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Winner, Best First Monograph, British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies

The first scholarly book on John Hughes examines Hollywood's complex relationship with genre, the role of the auteur in commercial cinema, and the legacy of favorites such as Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

In the 1980s and 1990s, John Hughes was one of Hollywood's most reliable hitmakers, churning out beloved teen comedies and family films such as The Breakfast Club and Home Alone, respectively. But was he an artist? Hughes, an adamantly commercial filmmaker who was dismissed by critics, might have laughed at the question. Since his death in 2009, though, he has been memorialized on Oscar night as a key voice of his time. Now the critics lionize him as a stylistic original.

Holly Chard traces Hughes's evolution from entertainer to auteur. Studios recognized Hughes's distinctiveness and responded by nurturing his brand. He is therefore a case study in Hollywood's production not only of movies but also of genre and of authorship itself. The films of John Hughes, Chard shows, also owed their success to the marketers who sold them and the audiences who watched. Careful readings of Hughes's cinema reveal both the sources of his iconic status and the imprint on his films of the social, political, economic, and media contexts in which he operated.

The first serious treatment of Hughes, Mainstream Maverick elucidates the priorities of the American movie industry in the New Hollywood era and explores how artists not only create but are themselves created.

In 1914, an unknown French filmmaker arrived in New York; within four years, Maurice Tourneur (1876–1961) would become one of America’s most acclaimed directors. In this masterful biography, Christine Leteux shows how intimately connected Tourneur’s life was to major events of the twentieth century as well as to the profound transformations in movie making. A master of directing silent films, he quickly managed the transition to sound. His last major work was created for Continental Films, the German-owned firm that controlled the French film industry during the Nazi Occupation. His son, Jacques, followed in his footsteps, also becoming an acclaimed director.

Drawing heavily on previously unpublished archival documents, Leteux reinvigorates film history and demonstrates that we know far less about this era of filmmaking than we often assume. She reveals not only how Tourneur jumped from France to the United States and back again but also how he shifted from one company to another, moving quickly up the ladder to bigger productions and ever larger studios. Tourneur’s drive, insight, technical proficiency, skill with actors, ability to create new forms of storytelling, and fame on both sides of the Atlantic make it all the more surprising that he is not better known today—an oversight that has now been corrected thanks to Leteux’s impressively detailed research and nuanced storytelling.