The eighties, goes the general thinking, was the decade of venality. No one in America—heck, in the WORLD—had been interested in making money before the 1980s came along and corrupted us all. It was, apparently, the era in which everyone walked around in gold lamé and regarded Ivana Trump as the last word in understated chic. Seriously, you couldn’t take the dog for a walk in the eighties without tripping over a giant Versace gold logo. And a pair of giant shoulder pads. And a massive pile of cocaine. And cocaine plays absolute HAVOC with one’s Armani stilettos.
Maybe it was—far be it from me to cast aspersions on lazy descriptions of an era—but a little-remarked-upon truth is that this is not, in fact, the mentality depicted in many mainstream eighties movies. Many Hollywood movies argued for, if not actual class warfare, then certainly a suspicion of wealth. Repeatedly, wealthy people are depicted as disgusting, shallow, and even murderous, while working-class people are noble and good-intentioned, such as in not exactly niche films like Wall Street,I Beverly Hills Cop, Ruthless People, Raising Arizona, and Overboard. Contrast this with today’s films like Iron Man, in which the billionaire is the superhero (and is inspired by actual billionaire Elon Musk), and the deeply, deeply weird The Dark Knight Rises, in which the villain advocates the redistribution of wealth—HE MUST BE DESTROYED. But the eighties films that were the most interested in issues of class were, of all things, the teen films.
The motivating force of almost every single classic eighties teen film was not, in fact, selling soundtracks, watching an eighteen-year-old Tom Cruise try to get laid, or seeing what ridiculous hairdo Nicolas Cage would sport this time round. It was social class. There’s The Karate Kid, in which the son of a single mother unsuccessfully tries to hide his poverty from the cool kids at school who make fun of his mother’s car; Dirty Dancing, in which a middle-class girl dates a working-class boy, much to her liberal father’s horror; Can’t Buy Me Love, in which a school nerd gains popularity by paying for it; Valley Girl, in which an upper-middle-class girl dates a working-class boy; Say Anything, in which a privileged girl dates a lower-middle-class army brat and her father turns out to be a financial criminal; The Flamingo Kid, in which a working-class kid is dazzled by a wealthy country club and starts to break away from his blue-collar father; and all John Hughes’s teen films.
Of course, issues of class can be found in the undercurrents of pretty much any American movie, from The Philadelphia Story to The Godfather. The difference with eighties teen films is that they were completely overt in their treatment of it: class is the major motivator of plot, even if it’s easy to miss next to the pop songs and Eric Stoltz’s smile. All these films stress emphatically that the money your family has determines everything, from who your friends are, to who you date, your social standing in school, your parents’ happiness and aspirations, and your future. They, to varying degrees, rage against the failure of the American Dream. They stress that true class mobility is pretty much impossible, and certainly interclass friendships and romances are unlikely, for the simple reason that rich people are assholes and lower-middle-class and working-class people are good. Which was unfortunate because according to the vast majority of eighties teen movies, the only way a teenager could truly move up out of their socioeconomic group was if they dated someone wealthier than them, Cinderella-style.
The one exception to this rule is Back to the Future, which definitely does not rage against the American system; instead, it concludes that, yes, money does buy happiness and that’s just great. When Marty returns from 1955 to 1985, he realizes that he has inadvertently changed history so that now his parents, formerly poor and therefore miserable and barely on speaking terms, are now rich and therefore happy and cheerfully smack each other’s backsides: “I remember how upset Crispin [Glover, who played George McFly] and Eric [Stoltz, who was originally cast as Marty] were about the ending of Back to the Future: now that they have money they’re happy,” recalls Lea Thompson, who played Lorraine Baines McFly. “They thought it was really outrageous. It went right over my head, of course. Maybe because I was poor and when I got wealthy I was happy!” This is indeed a subject that still riles Glover enormously. For decades he has spoken out against what he describes as “corporate movies”—that is, studio movies—that peddle “propaganda” and he is currently writing a book on the subject addressing, he says, “the Back to the Future issue in great detail.”
