Don’t You Forget About Me, an independently produced documentary about John Hughes, has found a distributor less than 24 hours after the director’s passing last Thursday. Montreal’s Alliance Films purchased the documentary by noon last Friday, according to Variety.
The film features four Canadian filmmakers who head to Chicago to try and find whatever happened to the director who walked away from Hollywood almost two decades earlier. (And shame on you if you have to ask what the film’s title is in reference to.) Interspersed with their road trip are interviews with many people who worked on Hughes’s films including Judd Nelson, Kelly Lebrock, Mia Sara, Alan Ruck, Gedde Watanabe and Andrew McCarthy. Contemporary filmmakers such as Kevin Smith and Jason Reitman, who have acknowledged Hughes’s influence on their own films, also appear. Unfortunately, Molly Ringwald, whose career was launched by her starring turns in the Hughes films Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, declined to participate.
Granted,it does seem a little ghoulish that it took Hughes death for someone to be interested in distributing a documentary about him. However, I’m trying to look at this from a different angle. With Hughes having off the radar for so long, I think that the impact his films have made on people is being revisited. While it is unfortunate that it took his passing to bring that back to the forefront, I prefer to think that the documentary getting picked up is not so much as a crass cashing-in on Hughes’ death as it is a way of memorializing the man and his films.
Below is the trailer that the filmmakers have but together before their deal with Alliance. You can find more information on the film, including some cut footage from some of their interviews, over at their production blog.
