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Something I’ve wondered off and on about myself—assuming Hughes hasn’t simply mutated into Judd Apatow Incorporated while none of us was looking. But Apatow himself apparently feels the loss, which presumably explains why he’d exhume an old Hughes story idea as plotline for Drillbit Taylor (starring Owen Wilson, pretty in pink as always), the Judd factory’s current teen-market outing.
“John Hughes wrote some of the great outsider characters of all time,” Apatow insists. “It’s pretty ridiculous to hear people talk about the movies we’ve been doing, with outrageous humor and sweetness all combined, as if they were an original idea. I mean, it was all there first in John Hughes’s films. Whether it’s Freaks and Geeks or Superbad, the whole idea of having outsiders as the lead characters, that all started with Hughes.”
