Other casting close calls: Molly Ringwald, who’d starred in Hughes’s The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, wanted to play Ferris’s girlfriend, Sloane, but Hughes wouldn’t let her. Emilio Estevez (The Breakfast Club) turned down the role of Cameron.
Matthew Broderick (Ferris) and Alan Ruck (Cameron) were friends before filming started. They had worked together on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues. When Cameron calls the school and berates the principal, pretending to be Ferris’s father, the deep voice he uses is his impression of Broderick doing an impression of the play’s director, Gene Saks.
Economist and former Richard Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein won the small role of a boring high school economics teacher. (“Bueller? Bueller?”) John Hughes asked Stein to deliver a real economics lecture, so he improvised one—everything he says is legitimate.
Stein later called Ferris Bueller’s Day Off “the most life-affirming movie possibly of the entire postwar period.”
Throughout the movie, Cameron Frye wears a Gordie Howe Detroit Red Wings jersey—an odd and bold move in a movie set in Chicago, home to the Red Wings’ rival, the Blackhawks. According to actor Alan Ruck, John Hughes did that on purpose. He’d decided that while Cameron didn’t get along with his father, he got along great with his grandfather, who lived in Detroit and took him to Red Wings games. The dad is a Blackhawks fan, so Cameron wears the jersey to spite him.
Ferris complained about getting a computer when he really wanted a car, but he could have sold his state-of-the-art keyboard to get a car. The synthesizer he uses to fake voices and snoring is an E-mu Emulator II. Used by 1980s synth-pop bands like New Order and Depeche Mode, it cost about $8,000 in 1986.
The car belonging to Cameron’s dad—stolen (and destroyed) by Cameron and Ferris—is a 1961 Ferrari GT250. They didn’t really wreck a classic car for the movie, or even drive one. It was too expensive for the filmmakers to buy or rent one, so they made three fiberglass replicas, each on an MG chassis.
The fancy French restaurant Ferris talks his way into is called Chez Quis. In French, it means essentially nothing: “the house of whom.” It was a subtle joke. Said aloud, “Chez Quis” sounds like “Shakey’s,” the name of a once-popular pizza chain.
Lyman Ward and Cindy Pickett played Ferris Bueller’s parents. Shortly after filming on the movie ended, they got married in real life.
Similarly, Matthew Broderick and Jennifer Grey (who played Ferris’s sister, Jeannie) started dating and became engaged (briefly).
In 1990 First Lady Barbara Bush delivered the commencement address at Wellesley College. “Find the joy in life,” she told graduates, “because as Ferris Bueller said on his day off, ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it!’ ”
A lot of weird “fan theories” about the secrets of what’s really going on in movies have floated around the internet, but one of the first was the “Ferris Bueller/Fight Club Theory.” It suggested that cool and free Ferris Bueller isn’t real—he’s merely the figment of sad-sack Cameron’s imagination…much the way that free spirit Tyler Durden is imagined by the narrator in Fight Club.
For a few years after filming wrapped, Hughes and Broderick discussed making a sequel, but they never came up with an idea they thought was worth doing. Hughes ultimately felt a sequel wouldn’t work because the first movie was “about a singular time in your life.”
In 2011 an amateur filmmaker named Rick Rapier wrote a Ferris Bueller 2 script that he released on the internet, and it went viral. The film never got made, but it had an intriguing premise: Ferris Bueller grew up to be a motivational speaker (like Tony Robbins), but he’s so overworked that his business manager (Cameron Frye) arranges for a day off.
Cost of a Bugatti sports car: $2 million. Cost of a Bugatti oil change: $20,000.
Odds that a billionaire didn’t finish college: 1 in 3.
MOUTHING OFF
WHAT THE FACT?
What is a lie? What is the truth? What is the difference? Here are some clear thoughts on a fuzzy subject.
“Telling the truth is less demanding than telling a lie.”
