You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation by Susannah Gora

Author:Susannah Gora [Gora, Susannah]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2010-02-04T07:00:00+00:00

\ chapter eight \

I LOVE FERRIS IN THE SPRINGTIME

Ferris Bueller Crafts the Perfect Day Off Before Graduating from High School—and John Hughes Graduates from Directing Teen Films

Act 2, scene 9—Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues, the Neil Simon Theatre, New York City, March 1985. The play chronicles the lives of young men preparing to fight in World War II, and a charming young actor named Matthew Broderick is reprising his role as the lead character, Eugene Jerome, which he originated two years earlier in Brighton Beach Memoirs. In the final scene of the play, he’s on a train with his army buddies, about to be shipped off to parts unknown. The soldiers, one of whom is played by Broadway newcomer Alan Ruck (who’d become close friends with Broderick through the course of the production), are sleeping while Eugene gives a soliloquy, clutching his notebook-size journal. Offstage, Broderick had recently been offered the leads in two movies—the film adaptation of Brighton Beach Memoirs, and a comedy, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, by John Hughes. Because of the conflicting shooting schedules, Broderick would have to choose which movie to do. “I was curled up there on-stage,” remembers Ruck, “pretending to be asleep.” While talking to the audience one evening, Broderick scribbled something in his notebook, presumably the inner thoughts of his character. During the scene, though, he subtly nudged Ruck and showed him a page in the notebook. On it, Broderick had written a number—the amount of money he’d been offered to play Ferris—and a question: “What should I do?”

Broderick picked the Hughes film. Alan Ruck would go on to play Cameron Frye, Ferris Bueller’s uptight best friend, the boy who starts the movie as the anxious, cheerless Id to Ferris’s Ego, but who, thanks to Ferris’s friendship and contagious joie de vivre, becomes a braver, more hopeful young man by film’s end. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the titular character may be a kid ditching school to spend an adventurous day in the sunshine with his friends, but he’s also something of a sage, possessing deep wisdom about savoring our brief time on this earth. (“The question isn’t what are we going to do,” Ferris tells his friends before setting off on their day of freedom. “The question is, what aren’t we going to do?”) Ferris, says Tom Jacobson, who coproduced the film, “is almost a magical character. He is a showman and a storyteller, and he has this exuberance that is a celebration of life.” It’s why today you’d be hard-pressed to find an American high-school yearbook that doesn’t quote somewhere in its pages Ferris Bueller’s view on existence: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

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