Speaker 1: Hi, I'm John Reid, I'm Bowwarm Oled, I'm Pat Cannagello.
Speaker 2: And we are the thirty Podcast. We're ready to believe you.
So anyway, the other day I was in Chicago. There
happened to be a parade, as there is every day,
and I jumped up on a float and started singing
Donkashin and then out of the blue, doctor Richard Kiple
runs by and tells me that he didn't kill his wife.
Speaker 3: And I don't care.
Speaker 2: And that's just what it's like living in Chicago. You
got pizza, you got hot dogs, you have murderous doctors
running through the streets. Ferraris driving backwards. It's just how
we roll here.
Speaker 4: Babies roll down steps and train stations.
Speaker 2: That's the Chicago way. So thank you for listening to
the Surely you Can't Be Serious Podcast. Take it away,
Dan Jason.
Speaker 4: Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around
once in a while, you can miss it.
Speaker 5: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Shirley you Can't
Be Serious Podcast, And we are here today with our guest.
We have mister Dave Dolphin. Hi, Dave, how you doing.
Speaker 3: Hello?
Speaker 6: It is good to be here first time caller, longtime listener.
Speaker 5: And we also have with us from Virginia. Mister Chuck Bryan.
How are you, Chuck?
Speaker 1: I am doing well. I thought you guys would never
have me on again. After Star Trek the Motion Picture,
I was like, what did I do something wrong? What's
going on here?
Speaker 5: You started your own podcast? Man? We just a little
bit busy on that note, Chuck, why don't you get
why don't you tell us about the Cinematic Flashback?
Speaker 1: Absolutely, The Cinematic Flashback Podcast is a podcast that covers
the greatest decade in movie history. I'm talking about the seventies.
I'm talking about New Hollywood. We're going back to Robert Altman,
Sam Peckham Pod, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, all of the
greats during that And we don't do anything outside of
the seventies. And we have a really great time. We
post every two weeks, So check us out.
Speaker 5: Excellent. Dave, tell us about your YouTube channel, man.
Speaker 6: Actually I do well. A lot of the things I
do are more in the short form content.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 6: Yeah, whether it's Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, whatever, you can find
me at Dave Dolphin. Okay, we just kind of talked
about people that are in the middle of life just
trying to figure it out. Sometimes I've referred to it
as documenting my midlife crisis, and so just you know,
a little bit of nostologia remembering back what life was like,
you know, as kids, which you know, I feel like
I'm at home here, and then just you know, the
weird like when we were sixteen eighteen thinking about our lives.
We never thought that it would involve so much like
changing air filters in our air conditioning systems and changing
the batteries out, or what to do with chicken and
ground beef every single night.
Speaker 5: But here we are excellent. Where can they find you.
Speaker 6: Dave Dolphin? Okay, in all all the places. If my
space was a thing, you can find me there one
of my top eight spaces.
Speaker 5: Okay. Well, I feel like that we have hit your
proverbial demographic right on the head for both of you.
But we're not here to talk about seventies movies, and
we're not here to talk about midlife crisis. We are
here to talk about two movies. And I don't think
I could put it any better than Jason put it
last week when he teased this up which is we're
going to talk about a really great movie and a
movie that's on the mount rushmore of all eighties movies.
Speaker 4: I guess you'll just have to decide which is which
at the end of this.
Speaker 5: All right, guys, you know what, I've been a member
of the text thread that started up when we started
talking about these movies together and the fact that we're
going to get together and talk, and so instead of
me going on my storytelling adventure like could normally do,
I'm going to ask you guys questions. All right, So
we're going to start with Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Jason
went Ferris Bueller's Day Off come out.
Speaker 4: Farris Bueller's Day Off came out June eleventh, nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 5: Okay, do you remember watching it for the first time?
Speaker 4: Absolutely? Yeah. I mean that to me was the Top
Gun summer, so I always just wanted to rewatch Top
Gun at the movie theater. And then finally, by the
time June rolled around, there was another movie that really
caught my attention and my admiration after watching it.
Speaker 5: This was it?
Speaker 3: Dave?
Speaker 5: What about you?
Speaker 6: Well, the interesting thing for me is that I live
in Oklahoma City. I've been in Oklahoma City for many,
many decades, but I was actually born in a suburb
of Chicago. So I was born in Elkrove Village, and
I grew up in Schaumburg, which is all like northwest
of O'Hare.
Speaker 3: And so we had.
Speaker 6: Moved to Oklahoma in November of nineteen eighty five. So
not that it was like super traumatic, but I you know,
I left the only home I've ever known, the only
school I've ever known, friends have ever known, and I'm
dropped into Oklahoma. And then a couple of months later
there's this movie that comes out that I like the
premise of, you know, this teenager just you know, getting
to have this one last hurrah. But to find out
that it was in Chicago, and even like when the
movie opens and they do the WLS jingle.
