A day away from school that includes lunch at a five-star restaurant, a Chicago Cubs game, a trip to the top of the John Hancock building, and a tour of the Chicago Museum of Modern Art made up the terrific 1986 summer filmFerris Bueller’s Day Off.John Hughesdirected the movie, which is one of many adored teen coming-of-age tales set in his beloved hometown. Many of us can identify with going to some lengths to avoid school, but few can match the exploits of the suave and charismatic Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick), his uptight, hypochondriac friend Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck),and his doting girlfriend Sloane Peterson(Mia Sara). Together these three (and Cameron’s father’s precious 1961 “choice” cherry red Ferrari 259 GT) made principal Ed Rooney’s (Jeffrey Jones) life a living hell, and left him traumatized and stranded in the middle of a suburban Chicago neighborhood. So if we’ve all skipped school, or at the very least contemplated it, we wondered whether the adventurous tales of Ferris Bueller were based on a real person and a true story. If you believe an essay published in theWashington Postthat was written by a childhood friend and neighbor of Hughes' in 2009, then Ferris Bueller may be a lot more real than we ever thought. More on that later.
What is ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ About?
The tagline for the movie is, “One man’s struggle to take it easy.” A noble pursuit, indeed, if we do say so.Ferris Bueller’s Day Offis the story of an underachieving but charming schemer who undertakes an elaborate plot to fake an illness in order to skip one last day of school before he graduates. But he can’t do it alone. In order to get his girlfriend Sloane out of school,he enlists the help of his trusty best friend Cameron. Together, they concoct a plan to fool the attendance office and the school’s Principal Rooney into believing that he is sick at home instead of taking the audience on a briskly paced tour of the Windy City over the course of a regular weekday. Rooney has other plans, however, and believes Bueller to be pulling one over on him and his parents, so he makes it his mission to catch Ferris red-handed. What ensues is 103 minutes of comedic gold and an epic cat-and-mouse game pitting Bueller and his cohorts against Rooney and Bueller’s oblivious parents (Cindy Pickett,Lyman Ward) who fall for their son’s exploits hook, line, and sinker. A fun fact about Ferris’s parents,Pickett and Ward actually did marry after filming was completed.
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Is ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ a True Story?
No, there is no Ferris Bueller in real life, but the film is based on the actual high school experiences of John Hughes himself. The red Ferrari in the film was actually his as well. But as far as which of the daring ventures Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane undertake in the movie, we can only surmise how much is true and what is artistic and sensationalized exaggeration. There are parts of the film that seem completely plausible. For instance, we can see someone pulling one over on the snooty maitre d (Jonathan Schmock) at a nice restaurant by pretending to be Abe Froman,“The Sausage King of Chicago,“in order to gain access to a nice lunch. Catching a foul ball at a Chicago Cubs baseball game and heckling the players with the unforgettable “hey, batter, batter, saahhhwiiing batter!” sounds like something many young Chicagoans would do if given a day playing hooky from school as well. Some of the more sophisticated of you would surely go and see some of the finest works of master artists Picasso, Matisse, and Seurat for sure. We all need a little more culture in our lives, don’t we? Sounds like fun.
But other events seem to be a bit harder to believe. For instance, while we don’t doubt Ferris' level of audacity one bit, the idea of him commandeering a parade float in the middle of downtown Chicago to sing hits like “Danke Schein” fromWayne Newtonand “Twist and Shout” byThe Beatlesis a bit out of the realm of possibility. It may be the best scene in the movie, and the choreographed shots of people dancing and singing on the floats and lining the streets are a riot, but this is where we draw the line between “the truth is stranger than fiction,” so to speak. Hughes always knew just how far to go when tweaking the truth to entertain his admiring audience.
Edward McNally’s Essay in theWashington Post
Many of the tales of the three truant teens have been attributed to a man by the name ofEdward McNally, a politician who wrote an essay for theWashington Postabout what it was like growing up down the street from the famous Hughes back in 2009. McNally wrote in the essay that was in remembrance of his childhood friend that he had a friend named “Buehler” who compiled an amazing 27 days absent his senior year. This Buehler individual is also written to have been relentlessly pursued by the high school dean for the outrageous level of truancy. It is put forth in McNally’s essay that Ferris Bueller was largely based on his own fantastical tales from high school.
McNally wrote,“Movie director John Hughes and I grew up on the same street in our hometown of Northbrook, Ill. We both graduated from Glenbrook North, the high school where he filmed scenes fromFerris Bueller’s Day OffandThe Breakfast Club, where his mom worked and two sets of our sisters were classmates. Because for years I was relentlessly pursued by a remarkably humorless Glenbrook dean about attendance, pranks, and off-campus excursions — and because my best friend was in fact named Buehler — I’ve spent an inordinate amount of my life being unfairly accused of serving among the inspirations for Ferris Bueller…For one of those Chicago adventures, we secretly borrowed a car almost as ridiculously conspicuous as the 1961 Ferrari 250 GT in the movie: my dad’s purple Cadillac El Dorado. Put an extra 113 miles on the odometer. Hoping to erase that telltale mileage, we raised the back on a pair of jacks and ran the car in reverse. The Caddy did not fly backward into a ravine, as in the film. What it did do is quickly take off a clean 10,000 miles. Oops.”
So if McNally is to be believed, then Ferris Bueller is not a complete conjuring of Hughes' imagination, but pulled from the real-life exploits of his neighbor and childhood friend. So with this in mind, we leave you with probably the most repeated, classic quote in the movie by the fabulously deadpan economics teacher (Ben Stein) as he’s taking the role, “Bueller?…Bueller?…Bueller?…Bueller?” It may have really happened to a guy named Buehler.
