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

by Susannah Gora

  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.”

  John Hughes had long been known for the almost superhuman speed with which he wrote scripts, but he took this concept to an entirely new level with the screenplay for Ferris Bueller. One day in early March 1985, Hughes excitedly burst into Ned Tanen’s office at Paramount with an idea: “Guy takes a day off from school.” Tanen was intrigued by the concept of the story, but there was one problem: The Writers Guild of America was thirty-six hours away from setting up picket lines in its strike against the studios.

  Howard Deutch, who was gearing up to direct the Hughes-penned and -produced teen drama Some Kind of Wonderful, recalls being at Hughes’s house, because Hughes was going to be doing some rewrites for Wonderful that night. Deutch fell asleep on Hughes’s couch at midnight. At five-thirty in the morning, Hughes woke him up. The music was blasting, and Hughes was chain-smoking. “He hands me this thick thing,” Deutch recalls. “I say, ‘What’s this?’ He says, ‘Oh, I just wrote this thing—I’m sorry I didn’t get to the rewrites yet—see what you think.’” The stack of papers Hughes handed Deutch was the first fifty pages of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and they were so good that Hughes barely changed them. He finished the script the next night. “You know how Salieri looked at Amadeus with rage when he’d pull it out of thin air?” says Deutch, referencing the film Amadeus. “This was me looking at John writing a script. I’d be like, ‘How?! How?!’” Sure enough, said Tanen, John Hughes “came to my door at 11:50 p.m. on Friday…and hands me a script. I read it and said, ‘Let’s go.’”

  The script Hughes gave Tanen told the story of a charismatic high-school senior who orchestrates an intricate plot to foil the dean of his suburban Chicago school, so that he, his best friend, Cameron, and his girlfriend, Sloane, can run loose on a gorgeous spring day. They spend their “day off” driving around Chicago in a Ferrari, checking out a Cubs game, and doing touristy things like visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, the observation deck atop the Sears Tower, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and participating in the German American Von Steuben Parade. Said Hughes while making the film, “Ferris is doing what everybody at some point wants to do, which is to say, ‘How can I be expected to go to school on a day like this? This is a beautiful day, and I have things to do.’” On the surface, the comedy seems like nothing more than a benign ode to playing hooky. But in typical Hughesian fashion, there are plenty of deeper issues at work here: Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane wrestle with questions of parental pressure, societal conformity, and the bittersweet angst that flavors the last few weeks of high school, when you know that unstoppable change is right around the corner.

  At the casting sessions for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, there was a rich pool of exciting young talent to choose from—out of a veritable treasure trove of gifted actors working in Hollywood. Thanks primarily to the earlier Hughes films and to St. Elmo’s Fire, the youth dramedy was, by the mid-1980s, continuing to be an ever more popular and enduring genre. Explains Tom Jacobson, the increasing profitability of the eighties youth films “created an environment where you had a lot of young actors aged nineteen to twenty-nine who were working, and coming up in the business.” At the casting sessions for Ferris Bueller, recalls Jacobson, “we saw all of them.”

  And yet, for the title character, the larger-than-life Ferris Bueller, casting directors Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins immediately thought of Broderick. The only other person they considered seriously was John Cusack, who was making his own claim to teen stardom with Better Off Dead. But ultimately, it was all about Broderick’s endearing mixture of confidence and warmth that sealed it for him, because, as Hirshenson has said, “the character, unless done right, could be a real obnoxious brat.”

  By the time Matthew Broderick was up for the role of Ferris Bueller, he was a bona fide star of both stage and screen (People magazine had called him “one of the most intriguing people” of 1983). He had already won a Tony (for his performance in the stage version of Brighton Beach Memoirs) and had starred in a handful of movies, including Neil Simon’s Max Dugan Returns, WarGames (the 1983 hit computer thriller in which he costarred with Ally Sheedy), and 1985’s medieval adventure story Ladyhawke. Born in New York City on March 21, 1962, Broderick grew up around the theater. His parents, James Broderick (who died in 1982, the day before Matthew would begin rehearsing Brighton Beach Memoirs) and Patricia Broderick, were both actors, his father having starred in the ABC series Family. A born and bred Manhattanite who projected a tongue-in-cheek awareness of his own charm, Broderick boasted a subtle nasal New York accent and unstoppable panache. When offered the role of Bueller, he was thrilled, but was also concerned: in the plays Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues his character spoke directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and so does Ferris Bueller. “I was a little bit afraid,” Broderick admits. “It was like, are these all the same? Am I basically playing the same part over and over again?”

  He worried he would be typecast, but then again, this was the chance to star in a movie made by John Hughes, who was the hottest thing going. “I mean, he was it,” says Broderick. “So I knew getting that job and playing that part was potentially a very big deal.” Broderick’s representation knew it, too. “My agents basically flew in and surrounded the theater with cop cars to make sure that I would do that movie,” he says, laughing. “They were petrified I wouldn’t like it. But even when I wanted to just take my time and read it, they were like, ‘No! You’re not allowed to even get to the end; you have to just say okay!’” Which of course, he did. Broderick knew, even then, that Ferris represented much more than a typical teen, particularly to Hughes. “To John,” Broderick said while making the film, “Ferris Bueller is more than a person—he’s an attitude, and a way of life, and a leader of men.”