Speaker 5: Like shory dive.
Speaker 4: Outside west Side Southside Chico.
Speaker 3: It's do.
Speaker 6: Like I know the radio station WLS ninety four point seven,
I was like, oh, it was like a love letter
from home.
Speaker 3: And so now I did.
Speaker 6: The funny part is I did go see it in
the theater with my parents, and there was a lot
of jokes of like, you know, is this you know,
should you actually see this movie with your parents, Like
we want to tip our hat to letting our parents know,
like the things that we might be Like if I
got some ideas, I couldn't. I couldn't do this on
my parents because he saw the movie right, it worked out.
Speaker 5: Right, Chuck, how about you man?
Speaker 1: Summer of nineteen eighty six June, I had just graduated
from high school and had started working at a local
general cinema theater. And the opening movies that weekend that
I started working were it was before so Top Gun
was opening up, and then we had earlier than that.
It felt like was back to school to school last, right,
And so when Ferris Bueller opened up, I had to
see it. I loved it. It was a good time
because I recognized instantly that one of my very close
friends was actually Ferris Bueller, so I was relating to
it on a different way. But then in my professional
duties as a theater employee who was tasked with not
only ushering but cleaning up all the pop horn afterwards,
this movie was maddening because of the ending, because nobody
left until Ferris told everyone to go home, even at
the midnight movies. So I saw it quite a few
times during the summer of eighty six.
Speaker 5: That was gonna be my next question. Did you stay
until the very end? Of course did you absolutely?
Speaker 6: Because that that beautiful scene in the school bus they
they like it just it led you there. You just
didn't like the movie, Like I guess you saw the credits,
but there's still movie happening.
Speaker 3: I'm not going anywhere.
Speaker 4: The Gummy Bear, the the Rooney eats it graffiti.
Speaker 3: They're nice and soft. They've been in my pocket.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I.
Speaker 4: Going on.
Speaker 3: Did you get that fight.
Speaker 1: At the start of the summer people would get up
immediately and start heading out the door, right because it's
all kind of closing up, and you got the people
who are gonna get out as quickly as they can.
But as soon as they realized that there was more movie,
they'd turned and they stopped, and they would stand in
the aisles or stand in at their seats, and then
they all turned around started to walk out, and then
they heard Ferris. They turn around, up, there's more movie,
and then he tells them to go home. And so
they were in on the joke at the very end
where he's like, what are you still doing here?
Speaker 4: Go it's over.
Speaker 5: I was ten years old when I saw this movie.
I saw it in the theater as well, and I
think this was the first movie I ever watched all
the way, all through the credits, through the end, and
probably for those very reasons, that very reason that like,
oh there's still movie going, I'm not gonna leave. It's like,
you know, Cannonball Run. You know, like it's like the
outtakes or whatever. You're going to stay and watch those.
And then yeah, there's a break between the last Rooney
scene and when Farah shows back up. But we had
gotten such a treat with the Rooney scene. We had
to wait and see if there was more, right, like
it's is it gonna be more? And then of course
it was.
Speaker 6: And even that scene, the whole bus scene was actually
supposed to be like earlier in the film, they had
that intersplice with something else, and then it got cut,
like a million other things in this movie. We'll get
to that about just how long this movie was and
all the footage that they had to deal with, But
it was earlier in the movie and then it got cut,
and then they're like, okay, we want to keep people
for this last scene. Like they had the idea of
faris saying go home, but we got to keep people here.
What should we do? Hey, that one whole series on
the bus that we have on the on the cutting
room floor, let's put that back in at the end,
all the credits on top of it. And that was magic.
There's so many conventions that are in this movie that
like now seems so normal, like the breaking the fourth
wall and talking to you to the camera. There's so
many conventions in that that were like nobody did that.
It was just such a unique movie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely was. You know, John Hughes kind of messed
around with that fourth wall breaking in Pretty in Pink,
But we talked about that, how Ducky at the end
breaks the fourth wall looks directly at the camera when
Christy Swatson, who showed up in this movie is there
as ducket right, So he was playing with it in
Pretty and Pink and then went full on with it
in Feris Peeler's Day Off.
Speaker 5: We haven't even said what the movie is that we're
comparing Ferris Bueller's Day Off too, yet.
Speaker 4: That might be part of the problem.
Speaker 5: Okay, yeah, so real quick, the movie that we're comparing
Ferris Bueller's Day Off to is another phenomenal movie called
Adventures in Babysitting. Do you remember the first time you
watched that one?
Speaker 4: I think I saw this on BHS, okay, but I
don't think I saw it in the theater. It did
not have as profound an impact on me as Farris
Buller's Day Off did, but I still loved it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was still, but it was it was still
in the eighties that you saw it. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
what about you do?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the same thing.
Speaker 6: I don't remember seeing it in the theater, And I'll
see your VHS and I'll raise you a beta, Matt
that I saw it on right and I remember watching
it or it might have been on HBO or something
like that, but I do I remember loving just that
premise of things just working out as one of the
things I loved about Paris is that it's just, you know,
the things just worked out for him, and so using
that same gimmick in this movie was fantastic. And of
course another love letter from Chicago. I was like, oh, yeah,
I remember that, I know that, I know that place
was exciting for me.
Speaker 5: Chuck, were's still working on the movie theater on the show,
I was still.
Speaker 1: Working in the movie theater, and I'm going to tell
you what. The trailer for this film opens up with
the same song as the movie opens up with, and
I tried to get in at the beginning of that
trailer as often as I could, because I still had
a little thing for Elizabeth Shoe after the whole Karate
Kid movie. I was still hurting just a little bit
after Karate Kid too that she had dumped Danielson. But
but I was, I was really uh, I was pretty
ready to go and see Adventures and by sitting and yeah,
I saw it when it I think we actually had
a sneak preview of this movie before it opened up.
So those were always fun for the employee previews because
they would put the film together. And one of the
reasons they would do that, first of all, is just
to make sure that the reels were put together in
the right order. Okay, So they would come in you know,
the cans, and then they would splice them together, put
them on the giant platters, and that's what would feed through.
So if you run it through one time, you can
just make sure that everything is as it is, just
verifying it. But also it gives the employees a little
bit of a treat to be able to see the
movie ahead of time and then be able to interact
with people coming to see the movie to you know,
let them know that if they liked it or not
or something.
Speaker 4: So okay, just a couple of quick stories before we
get started on the actual breakdown of the movie. We
tease this up, this matchup. I think in Ario Speedwagon.
Speaker 3: It was many moons ago.
Speaker 4: It was a while back. Yeah, And so you know,
I said, hey, this is what we got coming. We
got Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, We've got pretty in Pinak, some
kind of wonderful. We got Ferrispeeler's day Off in Adventures
of Babysity. Well, within twenty four hours, I got a
text from Dave and a text from Chuck that both
basically said, I'm your guy. I've got to be on this.
Farris Beeler's Day Off is one of my favorite movies.
Speaker 3: You've got it.
Speaker 4: We got to make this happen.
Speaker 6: You even said, yeah, sure, that sounds like a great idea.
And I said, no, Jason, what date when are we
doing this? Like I'm putting something on my like, don't
just give me the yeah shirt?
Speaker 3: No, we're doing.
Speaker 4: This, that's right. And Dave has special privileges because when
we were starting this podcast, de and I were still
in the kind of the formation stages of this, and
they've had a active podcast. He was the only podcaster
I knew at the time, and I took you to
lunch and I said, hey, I want to talk through
this idea with you. So you're a part of our
genesis story.
Speaker 3: So I love and.
Speaker 6: Every time I listen to an episode, I am honored
to be on that, you know, wall of founding fathers
of sorts, and as.
Speaker 4: The founding father, you have yet to be on our
podcast other than it and intro.
Speaker 6: We've tried on a couple of other episodes, but this
was the one because I was like, now, Baris Bueler,
I watched it like once a year, like it's a
great film. And then when you teed it up with
Adventures and Babysitting, I'm like, why have we.
Speaker 3: Not done it?
Speaker 6: First off, I was shocked that you hadn't even done
it yet. How have you gotten you know, you're like
seven hundred years into this podcast. How have we not
done this matchup?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Well, it took us a while to find the matchup.
And before we get too far off this, I would
like to say that not only was he influential in
how we did the podcast, but he is the reason
that we save final judgment for the end. That was
Dave's idea. He was like, you need to have something
to keep them hooked in. And I wasn't there for lunch.
But Jason, He's like, Dave's idea was we should save
final judgment on which one's the best movie for the
end so that people wait to find out. And I
was like, that's brilliant. So credit Todave for that great idea. Yeah,
thanks Dave, And we've been doing it now for seven
hundred episodes.
Speaker 1: Well, Dave, you would be very happy to know that
these guys paid it forward, because when I was starting
my podcast, first of all, I pitched the idea to
both Jason and d just to say, is this topic
even interesting at all? And you know, I think d
you were like I was saying everything and you just
had a blank face. And what I've come to learn
is that you're processing information all the time and you're
just you're thinking through it. And then you just said,
seventies movies are making a real big, comeback right now.
And then you name some movie about Late Night with
the Devil, he says, very popular movie. A lot of
seventies vibes think you should do it. And you know,
with the advice in getting like what how do I
start off? How do I get this thing going? And
you guys were very instrumental in helping me get Cinematic
Flashback podcast off the ground, so they paid it forward.
Speaker 4: So everybody, real quick, hit pause on your podcast, go
subscribe to Cinematic Flashback, and then come right back. Okay,
good to have you back.
Speaker 3: Okay, sorry that.
Speaker 1: Yes, thanks guys. I appreciate that the subscriptions just went up.
I mean I can see them happening right now.
Speaker 4: I mean, let's go, everybody get on board with Chuck
at Cinematic Flashback. I've got one quick story before we
dive into the movie. Okay, So movies, movies, movies. I'm
not tipping my hand yet, Okay, but I will tell you.
I will tell you that in nineteen ninety, several years
after this movie came out, I talked to my buddy Bomber.
I've talked about him many times. His name is Chris Bauer.
We all called him Bomber, and he's a lot like
Darryl in Adventures of Babysity. He was the goofball that
was always hanging around that was causing enough trouble that
he was so funny we could not bring him along.
So he and I decided we were going to skip school.
And our full proof plan was that we were going
to go up to the book sign ourselves out right
that we're going to our orthodonist appointment. We also were
going to sign our girlfriends out. Okay. He was dating
this girl named Catherine Ogel at the time, so that
was his girlfriend who is now my wife, and I
signed out my girlfriend, who I don't know where she
is anymore. But we all signed ourselves out on the
sign in spot. Okay, problem number one. Right, we go
to lunch, and this is going to sound like I'm kidding.
I'm not kidding. We go to Bennigan's at seventy first
and Sheridan and Tulsa. Oh I loved that Bennigans. Do
you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I had this buffalo shrimp there all the time.
Speaker 4: So good, So we place our lunch order. We really
haven't really missed school. Yet this is still during the
lunch hour. We sign out, we go to lunch, we
order my mom walks in. This is the true story.
She's looking around. She doesn't see us, but my buddy
hits the floor. He recognizes her because we go to
church together. He yanks me down on the floor. We
crawl out on our hands and knees walk the ticket.
The girls are irritated. They don't understand why we can't just.
Speaker 5: You're the reason Bennigan's went bankrupt.
Speaker 4: Yep. So we then go across town to Casperaneda. We're
hiding in the cave for the rest of the lunch.
The next day we get called in because we all
signed out on the sign in mark. We're trying to
plead our case. We're all four busted. We get detention.
So I tried the Ferris Bueller theme. It did not
work out for me, but I did manage to get
a wife out of the whole dell, So anyway, it
was all right, So anyway, all right, So let's get
into it.
Speaker 5: Okay, who wants to tell the origin story of Ferris
Bueller's day off.
Speaker 6: I just remember the first thing being that there was
a writer's strike that was getting ready to happen, and
they had like days, like almost a week. If I
don't get a script in before this strike happens, I
won't have anything to direct. And so and he was
kind of like, you know, I think brand new with
Paarmount at the time, and so he's like rushing to
get this. But because he's John Hughes, I mean he's
constantly writing. I think he was supposed to do like
rewrites on Pretty in Pink, and he was procrastinating, didn't
want to do it, didn't want to do it, and
so one of the guys for the team came over
and said, you know, hey, I'm sitting with you until
he finished this and fell asleep on the guy's couch
and woke up and it's like, okay, do you have
it finished?
Speaker 3: He's like, no, but I've got this great story.
Speaker 6: And he showed like forty pages of what would be
Ferris Peeler.
Speaker 3: So that's kind of how this thing starts.
Speaker 5: Yes, Howard Deutsch, right, Deutsch was the friend.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, guy he directed Pretty in Pink.
Speaker 1: Howard Deutsch also said it was a little bit like
in the movie Ama Daeis, where Salieria is just like
just enraged by how good Mozart can just pull music
out of the air. And you know, Hughes was writing
what like ten pages an hour or something like that.
He was like really banging it out so that the
amount the amount that he was channeling, whatever news he
was channeling, he was able to do it very very quickly,
and it was almost something to make Deutsch jealous.
Speaker 4: He said, we would go into like a trance. Yeah,
he's like a trance typing, typing, typing, you know, cigarettes burning,
and Howard Deutsch is like, I'm gonna go take a
nap on the couch while you work on this. The
date that John Hughes started on this February twenty fifth,
nineteen eighty five. Seven months later they're shooting. It goes
from writing to Ned Tannin's desk, to approval to funding,
to casting to hiring.
