MovieChat Forums > Sixteen Candles (1984) Discussion > The living quarters they lived!

The living quarters they lived!


What is it with 80's John Hughes movies? The kids are always living in 5,000 square foot totally upper-middle class homes in established neighborhoods! Not ordinary tract home suburbs with 3 or 4 bedrooms and 2 or 2 1/2 baths, which look like poverty cases in comparison!

And Samantha's home was a modest bungalow compared to what Jake lived in, which was more like a powerful millionaires home!

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Jake was supposed to be the son of a very wealthy individual. His father drove a Rolls Royce and he had a Porsche 944. So I took no issue with his home being that big.

In general in films and TV the homes are well beyond what people in a similar situation can afford. I lost track of how many times I laughed at the home/apartment they gave a character knowing what they do for a living in the show.

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Watch Pretty in Pink. Molly's character lives in a pretty ordinary house in that one and her dad's unemployed.

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Yes, back in the 80's many white people considered her "poor". What a laugh! More like lower middle-class. She had a phone in her bedroom and her own car!

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Yes, back in the 80's many white people considered her "poor". What a laugh! More like lower middle-class. She had a phone in her bedroom and her own car!

They were poor. Her dad was a deadbeat living off of unemployment. Sam had her own car and a phone but she also had a job of her own. Her car wound't have cost her more than a couple of hundred dollars and unlike today, a phone wasn't that big of an expense. As long as you didn't make a bevy of long distance calls your phone bill might have been a few dollars a month and the phone was free from the phone company.

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The size of that house and the lawn tells that it is in a upper middle class neighborhood as of most of suburbs north of Chicago where this movie is filmed. Same for Risky Business, Weird Science, Adventures in Baby Sitting, Ferris Bueller, and Uncle Buck.

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The suburbs outside of Chicago there were upper middle class and fairly fancy.
Hughes was from outside of Chicago.

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By the time Ferris Bueller came out, I'd say it was obviously confirmed John Hughes wrote from his own POV as a rich kid. Or at least 'relatively quite well off.'

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