—Eraldo Banovac
“Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
—Bernard M. Baruch
“Lies sound like facts to those who’ve been conditioned to misrecognize the truth.”
—DaShanne Stokes
“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.”
—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Lies can’t grow. Once plucked they can only wither. But every truth, once planted, grows into a tall, noble tree.”
—Stefan Emunds
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
—Aldous Huxley
“The best lies stay close to the truth.”
—Cornelia Funke
“The wisest in council, the ablest in debate, and the most agreeable companion in the commerce of human life, is that man who has assimilated to his understanding the greatest number of facts.”
—Edmund Burke
“A MAN IS HIS OWN EASIEST DUPE, FOR WHAT HE WISHES TO BE TRUE HE GENERALLY BELIEVES TO BE TRUE.”
—Demosthenes
NOT COMING TO A
THEATER NEAR YOU
You’d be surprised by how many films in Hollywood are started…without ever being finished. Here’s a look at a few that will probably never make it onto the big screen.
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS
GREAT IDEA: Director Guillermo del Toro has created some of the most visually stunning movies in recent memory, including Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, and The Shape of Water. Hs passion project, however, was a film version of H. P. Lovecraft’s classic science-fiction novella At the Mountains of Madness. Published in 1936, it’s the spooky tale of a geological expedition to Antarctica that uncovers the preserved ruins of ancient cities, and the remains of monsters thought to be dead or mythological. That sounds like the ingredients for a perfect blockbuster, and Universal Studios agreed. In the early 2000s, the company budgeted a whopping $150 million to make the movie.
KISS OF DOOM: Del Toro insisted that the movie be as dark as Lovecraft’s book. That would have meant an R rating, and Universal Studios balked. PG-13 movies have much better commercial prospects…simply because more people can go see it in the theater. Del Toro refused to compromise his vision, and Universal pulled the plug.
UNCLE TOM’S FAIRY TALES
GREAT IDEA: Before Richard Pryor became the incendiary, profane, political comedian he’s known as today, he did tame observational comedy. That all changed around 1968. And while his stage material was changing, Pryor was writing, producing, and starring in a movie about race in America called Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales—a dark satire about what happens when a white man is put on trial for assaulting an black woman.
KISS OF DOOM: Reportedly, Pryor was so obsessed with the film—his first—that his wife, Shelley Bonis, became enraged because he wasn’t spending enough time with her. When she confronted him, they got into a fight and he spitefully tore up the only negative of the movie. It was never released, of course, but a few clips showed up in a 2005 retrospective on Pryor hosted by the Directors Guild of America. Where’d they come from? Turns out Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales director Penelope Spheeris found a print in her possession at some point…but there are still no plans to release the still-unfinished film.
MIDNIGHT RIDER
GREAT IDEA: There have been a lot of great rock ’n’ roll movies, like The Buddy Holly Story, The Doors, and La Bamba. Midnight Rider could have joined that canon. The film biography based on singer Gregg Allman’s memoir, My Cross to Bear, began filming in 2014. Filmmakers started shooting with a sequence of a train traveling along a trestle in rural Georgia, standing in for Allman’s home state of Tennessee.
About 18,000 people have been successfully hidden by WITSEC, the witness prote
ction program.
KISS OF DOOM: There was a deadly accident on that first day of filming. The trestle scene called for the train to crash into a hospital bed that was resting on the tracks. The collision caused debris to fly through the air. Some of it struck a camera assistant named Sarah Jones, knocking her into the oncoming train. She died instantly. Not only was the movie canceled, but the film’s director, Randall Miller, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. It also turned out that the railroad company had actually denied Midnight Rider filmmakers permission to use the trestle because it was unsafe.
EI8HT
GREAT IDEA: In director David Fincher’s 1995 crime saga Se7en, cops Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and Mills (Brad Pitt) hunt down serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey), who has murdered five people, each inspired by one of the seven deadly sins (greed, lust, gluttony, etc.). The movie was a critical and commercial smash, so the studio, New Line Cinema, bought the rights to a crime thriller called Solace, hired screenwriters to insert Morgan Freeman’s character (who now had psychic abilities) into the story, and retitled it Ei8ht.