Speaker 6: Like boom, they actually greenlit the thing on like the
first pass, which is not typical normally, like they work
it back and forth and chop it whatever. But like
the moment they had like the very first bit of it,
they're like, yep, shirt, let's do it right.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, at this point we had had sixteen
Candles and we had had Breakfast Club, right.
Speaker 4: And pretty well, I guess pretty peak was in the works,
in the.
Speaker 5: Works, right, but they they've got at least three scripts
that they know this is this guy has the touch,
He's got the Mitas touch right now.
Speaker 4: That doesn't even count Vacation and mister Mom right, which
we're both hits as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: So John Hughes bases Ferris Bueller on a couple of
his school buddies. One of them was named Ed mcnully,
which kind of he was just a popular guy. Kind
of everything worked out for him. And then he had
this other guy named Buehler who was kind of the
Cameron character, and he just fired it out, started filming
September of nineteen eighty five and was done filming by
November of nineteen eighty five. Just rapid fire, and what
I think is gives us one of the greatest eighties
movies of all time.
Speaker 5: Okay, So, as the script for Ferris Bueller was going
from desk to desk, there was a place called New
World Pictures that had a guy named David Simpkins, David
Simpkins working there. His job was to review the scripts
and tell the studio whether he thought it was a
good idea bad idea, And he comes across the script
for Ferris Bueller's Day officer reads that comes across the
script for a movie called After Hours, which is a
Martin Scorsese movie.
Speaker 4: It is right, and Gryffin Dunn, Griffin dun.
Speaker 5: Yeah, from American Marble from London. Right, that's right. And
he reads both of these scripts relatively closely together, and
he thinks, I want to write a script that is
basically a marriage of these two ideas. And after Ours
is him Done's character trying to get home misadventures as
he tries to get home late at night. And then
of course Peris Bueller is high school kids out during
the day. And so what he writes is a movie
called Adventures in Babysitting.
Speaker 4: I'll make it very clear, you slip me the cash
and I'll slip you the winner.
Speaker 3: But I don't have any casts. But I don't have
a winner.
Speaker 5: Yes, he proposes that to New World. They say, now
we're good. But then what happens after that?
Speaker 4: Paramount picks it up and they say, we like what
you're doing here. We want to hire this girl named
Molly Ringwold. Yeah, and if you can get her, we'll
make this move.
Speaker 5: So this guy wrote a script that was close enough
to John Hughes's work that they were like, this is
something that we can latch onto John Hughes's coattails on
cast the girl that's been in two of his biggest
hits so far and make it our own thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think Jill McCormick last week on Pretty Pink said
Adventure in Babysitting is the greatest John Hughes movie that
John Hughes didn't.
Speaker 3: Right, that's a great way to put that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 4: Okay, So Paramount demanded Molly Ringwald they had the right
of first refusal. Molly Ringwold says, Nope, not interested. I've
done the babysitter thing. I've done the teen thing. I'm
trying to move on to bigger and better things. And
so Paramount comes up with a great idea, Well, maybe
we can get Bette Midler or share, which is crazy,
what are they what?
Speaker 5: So so the idea I get this, Like, the idea
is that it's a babysitter, and babysitters don't have to
be high school kids, right, they can be older people
they're I mean.
Speaker 3: But this movie is at Missus Doubtfire. That's a different vibe.
Speaker 4: Funny enough. Chris Clumbus directed This is Doubt Fire.
Speaker 5: No right, So I.
Speaker 1: Think I think share and that would have been much
closer in age to Bradley Whitford. So when when Mike
shows up, he would be right in the right age,
in fact.
Speaker 4: Just a little bit forty five years old.
Speaker 5: It looks maybe just he little must have always looked
that age. I looked him up. Bradley Whitford is actually
I think he's only like three or four years older
than Elizabeth Shoe and she was twenty four, so he
would have been twenty eight. I mean, so he does
look old for dating a high school kid, but she
was much older than high school kid. She was a
college kid. She was at Harvard at the time that
this movie was made. And a couple of things about
that number one Bradley Whitford, they used his real car,
so cool. Number two so cool was his real license plate,
oh my gosh. And number three Apparently he wasn't an
weirdo weirdo because Elizabeth Shoe said that like they dated
after the after the movie. Really, yes, yeah, She's like,
I can't remember if he asked me out or if
I asked him out. So anyway, there you go, Raley.
Speaker 1: No star stars dating each other in these movies is
a common theme.
Speaker 4: It really is real.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 5: Yeah it did. I don't think they had a drunk
driving accident together. But no, oh sorry I went there
too soon.
Speaker 4: Dang. So okay, just to continue on with that thought,
so Paramount decides, Okay, we can't get Molly Ringwold and
maybe cher or Bette Midler is not the greatest idea,
so they punt Disney takes over. Adventures in Baby City
becomes the first Touchstone picture that is rated PG thirteen.
