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The canvas backing from Hughes’s director’s chair from the set of Sixteen Candles, signed by members of the crew and cast.
A business card for Del Griffith, the John Candy character in Planes, Trains & Automobiles, that was designed by Aaron Draplin, of Draplin Design Co., in 2008. (Draplin, the creative force behind the popular Field Notes brand of memo books, was a late-in-life friend of Hughes’s.) A small run of cards was printed up, intended for circulation among Hughes’s friends and (somewhat subversively) in places where business cards are collected, such as community bulletin boards and the “goldfish bowls” that cafés and small businesses put out.
An untitled drawing from one of Hughes’s notebooks.
The shoulder bag used by Hughes during the filming of Sixteen Candles. When the production ended, this bag was boxed up with several personal items related to the shoot and remained untouched until family members came upon it in August 2009. The bag’s contents were perfectly intact, down to the script pages from the final scene of the shoot, a newspaper, train and airline ticket stubs, and a package of Life Savers.
Two pages from one of Hughes’s Moleskine pocket notebooks, from 2006.
The shoes that John Candy wore as Del Griffith, the outwardly chipper but inwardly blue traveling salesman in Planes, Trains & Automobiles. Hughes had them bronzed after the shoot.
A sample of one of the young Hughes’s pitches while working as a freelance joke-writer, pulled from his personal files. This particular set of one-liners was sent to Phyllis Diller in 1972, when Hughes was 22. Also stashed in the file were photocopies of the checks Hughes received from Diller ($10 per approved gag).
A box of demo tapes and mix tapes that Hughes gathered while deciding which music to use in his films in the 1980s. The tapes pictured here include temp scores (selections of existing recorded music used by directors to convey what they want in the final score), submissions from bands, and personal mix tapes of various genres that Hughes used to generate ideas for music cues.
Two pages from one of Hughes’s Moleskine pocket notebooks, from 2008. At left is a portrait of the jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy.