L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein posted a 3.24 piece on ’80s-youth- comedy poobah John Hughes, honoring the now-reclusive director as the author of the original treatment of Drillbit Taylor and the father of the Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith-type comedies filling screens today. Defamer found Goldstein’s piece unsatisfying, however, and yesterday ran a request for reader questions to be sent to Hughes for some kind of follow-up. I don’t have a question for Hughes, but I have a question about him that I’d like answered.

It concerns an article about Hughes in the National Lampoon. Or maybe it was in Spy magazine. Sometime in the early to mid ’80s, one of these two ran what seemed at the time to be a heavily-sourced, hugely entertaining account of Hughes’ petulant, sometimes irascible behavior as observed by anonymous colleagues and assistants. The article was called “Big Baby,” and it had, I recall, a distinctive painting of enfant terrible Hughes on the opening page.
I trusted it partly because of Hughes’ writing history with the Lampoon going back to the ’70s. With NatLamp staffers (or former staffers) having their own first-hand knowledge of the guy, I figured they had to have pretty good sources. Obviously this observation is moot if it was written for Spy.
If anyone has a copy of “Big Baby” and could send me a scan of the pages, I would make it available here. Please send a scan of the cover page also, information about the issue (date, issue #, other articles), and so on.