JOHN HUGHES AND ATWT

John Hughes, the legendary director of THE BREAKFAST CLUB and HOME ALONE (among many others) died August 6. While every youth oriented soap from the '80s on lives in Hughes' shadow, to me it was the character of Gwen on AS THE WORLD TURNS who felt truly plucked from the Hughes canon. Not only a dead ringer for Mary Stuart Masterson in SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL, Jennifer Landon's Gwen was also an aspiring low class rocker and in love with the upper class boy who doesn't think of her romantically. Arguably, straying far from this template in successive stories for Gwen weakened the character, perhaps leading to Jennifer Landon's decision to eventually leave the show. But for a while there, watching Gwen and Will on ATWT was like being in a wonderful John Hughes movie that had the potential to never end.