Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Adventures In Babysitting

The 1980s saw a mini-boom of what I like to call “up all night” movies, each one set in a different city following a hapless every-person (or, in the case of the film under discussion today, people) as circumstances force them into a situation way, way over their head. The first and best of these was Martin Scorsese’s all-time classic After Hours, with yuppie Griffin Dunne venturing into NYC’s SoHo district. Los Angeles had John Landis’ Into The Night, a west-coast twist starring Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer. And it seems appropriate that Chicago, home of teen movie master John Hughes, played host to Adventures In Babysitting, the teen variation on the “up all night” story.

That resemblance to both Hughes and Scorsese was wholly intentional. First-time screenwriter David Simkins freely admitted that his goal was to create a cross between Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and After Hours. Simkins was working for New World Pictures at the time. They weren’t interested, so he shopped his script around until it wound up at Paramount. Once there, it was assigned to producers Debra Hill, John Carpenter’s longtime associate, and Lynda Obst, who had recently set up their own production shingle at the studio.

Around this same time, Chris Columbus was looking to make the transition from screenwriting to directing. Columbus had caught the eye of Steven Spielberg with his NYU short film I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here. Columbus’ professional career got off to an unsatisfying start with the horny teen drama Reckless in 1984. Things turned around with his next project, the spec script Gremlins, which Spielberg bought and co-produced through his production company, Amblin. Subsequently, Spielberg became a bit of a mentor to Columbus, hiring him to write The Goonies from Spielberg’s story idea, and producing Young Sherlock Holmes.