Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Heartbreak Hotel

By 1988, Chris Columbus had enjoyed the kind of career most screenwriters dream of having. After his script for Gremlins was optioned by Amblin Entertainment, he’d been hand-picked by Steven Spielberg to write The Goonies and Young Sherlock Holmes. He then transitioned to directing with Adventures In Babysitting, a modest hit for Touchstone in 1987. All in all, things were going quite well for Chris Columbus. But he hit a wall with his follow-up project, Heartbreak Hotel, and he hit it hard.

Columbus also wrote the screenplay for Heartbreak Hotel, so it seems safe to assume that this was a story he really wanted to tell. It’s certainly idiosyncratic and intimate enough that it feels personal and Columbus was raised in Ohio, albeit not necessarily in a town like Taylor, the small Anytown USA setting of the film. However, the majority of the movie exists in a realm of pure fantasy with just enough nods to realism to create a real oddity that’s neither fish nor fowl.