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Nightmare parents and the curse of the child star: the difficult making of Home Alone

Who's the man? Macaulay Culkin - Alamy
Who's the man? Macaulay Culkin - Alamy

Home Alone was the costliest mistake Warner Brothers ever made. The studio loved John Hughes, who wrote and produced the film, but they loved him because he was able to deliver box office results on modest budgets.

Hughes, whose films included Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club, specialised in teen movies. But Home Alone, which recently turned 30, wasn't a teen movie. It was a movie with a 10-year-old child in the lead role, playing a boy who has to fend off burglars by himself after his family accidentally leave him at home when they take a trip to Paris. Warner Brothers agreed with Hughes that the budget would be capped at $10 million.

As it slowly became apparent that this would be impossible, Warner Brothers jumped off, and 20th Century Fox – whom Hughes had been secretly wooing anyway – jumped on.

Home Alone was released on November 16, 1990. And, on a budget of $18 million, it went on to make more than $476 million, becoming – for 14 years – the highest-grossing live-action comedy of all time.

In the lead role, Kevin McAllister, Hughes wanted Macaulay Culkin, as he had been in his most recent film, Uncle Buck, playing a headstrong eight-year-old called Miles. Chris Columbus, who directed Home Alone, didn't want to say yes without auditioning other kids. Casting director Janet Hirshenson says, “The first task was to see if there was anybody in New York or Chicago other than Macaulay.”

Magic touch: Macauley Culkin - Alamy
Magic touch: Macauley Culkin - Alamy

They didn't want a child from Los Angeles because the state had the strictest child labour laws, so Hirshenson flew to Chicago to audition a host of other children. (When she got on the plane the film was with Warner Brothers; by the time she touched down it had transferred to Fox.) “There were some great little kids,” she says, “but Macaulay was Macaulay. He was just this magic child.”

Devin Ratray, whose older brother had been influenced by Hughes' films in the 80s, had grown up hearing monologues from The Breakfast Club because his mother was an acting teacher. He remembers his callback for the part of Buzz in the Parker Meridian hotel in Manhattan, where children leant against walls because there were too many of them for chairs. He was excited and nervous but Columbus was there, and calmed him by reading the dialogue with him. Gerry Bamman, who played Uncle Frank, remembers that in his audition he was asked to improvise a scene in which he had to reassure Kevin's mother after she has left Kevin behind. “I remember liking him a lot,” Hirshenson says about Bamman. “He does the best blowhard.”

Executive producer Tarquin Gotch, who had worked as music supervisor on a handful of Hughes' films, was asked by his collaborator to come on board partly because a little mediation was necessary. “I think there was some friction between Chris and some members of the production team,” Gotch says. His job was to be “oil on the water”: to make sure that everyone was happy and that the script was being shot. “John's obsession was the script,” he says.

Shooting was tricky because of the restrictions placed on child actors. One of the reasons the budget rose and rose was because children can only film a limited number of hours a day, meaning the number of days had to increase. On the set in Winnetka, Bamman remembers, “The energy of all those kids from age five to 15 was bedlam. And it was amazing that Chris was able to control it constructively.” The team would shoot the kids' scenes first, then the adults', says Gotch. “You could bribe Macaulay with a few dollars if you wanted to try and get something in a rush when you were facing a deadline.”

On top of this, Kit Culkin – father to Macaulay but also to Kieran, who played one of Kevin's cousins and went on to star in Succession – was a difficult on-set presence. Kit, a former actor himself, would tell people what Macaulay wanted to do. “By law, he has the power to just abrogate a contract if he says that his child's welfare is being jeopardised,” says Bamman. “That's a pretty big club to be able to wield.”

Kit and his partner Patricia raised Macaulay and six other children in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side; they split up in 1995 and when Macaulay was 15 he had their names removed as his legal guardians.

Director John Hughes on the set of Home Alone - Paul Natkin
Director John Hughes on the set of Home Alone - Paul Natkin

There were other frictions on set. Actor Larry Hankin remembers that his agent called him, telling him that Daniel Stern – who played Marv, one of the crooks who breaks into the McAllister home – was likely to pull out because of disagreements about money. Hankin's agent told him to sit by his phone and pack his bag because, if he were to replace Stern, he'd have to leave immediately. But Stern capitulated and Hankin took his bag out from behind the couch. He was “pissed for the rest of the day”, he says.