KISS OF DOOM: Fincher didn’t want to do it. When asked by a reporter about Ei8ht, Fincher said he “would be less interested in that than I would in having cigarettes put out in my eyes.” New Line dropped the idea, removed Detective Somerset and all the other Se7en references it had wanted put in, and instead produced Solace in its original form, starring Anthony Hopkins, and released it in 2016. It was a box-office flop.
THE GODFATHER PART IV
GREAT IDEA: The Godfather Part III wasn’t nearly as well-received (by critics or fans) as the first two entries in Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia film saga. But it made $67 million at the box office and received seven Oscar nominations, so neither Coppola nor his screenwriting partner, Mario Puzo, were quite ready to let go of the Corleone family. Result: in 1990, shortly after filming on Part III wrapped, the two got together and hammered out a basic story for The Godfather Part IV. It had two main plotlines: 1) the rise of Vincent Corleone (Andy Garcia), and the fall of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), filling in the time between The Godfather Part II and Part III.
KISS OF DOOM: Upon rereading the material later, neither Puzo nor Coppola thought either plot trajectory was very good. Puzo’s death in 1999 and Coppola’s semiretirement from filmmaking (to focus on his winery) ultimately killed the project.
Pope Francis once worked as a bouncer at a Buenos Aires nightclub.
NAME THE PLACE
Everything has a name, and a lot of things are named after the place where they originated. Sometimes those things are so important or successful, they become a lot more famous than where they came from. Here are some of those things.
JALAPEÑO. These mildly spicy, deep green chilies were unknown outside of Mexico before the 1930s. They originated (and were cultivated) in the city of Jalapa (also sometimes spelled Xalapa), the capital city of the southeastern Mexican state of Veracruz. When the chili peppers were exported, they were called jalapeños, which means “from Jalapa” in Spanish.
DUFFEL BAG. Today a duffel bag is synonymous with a laundry bag or a gym bag—a large, floppy, over-the-shoulder cloth carryall. But it used to refer to a very specific kind of bag, both the style of the bag and the material from which it was made. Duffel is a town in Belgium where a thick, durable woolen cloth—duffel—has been manufactured for more than a hundred years. A bag made of duffel—like one carried by soldiers—was known as a Duffel bag…and then just a duffel bag.
BADMINTON. There’s a village in Gloucestershire, England, called Badminton. Settled around the year 1000 under the Middle English name of Badimyncgtun, it means “Beadmund’s farm.” As the English language evolved, Badimyncgtun became Badminton. In the 17th century, a fancy Gloucestershire estate called Badminton House was acquired by the Earl of Worcester. It is there that an ancient racket-based game, brought back from India by British colonials, became popular in the late 1800s. Before long, the sport was known as badminton, too.
VARNISH. The first use of this wood-preserving paint in the Mediterranean region was in the Roman city of Berenice (present-day Benghazi, Libya), probably before the ninth century. Tree resins were used to make it, and the finished product was shipped throughout the Roman Empire. The Latin name for Berenice: Vernix, and “varnish” is an Anglicization of that.
GEYSER. A geyser is a naturally occurring hot spring that bubbles and shoots water from underground up onto the surface. Iceland is dotted with thousands of these springs, among them one called Geysir, which gets its name from geysa, the Icelandic word for “gusher.”
First American city with electric streetlights: Wabash, Indiana (1880).
WISEGUYS AND WHALES
Whether you’re a casual gambler or a Vegas regular, it pays to know the language spoken in casinos. How else are you going to spot the mechanics and the mushes?