“The main idea was that the family was in love and I felt that if there was any indication that money equals happiness, that was a bad message to put out,” he says, the exasperation still palpable in his voice thirty years on. “I was not given the screenplay before we shot the film because Universal and Spielberg were at the time making it apparent that they needed to keep their movie under wraps. Which I understand but as an actor you have to investigate the psychology of the character, and you can’t do that until you’ve read it. Now I would be very insistent [about reading a script before committing to a film], but I was twenty years old at the time and it was a Universal movie; of course I was glad to be in it. So I wasn’t given the opportunity to read it before I was hired and so it was fair for me to be asking these questions but they did not think it was fair. When you raise questions people say ‘You’re crazy, you’re weird,’ because you’re questioning the authority that people have been brought up to think is the only correct way to think, when there are many correct ways to think.”
Ultimately, Glover says, he was so disgusted with the message of Back to the Future he refused to be in the sequel.II, III
“The point [of making the McFly family wealthy] was that self-confidence and the ability to stand up for yourself are qualities that lead to success,” says Bob Gale, cowriter of Back to the Future. “So we showed George and Lorraine had an improved standard of living, we showed them loving toward each other, and we showed that George was a successful author. It was the way to show the audience that George had indeed become a better man. And, of course, in the beginning, we depicted George as a loser, Lorraine as a drunk, with a terrible car and a house full of mismatched and worn-out furnishings.”
Back to the Future is such a charming film that it’s easy to be swept along by it and not notice this equation of lower-middle-class status with being a “loser.” But it does echo precisely the same message that other eighties teen films sent: the class you are born into dictates every aspect of your life.
“Class has always been the central story in America, not race—class,” says Eleanor Bergstein, the writer and producer of Dirty Dancing. “And when you’re a teenager you really start to notice this.” And there was no teen filmmaker who felt this as deeply as Hughes.
David Thomson complains in his majestic Biographical Dictionary of Film that in Hughes’s teen films “the fidelity of observation, the wit and the tenderness for kids never quite transcend the general air of problem solving and putting on a piously cheerful face. No one has yet dared in America to portray the boredom or hopelessness of many teenage lives—think of Mike Leigh’s pictures to see what could be done.” The first thing to say is that to complain that John Hughes isn’t enough like Mike Leigh is like getting annoyed that a chocolate cookie is not trying hard enough if it’s not a roast chicken. But it isn’t fair to dismiss Hughes’s movies as devoid of “hopelessness” since his repeated depiction of class issues in his films definitely shows the “hopelessness” in these American teenagers’ lives. Pretty in Pink (lower-middle-class girl falls for wealthy boy) and Some Kind of Wonderful (lower-middle-class boy falls for lower-middle-class girl who has gained acceptance among the rich kids through her looks) are the most obvious examples of Hughes’s teen films that were obsessed with class injustice and how difficult it is for kids from different classes to connect (Hughes, despite his inherently romantic nature, apparently thought they couldn’t, really). But it’s there in all his teen films, including Sixteen Candles (Jake’s house is notably bigger and flashier than Samantha’s) and The Breakfast Club (Bender’s somewhat implausible-sounding home lifeIV is compared to pampered Claire’s world, in which she can give out diamond earrings on a whim). But the film that really emphasizes how unfair he thought the system is is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
There are many reasons to love Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and I’ve gone through all of them. As I said in the introduction, this was the first what I called REAL MOVIE (that is, neither animated nor a musical) I was allowed to see and it instantly became my first love and Ferris my first crush. It represented everything to me, everything I wasn’t and didn’t have and wanted: teenagehood, freedom, coolness, sexiness. Every day after school, for a whole year, I would come home, go straight to the TV room, carefully close the door to keep out my dorky parents and Jeanie-ish younger sister, and watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Every. Single. Day. I carefully transcribed the script into my diary, which I still have, and at some point I decided my sister was sufficiently acceptable to allow her to reenact scenes from the movie with me, using my transcribed script. That summer, I taught my sister about making out, using the scene in which Ferris makes out with Sloane in the museum as a guide, and the two of us would duly writhe around on the living room, making out with our imaginary boyfriends (Ferris for me, Marty McFly for her), while our parents, watching from the doorway, wondered what new game their innocent little nine- and seven-year-old daughters had invented. This is perhaps the only time in my sister’s and my lives that our parents underestimated us.
As a kid, I loved the film and Ferris because I thought Ferris was so cool—he was cute, he was funny, and, most thrillingly of all, he could drive a car. I fantasized about him driving me to school, holding my hand all the way. (Yes, that was my sexual fantasy. Like I said, I had a pretty sheltered childhood.)
