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

by Susannah Gora

  One of the days before Ferris started filming, when Hughes was looking at the pictures from a wardrobe test shoot featuring Broderick, Ruck, and Sara, he may have been missing the comfort and familiar camaraderie of his beloved coterie of earlier teen stars. For the test, the three actors were taken to Michigan Avenue and shot walking down the street. The next morning, Ruck showed up for rehearsal in Hughes’s hotel room, where, he remembers, Hughes was sitting “way far down at the other end of the room, smoking like a chimney.” Producers Tom Jacobson and Michael Chinich walked into the room alarmingly quiet. “And it was scary,” says Ruck, “like, what’s going on? Mia asked John what was wrong. Then John said, ‘We saw the wardrobe test. It sucked.’” It was a puzzling assertion, because wardrobe tests are usually used only to determine if the costumes are working, nothing more. But somehow Hughes had looked at the wardrobe test shots and seen something lacking in the actors themselves.

  Matthew Broderick, who arrived a few minutes later than the others, recalls walking into the room that morning. “I remember Alan’s face when he opened the door for me,” says Broderick. “Everybody was sitting around in a foul funk. It was like the world ended. John was very distraught because we had not shown any excitement in our wardrobe test; [he felt] that I looked dull and out of it. I thought [the test] was for the clothes, but it was also, I guess, to show that we were charming. And John was in a panic. He said, ‘I am not used to working with people who don’t—you don’t seem into it.’ He was very upset.”

  Recalls Broderick, Hughes “said that he was used to working with Anthony Michael Hall, who would improv lines, and was always very into it and animated. He said that not in a bad way toward me. He said, ‘Maybe I am just used to something that is different.’” Part of the problem may have had to do with Broderick’s habit of remaining somewhat quiet and subdued until his performance actually begins. “I tend to be that way until I am shooting,” he admits. “People think, ‘What’s wrong with him? He doesn’t do anything!’ And then when I get on the stage, they say, ‘Don’t do so much!” Broderick laughs. “I guess [Hughes and I] were just getting used to each other’s style.”

  That uncomfortable morning in Hughes’s hotel room, Broderick, Sara, and Ruck were told that the three of them—who were the whole movie, after all—had no chemistry whatsoever in the wardrobe test shots. The filmmakers and the actors “had a big, very serious talk,” remembers Broderick, “‘maybe we shouldn’t be doing this movie’—it was one of those.” While all this was going on, Jennifer Grey was told she could take the day off, a reward for the fact that she was so present in her wardrobe test shots that she positively glowed. Broderick was mildly perturbed, but charmingly commented, “Wow, I never knew that anybody was supposed to glow in a wardrobe test.”

  “In one sentence,” says Ruck, “Broderick defused the whole thing. He made John laugh, which is what was needed, because I think that John was unsure. You know, with his other people—Molly and that whole gang—they were like family. They sort of had their own language.”

  They did indeed, and it had been a language forged partially by the fact that John Hughes had made Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, and company into the stars they had become. When those young actors met Hughes, they were newbies, unknowns eager to be molded by him. Matthew Broderick, on the other hand, was already an established name when he showed up for work on Ferris, not the malleable, impressionable young actor Hughes was used to directing, and befriending. “John liked to work with actors he could control,” said Tanen, “and Matthew was not the kind of actor you could control.”

  For his part, Broderick told the Chicago Tribune that Hughes’s frequent habit of asking the actors to go off-script—improvise completely—was “pretty disturbing at first.” Says Broderick today, looking back on his work with Hughes then, “I thought I knew a lot at twenty-three, but I now realize I knew very, very little. And when I ever did butt heads with him, when I think back on it now, I basically think of what an idiot I was.”

  Filming on Ferris Bueller began in Chicago just after Labor Day weekend of 1985. In late October, the production would move to Los Angeles. “It was more cost-effective to shoot only what we had to shoot in Chicago,” explains Jacobson. The film begins with a shot of the Bueller family home (actually a house in Long Beach, California). Ferris’s first step toward emancipation is faking out his parents, convincing them he’s too sick to go to school. This isn’t hard to do: the Buellers adore Ferris and would never think to doubt him, and he has convenient little tricks at his disposal, such as licking his palms so they feel clammy. With the Buellers sufficiently duped, Ferris enlists his best buddy, who’s actually sick, to help him spring his girlfriend, Sloane, from school. (It’s unlikely that an optimistic go-getter like Bueller would really be best friends with a wet blanket like Cameron Frye, but Hughes was skilled at crafting stories highlighting commonalities between people who seemed worlds apart. In Ferris, unlike Hughes’s other scripts, the two dissimilar main characters are already friends when the movie begins.)