So the first Disney movie rated PG thirteen for those
of you who have always wondered this question is Adventures
in Baby City, which is interesting because it's directed by
the guy that wrote movies that led to the PG thirteen.
Speaker 6: Because Goonies was was the movie when they said, okay,
we got to do something because there is just not
enough room. There's too much room between PG and R.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say it. The Goonies didn't do it,
THENMINS would have done it as well.
Speaker 5: No, it was Grimlins so Chris Columbus wrote Grimlins. That's it,
you just say to but yeah, I mean, yeah, it
was Grimlins. It was something with a G right, right,
and as and if you will, if you notice the
little girl has a backpack that has Grimlins on it.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, it's a great callback.
Speaker 5: Yes there are tons of them in this movie. You know.
We'll get into later on the ability to do those
little easter eggs, those little moments in the film, and
why one of these movies is great, and why one
of them is Mount Rushmore. But I don't want to
get us too far off the path, so tell us
about the rest of the process. Chris Columbus obviously is
tapped to direct this. This is his directoral debut. We
talked back when we did Grimlins Versus Ghostbusters about how
he became a writer, how Steven Spielberg picked up his
script because of his name right right. He was living
in a place where rats were eating his fingertips as
he slept, and that's how he came up with the
idea for Grimlins. But he gets that. Spielberg actually considered
producing Adventures in Babysitting under the Ambulin banner, but because
he wanted to help Chris columb but Chris had already
been hired, so he didn't need to get in there
and do that. So we have Chris's directorial debut. He
directs then a terrible movie called Heartbreak Hotel, and manages
to save his career after getting fired from Christmas Vacation,
which we talked about there by getting hired on to
another John Hughes movie called Home Along.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we've talked about all this stuff, right, So
Steven Spielberg saw the screenplay with Chris Columbus's name on
it and said, this guy's name really Chris columb Like
who names their kid Chris Columbus on purpose?
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 4: And so sure enough that is his given name. And
then but he produced, you know, screenplays for Gremlins and Gooni's,
I mean, two great great movies from the eighties. And
of course he's talented, and at a time in his
life when he had to have a job, he was
hired by John Hughes. So there is some incestuous relationship here,
right to direct Christmas Vacation, and Chevy Chase is such
an insufferable turd that Chris Columbus, who had to have
the job said, I can't do this, I can't be
here and I can't work with Chevy Chase. John Hughes says,
that's okay. I got this other movie I think you'd
be great for. It's called Home Alone. And then we
all know what happened there.
Speaker 5: Now, I will say this for Chris Columbus, I mean,
obviously he has skills as a writer, and so those
came into play while he was making the movie. The
bar scene, which is potentially one of the most memorable
scenes in the movie, was a Chris Columbus idea. And
then nobody gets out of here without playing the Blues,
and nobody gets out of play. That was all Chris Columbus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you don't mind, we just like to let
ourselves off.
Speaker 7: Nobody is out of just played for that sanging and blue.
Speaker 3: What nobody leader his place without sang in the blue?
Speaker 4: Brilliant?
Speaker 5: All right. So this is the point in the show
where we talk about casting, which we began talking about
it a little bit already with adventures and babysitting, but
we'll come back to that. Let's talk about casting for
Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Now I know that this script
was written for Anthony Michael Hall right, and Anthony Michael
Hall said, no, I want to do this movie called
out of Bounds.
Speaker 4: Dave, have you seen out of Bounce? I have not seen, Chuck,
have you seen out of Bounds?
Speaker 1: I did not see out of Bounds.
Speaker 5: I saw the front, I saw the poster, I saw
the VHS box, and it's got Anthony Michael Hall with
a gun pointed at it at me.
Speaker 4: So I had the pleasure of joining Jeff Johnson on
his nineteen eighty six podcasts where he covered like eighty
six movies from eighty six. One of them was out
of Bounds. So it was an interesting thought to have
Anthony Michael Hall in a like crime thriller. But that
movie sucks. It is set in the sunset strip, which
does make it kind of a fun readventure, but it
is not a good movie. He blew it when he
could have still continued on in the John Hughes you
know Climb.
Speaker 5: Now. Interestingly, he was also at this same time cast
in the role of Joker for Full Metal Jacket, just
couldn't work it out financially and ultimately didn't get it
done and it went to Matthew Modine. Now that's interesting
because that happened at the same year as Adventures and Babysitting, right,
and both of them have this memorable part with the
actor Danafrio if and looking at Vincent Danafrio in those
two parts that literally they had to be filming right
around the same time. Substantially different look. I mean, even
if you take away the blonde hair. I mean he
was thin and muscled up and a little oily.