When I finally, and contrary to all my expectations, became a teenager and realized driving a car wasn’t quite as rare a skill as I’d believed as a nine-year-old, I decided that the real reason to love this film was that it was so weird. Like all of Hughes’s teen films, it has a simple premise (boy skips school and brings his best friend, Cameron, and girlfriend, Sloane, along for the ride) and takes place over a tiny period of time (like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off doesn’t even cover twenty-four hours). But it is a much stranger beast than anything else Hughes ever wrote. While all Hughes’s other teen films deal with the emotional minutiae of being a teenager, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off doesn’t make even the slightest pretense to realism. The characters are all surreal exaggerations of recognizable characters—the teenager, Ferris, is just that little bit too cocky, the principal, Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), is definitely too demented—and the situations it depicts are, quite clearly, impossible.
“John always meant for the movie to be a fable,” says Matthew Broderick. “In the original, longer version of the film there were some somber Hughesian musings about how when you’re an adult nothing matters anymore. But when he was editing he decided to make it clear that it was a comedy fantasy and so cut all that out. From the start, he knew it wasn’t going to be a messagey movie, like The Breakfast Club. He wanted it to be about having a good time.”
For years I had a theory—and I was very proud of this theory—that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off isn’t about Ferris at all: it’s about his miserable best friend, Cameron, and the whole movie is actually seen through Cameron’s eyes.V This is why we see Ferris as this golden boy, the one who can do no wrong, the one for whom everything always goes right and the one whom everyone loves: because that’s how Cameron sees him. Everyone had a friend in high school—and some still later in life—who, to their mind, exists within some kind of gilded halo, who is always funnier, smarter, cooler, and more popular than they could ever be, and that is who Ferris is for Cameron. While Ferris happily makes out with his girlfriend by the stained-glass windows in the Art Institute of Chicago (in what is the greatest montage scene of the eighties and my favorite cinematic moment of all time), Cameron has a mini nervous breakdown while staring at Georges Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte, as he realizes that he, like the child in the painting, is nothing more than a series of meaningless dots. Nothing comes easy for Cameron, who thinks too much about everything, but everything comes easy to Ferris, who thinks deeply about nothing. The clinching piece of evidence to my theory is that it’s Cameron who goes through an emotional change during the movie. He learns that, in order for him to achieve happiness at last in his life, he’s going to have to stand up to his father, for once. Ferris, by contrast, is as blithe and content at the end of the film as he is at the beginning.
I liked this theory a lot, mainly because I came up with it, but also because it explained all the things in the movie that I treasured. I loved the movie’s dreamy surrealism, with Ferris frequently breaking the fourth wall (Hughes loved to have his teen characters break the fourth wall but nowhere did he do it better, or as much, as in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and the strange characters with their strange peccadilloes: Grace, the school secretary, pulling pens out of her enormous hair; Charlie Sheen as the druggy punk dispensing life advice in the police station; the teachers whose classes are so boring they feel like a lobotomy.VI They are all exaggerations, and that feels right if the movie is seen through a teenager’s eyes because teenagers do exaggerate everything as they feel everything so intensely. And most of all, I loved Cameron, Ferris’s miserable best friend, who increasingly felt like the heart of the film to me. Ferris, I realized, might be kind of a jerk: he borrows his best friend’s dad’s vintage car, much to his friend’s horror (license plate: “NRVOUS”), just because he wants to borrow it. He manipulates his parents’ blind love for him, he torments his younger sister, and he lies to pretty much every single person in the movie.
“It was definitely a concern when we were making the movie—is Ferris actually just an asshole?” Broderick says with a laugh. “But I saw him as the maître d’ of the movie, and it’s right that he shouldn’t have emotional development. He’s hosting the film.”
In Ferris’s defense, he is definitely not “just an asshole.” Okay, sure, he drives his best friend to near suicide and his sister to the brink of self-destruction, but he is also the ultimate bringer of joy, making everyone happier and better for being part of his world (with the exception of Mr. Rooney, that is, and there really is no helping that man—he won’t even accept a consolation Gummy Bear!). But it is true that Ferris never experiences the sort of emotional journey one might expect of a film hero, and especially of a Hughesian hero.
All these issues further convinced me of the rectitude of my theory: of course the film must be Cameron’s fantasy because only a teenager like Cameron (or a kid like me) would think that Ferris was cool. All adults think he is a jerk. Of course the movie was seen through Cameron’s eyes. But as an adult, I’ve realized none of this is right either. What makes Ferris Bueller’s Day Off feel so special and warm isn’t that it’s about Cameron or the relationships behind the camera: it’s that it’s about John Hughes and, in particular, a subject especially close to his heart—social class.
