HUGHES DOES HIS KIDDING SERIOUSLY

The temptation has been to lump youth pictures into one genre which could be thought of, like junk food, as popular, profitable and indigestible.

But there are wide differences among the youth films. Members of the pack are not all bratty, and some of the comedies make substantial contact with the realities of teen-age life.

“The Breakfast Club” in 1985 gave voice to the complaints (justified or not) that teen-agers have about their parents. It confirmed yet again a kind of information gap between parents and children, and it demonstrated a fairly dismaying shortage of values and goals among the high schoolers who were watched doing penance in a study hall all day Saturday.

John Hughes, who wrote and directed “The Breakfast Club,” has in scarcely half a decade become a figure of near-legend as the principal and highly prolific interpreter of the youth scene. In addition to “The Breakfast Club,” he has written and directed “Sixteen Candles,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Weird Science,” and has written “Pretty in Pink,” “Some Kind of Wonderful,” which is in release at the moment, and “She’s Having a Baby,” with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern, which is due out later this spring.

Most recently, Hughes, a boyish-faced and unexpectedly reclusive man, has been off in Buffalo, N.Y., directing a non-youth comedy, “Trains, Planes and Automobiles,” which co-stars Steve Martin and John Candy as two ill-matched travelers thrown together by a blizzard as they try to get to Chicago for Thanksgiving.

Hughes grew up in Detroit and later lived in the Chicago suburbs where some of his films, including “The Breakfast Club,” have been set. He started out by writing direct-mail advertising. “It’s like writing for throwaways,” he says.

Like Woody Allen, he also wrote free-lance gags. “I would read weekly Variety and see who was appearing where in town, then I’d flood them with jokes.” He photocopied the jokes, and the checks they had earned him, and sent them to ad agencies as calling cards. The trick landed him one job, and later he joined the huge Leo Burnett firm, where he worked on the Kellogg, Schlitz and Johnson Wax accounts among others.

In 1979, seeing security but no excitement in his future, he quit cold and began free-lancing. He sold parodies to Playboy and funny stories to National Lampoon. He was already trying his hand at screenplays when Matty Simmons of the Lampoon commissioned him to do a screenplay of one of Hughes’ most successful stories for the magazine, “Vacation ’58.” It became “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” one of the substantial hits of 1983. Another Hughes script, “Mr. Mom,” with Michael Keaton, Teri Garr and Martin Mull, was also a box-office success that year.

That was only four years ago and things have obviously moved very fast for Hughes, who has also just been given his own record label to celebrate the music from his films.

“I think things are funny because they happened to you,” Hughes says, “or to someone you know, or because they could happen to you or to someone you know. I try for the laughter of recognition in my work.”

In “She’s Having a Baby,” Hughes adds, “I played it straight, against the jokes, and I think--I hope--it’s funnier than anything I’ve done so far. I wasn’t anticipating some of the laughs we’ve had in the previews. The reaction is, ‘Oh lord, I’ve done that.’ ”

The taste in comedy has changed, Hughes thinks. “In the mid-’70s,” he says, “the style was to choose your targets and then attack. It was very aggressive comedy. Now the style, my style, is more passive. Let the heroes be passive victims. My films turn the other way from the attacks. I turn the gun on myself, you might say. If you think of Chevy (Chase) in ‘National Lampoon’s Vacation,’ he was always the butt of the joke.

“In real life that’s who I am, the guy things happen to.”

Despite having his own record label, Hughes says he’s dubious about the value of music in selling a picture. “The question always is getting the right music for the picture. ‘Ferris Bueller’ did just fine without a song or a video. People buy a song because they like the movie, and a song can hit the charts after the film is long gone.

“The challenge now will be to find contemporary music with maturity instead of rebellion as the theme. There’s nothing wrong with growing up.

“When I was 16 there were the beach blanket pictures, made by people unfamiliar with this universe. Then came those who did recognize that young people’s perception of time is different from adults’.

“For the kids, the future is not a factor. It hurts now . They have huge mood swings. Teen suicide is so terrifying because kids don’t think any relief is in sight. They can’t figure school, they feel they don’t belong and they can’t see beyond the moment.

“It’s important for them to know that somebody else understands the problems.”

Does Hughes, as has been said, take an anti-adult stand to ingratiate himself with his young audiences? “Not really,” he says. “I’d take less heat if I were doing period pieces. But I’m not. I make films for people who are that age, or for people who want to look at that age and try to understand.

“It’s tough for a teen-ager to be a rebel today, when Mom has four holes in her ears and wears black leather. We all had to know the ‘80s would be strange with the baby boom coming through.

“With the high school kids, I’ve cultivated an audience. They’ll let me know when I’m not serving it.

“The more credit you give an audience, the better it is. Let them find the laughs. The jokes are always easy; the trick is to keep the characters advancing the story, and letting the humor come from the characters.

“Comedy is like figure skating. It’s wonderful if it looks easy.”