Arm: A craps player who’s so skilled at throwing the dice that they can increase their chances of winning
Steaming/On Tilt: Placing reckless bets in fear or anger, in the hope of winning back money that has been lost
Crossroader: An old-time term for a cheat (casinos used to be built at major crossroads)
Square: A casual gambler (the opposite of a sharp)
Playing the Rush: Playing more aggressively (or sloppily) after winning a bunch of money
First Base: The position at a blackjack table immediately to the left of the dealer (and thus the first to be dealt cards)
Third Base: The position to the immediate right of the blackjack dealer (the last position to be dealt cards)
Black Book: The list of gamblers (cheats, etc.) who are banned from every casino in the state of Nevada
Racino: A racetrack that also has casino gambling
George/Real George: A player who tips the dealer generously
Fish/Pigeon: An unskilled, money-losing player
Flea: A small-stakes player who still expects the casino to “comp” them free drinks, free meals, etc.
Spooking: Standing behind the blackjack to peek at the hole card, then signaling to an accomplice placing bets at the table
Coat-tailing: Copying the bets of someone who is winning money
Beard: Someone who places bets for another gambler
Mush: A gambler who is unlucky to be around
Automat: A gambling establishment that offers nothing but electronic games—no dealers required
Shiner: Something with a reflective surface that a cheater uses to see a card that has been dealt facedown
Honeymoon Period: Beginner’s luck
The good news: Only 1.5% of Earth’s 9 million insect species are harmful to humans. The bad news: 1.5% of 9 million still comes to 135,000 species.
Color Up: To exchange smaller-denomination chips for higher-denomination chips (of a different color)
Barber Pole: A stack of chips with more than one denomination, and thus more than one color
Carpet Joint: A high-end casino
Eye in the Sky: Video surveillance cameras installed in casino ceilings above the gaming tables
Mechanic: A casino dealer who cheats; it can also mean a gambler who uses sleight of hand to cheat at cards or dice
Crack the Nut: When a casino makes enough money off of losing gamblers to cover its expenses and turn a healthy profit
Camouflage: Any techniques (disguises, feigning drunkenness or inexperience, etc.) that a highly skilled gambler uses to appear unskilled or impaired
Firing: Placing one big bet after another
Sharp: A professional gambler
Silver Mining/Slot Walking: Checking unattended slot machines for coins that have been left behind by other gamblers
Whale: A player who bets in increments of at least $1,000 (a “high-roller” bets $100 or more per round)
Grinding It Out: Gambling consistently over time, often when the grinder understands the probabilities of the game
Burn Cards: Cards that are removed from the top of the
deck and removed from play after the deck is shuffled and cut
Sawdust Joint: A low-end casino
Card Washing: Shuffling the cards by laying them facedown on the table and spreading them around the surface of the table with both hands in a manner that looks like they’re washing the tabletop
Scared Money: The money a gambler can’t afford to lose
Skinning the Hand: When a card cheat gets rid of their extra cards
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
“Being fired has some of the advantages of dying without its supreme disadvantages. People say extra-nice things about you, and you get to hear them.”
—Howard Zinn
The geographical center of the United States is located near the Nebraska/Kansas border.
HERE COMES BOATY
MCBOATFACE!
Here’s what happened when the British government let the internet name a $287 million polar research ship.
SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA
In March 2016, England’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) launched a competition to name the new Royal Research Ship (RRS) that was scheduled to set sail in 2019. The bright red, 15,000-ton, 423-foot-long vessel includes a helipad, a crane, and onboard labs. It has the ability to deploy subs and can host as many as 90 research scientists who will study ice sheets, ocean currents, and marine life. In the name-that-ship competition, NERC said it was looking for “something inspirational” that would exemplify the magnitude of the ship’s work.
The British, who are known for their dry, absurd, Monty Pythonesque sense of humor, immediately submitted inspirational names like What Iceberg? and It’s Bloody Cold Here. One submission, Clifford the Big Red Boat, inspired BBC presenter James Hand to toss his idea for a name into the ring: Boaty McBoatface. His submission immediately went viral and within 48 hours it received 8,000 votes and crashed the NERC website.
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