Hughes wrote all his teen scripts quickly and with seeming Ferris-like ease, and this, his masterpiece, was no exception. He wrote it, incredibly, in just two nights: “You know how Salieri looked at Amadeus with rage when he’d pulled it out of thin air?” his collaborator Howard Deutch said, remembering Hughes working on Ferris, and using another eighties classic film as an analogy. “That was me looking at John writing a script. I’d be like, ‘How?! How?!’ ”
The reason Hughes was able to write his teen scripts so quickly was that he wrote so much of himself in them, both emotionally and in the details. It’s easy to mock the homogeneity of the world presented in these films, a world in which everyone’s white, suburban, and straight. But Hughes never meant his films to be seen as universal—they were utterly personal portraits of his own childhood, growing up as a teenager in the suburbs of Illinois (almost no one made movies set in Chicago until Hughes came along). But like Ephron, while the stories were personal, the emotions in the film are universal, and with their simplistic narratives and familiar tropes, their clean divisions between good and bad, Hughes’s teen films have become to the latter half of the twentieth century what Western films were to the first: they are as central to the way Americans raised on them see their own lives, and the way non-Americans raised on them see America. There is a part of me that still feels, and probably always will feel, that I didn’t go to a REAL high school because mine—private, all girls, urban—looked nothing like the public, coed suburban schools I grew up watching. At my school in New York, we didn’t even have a high school—we had an “upper school.” So whenever people ask me about my “high school” experiences, for a few initial seconds I envisage myself at Shermer High School, Hill Valley High School, or even Westerberg High School. And then I remember the boring truth.
To cite all the references Hughes put into his films that came straight from his own life would take up a whole book, but a few select ones from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off alone include Ferris’s home address (his house number is 2800, Hughes grew up in 2800 Shannon Road); the “Shermer High” school scenes were shot in Hughes’s old high school, Glenbrook North High School; Hughes and his high school best friend used to talk their way into fancy restaurants, as Ferris does when he takes his friends to Chez Quis (a punning reference, as writer Susannah Gora points out, to the American pizza chain Shakey’s). But probably the most autobiographical moment in the film comes when Ferris takes Cameron and Sloane to the Art Institute of Chicago. When Hughes was in high school the museum was, he said, “a place of refuge for me” (in Some Kind of Wonderful, the male protagonist, Keith, describes the museum as “my sanctuary”) and “this was a chance for me to go back into this building and show the paintings that were my favorites.” But whereas Hughes would go to the museum alone as a teenager, here he has the teenage male lead of the film bring his girlfriend and best friend (and Hughes himself now brings his entire audience with him).
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off isn’t Cameron’s fantasy about Ferris—it’s a former teenage outsider’s self-fantasy about what their teenage life should have been like, and this is why it appeals so much to Hughes’s audience, which is largely made up of current and former teenage outsiders. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off presents a nerd’s idealized view of teenage life: sanitized, safe, and sweet, in which you are universally adored for being your own weird self and can do whatever you damn well want. This is a vision that would appeal enormously to a former teenage outcast (Hughes) and a future one (me as a child).
“I sort of saw Cameron and Ferris as the two sides to John Hughes, because he could be moody and quiet, John. But he had another side to him that didn’t give a damn about anything and could be really funny,” says Broderick.
Hughes wrote Ferris Bueller’s Day Off after Pretty in Pink and during his reworking of Some Kind of Wonderful, and both of those films feature archetypal Hughesian outcasts: Duckie (Jon Cryer) and Keith (Eric Stoltz). Ferris, by rights, should fit into this group, seeing as he is odd, has no interest in doing what people in authority tell him to do, and likes New Romantic English singers. Like Duckie, he favors animal print (Duckie: shoes; Ferris: waistcoat), he talks to himself, and he dances to old-school singers.VII And also like Duckie, he would be insufferably annoying if he weren’t so sweet. (That Jon Cryer looked almost identical to Broderick as a teenager further encourages identification between their characters.) But there are two key differences between Ferris and Duckie and Keith: Ferris is rich and popular and Duckie and Keith are poor and outcasts and, in an eighties teen movie, these issues are inextricably connected.
