The John Hughes Files was very early to the Internet, 1996, the earliest year that personal Web sites, in any significant numbers, appeared on the Web. I first encountered the site when looking for additional ideas for the Tavern's obituary to the filmmaker who produced Mary Stuart Masterson's Some Kind of Wonderful. I spent over two hours exploring Ms. Gieseke's comprehensive Web site about the life and career of John Hughes. By this time, 2009, Christine was no longer making major updates to the site as adult responsibilities took over more of her time, including several sites she was maintaining for businesses in the Minnesota region. After awhile, I stopped visiting the site for a few years, but looked for it while checking on archived pages of the FYI page early in 2019. That was when I found out the site was gone except for copies in The Wayback Machine, and that Christine Gieseke passed away in September 2012.
It has been 22 years since the John Hughes movie Some Kind of Wonderful made so many past and present visitors to this site fans of Mary Stuart Masterson and the character she portrayed in the movie, Watts. Mr. Hughes passed away suddenly while taking a walk in Manhattan, where he was visiting relatives. He leaves behind his wife, Nancy, two sons and four grandchildren. Born in 1950, Hughes started his career as a copywriter for an advertising firm, working on such campaigns as Johnson's Floor Wax and other high-profile brands. He started in film as a screenwriter for the National Lampoon movies, and then began making his own mainstream movies, concentrating, at first, on the trials of adolescence and the social caste systems in public high schools. For a fine retrospective of John Hughes' movie making career, visit The John Hughes Files, a huge database of information about all of Hughes' work. The site was started in 1996 by a college coed who was inspired while down with the flu and unable to attend classes. She spent an entire day watching John Hughes movies on video and decided to start the site. The John Hughes Files has been on-line for nearly 13 years, originating in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
