1987 • R • 1h 33mins • Watch trailer • Rent it
You’re reading Pizza & A Movie—eating our way through rental classics and their backstories. Tonight we’re taking on Thanksgiving with John Hughes’ first movie for grown-ups. It’s the one that elevated Steve Martin and made John Candy a name at the same time. Pack your bags, we’re taking Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
Here’s the plot. Ad man Neal Page (Steve Martin) is in the Big Apple on business two days before Thanksgiving. He just want’s to get home to Chicago. Unbeknownst to him, Neal’s life is a series of dominoes, the first of which is pushed over by a client (William Windom) who can’t make up his mind. The meeting runs late. Neal can’t get a cab at rush hour and narrowly misses his flight out of LaGuardia.
Enter shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith (John Candy). Neal and Del? These two? Don’t get along. But they’re side-by-side on the only jam-packed flight available. A blizzard forces the plane to land in Wichita, where a supremely grumpy Neal shares a hotel room with Del for the night. They’re together again on a train the next day, a bus after that, then a rental car and the refrigerated container of an eighteen-wheeler. As the transport system weathers a blizzard-based breakdown, so too does Neal. Will he ever see home again? And will Neal ever be rid of Del?
Two True Stories
Writer/Director John Hughes was the reigning king of teen angst. The poet laureate of pubescent languish. He’d already made Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. What he hadn’t made was a movie for grown-ups. PTA would be his first.
You’re not gonna believe this, but Planes, Trains and Automobiles is based on two true stories.
The first: This plot really happened to Hughes. Well, in broad strokes, anyway. He himself was an ad copywriter working in NYC. It was Thanksgiving weekend and he tried to get to Chicago. They’re not that close. It’d take you about thirteen hours by car to cover the 800ish miles. But Hughes didn’t end up in Chicago. Got himself routed through Wichita—same as Neal—and dead-ended in Phoenix. I’m no expert, but that’s not how you get to Chicago from anywhere.
Years later, Hughes was having dinner on a Wednesday night in LA with second unit director Bill Brown. Not sure what moved him to take out this yarn, but he told Brown, “I’ve got this idea.” Over the course of the meal, Hughes developed his bananas travelogue into a movie pitch. Brown said, “ just casual, sitting around talking about it. The following Tuesday, it was a greenlit picture at Paramount.” Hughes didn’t have a slow setting.'
I know what you’re saying. “Wait, you can’t ramble your way through a first-pass pitch on Wednesday and get a yes in six days! You’d need a script!” And you’re right, as usual. You’re always right! And that’s why you’re my favorite. Don’t tell the others, please, they don’t even know I do favorites. But you do, because you’re my favorite. Anyway, by the Monday following his dinner with Brown, Hughes had written the whole script. Banged it out over the weekend. This guy.
Sometimes scripts take a couple months to write. And that’s just for a draft. Two weeks is fast. But two days? I assume there was a Back to the Future-esque trail of fire behind Hughes’s word processor. I’m pretty sure his performance wasn’t powder-enhanced because the guy was a lifelong conservative. The wild thing is that Hughes’s land speed record scripts were really good. Fella had a reputation built on ‘em. But even so he wasn’t precious about his writing, encouraging actors on his movies to go off-book as the spirit lead. A pro and humble. This guy!
Well I’ve spilled an awful lot of MacBook ink to say: Planes, Trains and Automobiles basically happened to Hughes in real life. That’s true story numero uno.
Planes, Trains and Automofails
But I said this flick is based on two true stories. And it is. Which brings us to story number two.
So far we’ve got a hot director, a hot script and a green light from Paramount. Pre-production steams ahead. Steve Martin hops aboard, looking to move out of slapstick and into more intellectual roles. John Candy, who’d never quite gotten his breakthrough part, joins too. What could go wrong?
When directors make weather-based plans, Mother Nature scoffs. Chicagoan Hughes needed snow to make his Thanksgiving tale work. But it was hard to get. Brown said, “I just remember we were chasing snow. We were chasing snow everywhere we went. It was really, really bad.” They flew from city to city to keep production going. One day the ground would be bare, then inches of snow would move in overnight. They couldn’t keep shooting the scene because conditions were so different, so they’d start over. Take their licks and shoot it twice. Move on to wherever the snow went next.
