Home Alone Breaks Away

By Gerald Clarke

Nearly every year, it seems, John Hughes gives moviegoers a surprise Christmas present: an amiable, unassuming film that blossoms into a smash entertainment. Last year it was National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Two years before that it was Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Both were a bit loud and raucous for some people, but this year Hughes' offering has a universal appeal and looks like the breakaway hit of the season. Home Alone, released on Nov. 16, has already grossed more than $50 million, and is causing jubilation in the executive suites of 20th Century Fox. "The figures we're getting, from both big towns and small towns, are telephone numbers!" exclaims Tom Sherak, < Fox's head of marketing. "They've got a lot of digits."

Like all of Hughes' ideas, Home Alone sprang from a small domestic problem. "I was going away on vacation," he says, "and making a list of everything I didn't want to forget. I thought, 'Well, I'd better not forget my kids.' Then I thought, 'What if I left my 10-year-old son at home? What would he do?' " One what-if led to another. Taking a break from packing, Hughes wrote eight pages of notes that developed into the screenplay of Home Alone, which he also produced.

The movie family is the McCallisters, preparing to leave for a Christmas reunion in Paris. Their youngest son Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) is sent to bed without supper for spilling milk on the passports. "I don't want to see you ever again for the rest of my whole life," he sulkily informs his mother. When he wakes up the next morning, he has got his wish: the family has vanished. In the confusion of a rushed departure for the airport, a sleeping Kevin has been forgotten, and his absence is not noticed until the rest of the clan is halfway over the Atlantic.

Kevin's first reaction is ecstasy. He turns his parents' bed into a trampoline, devours mountains of ice cream, looks at the forbidden photos in Playboy ("No clothes on anybody. Sickening"). His excitement wanes with the daylight, however, all the more so since most of the neighbors on his affluent block have also gone away for the holidays. What most scares a child? The bogeyman, of course, and Hughes supplies two comical would-be burglars (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern), one of whom has posed as a policeman to find out when the family would be gone. By the time they arrive, Kevin has decided that he is too old to be afraid, and he has loaded the house with enough booby traps to stop an army.

He coats the steps with ice -- a simple matter of spraying them with water -- and swings paint cans from the banister. Christmas ornaments are strewn about the floor like little land mines, a blowtorch becomes a flamethrower, and a hot iron is transformed into a ballistic missile. Home Alone director Chris Columbus notes that all the dirty tricks can be rigged up by a 10-year- old with simple household supplies, and all have what he calls "kid logic."

The wide-eyed belief of Culkin, 10, in the script's improbabilities is what makes them believable to the audience. A Manhattan native, he has been acting since he was four and has been around actors -- his own family -- all his life. His father Christopher has appeared in off-Broadway plays; his aunt is Bonnie Bedelia, who played Harrison Ford's wife in Presumed Innocent; and three of his five siblings are actors (the other two are too young). Culkin's biggest previous role was as John Candy's nephew in 1989's Uncle Buck.

Despite his seasoning, Culkin was by far the most natural of the hundred or so boys Columbus auditioned for Home Alone. "The others seemed to be playing to the moon and the stars," says Columbus. "Mack was very real and very honest. He seemed to be a real kid, one that you wouldn't be annoyed with if you had to spend two hours with." To induce Culkin to learn his lines, Columbus rewarded him with a game of Nintendo after each day of rehearsal in the Chicago studio where the picture was shot. Culkin was also entranced by Columbus' working habit of moving around the huge sound stage on roller skates.

Like Hughes, who made his name writing and directing adolescent stories such as The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Columbus has an affinity for tales of the young told by the young (he directed Adventures in Babysitting and wrote Gremlins and Young Sherlock Holmes). "For this picture I was mostly inspired by old David Lean films," he says, "particularly Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, because they are told from a child's perspective. No one has shown the terror of being a child in an adult world better than Lean."

Fox executives were apprehensive that their little story of a kid and two Keystone Kriminals would be lost in a season awash in such high-profile films as Rocky V, Kindergarten Cop and Godfather III. They were even more apprehensive about competition from Three Men and a Little Lady, a sequel to one of 1988's big hits, Three Men and a Baby, which opened five days after Home Alone. But, says Sherak, "by the time Three Men opened, we were already positioned. Our momentum just kept going."

It seems likely to continue for quite a while. Hughes and his colleagues have succeeded again in reminding Hollywood that though audiences like to be scared and occasionally shocked, they like most of all to feel good.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York