  When Alan Ruck’s agent at William Morris pitched him for the character of Cameron Frye, Ferris Bueller’s best friend, filmmakers weren’t interested: Ruck was twenty-eight at the time, and thus, they thought, too old to be playing a high-school senior. But Ruck’s agent reminded them that he played the same age as Matthew Broderick, who was twenty-three, onstage every night in Biloxi Blues. Ruck was born July 1, 1956, in Cleveland, and went on to study at the University of Illinois and act in Chicago in the early 1980s before moving to New York, landing small roles in movies such as Class, doing Biloxi on Broadway, and then wowing the casting directors of Ferris. Ultimately, he looked so youthful, with his huge blue eyes and unlined face, that he won the part. This wasn’t Ruck’s first encounter with John Hughes—the actor had auditioned, uneventfully, for The Breakfast Club some years earlier. “I think [Hughes] had me read Anthony Michael Hall’s part,” says Ruck, “and then Judd’s part.”

  Ruck says the role of Cameron in Ferris had been offered to Emilio Estevez, who turned it down. “Every time I see Emilio,” says Ruck, “I want to kiss him. Thank you!” Although Ruck would be playing a character more than ten years younger than himse
lf, there were plenty of notes that he felt he shared with Cameron. Growing up, says Ruck, “I was a complete weirdo,” so when he was playing Cameron, “I was pretty much just me. Me, in a hockey jersey.”

  And Alan Ruck had something else going for him: his real-life connection with Matthew Broderick, which would translate beautifully onto the screen. “We didn’t have to invent an instant friendship like you often have to do in a movie,” says Ruck. “We were friends. We were easy with each other, and we shared a particular sense of humor. So it just worked.” Remembers Broderick, laughing, “We shared the same trailer. [Ruck] had a teeny trailer, and I had a huge one, so right away he moved into mine.”

  For Sloane Peterson, Ferris’s popular girlfriend, who tags along with him and Cameron for the day, it would have seemed obvious for Hughes to cast a buxom blond cheerleader type, but Hughes felt that Bueller would actually pick a girl with a more serene, poised kind of beauty. At one point Molly Ringwald had wanted to play Sloane, but, says Ringwald, “John wouldn’t let me do it; he said that the part wasn’t big enough for me.” Elegance isn’t a quality often found in high-school girls, and yet, Mia Sara, a stunning eighteen-year-old up for the part of Sloane, was elegance personified. With her high forehead, chestnut hair, and heart-shaped face, she seemed like a young Jane Seymour, and she was beautiful by any standard, conventional or otherwise. Though she exuded kindness, Sara also carried herself with a graceful, almost regal bearing that would prove essential to the role.

  Born June 19, 1967, Mia Sara grew up in Brooklyn Heights, where she had a summer job working at an upscale restaurant called The River Café, nestled beneath the Brooklyn Bridge and overlooking Lower Manhattan. It was there that she found out she’d won the role of Sloane Peterson. “I had shot for so long in England,” says Sara, referring to Legend, the 1985 Ridley Scott–directed fantasy in which her costar was Tom Cruise and she played a fairy-tale princess—not bad for a movie debut. Ferris appealed to Sara right away, and for an unexpected reason. “I had a very atypical high-school experience,” she says of her time at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s prep school. “It was small and very artsy—everyone sat on the desks, we called our teachers by their first names, there was a smoking lounge for students. And so I was curious about the big, classic, middle-American high-school experience. To me,” she says, grinning, “it seemed kind of exotic.” Because of his similar background, it seemed rather exotic to Broderick as well. Just the idea of “your father picking you up in a car was very foreign to me,” he says, and so making this movie was like “learning a new world.”

  Sloane Peterson has it all, and she so easily could’ve been played like a popular, bitchy princess. However, says Sara, “I was not cool at all in high school, and I wouldn’t have known how to be that person.” So she took Sloane in a different direction, bringing the character a goodheartedness, a generosity of spirit. This meant that she was exquisitely beautiful and incredibly popular, and we liked her anyway.

