of your movies because it snows in Chicago and snow is necessary for a Christmas movie in the Northern Hemisphere. Christmas movies need to be cold and white and red and green.

3 – The Complications. What’s the worst that could happen? Your child is left home alone. By you. And if that doesn’t make you feel like a bad parent, your child befriends the town’s alleged murderer and then is attacked by burglars while they invade your house. Pretty much a parent’s worst nightmare. At least you didn’t leave the garage door open. Oh wait, you did. At least the last time you saw your son – Kevin? Yeah, that’s the one – he only likes cheese pizza – got at least one slice of cheese pizza on the last night you spent alone together, yes? No? Wow, parents. Just wow. Enjoy your flight to Paris.

4 – The Fun Stuff. A kid takes care of himself and and acts as your home security system while you vacation in Paris. Let Kevin really torture these silly burglars better than any silly alarm or security company could do. We can get violent, because of the cartoon-like innocence of actor Macauley Culkin and the over the top acting from the bad guys. We want Kevin to really beat up these terrible middle-aged men, so a blowtorch to the head, an iron on the face, and an ancient feather torture technique will play well with the audience. We giggle at the violence. These bad guys steal stuff on Christmas. That’s bad. But what’s good is that we can get John Williams to compose the score after he is enchanted by a rough cut of the film.

5 – The Old Man. Kevin isn’t completely alone because he meets the weird old man who supposedly murdered his own family! I mean the weird old man did figuratively murder his family by estranging himself from his son, but Kevin helps him with that. The old man also comes in handy when the bad guys get really bad and he comes to save the day with a shovel! It’s good to have old friends.

6 – The Burglars. We need bad guys who have a sense of humor. Well, they can carry the comedy necessary to handle all of the violence we put upon them. Do you think I’m funny? Yes, I do, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. Also, Joe, when you have the urge to use the “f” word, can you choose “fridge”? This isn’t Goodfellas, so you need to be a good fellow. And we pay Stern his asking rate because he’s the voice of Kevin on the hit tv show The Wonder Years and has a great agent. He’s also a talented actor who has better chemistry with Joe than that first actor we hired and had to replace with Daniel.

7 – The Jokes. Thank goodness you got your first job as a joke writer for an ad agency, then lampooned jokes for a national magazine before writing several successful feature films. The audience liked your jokes then, and you prove yourself over the next twenty years of your comedy movie writing career, even under the pseudonym “Edmund Dantes” as a not-so-subtle Count of Monte Cristo reference when you write the Jennifer Lopez movie Maid in Manhattan but don’t want to be seen next to it. Busted, John Hughes! Now everyone knows.

8 – The Title. Home Alone. It’s simple and to the point and the audience can drink their eggnog when the burglars realize that the kid is “Home Alone”, thus obeying the first rule of movie drinking games – drink when a character says the name of the movie. Make sure to provide non-alcoholic eggnog for the children in the audience. This is a family drinking movie. Also, let’s make kids feel alone in their own homes, so make sure we never actually see Kevin’s room. Weird, right?

9 – The Ending. Kevin gets his family back on Christmas after defeating the bad guys. This is a family film, after all, so of course the kid survives. We need him for the sequel. We also need the bad guys for the sequel, so thank goodness no one dies in this violent yet family-friendly movie. Mom takes a road trip with a Polka band and John Candy, which is punishment enough, because, you know, polka sucks. At least John Candy is good friends with our mom actor Catherine O’Hara from their Canadian improv days, so we can let John Candy improvise these scenes. We only get him for 23 hours anyway, but it’s kind of a thing to put him in movies you’ve written lately. The rest of the family shows up three minutes later after waiting for that direct flight, kind of rubbing it in mom’s face for taking a rough road trip. The mom really gets punished for leaving her son home alone. The dad, not so much, even though he is the one that throws away Kevin’s airline ticket.

10 – The Heart. Family matters. Kevin learns that he actually loves his family and wants them around, no matter how insulting or annoying they are. Being Home Alone is far worse. But he did it. He survived unharmed and didn’t burn the house down. What a tough kid. You know what, I think we can take another family vacation next year.

*L.A. Zvirbulis did not write Home Alone. John Hughes did.

How to Write The Breakfast Club

by L.A. Zvirbulis

1 – The Inspiration. Assume that Hollywood won’t give a new director a huge budget, so come up with some story that uses only five main actors and one affordable location.

2 – The Genre. Teenage Angst makes a lot of money because teenagers don’t know that adults were once teenagers that can now write about that experience with a college education. It is best said by the brain named Brian – “You see us in the simplest of terms, and the most convenient definitions.” Seriously, make your main characters broad strokes of things you remembered from high school, just tell us that’s what you’re doing at the beginning.

3 – The Complications. What’s the worst that could happen? The characters are already in trouble, so getting more punishment is worse. Also not being friends after this is a huge threat. And also maybe not being able to define yourself as something more than just a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, or a criminal. You can be everything, but only after making friends with the things you’re not.

4 – The Fun Stuff. Detention, am I right? Detention is so much fun. Well, misbehaving in Detention can be fun. Let’s stick it to the man. Let’s rebel. Let’s play by our own rules but still kind of play by the Principal’s and our parents’ rules because we aren’t considered adults yet and the budget doesn’t let us leave the interior of the High School. Let’s just run around this school. Add music and marijuana and some iconic poses.

5 – The Device. Bender is the device. His “Criminal” antics drive the plot, from unhinging the door to the Principal’s office to making Molly Ringwald feel uncomfortable to providing the marijuana. This would be a boring morning in detention if it weren’t for John Bender.

6 – The Principal. He’s the bad guy. “The Establishment”. The adult who hates his job but is stuck in adulthood with bills and alimony and an ill-fitting suit he bought at an outlet mall. Counterbalance him with a cool adult – the Janitor who has a shitty job but knows everything about the school and seems totally fine with going through teenage garbage.

7 – The Jokes. The Criminal isn’t the only funny person. We really do laugh when the Principal looks foolish. It’s the teenagers in all of us.

8 – The Title. The Breakfast Club sounds great. No one will notice or be bothered by the fact that the only meal that is consumed on screen is lunch. No one eats breakfast in this movie, but The Lunch Club doesn’t look good on a poster.

9 – The Ending. These five strange teenagers learn that their differences aren’t so different. But will they be friends on Monday? Will Claire ask for her diamond earring back? Will Bender be stuck forever, frozen in time on a football field with a fist in the air?

10 – The Heart. Just read Brian’s essay. He’s the only character that writes one.

*L.A. Zvirbulis did not write The Breakfast Club. John Hughes did.