Director John Hughes Dead At 59

The king of teen comedies, director John Hughes, died today of a heart attack while taking a walk in Manhattan

The 59-year-old was taking a morning walk in New York when he went into cardiac arrest, according to Michelle Bega. He was in Manhattan visiting his family. Hughes was famous for his countless hit movies in the 1980s including "Sixteen Candles," "Home Alone" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." His films made such young stars as Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore and Andrew McCarthy household names in the 80s, with fans dubbing the group of actors "The Brat Pack." Hughes was born in 1950 in Michigan and began his career in the field of advertising. At the time of his death, he lived in Illinois and set many of his films in the Chicago area. He is survived by his wife of 39 years, Nancy, with whom he had two sons, John and James.

While I enjoyed Hughes films, for me the best part of his work was their soundtracks. But I will confess that my roommates and I could quote every single line of dialog from Sixteen Candles. I probably still can.

Doin' It Right, Night After Night

For some disco history, head over to PopDose where JMG blog-pal John Hughes has just posted a great piece on Donna Summer's unmatched reign of 1979's pop charts, when she scored three #1's out of five Billboard Top Five smashes. John makes special note of Bad Girls album track Sunset People, which is easily the most popular Donna Summer track never to be a single.

Go to PopDose for a free download of Sunset People and edumacate yourself to the song that had all the gay boys bumping that year. John's also dug up a campy video of Sunset People/Bad Girls from Summer's Bad Girls TV special. Can it have been almost 30 years? I can still remember sitting in traffic and ripping the shrink-wrap off my cover of Bad Girls because I couldn't wait until I got home.

For the record, Bad Girls is my 4th favorite Donna Summer album, behind 1977's Once Upon A Time (my #1 all-time album, period), 1976's Love Trilogy, and I Remember Yesterday, also from 1977. Can you imagine one of today's artists being so prolific and yet so consistently good? Donna Summer's new album Crayons, her first new studio album in 17 years, will be released on May 20th and the advance word is great.

Johnny Is A Man Who Does Silly Voices

Longtime JMG blogroll pal Johnny Is A Man does a raft of dead-on impressions for his boyfriend, Baby Chutney. Johnny's Neil Tennant kills.

Linky Love: John Hughes

I met John Hughes, author of Johnny Is A Man and the fab 80's music blog, Lost In the 80's, back in the late 90's when we starting chatting online about music after Johnny had been a winning contestant on the short-lived Rock-N-Roll Jeopardy. These days he's also writing for PopDose. Check out his stuff, I dig his latest piece on Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

Frankie Say: Go Johnny!