At its heart, the movie is about freedom—the freedom to stand up to an overbearing father, to hold on to the last gasp of youth, to dance on a parade float down the streets of Chicago. “It appeals to the most basic part of the human spirit, which is to be free,” Ben Stein has said. Ferris is a high-schooler, but he has the wisdom of the ages, and the unflappable courage of a hero. “Ferris is sort of a Superman,” says Jacobson.
So much so, says Matthew Broderick, that “Ferris seems to be able to control the universe. I mean, he can get away with anything. He can change time. He seems to have an ability to have physics come out the way he wants them to.” He is, in many ways, a superhuman character, but he’s also just a kid, Broderick points out. “It’s a joke about that, too, because people in the movie say, ‘Oh, you’ve met him? You know him?’ They even talk about him [like he’s] some prophet. There are those people in high school who take on mythic levels—they are beyond what any human being could be.” But it’s important to see the humor in people idolizing Ferris, says Broderick, “because finally, he’s a teenage boy who’s hiding in the back of a car so his father won’t see him.”
Of the Ferris Bueller role, says Matthew Broderick, “It eclipsed everything, I should admit, and to some degree it still does. I mean, I’ve done a lot of movies and, still, people on the street just call me Ferris Bueller, basically. They say, ‘I like your movies, but I have to tell you, my favorite’and I already know. Ferris Bueller.” Broderick is aware, he says, of “how much it meant. Which is great. It really is. And now I am so used to it that I totally enjoy it.”
Whether a freedom-loving prophet or just a teenage boy hiding in the back of a car, Ferris Bueller inspired us to think about some pretty powerful themes, including one that was familiar territory in a John Hughes youth movie: love, the heart-rocking, soul-lifting young romantic love Hughes was so brilliant at portraying on-screen. At the end of the adventurous day off, with the soft light of the late-day sun beginning to set over the trees and lawns of their hometown, Sloane and Ferris kiss. In typical Hughes fashion, a moody New Wave ballad (“The Edge of Forever,” by The Dream Academy) plays in the background. Ferris and Sloane pull away from each other, he runs off, she shouts that she loves him, he shouts back that he does, too. With wonder, Sloane then breathes, to herself and to us, “He’s gonna marry me.” Even though she’s just a kid, and so is the boy she loves, we believe her. “It could be such a vapid thing to say,” says Sara, “but I really meant it there. I think it was absolutely true. John had married his high-school sweetheart, and knowing that, I took it as ‘that’s true.’” It was a notion that was deeply attractive to the young Sara. “I was a very romantic kid, and obsessed with love and romance, and so it appealed to me on that level—the idea that you could actually meet your soul mate in high school.”
Filming wrapped, and some of the cast members were nervous about how the film, and their performances in it, would be received. The sexy, dramatic Pretty in Pink was released in February of 1986, and it was a lot to live up to. “Somehow,” says Alan Ruck, “I didn’t think our movie was as cool.” Jennifer Grey recalls being worried, during the filming of Ferris, that she was taking her character’s wacky physical comedy a little too far: “It was so broad that every night I would come home and think, ‘I have really done it now—I am gonna be so screwed from this.’”
Ruck remembers the anxiety he felt the first time he saw the completed film, in the spring of 1986, a few months before its release: “It was in New York, at the old Gulf and Western Building near Central Park West.” There, Ruck, Grey, Sara, and Jeffrey Jones (the actor who portrays Dean Rooney) saw a rough cut of the film, and, says Ruck, “we were mortified. We all thought that we were horrible, and it sucked, and that our careers were over. I remember that we watched this and there was not one laugh out of any of us. We were all traumatized. And then Jeffrey turned around and said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ None of us had an answer. We were pretty much horrified.” The movie got a similar response at an early showing for Paramount execs. “It was a disastrous screening,” said Tanen, who was top brass at the studio at the time. But John Hughes could sense what needed to be done to turn things around. “Hughes said, ‘Leave me alone for two weeks,’” remembered Tanen, “and he took the thing and edited it, and it was brilliant. There was an editor, obviously, but Hughes did it—he was that good.”