It was a fiasco.
Steve Martin said, “We actually lived the plot of the movie. As we would shoot, we were hopping trains, planes, and automobiles, trying to find snow” Brown added, “I’ve worked on a number of films where there’s almost like…I refer to it as method filmmaking? Because it’s like, you just become the characters, in their experience.”
Character actor Troy Evans’s experience says everything. Hang on, lemme lay it out for you.
The guy was looking for work, bank account on empty. Then Planes, Trains and Automobiles hired him for a single day with a single line. It paid $1,000. An easy paycheck. The scene was to be shot in LA, but Evans’s agent phoned to say it moved to New York. So am I fired, Evans wondered? Nope, said his agent, you’re flying out. Plans changed as the weather did, and the time wasn’t right when Evans got there. So they hung onto him for that $1,000 fee—every day. For fifty-one days.
Evans: “We finally shot the scene in Kankakee, Illinois, on my fifty-first day. So I left home not having $300 in rent. And when I went back home, having done my one line in the movie, we bought our first house.”
Hughes’s two-guy comedy shot for eighty-five days total. That’s three months, the amount of time a big action picture would have required. Not this. Hughes, to his credit, kept calm and carried on. I think it helped that he used the same production crew shoot to shoot. When you’re good to who you work with and they’re good to you in return, how bad can things really be?
How to Land the Plane
John Hughes’s first picture for grown-ups was way over time and budget. What was supposed to be a simple story cost $15M and a quarter of a year. It was hard to edit down to a trim, commercial hour and a half. But when it hit theaters on the day before Thanksgiving of ’87, how’d it do?
Critics were mostly positive. Variety said “the disaster-prone duo” of Martin and Candy reminded the reviewer of "a contemporary Laurel & Hardy”. Movie-goers bought tickets to see it. Considering PTA came out right before Thanksgiving and with Christmas just a month away, it didn’t have a long thematic shelf life. But even so it raked in $49M at the box office. Not a grand slam, but tripling your budget isn’t bad at all.
Since ’87 Planes, Trains and Automobiles has became a late November regular. Its audience has only grown over the years, helped along by cable airings, VHS and later DVD and Blu-ray sales. You get the feeling this is a movie you really ought to have in your collection. And you’d be right.
In the end, PTA is a classic because it’s about two folks who have nothing in common except that they are both people. And, after a while, that’s enough. Friends? No. But fellow humans? Yes. Between November voting and Thanksgiving, it’s a good time of year to remember that we are all just people trying our best to make it work. And I think there’s probably a way to do that and to give each other a leg up from time to time, wouldn’t you say?
Pizza of the Week
This weekend’s pizza pie carried blanched wafer-thin potato slices tossed in olive oil and seasoning salt on a sour cream base. On top went a teensy bit of shedded mozz, cheddar and caramelized onions. The potatoes crisp up as the pizza bakes, resulting in something between a loaded baked potato and sour cream and onion chips. Mama mia!
Thanks for reading! That’s Thanksgiving classic Planes, Trains and Automobiles. If you’ve never seen it or haven’t in a while, put it on!
And, hey, if you liked this one, share it with a pal who would too. They’ve had enough Halloween candy anyway, make ‘em try Thanksgiving Candy.
Notes:
Steve Martin loves playing banjo. Pretty good at it too. His ’09 album The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo won a Grammy in ’10.
Since the shoot ended up being so long, so was Hughes’s first cut of the movie—3 hours and 45 minutes. Brown said, “I always joked that I think John cut out more funny stuff out of his movies than most people put in.”
John Hughes died of a heart attack in '09 at age 59, apparently in good health before.
John Candy would become a Hughes regular, co-starring in The Great Outdoors in ’88 and playing the solo lead in Uncle Buck in ’89.
I consider his crowning achievement to be Cool Runnings, which may not have aged well. Candy died in ’94 at age 43.