John Hughes, a damn racist?
Well, it turns out that John Hughes offered Todd Bridges a role in The Breakfast Club. So what happened? One of Hughes writing partners looked at Bridges and said, "We can't write for blacks," and that was that.
Can't write for blacks, eh. How does one "write for blacks"? The movie was set in a petit bourgeois high school. Do they think white bourgeois youth are wildly different from black bourgeois youth?
Well, Hughes was the one who offered Bridges the role. The other guy overruled him even though Hughes was in charge and would have been the one to make the decision.
Maybe Bridges wouldn't have been any good in it anyway.
Scott Baio was the first choice to star in Top Gun. Sadly, the role went to that idiot, Tom Cruise. His first big role. It should have been Scott Baio! HE should be the big star!
On the other hand, you had Gene Hackman who really dodged a bullet. Sherwood Schwartz wanted him to play Mike Brady on The Brady Bunch. Fortunately for him, the studio insisted on Robert Reed since he was already under contract. Around that time, Hackman starred in The French Connection in the role Peter Boyle turned down because his agent convinced him he was in danger of being type cast.
And, for some reason, John Denver was the first pick for An Officer and a Gentleman. But that's just weird.
Carrol O'Connor auditioned for the role of The Skipper on Gilligan's Island.
They wanted Tom Selleck to play Indiana Jones, but he was already set to play Magnum, P.I. Remington Steele had to pass on playing James Bond. Adam West was offered the role, by the way, but he turned it down because, after the George Lazenby fiasco, he thought only someone who was actually British should play Bond.
Danny Thomas was making his move to buy the rights to The Godfather. Planned to play the title role himself. Would that have been so bad?
Was John Hughes a jerk?
Many years ago, Spy magazine ran a hatchet job on Hughes. They attacked him in a lengthy article.
Let me see. He yelled STOP! over and over as they drove around in a mini-van scouting locations, and this annoyed the other people. He was late to a screening of one of his movies. After making the people wait for him, the projectionist started the movie before Hughes arrived, and Hughes may have fired him. Hughes interviewed people for jobs by asking them questions about irrelevant things and making them reenact football plays. He made wealthy studio executives stand waiting for him in an alleyway where they were filming.
He also did sort of an ad spoof in National Lampoon inviting women to send "pictures of your husband's butt".
Now that I think about it, they didn't accuse him of anything terrible.