  The unflappable Ferris creates an elaborate scheme in which Dean Rooney is led to believe Sloane’s grandmother has just died. Part of this ploy involves Cameron impersonating Sloane’s dad over the phone. When deciding how to imitate the exasperated voice of a grown man, Alan Ruck thought of Gene Saks, the famed Broadway director who directed him and Broderick in Biloxi Blues. “He’s a great guy,” says Ruck of Saks, “and would just get so flabbergasted with us, we would be afraid that he was going to have a stroke. As soon as our scolding was over, Broderick would immediately do an imitation of him, because Broderick had worked with him before. So when I did [Sloane’s dad’s] voice, I did an imitation of Matthew imitating Gene Saks,” Ruck says. “And I did it pretty much just to see the look on Broderick’s face.” You can catch Broderick trying to suppress a laugh in the scene where Ruck imitates “Mr. Peterson.”

  When Ferris poses as Sloane’s father coming to pick her up from school, his guise is helped along by a few key accessories: a suit, a trench coat, and the cherry red 1961 Ferrari 250 GT he’s driving. The car is Cameron’s father’s (“He loves this car more than he loves his wife,” Cameron says of his dad), and Ferris, with his characteristic coerciveness, has convinced Cameron to let them take the car, which normally doesn’t leave its garage.

  The car featured in Ferris was to teenage boys what the character of Jake Ryan in Sixteen Candles was to teenage girls: a gorgeous dream come to life on celluloid. But the red Ferrari was just that—a dream, and nothing more. “It was a replicar,” says Ruck, “a Ferrari replica body on a Mustang chassis, and we had three of them: the one that we drove around in, one that had a bigger motor and better suspension for the stunt guys to do all their stuff in,” and a third one that would be used in a pivotal scene toward the end of the film, when Cameron finally faces his feelings of anger toward his father.

  Although the real Ferrari 250 GT (worth $350,000 when the movie was made) is an exquisite driving machine, its “replicar” that the threesome drove around Chicago in was anything but. “It was universally hated by the crew,” says Ruck. “It didn’t work right.” One scene, in which Ferris and friends turn the car off to leave it with a garage attendant, who then turns it on again, had to be filmed a dozen times because the car wouldn’t start up. “There was kind of a gremlin in the machine,” says Ruck. The car whose image inspired so many visions of automotive grandeur among moviegoers was, in reality, he says, “just a piece of crap.”

  The interior of Bueller’s high school, “Shermer High,” is in actuality John Hughes’s own alma mater, Glenbrook North High School. Peppering his films with elements from his own youth was nothing new for Hughes, but here, with Ferris Bueller, he had truly come full circle. By the time Ferris was in production, Hughes had become a famous, rich director, one of a handful of Hollywood directors recognizable enough that teenage kids would excitedly come up to him in public. (“He liked that a lot,” says Hughes’s for
mer advertising colleague Bob Richter.) On the set of Sixteen Candles, John Hughes was a newbie helmer facing the challenges of the unknown; on the set of The Breakfast Club he worried if audiences and the studio would appreciate the dark, unconventional teen drama; but on the set of Ferris Bueller, he was a returning hero, an established success coming back, victoriously, to his hometown—coming back, even, to his own high school. Hughes has said that he related personally to the character of Bueller, and that’s apparent from the litany of references Hughes included in the movie that alluded to his own adolescence, most notably the Buellers’ home address: 2800. (Hughes’s childhood home was 2800 Shannon Road, Northbrook, Illinois.) “I don’t think he had really ever gotten over certain aspects of his adolescence,” says Mia Sara of Hughes.