Hughes grew up in a lower-middle-class family in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, an artistic outsider in a typical suburban high school, and he never forgot how it felt to be “on the lower end of a rich community,” as he told the New York Times. The divisions he draws between the wealthy and poor kids are done with a hand so heavy they could only belong to a man who once felt himself to be the victim of class snobbery. To be rich, in Hughes’s films, means that you are a jerk but granted instant popularity, while the noble working-class kids muddle through in the shadows.
So when Hughes decided to write a film about—for the one and only time in his career—a popular but likable kid, he simply took the nerd from his previous film, Duckie, and made him rich. This, in Hughes’s world, was how a kid, even one as odd as Duckie/Ferris, was guaranteed popularity. The Buellers definitely have money, enough to give their son a computer and their daughter a car. Where Duckie apparently sleeps on a mattress in a bare room in Pretty in Pink, his alter ego Ferris sleeps in a room surrounded by computers and a giant stereo system. Where Duckie pines hopelessly after his female best friend and fantasizes in vain about marrying her, Ferris dates the prettiest girl in school and she is desperate to marry him. And where Duckie seems to have no parental figures at all in his life, Ferris’s parents think he’s wonderful, even when the school principal tells them he really isn’t. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is like Duckie’s fantasy, which it is, to an extent, because it’s Hughes’s fantasy. But because this is a Hughes film, there is, inevitably, a dig about wealth in it and this is done through Cameron.
Cameron is, clearly, much richer than Ferris. Whereas Ferris’s house is a typical but very plush upper-middle-class suburban house, Cameron lives in what looks like a multimillion-dollar bunker for a Bond villain. His father’s collection of vintage cars alone probably costs twice as much as the Bueller homestead. And Cameron is emphatically miserable. Hughes suggested that Cameron’s parents simply don’t love him (the reason there is a close-up on Mary Cassatt’s painting Mother and Child in the museum montage is that, Hughes said, “I thought it was very relevant to Cameron, the tenderness between a mother and a child which he didn’t have”), and Cameron knows that his father loves his Ferrari more than he loves his family. Even in a film that ostensibly lightens up on wealthy kids, Hughes couldn’t help but make the point, again, that being a rich teenager—despite how it might look from the outside—actually sucks. Even if you yourself are not a jerk, like Steff in Pretty in Pink or Hardy in Some Kind of Wonderful, chances are your parents will be.
“Class consciousness was very important to John, and you can see it as he wrote about it so much,” says Broderick. “He didn’t talk about things like that so much but as time has passed I’ve realized that although he was very conservative politically, I think, he had a real problem with wealth when it was too concentrated. He always writes about it, even in something like Planes, Trains and Automobiles. There’s very often somebody with money and somebody without. With Ferris, he tried to keep it on a fable level but those elements are definitely still in there.”
This issue of class consciousness became, thanks largely to Hughes, such a staple of eighties teen movies it is as much of a cliché as the climactic prom. But it is the one ingredient to the genre that has never been picked up by its many copyists. Plenty of films have come out in the past decade that pay explicit homage to eighties teen films, and especially Hughes’s teen films, from Easy A to 21 Jump Street, which the film’s star and producer, Jonah Hill, described as “a mix of Bad Boys and a John Hughes film.” But none of these films ever deals with the class issues that Hughes depicted. Partly this is because the people who make these homages are remembering the films from when they saw them as kids and, by and very large, kids didn’t notice all these arguments about social mobility, focusing instead on the power ballads and fights in the school canteen. But it is also because Hollywood—and by extension America—doesn’t talk about class issues the way it used to.
“There is an avoidance of talk about class identification now. You’ll hear talk of gender identification, sexuality identification, race identification, but never class,” says Eileen Jones, a lecturer in film and media at the University of California, Berkeley, and a writer for the socialist-leaning magazine Jacobin. “Class identification, in America at least, is going through what feminism went through in the eighties: it is completely passé.”
What is even more passé is to say that social mobility is impossible. This goes specifically against the American dream and therefore verges dangerously into the kind of talk that will get a filmmaker denounced by Fox News. Mainstream Hollywood movies that have depicted social mobility in the past twenty years, such as Erin Brockovich or even Pretty Woman, have all suggested that it is possible to lift oneself out of one’s class (even if one has to become a prostitute and—even worse—spend a week with Richard Gere in Beverly Hills to do so). Teen movies of the 1980s argue precisely the opposite. “Eighties films were willing to deal with being poor and people’s lives being screwed over by economic structures. You hardly see that at all in movies today,” says James Russell, principal lecturer in film at De Montfort University in London.
