SSRP Books for Referencing

For my Small Scale Research Project, I am writing about John Hughes, and some of the research material will be used through books, several of which I have already found and purchased, so I will be using them as reference and as 3 out of my 15 items that I will use as research for this project.

The first of these books that I have bought is titled "John Hughes and Eighties Cinema - Teenage Hopes and American Dreams" by Thomas A. Christie. The reason why I have chosen this book is because it is a full length analysis of his films, not just the ones he directed, but the ones he wrote as well. It discusses his films and the impact they have made and their significance in social and culutural aspects and how they define a generation. The film as his that they focus the most on is "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986), which is also one of the several Hughes films that I am focusing on.

 

The second book is "You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried" by Susannah Gora, this book is different from the other two I have picked as it doesn't focus on John Hughes making the films, but more specifically on the films themselves and the characters and ideology that is created through them. In fact it doesn't focus on just Hughes' films, but the films of "The Brat Pack" a group of actors who often collaborated together in the 80's, however the majority of them are Hughes films (Such as The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink) so it still has valuable information and research in them. However that being said, there will be sections that aren't very useful as they have nothing to do with Hughes or his films (i.e. St. Elmo's Fire). 



The third book that I have already bought is "Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes" written by a group of writers. This book focuses on the films and the ways how Hughes' writes teenagers and how they are represented. They explore the majority of his films, including all three that I am focusing on, and the motifs and ideology featured in all of them, focusing on love, angst and self-discover that make his films some of the most famous coming-of-age films of the 80's. As you can tell by the cover and title, they focus mostly on The Breakfast Club, one of-if not-his most successful film and the effect that it has had on a generation of teenagers.