  The scene where Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane go to a snooty restaurant (Chez Quis—a pun on the Shakey’s pizza chain), and are treated with disdain by the maitre d’ until they convince him that Ferris is Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago, seems to have been taken directly from Hughes’s personal memories from his senior year of high school, when he and his close friend Jackson Peterson would go to the Union League Club in downtown Chicago with their girlfriends (“This was an exclusive club that my father belonged to,” explains Peterson, “and I used to have to make up stories to try to get in, so we could be served alcohol while we were still teenagers”). Ferris tells us in the movie that even though he’s in high school, he knows he will marry his girlfriend, Sloane; not too many years after crashing the Union League Club, John Hughes would go on to marry his high-school girlfriend, Nancy. Even the very names used in the movie seem to reference Hughes’s youth: The character Sloane Peterson shares a last name with Jackson Peterson, and Ferris’s sister, Jeanie, shares one with Jackson Peterson’s high-school girlfriend and later wife.

  On his earlier teen films, John Hughes’s rich personal connections with actors like Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall allowed him to tap into the wellspring of true teen emotions, but when he was working on Ferris Bueller, he shared a special friendship with a girl who wasn’t an actress at all: the teenage daughter of Ned Tanen, Hughes’s mentor. Sloane Tanen (yes, Sloane—no coincidence there) would talk to Hughes for hours on the phone, telling him about what her life in high school was like. Perhaps longing for another meeting of the minds with a bright young woman after his relationship with Ringwald had begun to unravel, Hughes took elements of Sloane Tanen’s life, breathed drama into them, and wove them into his scripts. “My daughter, Sloane,” said Ned Tanen, “is the only person who could have a real conversation with John Hughes. Nobody else could ever get his attention. When she was sixteen, he would call the house, and I’d say, ‘Does he want me?’ and she’d say, ‘No, he’s calling for me!’” Sloane Tanen was honest in her opinions, and Hughes appreciated her candor. “She’d go, ‘Oh, John, you’re full of shit,’” recalled Ned Tanen, adding that he told his daughter at the time, “He doesn’t want to talk to me eighty percent of the time, so you talk to him!”

  Remembers Sloane Tanen (now a noted artist and writer), “I was always very comfortable talking to him; I was always happy that it was John on the phone. Because he was interested in my life in a way that most adults aren’t, interested in the little minutiae and details. He was an observer,” she adds, “but you never felt like you were being studied. It felt like he was a contemporary. He was very unthreatening, kind of a big brother type.” As familiar as Hughes was with extreme teenage archetypes (the jock, the rebel, the princess), he also stayed keyed in to the emotional framework of ordinary teens (such as Molly Ringwald’s character in Sixteen Candles), and Sloane Tanen fit more into that category. “John recognized in me that I was just a normal teenager,” she says. “I wasn’t a really popular girl, but I wasn’t a dork, either.”

  Though most of their conversations took place over the phone, sometimes Hughes would come over to the Tanens’ home. On one such visit, he was looking at a school notebook of Sloane’s that was covered in the scribbles of her teenage friends. “I went by my middle name, Amanda,” she says. “Someone had written in huge letters in a bubble, ‘Amanda is so fucking gorgeous.’” As a grown woman, Sloane Tanen is indeed stunning—tall and slender, with a delicately beautiful face and a head of lovely auburn locks. But in high school, she had frizzy red hair, and, she says, “I was not gorgeous. One of my girlfriends had written it, and John loved that. He loved the girliness of it, he loved the untruth of it, the insincerity of it. He just got it. Those were the kinds of details that he was interested in.”

  And the nervousness that Ferris’s buddy Cameron feels about the world-class automobile in his family’s garage may have been inspired by Sloane Tanen’s real-life teenage existence. “We would have parties at my dad’s house in high school,” she recalls, “and some kid would call in to the radio and say there’s a party at this address, with free beer. I remember walking into the garage and there was a bunch of twenty-year-old guys I’d never seen before, and they were in my dad’s antique cars—a Ferrari, a Spyder Daytona. It was a nightmare. I called the police to get everyone out of the house.”

  Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane drive all over Chicago—arguably there has never been a movie before or since that showed the Windy City in such a loving, sumptuous way. John Hughes was, in many ways, creating a love letter to his adored hometown. “Chicago seemed like a character in the movie,” says producer Jacobson. “His presentation of it was very beautiful, and what’s great about Chicago is that it has this vibrant urban center, but it also has idealized images of suburbia; you get both.” Filmmakers are all too eager to show the honking yellow taxis of New York or even the smog rising above the L.A. freeways, but often they overlook the sparkling city that is the urban capital of the Midwest. “Nobody shot in Chicago,” said Ned Tanen, “and John Hughes really resurrected shooting there.” For Mia Sara, who’d never even visited Chicago before this job, the city was particularly seductive. “I loved all the different neighborhoods,” she says winsomely. “And as a New Yorker, L.A. was like a living death for me at the time, so I really enjoyed Chicago.”

