I’ve lived in Chicago my entire life. I love this city more than I could ever express. Even when the daily grind of commuting gets to me, I see the city skyline and well, the sight is enough to make the stress of work evaporate. Chicago has always been a big city that can sit next to New York, yet has a community that feels like a small town. The city as whole bonds, even if we are divided by north side and south side rivalries. A girl who had moved here post-college once asked me that whenever people from Chicago met one another for the first time, we always asked “What high school did you go to?” College didn’t matter, neither did your job, but we wanted to know if our lives or the people we knew intersected. When I mentioned Loyola Academy, it always had a flurry of responses, but every once in a while people would say, “Hey, didn’t they film The Breakfast Club at that school behind Loyola”.
Chicagoans are proud people, ready to fight to the death when someone says it’s the second city to New York and equally defensive when they put down our beloved Cubs. The truth is, no matter how much one person visits Chicago; they’ll never really know what it’s like to be a Chicagoan without living here. It’s tattooed in our souls and despite the horrific winters, the damn expressways, commuting to jobs far and wide…well, few of us ever think of leaving unless it’s absolutely necessary. However, whenever people do come to visit me, I always tell them to bring a list of things and places they want to see. I’m always prepped for the worse. The Sears Tower (or whatever the hell it’s called now) is usually a bore of a trip and some of the other landmarks are often tourist traps that never interest a true Chicagoan. However, in recent years one of the things people often ask about are the landmarks seen in the Blues Brothers, Ferris Bueller and The Breakfast Club. No one is more surprised by this than me. But there’s something about Chicago that’s sweeping and dreamy. New York has it, Paris has it, Tokyo has it…dozens of cities have something that beats within that’s inexplicable, yet John Hughes breathed life into the Chicago though his characters, scripts and films and the world wants to experience what his characters experienced as a result.The first time journalist Lonn Friend ever came to visit me was to see the opening night of Peter Gabriel’s Up tour in November of 2002. The day after, we had time to kill with no agenda and he asked me “What would you do if you were Ferris ditching school? Where would you go?” I said, "I know just the place". We hopped in my car, drove north on the Edens Expressway and I drove him up and down Lake Avenue. I took him to the beach, the Baha’i Temple, my old high school, the high school they films The Breakfast Club at, the legendary Ferris tower and a number of other North Shore landmarks used in John Hughes films. I could tell Lonn appreciated it because the average Chicagoan would not have ventured to the burbs when there is so much life in the city. He still mentions my tour when we talk.
Just last year my friend Adam came from Australia for a much needed vacation. He went coast to coast seeing something like thirty-plus concerts in as many days. It was insane. His stop in Chicago was early in the trip and he and his mate (now my mate as well) Paul stayed with my wife and I for four days. Adam’s like me. He has a big heart and when life challenges him, he looks inward and finds solace in the form of music…or a film. His two favorite films of all time are The Blues Brothers and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, both of which were largely filmed in and around Chicago. One of the Blues Brothers scenes is mere blocks from me in Park Ridge and the North Shore of Chicago had plenty of Hughes sites. I drove him down to Wrigley Field not because it is a legendary ballpark, but because Ferris Bueller had a scene there. We had to come downtown at 5am one morning for a John Mellencamp concert and on our way home; I tried to zigzag around the city to show them as many landmarks as I could. When Adam made it to LA, he found the exterior of Ferris’ house as well. History be damned, these two guys came half way across the world and wanted to see the sights and sounds of my city because of John Hughes.
John Hughes had a pulse on what it was like to grow up. He understood the alienation, the difficulty and the challenges we all experience. No film better showcases this than The Breakfast Club. Back when I was a peer counselor in high school we had to show our groups the film and discuss it. It was almost a template for what we hoped we would get out of the underclassmen circumventing the waters of high school. Even in a film like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, people saw more than a comical film with a few laughs. They saw rebellion, living every day like it was your last and complete and total surrender of the outside world in which you found a way to truly live life. The shadows that surround Cameron are there to be seen and hopefully was an inspiration for kids to find their own path despite the deck they have been dealt. The truth is that for my generation John Hughes was more than a man behind a camera, but someone who was integral to our lives regardless of age. As people come to visit me, his films and my showing of the landmarks are a source of bonding for us and in some ways through these films we realize our struggles, demons and desires are all the same. John Hughes was a voice of optimism much like a great book, a really enlivening song or a best friend. He was a teacher who “got it” and as a result, our lives our better for it. He will be missed, but his films will live within all of us forever.Anthony Kuzminski is a Chicago based writer and Special Features Editor for the antiMusic Network and his daily writings can be read at The Screen Door and can be contacted at thescreendoor AT gmail DOT com.