  When actress Jennifer Grey auditioned for the role of Jeanie, Ferris’s sister, Grey was, she says, “in an unknown place in my life—nobody knew who I was.” Grey hailed from a showbiz family: Her grandfather was Borscht belt comedian Mickey Katz; her father, Joel Grey, was the Tony- and Oscar-winning emcee of Cabaret on Broadway and film; and her mother, Jo Wilder, was also a Broadway actor. Born March 26, 1960, Jennifer grew up in New York and attended The Dalton School (where one of her closest friends was actress Tracy Pollan, who would later marry Michael J. Fox). Grey also spent occasional stints in L.A., depending on what was happening in her parents’ careers. She studied acting at Manhattan’s Neighborhood Playhouse, and supported herself between gigs by waitressing. (She was once fired for dropping a record executive’s ham hocks on the floor.) When she auditioned for Ferris Bueller, she had only appeared in the Cold War action film Red Dawn—her Dirty Dancing superstardom was still a few years off. She certainly didn’t hang out with the actors who were becoming known as the Brat Pack. “They were rich, they lived in Hollywood, they were glamorous,” she says, “and I didn’t have any of that.” When she auditioned for Ferris, Grey recalls, “I had only done a couple of jobs, small parts. And to be perfectly honest, when I read the script, I didn’t get it. I said, ‘It’s all these monologues to the camera—what is this?’” Plus, she says, “I wasn’t sure about this John Hughes guy. At that time in my life I wasn’t in a position to be picky, but I didn’t even want to audition for it. I didn’t relate to it or respond to it. I smoked a lot of pot in those days; maybe I didn’t really take the time to read it. I don’t know what it was.” Still, something inside her told her to go to the audition. She didn’t prepare at all; that’s how indifferent she was about the role. When she got there, Meg Ryan was in the waiting room readying herself to audition for the same part.

  Grey was called in to read as Jeanie, Ferris’s put-upon sister, and when she walked into the audition room, her apathy vanished. “I met John,” says Grey, gushingly of Hughes, “and it was love at first sight. I was completely besotted. I don’t remember what he said to me, but all of a sudden I just felt an energy of the character that I didn’t plan or plot. God knows I spent so many years trying to get jobs that people didn’t want to give me, and this was the opposite. This was,” she says, her hazel eyes flashing, searching for a way to describe it, “the perfect example of God’s will overriding everything else.” Once she was with Hughes, she says, “there was a freedom, a flow, an ease, like slipping on something that fit really well. I remember not caring what the movie was about. I just wanted to do whatever this guy wanted me to do.” And what he wanted her to do was play Ferris’s sister, Jeanie Bueller.

  For most of the movie, Jeanie is Ferris’s nemesis, and in Grey’s hands, she is a broadly drawn comic villainess. Ferris is the adored favorite in his family, the high school, and even the town of Shermer, Illinois, the fictional suburb in which Hughes also set The Breakfast Club. Ferris has his parents wrapped around his finger; he can get away with anything, which enrages Jeanie. “The fact that she doesn’t get everything she wants makes her livid,” says Grey of the character. “She was outshone, always in his shadow. He was so clearly the golden boy, and she was so clearly the second banana.” But rather than brooding about this alone in her room, Jeanie rages against the machine, the Ferris-loving machine that is her world. “She fought her station,” says Grey.

  The other supporting roles were filled in: Character actor Jeffrey Jones was cast as Dean Rooney, a vindictive man who takes Ferris’s absence from school as a personal insult; and comic actress Edie McClurg won the role of Rooney’s beehived secretary, Grace, who, with the painfully unsexy, flat vowels of a thick Wisconsin accent, informs her boss that “Ferris is very popular—the sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waste-oids, dweebies, dickheads, they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.” Ferris’s advertising exec dad (another nod to Hughes’s real life, since he’d worked in advertising in the 1970s) would be played by Lyman Ward; and Ferris’s harried real-estate agent mom by soap opera actress Cindy Pickett.

  Ben Stein, a noted economist who had served as a speechwriter and lawyer for Presidents Nixon and Ford, was connected to John Hughes through friends in common and was given the chance to play Ferris’s economics teacher, the one who in an unforgettable nasal drone takes attendance (“Bueller…Bueller?”) on the morning that Ferris et al. have skipped school. Originally, the role called for only a voice-over, but when Stein rehearsed his lines off set, he had cast and crew in stitches, so Hughes decided to show him on-camera, teaching a class. Nothing had been scripted for this impromptu scene, and Stein was asked to improv by teaching a subject he knew well. So Stein taught about the Great Depression and the effects of tariffs on economic policy. Stein has said that the day he shot that now-iconic scene was the happiest of his life, and that he already knows what his obituary is going to look like. “It’s going to 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 fine.”

  When it came time to cast a very small role, that of the handsome teenage hoodlum who meets Jeanie Bueller at the police station toward the end of the movie, Grey told Hughes about a young actor named Charlie Sheen whom she’d befriended while making Red Dawn. Sheen was new to the business—Dawn had been his first movie—but Grey asked Hughes to give him a chance. He was talented and good-looking, was the little brother of Emilio Estevez, and had, after all, been considered for the Blane role in Pretty in Pink when the filmmakers originally thought they wanted a chiseled-jawed stud. Sheen got the small part in Ferris, and would turn in a performance that blended raw sex appeal with comic prowess. He would barely be in the film, but Charlie Sheen would “nearly steal the movie,” said Ned Tanen.

  With Matthew Broderick as its star and Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, and Jennifer Grey in supporting roles, Ferris Bueller would be—interestingly and importantly—the first John Hughes teen movie made without the usual suspects, the previously established group of Hughesian teen actors. Here, there was no Molly Ringwald, no Anthony Michael Hall, nor any of the other young thesps whose names had become synonymous with Hughes’s own. Says Ruck of Hughes, “He was kind of branching out.”