The Undersung

Our critics on seven great artists who might’ve been lost to the canon.

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FAME, AT LEAST LASTING FAME—the your-work-goes-down-in-history kind, often accompanied by fat royalty payments—is a club that thinks of itself as an unbiased meritocracy, blind to everything but aesthetic innovation and popular success. It’s never quite worked out that way. When we look at the past, we still see generations of great talents who never quite got their due critically or commercially, many of them left relatively unsung. Here, our critics pick artists they feel remain underappreciated and tell their stories and sing their praises. ¶ We will continue this project all year online at Vulture.

Anne Beatts was always more interesting than John Hughes.
BY JEN CHANEY

IN CONVERSATIONS ABOUT portraits of teenage life from the 1980s, the first name that invariably gets mentioned is John Hughes. That makes sense. The filmmaker’s coming-of-age canon—which includes Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—was enormously influential and is still actively referenced in today’s high-school movies and TV shows. But there’s another name that doesn’t come up nearly as often and definitely should: Anne Beatts.

Like Hughes, Beatts got her start by working at National Lampoon, becoming the first female editor at the male-dominated comedy institution. She was also a member of the original writing staff of Saturday Night Live, working as one of three women writers in an atmosphere often likened to a frat house. Two decades before Tina Fey pulled off a similar move, Beatts left the show to create and produce her own television series. As People magazine put it in a 1983 profile of Beatts, “Mary Tyler Moore had Grant Tinker, Carol Burnett had Joe Hamilton, and Lucy had Desi; Anne Beatts has chutzpah.”

The series was Square Pegs