Paramount Pictures; Slaven Vlasic/Getty ImagesWhen John Hughes passed away in 2009, he left a huge void, not only in people's hearts, but in Hollywood.
He had written and directed most of the popular family-friendly teen films of the '80s, which became cult classics and still air on cable today—Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Uncle Buck, Home Alone...the list goes on and on.
Many teen movies that he took no part in making, which are much racier and contain more complex plot lines, became popular in the last 20 years, notably American Pie, Mean Girls and Pitch Perfect. Nowadays, such films are rarely made and do not enjoy the same level of success. Can anyone step in to help bring the nostalgia to the big screen?
"I don't know that those movies can be made anymore," '80s movie icon-turned director and writer Andrew McCarthy, who famously starred alongside Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, told E! News in an exclusive interview this week.
"They don't make those sort of mid-budget, kind of human stories really," he said. "At the moment we're not in the phase of that. In the moment, we're in the phase of Marvel. So it's a very different experience in the movies now. Those movies are few and far between."
McCarthy rose to fame in the '80s as a member of the "Brat Pack" of actors, also appearing in other popular films such as St. Elmo's Fire with Demi Moore and Rob Lowe, Mannequin with Sex and the City's Kim Cattrall and James Spader and Less Than Zero with Spader and Robert Downey Jr.
"You know, Pretty in Pink, at the time, I was like, 'This is a silly movie about a girl, making a dress, wanting to go to a dance. I mean, really? We're making a whole movie about this? I mean, really?'" McCarthy recalled.
"To me, they're just part of the story, part of the deal, and I have great affection for those movies now," he said. "And it clearly touched something in a generation, now a second generation of people, that is meaningful to them in a very real way. And I think more so, that it just reminds them of their own youth. It reminds them of a period in their own life where they were just beginning, just cusping, and the thrill and excitement of life."
McCarthy also attributed the long-term success of some of his popular '80s films to technology.
"That's when VHS first hit the market," he said. "So it was the first time you could take a movie home. So before that, you could see a movie once, and then maybe a year later it would be on TV so you could maybe see it a second time. You could catch it on TV. But then, suddenly, you could take movies home in a way that no one ever could before. And the people that were renting movies were 20-year-olds. And what movies were 20-year-olds seeing? St. Elmo's Fire and Pretty In Pink, so suddenly they could watch these 20 or 30 times and they owned us and it was different."
McCarthy has in recent years continued to act but has mainly concentrated on his writing and directing career, helming episodes of Gossip Girl, The Blacklist—working alongside Spader again, and Orange Is the New Black.
"The ladies are always just chatting, talking, talking, screaming," McCarthy said. "It's not like, 'Ok, quiet...Ready, slate and action.' They're just screaming, all the time. And you want to keep that going because you want to capture that, but you just go, 'Ready! Ok! Action!' And they just snap right into it. So, I mean, it's been interesting to watch that show grow and change and still, yet, remain true to itself in a very real way."
"Everybody loves to be there, and everybody loves doing what they're doing and it's a big crazy family," he added.
"No one did TV [in the '80s] until...you don't do TV until your career is over and then you go do TV," he said. "Now, TV is where so much of the best writing is. And so, consequently, the best writing is going to attract the best talent. And the whole Netflix of it all, the long form, has changed everything. It's changed viewing habits and it changed the ways that stories are being told. Now we're telling 10-hour stories."
And when it comes to writing, McCarthy concentrates on projects off-screen; He's been a travel writer, penning his own books as well as articles for National Geographic Traveler, and recently published his first YA novel.
Sorry, what was that?
That's right, a YA novel. Just Fly Away is a book told from the perspective of a 15-year-old girl.
"I thought I was writing a book about a man who has an affair and has a child out of wedlock and keeps the secret from his family. So I was writing that book for, literally years- five, six, seven years," said McCarthy, who is himself a father of three. "And then, one day, a couple years ago, my favorite character was always the 15-year-old daughter, who was very minor in the original version of the book, and one day I started writing from her point of view. 'My dad's a f--king asshole. He's got this other kid across town.' And suddenly I was completely liberated and I was zipping through this thing."
"I didn't tell anybody. I didn't give it to anybody to read until I finished, when I gave it to my 15-year-old female neighbor," he said. "And I asked, 'Would you read this?' And she was like, 'What is this?' And I was just, 'Can you read it?' And she read it [and was like], 'This sounds just like me and my friends.'"
Pretty in Pink, McCarthy said, is like "YA cinema."
"It's not lost on me that I've spent my whole life trying to run from my teen success," he said. "And there I turn back into it finally and feel very comfortable."