Hughes’s cuts worked, and the film, released on June 15, 1986, and rated PG-13, became a massive hit, grossing over $70 million. “I do think it worked, in its own self, sort of perfectly,” says Broderick of the movie. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was such a hit, in fact, that it went on to become one of the top ten grossing films of the year. “That,” says Ruck, who had been so anxious about the whole thing, “was a glorious surprise.” Hughes had pulled out all the stops for Ferris, finagling the use of the Star Wars theme as part of a gag shot and even getting his hometown of Northbrook, Illinois, to paint the words “Save Ferris” on a water tower, for a quick shot suggesting the powerful hold Ferris has over his community.
Paul McCartney let it be known in an interview that he didn’t like the way “Twist and Shout” sounded in the sequence where Ferris lip-synchs the Beatles’ version atop the parade float. But the fact that McCartney was even thinking about such a thing reveals just how huge the Ferris phenomenon became. And Sir Paul didn’t have too much to complain about: thanks to the movie, “Twist and Shout” was rereleased as a single, marking the only time an original recording of a Beatles song reappeared on the Top 40.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off billboards, featuring Broderick’s impishly grinning face as he lies back, resting his head on his hands folded behind him in the universal symbol of taking it easy, were plastered all over America, attesting to his star power and the singularity of his performance. As Broderick’s then girlfriend, this was a particularly odd phenomenon for Grey. “It was pretty surreal,” she allows. “I remember in New York City, billboards covered with Matthew’s face were everywhere. I remember a whole street block of just that.”
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was a huge hit, and yet it would be the last teen film John Hughes would direct. Hughes still had one great youth story left to tell (he would go on to write and produce Some Kind of Wonderful) but never again would Hughes get behind the camera on a high-school film.
Making Ferris Bueller’s Day Off gave John Hughes more money, it gave him the chance to film in his hometown as a returning hero, it gave him even more power in Hollywood. But there was one thing it didn’t give him, something he’d grown to love on the sets of his earlier teen films, perhaps even something he’d grown to need. “In the previous films,” says Sara, “he had developed very close relationships with a lot of those actors, and he really had created that environment that he sought to create, where he was one of them. And I think that didn’t happen with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
Although Hughes would regularly have Grey and Broderick over to his house in Brentwood, where the three would “sit in the Jacuzzi and turn to raisins,” as Broderick recalls, there didn’t seem to be a deep connection between Hughes and the entire cast, as had happened on his earlier films. “We weren’t like a big group hanging out,” says Broderick. Even though Hughes would sometimes ask the Ferris cast to listen to music and chill in the way he had with his earlier casts, Sara says, “that just didn’t happen in the way that it seemed like it had always happened. There were more experienced actors involved, and they weren’t as up for that ‘let’s all hang out and be kids’ kind of thing.” Posits Ruck, “The relationship that John had with Molly and Anthony Michael Hall—the three of them probably were like Ferris and Cameron and Sloane, just inseparable.”
On Ferris, suggests Sara, “I think [Hughes] was actually looking for a new core of performers, and it just didn’t work. It just didn’t gel.” This was not a group of actors whom Hughes could mold, could shape. These were not kids who would inspire him to retrace the emotional map of his own a
dolescence. Says Sara of Hughes’s feelings about the Ferris shoot, “I don’t think—socially and on a personal level—it was as easy for him, or as satisfying.”
And so, as Ferris Bueller graduated from high school, so, too, did John Hughes graduate from directing high-school movies. Soon afterward, Hughes would dismissively, and with perhaps a revealing bitterness, tell Newsday: “I had shot enough high school hallways, and I thought, I should rest this. All those people I’d worked with had grown up.”