  Over the course of the “day off,” our teenage heroes visit locales throughout the city, including the Art Institute, where Hughes often went as a kid. Recalls Jennifer Grey, “I remember John Hughes saying, ‘There are going to be more works of art in this movie than there have ever been before.’” And indeed, the scene inside the Art Institute lets the audience see these many works of art through the wonder-filled eyes of Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane. In an age when MTV-style quick cuts were becoming synonymous with youth entertainment, this scene in the museum treats us to long, languid close-ups of such works as Edward Hopper’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, and Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which is shown in a series of closer and closer shots until we can literally see the geometric cloth grains of the canvas and Seurat’s signature dots as distinct, tiny pinpoints of color. With this scene, Hughes once again distinguished his work from the farcical hedonism of the teen films that came before his, reminding us that teenagers aren’t interested only in brewskies and make-out sessions.

  David Anderle, who’d been the music supervisor on The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, had been hired by Hughes to oversee the creation of the Ferris soundtrack as well. Anderle, now a painter, remembers that he “totally fell in love with the scene in the Chicago art museum.” So much so that he sent the scene to Robert Smith of The Cure, who wrote instrumental music for it. “It was beautiful,” remembers Anderle, who was at the time the head of the film music division of A&M. Hughes was so fond of Anderle and his work that he decided he wanted A&M to become his private record company label. “He didn’t want us making music for any other film,” Anderle remembers. “He wanted me exclusively. We said, ‘John, we can’t do this. We’re a major record company!’ Well, when you said no to John, bye-bye.” And so came the end of the working relationship—and the d
eep friendship—between Hughes and Anderle. “I hadn’t seen John since,” says Anderle, “which really kind of broke my heart.” Hughes hired Tarquin Gotch, manager of the British band Dream Academy, to be Ferris’s music supervisor, and in doing so lost the Robert Smith song.

  After their trip to the museum, Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane’s day reaches its climax at the German American Von Steuben Parade in downtown Chicago. “It was madness,” says Grey. With characteristic insouciance, Ferris somehow makes it atop one of the floats, and before long, he is cheekily lip-synching and dancing his way through Wayne Newton’s “Danke Schoen” and The Beatles’s “Twist and Shout,” to the approving screams of thousands of delighted Chicagoans. The scene was shot over two weekends—the first, during an actual parade that the filmmakers got permission to tag on to; and a second weekend, in which the parade was re-created by thousands of extras who showed up for the chance to be in the movie. While Ferris performs, Cameron and Sloane walk alongside, on the sidewalk. “We’d film that little piece, and then gather everybody up and run to catch up to the parade again,” says Sara. “That was what we did all day, running to catch up with the parade. I was so jealous because Matthew got to go on that float.”

  Ferris’s infectiously free-spirited dance moves, choreographed by Kenny Ortega (who’d choreographed Duckie’s unforgettable “Try a Little Tenderness” dance in Pretty in Pink), get everybody dancing—from a construction worker shown boogying on scaffolding (“a real guy,” Hughes told the Chicago Tribune; “that was spontaneous and we were lucky enough to catch it”) to a group of savvy dancers who, says Ruck, “look like they’re doing the Moonwalk. They seem to be gliding.” Unfortunately, Broderick had injured his knee badly earlier in the shoot, while filming the climactic scenes running through the neighborhood’s backyards to the Buellers’ house, and as such, was unable to do much of the fancy footwork that Ortega had choreographed for him. “I was pretty sore,” Broderick admits. “I got well enough to do what you see in the parade there, but I couldn’t do most of Kenny Ortega’s knee spins and things like that that we had worked on. When we did shoot it, we had all this choreography, and I remember John would yell with a megaphone, ‘Okay, do it again, but don’t do any of the choreography,’ because he wanted it to be a total mess. And I think that’s pretty much all there is in it.”