The reason American teen movies specifically stopped featuring class issues after the eighties can be traced, again, back to one specific film: Clueless. Clueless was so big it inevitably changed everything about how teen films were framed, including the trend in teen pop culture of showing, not how middle-class American teenagers actually live, but how they didn’t even know they would like to live. Already by the mid-1990s teen films such as 10 Things I Hate About You and American Pie were depicting a world in which all teenagers came from the same upper-middle social class, in which everyone lived in big houses and drove big cars. Sure, there were still cliques and outcasts in the schools, but these had nothing to do with social class. Instead, the idea of a poor or even lower-middle-class kid appearing in a teen film today feels as outdated as a movie about workers’ unions.
But instead of looking at why American teen movies in particular don’t deal with class anymore, the question could be instead why so many of them did in the eighties.
“Never underestimate Hollywood’s eagerness to copy something successful,” laughs Dirty Dancing’s Eleanor Bergstein. “The reason so many teen movies talked about class is because those movies were successful, so then more movies would come along just like them.”
Another factor is the demographic of the people who made the films. Hughes was from a lower-middle-class family, Bergstein grew up in a similar economic situation, and Dirty Dancing was born out of memories of her childhood, “and these were subjects that we talked about,” she says. It is impossible to find precise statistics about the demographics of who works in Hollywood now but one thing is widely agreed on: “Hollywood has never been culturally diverse, but it’s getting narrower, and it’s definitely narrower than it was thirty years ago,” says Russell. “It’s much more male and more white and largely college-educated and middle-class. It doesn’t draw from a particularly broad background, at least at the top end. It’s hard to imagine Sam Peckinpah getting in today.”
But probably the most crucial factor of all is the fact that movies today are more dependent than ever on the international market.
“You can’t sell a movie to Japan or China that is about specific American cultural issues. So while American movies are still set in America, they are much vaguer and certainly not about American social issues,” says Russell. “Also, it tended to be mid-budget films that dealt with social issues in the eighties, and Hollywood doesn’t make films with those budgets anymore. It makes big blockbusters or low-budget independents.” Hollywood in the 1980s produced hundreds of films about American social issues. Four alone were produced about the 1980s farm crisis: Field of Dreams, Places in the Heart, Country, and The River. These days, social engagement is left to the niche independents while the big-budget movies that are aimed at the masses take care to talk about nothing specific at all.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off isn’t just a fantasy about wealth, it’s about growing up. The best of Hughes’s teen films—The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—are ultimately about the dread of growing up, of moving away, of losing that sparkle you have as a teenager and becoming as dead inside as all the adults seem to be around you. As the man wrote, in what is possibly his most famous line of all, when you grow up your heart dies. Everyone who watches those films as a teenager grows up with that dread and, eventually, regret about it. And this is something Hughes struggled with as much as any of his fans. It is ironic that Hughes, who made such a sparkling film fantasizing about what it would be like to be rich and popular, struggled when he attained that status for himself.
By the time he started shooting Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Hughes was already, as Broderick puts it, “the godlike Spielberg figure of teen movies.” By the time it came out, and became his biggest success, he was one of the most sought-after directors and writers in Hollywood. Everyone wanted to meet and work with the former kid who used to lurk around museums on his own. “And John, I think, really didn’t like it,” says Howard Deutch. “He always felt like an outsider, and that’s how he was able to write those characters. When he became successful out in L.A. and everybody wanted him, from Spielberg to Katzenberg, and all the power elite all wanted to do business with him, he found himself as a member of the insiders boy club. I think he felt like it was actually an obstacle to writing these characters that he believed in because he no longer felt like himself.”
So Hughes and his family moved back to Chicago, Hughes’s hometown, where he always felt happiest, and he continued to write. But the films he wrote “never had the emotional impact I recognized as John’s real skill,” says Molly Ringwald. Instead, particularly from 1990 onward, he wrote his “dopey-ass comedies”: Beethoven, 101 Dalmatians, and, of course, Home Alone. He no longer wrote about soulful teenage outcasts, maybe because he knew he no longer was one.