Hughes, it seems, had grown up too.
chapter nine
TEENS IN WONDERLAND
The Drama Behind Some Kind of Wonderful
Once a filmmaker has directed many successful movies, he can usually relax a bit, and ease into each new project with the confidence that he’ll keep getting more and more opportunities to helm films. But for newer directors, the desire to secure another chance behind the camera can be much more urgent. “I was told by so many people that if you direct three movies, you have a career,” says Howard Deutch. Although he’d earlier enjoyed a wildly successful career as a director of trailers, by 1986, he had directed only one film, Pretty in Pink. “So all I could think about,” says Deutch, “all I could think about—I completely had blinders on—was, how do I get the second movie?” The answer came in the form of another Hughesian teen dramedy. “John had written Some Kind of Wonderful,” says Deutch. “He gave it to me, and that was it.” Deutch got his crucial second chance to direct pretty easily, but it would be one of few easy moments associated with the making of Some Kind of Wonderful, an oft-troubled production that saw some rather extraordinary behind-the-scenes drama on its way to becoming another cult favorite from the Hughes canon.
Although Hughes would not direct Wonderful, his imprint on the film would be unmistakable, especially because of the almost embarrassingly similar plot points shared between his scripts for this film and Pretty in Pink. Switch the genders of key characters, and the stories are virtually interchangeable. In both movies, a passionate, misunderstood protagonist (Andie Walsh in Pink, a sensitive boy named Keith Nelson in Wonderful) chooses between their funky, lovably weird best friend (Duckie in Pink, a drum-playing girl who goes by the name Watts in Wonderful) and a dreamy, popular kid (Blane in Pink, the gorgeous Amanda Jones in Wonderful). “People say to me all the time, ‘You were great in Pretty in Pink,’” reveals Mary Stuart Masterson. “I’m like, ‘I wasn’t in it!’”
Masterson was, in fact, the first actor to become attached to Some Kind of Wonderful. The female lead had been offered to Molly Ringwald, but she turned it down, she says, because she “felt in a lot of ways it was just too similar to Pretty in Pink. I felt like instead of playing Andie, I was going to be playing Duckie.” Filmmakers then turned to Masterson, an expressive blond beauty who had acting in her blood.
Born June 28, 1966, Masterson was raised in Manhattan in a very artistic family. Her father, Peter Masterson, cowrote and directed the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which starred her mother, Carlin Glynn, in a Tony-award-winning performance. (Glynn portrayed Ringwald’s mother in Sixteen Candles.) Mary Stuart made her screen debut at age eight, playing Katharine Ross’s daughter in the original Stepford Wives. From there, she worked mostly as a stage actress, making her Broadway debut in a poorly received 1982 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that closed after three weeks. It was not until she held her own opposite Sean Penn and Christopher Walken in 1986’s At Close Range that Hollywood really took notice.
While Some Kind of Wonderful was going through its early stages of development, Mary Stuart Masterson was going through some stages in her own personal development. “I was sort of in this strange state,” she recalls. She’d graduated from the Manhattan prep school Dalton (the same school Jennifer Grey attended earlier), had spent some time studying at NYU, and “wasn’t sure of what was next,” Masterson admits. “I was just a little muddled.”
“I was asked to come in for Some Kind of Wonderful, and I read for it,” she says. “And I remember I was thinking, ‘John Hughes? Oh, people don’t really talk like that.’ I took everything pretty seriously back then about, you know, the craft,” she says, rolling her eyes now at the memory. Luckily, her youthful misgivings about the project were put aside when she met Deutch. She was charmed by him, and the feelings were reciprocated. “He was taken with things about me personally that I wasn’t doing in the audition, or so he said,” Masterson remembers. She was cast as the character who would later be named Watts, but who had been up to that point mainly known by the moniker Drummer Girl, for that was the name and vision John Hughes had in mind as he created the character on the page: a fiery, unwittingly sexy tomboy whose love for her drum set is rivaled only by her secret love for her best guy friend.
Because she came on to the project before other actors, Masterson was privy to the script’s earliest versions, and the filmmakers let her read and discuss these early drafts. The bright and opinionated young actress let Deutch and Hughes know her thoughts about the script at many points in development: “I would sit in a room with them, and I would just kind of talk to them,” she says. “I had no idea I was being this audacious, but I gave all these notes, like, ‘This character is written as a tomboy. But I don’t think tomboy is necessarily a woman that wants to be a man. It’s somebody who’s just not willing to be a slave to the feminine manipulative paradigm.’”
