I found out in later years that Spielberg went to the heads of the company and said, ‘If you do this movie, I’m leaving.’ He thought it demeaned him and demeaned Jaws. I had just closed Animal House, I was the hottest producer of the year. The studio had $2 million into pre-production, and Tannen called me on the phone… He said, ‘I have to pull the plug.’ I was furious. The leading lady was Bo Derek, Richard Dreyfuss was in it, and Joe Dante, who was an unknown director at the time was gonna direct it. You guys are gonna write the screenplay.’ And they wrote it. I called ‘em into my office, and I said, ‘This is the story for Jaws 3, People Nothing.
Neither of them had ever written a movie script before. He looked at me like ‘What?’ Then, came up with a story I made up on the spot, and he said, ‘I love it!’ and ran to the phone and called his partner, Richard Zanuck…So, I go back to my office… and I had to remember the story I told, you know?… When they called and told me the studio wanted to do it, I walked into the editorial office, and… two of the editors were sitting there: a guy named Tod Carroll and a guy named John Hughes. Here’s what Simmons had to say about the National Lampoon’s Jaws movie when I interviewed him for Spltisider a few months back: “I was having lunch at the Friar’s Club with David Brown, who produced Jaws, and he said, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do a movie together.’ As a gag, I said to him, National Lampoon’s Jaws 3, People Nothing.
When it came time to start working on a third Jaws movie in the late 70s, Universal made a deal with National Lampoon publisher and producer of Animal House Matty Simmons to make a comedic version of Jaws under the Lampoon banner. National Lampoon’s Jaws 3, People 0 (1979)
While these unproduced John Hughes movies come from various points throughout his impressive career, given how fast he worked, Hughes probably could have written all twelve of these screenplays on one rainy three-day weekend. The unproduced movies listed below span John Hughes’s two decades in the film industry, from his days with National Lampoon in the late 70s to his creative peak as King of the Teen Movie in the 80s to his transition into less ambitious family fare in the 90s. At the rate he worked, there are probably a hundred more movies he wanted to make that we don’t know about. Hughes admitted to having written Sixteen Candles and Weird Science in two days each, Planes, Trains & Automobiles in three days, and Ferris Bueller in six.īelow, I’ve collected all the known information about a dozen of John Hughes’s unproduced screenplays and movie ideas. Some of Hughes’s most beloved films were written in just two or three days, and he was refreshingly honest about the fact. Part of the reason John Hughes was able to rapidly pile up projects is that he was an incredibly fast writer who didn’t care much for rewriting. Even Judd Apatow, who’s pumped out hit films at a consistent rate for the better part of the last decade, doesn’t work as fast as Hughes, who was cranking out two or even three popular comedies a year throughout his 80s heyday, with many of these films going on to become iconic classics. One of the most prolific comedy filmmakers of all-time, you can’t really compare John Hughes’s dominance of big screen comedy in the 1980s to the work of anyone modern.