In 1987, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles was released in theaters and instantly became a holiday classic. Directed by John Hughes and starring Steve Martin and John Candy, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles tells the story of two traveling strangers who encounter numerous delays as they try to make it home in time for Thanksgiving. It’s a maddening series of events for the pair, who can’t seem to avoid hitting some bump in the road or another throughout the course of the movie. It’s also based on a real thing that happened to John Hughes back in his pre-fame days.
Like Steve Martin’s character Neal Page, Hughes once worked in advertising. One winter morning, he flew from Chicago to New York for an 11 a.m. presentation. He planned to return to Chicago by 5 p.m. that same day. However, the weather had other ideas, though, and Hughes’s flight out of LaGuardia Airport was canceled, forcing him to shack up in a hotel for the night.
By the next morning, even more flights were being canceled due to a snowstorm in Chicago. Hughes managed to get on a plane out of New York, but was rerouted to Des Moines, Iowa. As luck would have it, the airport in Des Moines was snowed in, and his flight would now be bringing him all the way out to Denver. He still wasn’t able to get back to Chicago from there, so he decided to stay on the plane and take it to Phoenix, because, as he later told his boss, “Well, Phoenix is warmer.”
When all was said and done, it took Hughes five days to return to Chicago after his presentation. While that might not sound exactly like how things played out in the movie, it was enough inspiration for Hughes to write the original script in a single weekend. He even met a guy at some point after his experience—a salesman, no less—who’d been traveling for many years and knew a lot about the very situation Hughes had dealt with. We’ll let you figure out how the impression that the traveling salesman left on him got incorporated into the screenplay.
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