At one point in this process, it was decided that her character would want people to call her Keith, for Keith Moon, the late drummer of The Who. This didn’t sit at all well with the actress: “Why does she want a guy’s name?” Common sense prevailed, and her character was instead named Watts, the last name of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie. Watts’s best friend and object of desire would become Keith. (The musically inspired names abounded: “Amanda Jones” was a reference to the Rolling Stones song.) Among Masterson’s other suggestions was that her character, who originally was supposed to be seen wearing boy’s briefs in the gym locker room, should instead wear boxer shorts. “These were the things that seemed really important to me at the time,” Masterson recalls. Her suggestion resulted in an androgynously sexy image that perfectly captured Watts’s unique sensuality.
Many actors auditioned for the other main female part, that of Amanda Jones, the popular, alluring girl whom Keith admires from afar though she seems out of his reach. Among those auditioning was Lea Thompson, then twenty-six and hot off playing Michael J. Fox’s mother in Back to the Future, still the actress’s best-known role. Thompson, born May 31, 1961, in Rochester, Minnesota, had been a ballerina before coming to Hollywood and costarring in early 1980s youth ensembles like Red Dawn. “The character was a little bit different then,” Thompson says of Wonderful’s Amanda, who, in an early incarnation of the script, was not just popular but also wealthy. Deutch thought Thompson would be perfect for the role. But she turned it down.
Her reasons for rejecting the part had everything to do with her long-term career plan. Thompson was the star of an eagerly awaited, seemingly inevitable blockbuster produced by George Lucas, which hadn’t come out by the time Deutch offered her the role in Wonderful. “So I didn’t want to play second banana, and the Mary Stuart Masterson part was better,” she says, bluntly. “I was very jealous. That was such a great part, and I would’ve loved to play it. People didn’t see me that way, as a tomboy. But that was definitely the better part.” The Amanda Jones character, on the other hand, “was the third lead, and I’d been the first lead for a while. So I probably thought it wasn’t a good career move for that reason.”
Thompson’s rejection of the role was one in a series of casting woes that Howard Deutch had been experiencing. He’d been having particular trouble finding the right young man to play Keith, the character at the center of the story. Deutch needed an actor who would, like all great Hughesian protagonists, be able to deftly dance the line between comedy and drama, and portray a very adult range of emotions while still seeming believable as a teenag
er. The original script was broadly comedic, almost wacky, striking a tone much closer to Ferris Bueller than to the nearly somber quality the picture ultimately achieved. In the original draft of Wonderful, we’re introduced to the main character, then called Garth, in his bedroom, masturbating. “The opening used to be him…well, how do I say it politely? Making love to a pillow,” says Masterson sheepishly. “The character used to be a little bit more of a ‘loser’ in the John Hughes way, the Duckie kind of character.”
Jon Cryer, who had recently turned in his unforgettable, comically brilliant performance as the aforementioned Duckie in Pretty in Pink, recalls that the original story of Some Kind of Wonderful was indeed “much more of an antic, silly movie.” He was privy to an early version of the script because he was, at an early stage in the development process, up for the male lead. “It was about a kid who was a total geek in school, and his friends are geeks, and he gets up the nerve to ask the prettiest girl in school to the prom,” Cryer remembers of the original story. “And she’s trying to piss off her boyfriend at the time, so she says yes. When he finds out that that’s the only reason that she’s said yes, he decides that he’s going to take her out on the date of her life.” This date was over the top, rather literally: It featured a fly-over from the Blue Angels, the showy flight demonstration team of the U.S. Navy, and had a light, humorous touch. “Early on there was a scene where the lead character is in his gym outfit looking like a total dork,” Cryer remembers. “And he’s scratching his crotch. And the girl walks by. He tries to pull his hand out of his shorts, but his digital watch gets stuck on the inside seam of his shorts. So he’s struggling with it, which, of course, looks even worse. And because he’s brilliant, he undoes the clasp on his watch and just leaves his watch in there, and strikes a cool pose, and just then his digital watch alarm goes off.”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 26