However, fortune smiled on him. Having rejected an actor they liked, the producers – according to Hankin – felt that the movie would be cursed. There was only one tiny role left but they wanted to offer it to him, and they were willing to pay $10,000. He would be picked up in a limousine, fly first-class, and be back home the same day that he'd left. “That's how bad they think their movie is cursed – not how bad they want you,” he remembers his agent saying.

Hankin didn't have much trouble accepting the role, and played a police officer from Family Crisis Intervention, talking on the phone to Kevin's mother (Catherine O'Hara). His involvement is memorable for the fact that a piece of doughnut accidentally falls from his mouth to the telephone receiver, where it stays lodged for a surprisingly long time. The scene had been going wrong in various ways, says Hankin – the dolly went off the tracks; a light exploded – so, after the 11th take, when Columbus asked Hankin to look at the monitor, Hankin thought he must have screwed up in some way.

He showed him the doughnut falling onto the receiver. “Oh f___, all right, let's do it again,” Hankin said. “No no,” said Columbus. “That's going in.” Hankin wanted to find out why the doughnut stuck. “I was an industrial designer, I took physics,” he says. “What in a doughnut would make it cling?” He went over to the rack of doughnuts the props department had prepared for him, and he noticed that the lights above it had melted some of the doughnut glaze, making it stickier than it once was. His decision to ask for a doughnut in the first place was “the best acting decision I have ever made in my life”.

Home Alone's success was by no means expected. Gotch explains that for a comedy, the action actually starts unusually late in the film. In test screenings, Hughes would stand in the foyer, holding a coffee, able to hear the film and the audience. It would be nerve-wracking, says Gotch, because the film doesn't elicit more than titters for about an hour. And then, “Boom, you got the laughs.”

The film came out a month before Christmas and stayed at the top of the box office for 12 weeks, a colossal success. Critically it was actually sneered at, but this made no difference. Audiences loved it. “You go to a lot of kids' films that you don't wanna see twice, if you wanna see once,” says Bamman. “And this was a film that adults loved seeing again and again – and so did the kids.” So successful was it that for a while Bamman couldn't go out without getting a lot of attention, and in cinemas he would often wait until everyone had left before he walked out.

For Ratray life was forever different, and not necessarily in a good way. “As a young, burgeoning actor I didn't want to have been thought of as peaking as 13, for God's sake.” Everyone remembers the pizza scene early in the film, he says, but for him it has become impossible to remember that he was actually there in three dimensions, touching the linoleum and eating the food. “I can remember vividly many other memories of my 13th year: the summer I spent at a beach-house in Long Island; and I can smell the sea salt from Oyster Bay; I can remember the prickly green plants that grew out of the sand that you had to avoid, walking back to the house. But I can only remember vividly the Home Alone memories through a filter. It's the first time I've ever said that out loud.”

For Culkin, of course, being catapulted to international stardom was even more bizarre. “I don't know if you've ever been the lead in the highest-grossing family comedy of all time at the age of ten,” says Ratray, “but it's gotta be an unearthly sensation.” Culkin hadn't been given a crash course in how to deal with the adulation, so the subsequent years of his life were uniquely extraordinary. “There was a real freedom that he had that I'm not sure children should have,” says Ratray, who remembers visiting Culkin's apartment – which he owned as a teenager – and skating on a door down a hallway strewn with glass bottles. “None of this was charted territory.”

Barely out of puberty, Culkin had everything a child could wish for. This meant that in later years, when he decided to withdraw from acting for almost ten years, then focusing more on his pizza-themed band The Pizza Underground and starring in much smaller films, the press enjoyed announcing that his life had taken a turn for the worse. When he went through a thin phase, they said that he was using heroin; that he had AIDS; that he was dying. “I got pretty upset because Mac is a very sweet kid,” says Ratray. “He had a natural curiosity about him and a sincerity that he kept with him into adulthood.”

For better or worse, the actor will always be synonymous with the film, which spawned sequels, made-for-TV versions, and, unfortunately, a prospective reboot. Ratray is also besieged by fans on a regular basis. “The film has become more than a movie,” he says. “It has become an actual event and a bonding experience with millions of people. I've never heard anyone say, 'Home Alone caused my divorce.'”

Though Warner Brothers probably curse the film for robbing them of hundreds of millions of dollars, every year countless thousands of families sit down and watch what may be the most quintessential Christmas movie of all time. And, every year, Larry Hankin opens up a sweet residual cheque for the $10,000 he made eating a doughnut 30 years ago.