Behind the Scenes of Christmas Vacation from John Hughes: A Life in Film

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T H E G E N I U S B E H I N D

Ferris Bueller, The Breakfast Club,

Home Alone, A N D more

KIRK HONEYCUTT

FOREWORD BY C HRIS C OLUMBUS



J O H N H U G H E S : A L I F E I N F I L M

134

CHRISTMASVACATION

In the interim, John rediscovered his interest in theVacation series and got much more heavily involvedin Christmas Vacation. Even though he produced themovie with Jacobson, what he didn’t do, accordingto Matty Simmons—afforded only executive pro-ducer status—was show up on the set.

“He had turned himself into a mini-studio,grinding out three–four pictures a year, all of

which he wrote but no longer directed,” saidSimmons. “He was working six pictures ahead

while one or two were being shot. So there wasa sameness of plot—many lms were revisions

of earlier ones.”Christmas Vacation (1989) is a tepid affair, alm about a dysfunctional family holiday thatsearches for laughs amid quarreling in-laws, col-lapsing ladders, road rage, exploding sewers, oneaccidently electrocuted pet, and several sequenc-es of Christmas light failures featuring tens ofthousands of bulbs but no electrical current.

Chase gamely takes one pratfall after another,but even the slapstick falls short—no joke intend-ed. The problem is not simply that the pratfallsare wholly predictable and contrived; they seemmore prehistoric than the family’s ancient aunt.

As with the original Vacation lm, John looked forinspiration in a National Lampoon piece he once

penned—this time “Christmas ’59.” This one,though, again related by the young son, has littlenarrative. It’s mostly a series of discordant notesamong a large, bickering family.

About the only mildly amusing new angle isa next-door couple, played by a pre- Seinfeld JuliaLouis-Dreyfus and Nicholas Guest. They inad-

vertently take the brunt of all the mishaps hap-pening in the Griswold household, which prettymuch destroy their house and quite possibly theirmarriage.

John’s handpicked director, another rst-tim-er, Jeremiah Chechik, assembled an outstandingcast that includes such veterans as E. G. Mar-shall, John Randolph, Diane Ladd, Doris Rob-

erts, and William Hickey. They had little to do. As Roger Ebert noted in his review, “The

in-laws are handled almost as a tour group, tobe shunted around in the backgrounds of shot

Left: The promotional poster for Christmas Vacation starring Chevy Chase (1989).



M O V I E M O G U L

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after shot or lined up as a quartet to react toClark’s dilemmas.”

While making the second and third lms ofthe franchise, D’Angelo admitted, “In terms of thequality and the [ Vacation] legacy, we were dogged bythe feeling we were letting everybody down, that we

were not fullling what we started out with.”During this same period, John’s lawyers were

negotiating an exit from Paramount. Tom Pollack,one of John’s former attorneys, had taken over ashead of Universal and was wooing John to moveback to its lot.

The deal wasn’t concluded until April 1988. John moved his production ofce to Universal’sEast Penthouse and installed his Ferris Bueller producer, Jacobson, as production chief.

The previous year, in the last week of lming Planes , he had dumped Chinich. As usual with John, Chinich had no idea why. What was unusu-al, though, was that John did it personally.

“Well, at least you had the balls to do it face toface this time,” Chinich told him.

Jacobson would resign the following year to goto Twentieth Century Fox as executive vice presi-dent. John followed him there. While keeping hisUniversal deal, John moved his ofce to Fox. It

was an ofce he rarely visited since by then he hadmoved his family back to Chicago. He came toL.A. usually in the summer.

He was now burning through production exec-utives at a rapid pace. Peter Heller replaced Jacob-son as the head of John’s company, but resigneda few months later when he refused to move toChicago. This was when John patched things up

with Gotch and brought him to Chicago as senior vice president of creative affairs.

Meanwhile, John continued his auspiciousteaming with one of the most talented comedyactors of that era.

Left: In a classic Christmas

Vacation moment, ClarkGriswold (Chevy Chase)clearly has no idea he’sabout to cut into a dryand deated turkey.

Behind the Scenes of Christmas Vacation from John Hughes: A Life in Film

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