Sam Stark writing in Harper's Weekly.

Screenwriter Budd Schulberg, whose 1957 film "A Face in the Crowd" depicted the rise to power of a fascist hillbilly drug-company spokesman, died, as did film director and Republican John Hughes.

In a eulogy, actor and economist Ben Stein said that Hughes was "to the postwar middle class white kid what John Keats was to the age of upheaval during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars," and that his film "Home Alone" had captured "the mindset of the rich pre-teen child: total paranoia combined with almost Hitlerian fantasies of power and sadism."