Kevin Bacon Wishes His '80s Comedy From A Beloved Director Hadn't Flopped

"She's Having a Baby" was supposed to be John Hughes' transition to adult comedies. It was, in theory, perfect material for a writer/director who had become a household name on the strength of zeitgeist-seizing teen comedies like "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club." Hughes was squarely in his 30s by then, and he needed to train his suburban Chicago wit on the Yuppies who had spawned his Brat Pack target audience. Either that or step away from the Chicago of his mind altogether and make his "Kundun" (as in, the Martin Scorsese classic you've probably never seen).

A tragically unfunny thing happened on the way to "She's Having a Baby" hitting theaters. Hughes shot the movie mere months after releasing 1986's "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (which reaffirmed his mastery of the teen comedy), but it wasn't released until after his next production: 1987's "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." Why? Paramount had much less confidence in it than Hughes' Thanksgiving classic in the making, with the latter movie generating lots of positive pre-release buzz.

Most importantly, "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" was a holiday flick with a set release date, which allowed Hughes and Paramount to buy some time for revamping "She's Having a Baby." Hughes had more than earned some generous treatment from the studio, which was aware that it was a personal movie for him. After all, Kevin Bacon stars in the picture as Jake Briggs, an advertising copywriter in the same profession that Hughes was working in when he broke into the entertainment business and built a family.

Paramount finally premiered "She's Having a Baby" theatrically on February 5, 1988, where it received mixed reviews and flopped commercially. Hughes never recovered as a writer/director, and Bacon's burgeoning movie star career stalled, as he lamented many years after the fact.

Speaking with The Independent in 2005, Kevin Bacon recalled the heady days of the mid-1980s, when he was building off the critical and commercial momentum of "Diner" and "Footloose" and looking to cash in on that Brat Pack windfall. The next three years were an aspiring star's Vietnam. While contemporaries like Tom Cruise, Sean Penn, and Rob Lowe were rocketing to full-blown stardom, it felt like Bacon was getting table scraps with non-starters like "Quicksilver," "White Water Summer," and "End of the Line."

This was all supposed to change with "She's Having a Baby," but Paramount lost faith in the film. The studio dumped it in theaters in the early going of 1988, where late 1987 releases like "Good Morning, Vietnam," "Three Men and a Baby," and "Moonstruck" were still doing bang-up business. I think it's a flawed movie, but Bacon and his co-star Elizabeth McGovern were terrific in it. It deserved better.

Bacon took this failure hard. As he told The Independent, "I did 'She's Having a Baby' and I was really proud of that. It was a funny movie, it was a heartfelt movie. It was from a director, John Hughes, who'd just had one smash after another and it was, in my opinion, his best movie. And it didn't work. Nobody saw it."

One major issue for Paramount was that the movie's buzziest scene, a difficult childbirth scored to Kate Bush's emotionally pulverizing "This Woman's Work," was its climax. To sell that moment would have meant spoiling it in the film's marketing. Also, how do you finesse that into a trailer filled with belly laughs?

1988 was rough for Bacon. Two years later, though, he redeemed himself by starring in the greatest movie ever made: "Tremors."