He also cut himself off from almost all the friends he’d made on those teen films, leaving them behind when he left the genre. “I went to John’s funeral and I realized when I was there that I hadn’t actually seen him in over a decade,” recalls Broderick. “It was sad because it had been such a happy set when we were making the film, and even afterwards John would invite Jennifer [Grey] and me to his house and we’d hang out in the pool with his family.” He smiles at the memory, and then sighs: “But then he just disappeared.”
Ferris had his one perfect day. It’s what comes after that can be a drag.
I found that out for myself, too. I would never have believed it when I was nine, but I did eventually grow up and when I was about thirty-one, I moved back to New York after having spent twenty years in London. I don’t know, maybe I was trying to recapture my youth, like Hughes did with his films. But that only really works in the movies and, the truth was, I felt as lonely and confused as Cameron Frye did when he was eighteen. I tried dating for a while, but it turned out that dating as a thirty-something woman in New York was about as tedious and riddled with clichés as trying to get a date to the prom when you’re the school nerd in an eighties teen film. So eventually, I gave up the men and got a dog. As it happened, one of my neighbors had as little of a life as I did and our evening dog walks often synched. At first we just smiled at each other while our dogs sniffed one another’s butts. But eventually, as we picked up dog poop together on Seventh Avenue for the tenth night in a row, it got too awkward not to introduce ourselves—after all, our dogs already knew one another’s anal glands. So I went first.
“So, um, I’m Hadley,” I stammered.
“I’m Matthew,” he mumbled back. But I knew that already, of course. Because it was Matthew Broderick.
I didn’t make out with him on my parents’ living room rug. I didn’t even hold his hand. But none of that mattered—as I headed out again every evening, knowing I’d be picking up dog poop with Matthew Broderick, it felt like I finally got my Hughesian happy ending.
I. Wall Street is pretty much the film equivalent of “Born in the USA” in the way it was misunderstood and reappropriated by precisely the people it was satirizing: just as Gordon Gekko’s mantra “Greed is good” was adopted by Wall Street bankers, so Springsteen’s protest against the Vietnam War was clunkily adopted by Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign for the presidency.
II. He has also said in the past that another factor in his refusal to be in the sequel involved a pay dispute. With delightful and characteristic Gloverishness, he does not seem to see any contradiction between his moral stance against the film’s celebration of wealth and his demand for more pay.
III. This refusal then led to Zemeckis’s re-creating Glover’s face in the sequel through the use of film and prosthetics on another actor. Glover in turn sued the filmmakers and the case was settled out of court. As you can imagine, Glover has quite a lot of feelings on this subject, too, which, sadly, we have neither the time nor space to get into here.
IV. Although to be fair to Hughes, the implausibility may be more of a reflection on Judd Nelson’s attempts at Method acting than Hughes’s writing.
V. There is a popular Internet conspiracy theory that says Ferris is actually a figment of Cameron’s imagination, and there is merit in that. But personally, I don’t want to live in a world where Ferris doesn’t exist, albeit only on-screen.
VI. The economics teacher who roll-calls “Bueller . . . Bueller . . .” was played by Hughes’s friend and noted economist Ben Stein, who has said that acting in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was the happiest day of his life: “[My obituary will] have a picture of me and above it will say ‘Bueller . . . Bueller.’ The fact that I went to Yale Law School, was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, wrote thirty books, that will all be washed away and it’ll just be, ‘Bueller . . . Bueller.’ And that will be just fine” (from Susanna Gora, You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried). Stein omits from his list of achievements that he was also a speechwriter for Nixon, a game show host, an advertising spokesperson (which led to him being sacked by the New York Times), and author of a famously laughable defense of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund who in 2011 was accused of raping a hotel maid. Stein pooh-poohed the allegation with the ironclad argument that “people who commit crimes are criminals,” and not rich, important men like Strauss-Kahn. Maybe those achievements didn’t feel as noteworthy to Stein as his attendance at Yale Law School? But no matter. In this book at least, a good Ferris Bueller’s Day Off appearance can momentarily wash away all sins.
VII. Ferris and Duckie’s dance styles are pretty similar, too, which is not that surprising as the man who choreographed Ferris’s parade dance, the great Kenny Ortega, also choreographed Duckie’s dance to “Try a Little Tenderness” in Pretty in Pink. He later went on to choreograph Dirty Dancing and, somewhat less excitingly in this book’s opinion, High School Musical.