Speaker 1: But I think the Nafrio must have shown up on
set being the most buff guy in the entire production,
and they basically told him, you need to put on
some weight. So so he yeah, I was gonna say
he hit the burger stand.
Speaker 4: Seventy pounds is what he put on.
Speaker 3: For a while.
Speaker 4: It's to wait, okay, so let's talk about the cast
of Ferris Buel's daff Matthew Broderick as Ferris. I said
it before and I'll say it again. Life moves pretty fast.
You don't stop and look around once in a while,
you could miss it.
Speaker 6: That's he was one of the first people that they
wanted and they're like, well, that's just out, so well,
let's let's try some others. And then that didn't pan out,
and eventually came to Mathwick.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I could see anyone else.
Speaker 6: I mean, obviously, you know this movie is iconic and
all that, but like, there's just something about watching him.
It's enjoyable, and there's different aspects of the character that
he just captures beautifully. And the nice part too, is
that he had already done some Broadway shows where he
had to talk to the audience, So even just the
idea of talking to the camera and breaking the fourth wall,
he already had experience doing that.
Speaker 5: We've talked before he was His first movie was Max
Dugan Return, which is how I learned how to bat.
His second movie was War Games, which we talked in
detail with Chad Briggs about Chad, who actually does real
war games. He hit is up and said this movie
was an inspiration to me. We had no idea that
that meant that he actually was a key factor in
many war game scenarios. Hey, Chad. Then after that he
had done Biloxi blues A Paul Simon, Paul Simon, that's wrong,
Simon Simon, Neil Simon, thank you that he had done Simon.
Paul Simon did that all right, So I'm sorry. So
he had done Neil Simon's play Biloxi Blues, which he
would later do the movie in my hometown of Arkansas,
and he was just outside of Fort Smith that at
Fort Chaffee. That's where they filmed that one. Really, Yes,
But anyway, what other like other than the Broadway play
and those two movies had he done before he got.
Speaker 1: So he also was in Lady Hawk, that's right. You remember,
he was the mouse. And there was a movie Forgive Me.
I cannot think in the title of it right now,
but it was it had to do with sending monkeys into.
Speaker 4: Space Rodick X. Yeah, oh, thank you.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's hard to think of Matthew Broderick because in
his roles because for me, it's like Ferris Bueller runs
right down the middle between things, you know. I feel
like afterwards I don't see him quite as much, or
he begins his he starts to diminish once we get
further and further out of the eighties when he shows
up for me. But I remember him being in those
all those movies that we've talked about, and in this
movie there was something that was a little bit different
about him, and I really believe that he had honed
his craft on Broadway. You know, he wasn't doing the
thing where an actor becomes Ferris Bueller. The entire time
he was still It was totally an act. John Hughes
in his commentary says he loved that Matthew was just
acting it out. You know, he had worked with Alan
Ruck as well on Broadway Way, and the two of
them just had natural chemistry right from the start. And
I didn't realize it until John Hughes pointed out in
the commentary and I know we're not talking about Alan Ruck,
but I brought him up. His facial expressions are just amazing.
I never realized how pliable his face was. And it's
it's very funny guy. You know, Matthew Broderick has to
walk a really fine line.
Speaker 4: He has to be this combination of Yoda and Phonsie
and not come off as a deceitful jerk to his teachers.
You don't want you really have to protect against the
audience siding with mister Rooney in any way, right in
any way.
Speaker 6: And there was even this is like later on, but
like there's definitely scenes that were shot that involved like
drinking and just you know, and even like how does
he fund this adventure in like stealing money from his parents.
There's things that eventually got caught. Those things were in
the film. I don't think it works because you have
to you have to always side for Ferris. You always
have to like aspire to like I want to. Like
when I was sitting there in the theater with my
parents in the sixth grade watching this film, I wanted
to be Ferris. And you have to keep that for
the whole ninety minutes.
Speaker 4: It's tough to do, right. He's kind of up on
the on the tight world with that.
Speaker 5: This is one of those very interesting I'm gonna digress
here for just a second. It's one of those very
interesting stories where the guy who you think is the
main character is not really the hero of the movie.
Speaker 6: No, because there's no character arc with Ferris. He says
the same, but there's multiple arcs with other characters, with
his best friend and with Genie, and those are the
main characters.
Speaker 5: You have a character twist with Genie. But I think
that absolute hero, as far as the hero's journey goes,
has to be Cameron. Yeah, it has to be Allen
Rux's character because he starts in a spot of misery.
Like it's said he gets sick because of how miserable
his life is, and he's forced to go out on
this journey that he doesn't want to go out on,
and Ferris is his mentor. Ferris is the wise character
that leads him along. He's the Obi Wan Kenobi to
Cameron's Luke Skywalker, right. And then you have this moment
as he's as he's moved to the other side where
it's it's really it's one of the most beautiful parts
of the movie because it's absolutely to music. They're in
the art museum, they have all these wonderful poses. There's
no dialogue. You see Ferris kissing Sloan in front of
this beautiful stained glass while Cameron is locked eye to
eye with this child this pointissm child on the George
Sarah painting, and it's just back and forth between their
two eyes, and you've you come to the conclusion that
he is realizing his lost childildhood, like what was it
like to grow up in his house? It was like
growing up in a museum. Right. Then you get to
this point where he's at his bottom. He realizes that
the mileage is one hundred and seventy three and one
quarter miles over what they had started with, and they
get to the you know, he's reached the bottom. He
goes catatonic and then he comes out of that. They're
trying to reverse it, but he's had it. He's had enough.
He's realized that his life has been dismal at this point,
and it's at this point that he's got everything changes
and he's going to take a stand, right or wrong.
He's going to take a stand.
Speaker 4: You got to defend it, right or wrong.
Speaker 5: He's the hero of this story. Yeah, he is crazy.
He is.
Speaker 1: Even from the very beginning, Ferris is even saying, the
reason why I'm taking this day off is for Cameron.
Cameron needs a day off. In fact, Cameron is so
wound up, so tight that if you were to put
a lump of coal in his butt in a few days,
you would have a diamond. That's that's how uptight his
friend was.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a couple of little nuggets on Matthew Broderick before
we move on. Okay, he was the original choice to
play Alex P. Keaton on Family Tie. Oh how about that?
Speaker 1: That would have been good. I would have enjoyed that
one too. I mean he could have both both casting
of that, I mean I would have enjoyed both of them.
Speaker 4: He turned down the role for Johnny Utah in Point Break.
Do you see Matthew Broderick as an.
Speaker 5: FBI agent, football player, football quarterback Utah?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 5: Okay, sorry, Matthew?
Speaker 4: All right, and I got a quick trivia question. I
want to see how you guys doing this real quick?
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Matthew Broderick has three movies selected for the National Film
Registry Library of Congress. Can you name those three movies?
Speaker 5: Have we talked about Harris Bueler's Day Offers, Day Off one,
War Games one? No.
Speaker 4: I posed this to Dave def Dave last night and
he got it, but it took him a minute. Okay,
So let me ask, Are they all in the eighties?
Speaker 5: No? Okay? Is one of them?
Speaker 4: Election no Glory? Yes, okay, Ferris Buelow's Day Off Angler,
you got the two eighties ones? Okay, And it's another
one in the nineties nineties, arguably bigger than Ferris Bueler's
Day Off.
Speaker 3: I'm out man, Chuck.
Speaker 5: Chuck, you got any idea?
Speaker 1: And now I'm I'm drawing blanks on nineties movies I've
been living in the seventies for too long.
Speaker 3: So you're in your ear.
Speaker 5: Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1: Ninety four, let's see ninety four. I was in Okinawa.
What were we doing?
Speaker 5: That was all kinds of right, incredible movie. Right, he
wasn't in pulp fiction. Right, he wasn't in shosh Anng Redemption.
Speaker 4: It's a bit of a curve, more of an ensemble.
Speaker 5: What is it?
Speaker 4: I don't know. The Lion King. He plays Simba in
The Lion King.
Speaker 3: Of course. How about that?
Speaker 5: That's right? Wow, great one, thank good one. I like that.
I like that. Okay, So we down have Matthew Broder yep, okay,
So Alan ruck, Alan.
Speaker 3: Ruck, Paris Bueller your money? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Was he like thirty twenty nine when he did Yez?
Speaker 3: That was the thing they were like.
Speaker 6: He was like because Alan and Matthew were they were friends,
which is the explains to the chemistry you see on screen,
because they really were friends when they were doing Lexi
Blues and and Alan had his people reach out say
like that, I really like to do this this Ferris
Muler thing. And they came back and so now you're
you're too old. We think you're too old, and They're like, well, no,
wait a minute, I don't know if I have anything
past that.
Speaker 4: Well, no way to minute, you'd be perfect for this role.
Speaker 5: Well, I was gonna say I I had never questioned
that he was in high school. I found out much
later on that he was twenty nine whenever he did this,
and I was like, oh wow, he totally sold me.
Like not, I mean, you compare to pretty in pink
or some kind of wonderful and yeah, those people look
like they're thirty five, but he didn't look like that.
It was thirty five. Okay to me if you say so. Yeah,
So tell me about the Gordy how jersey.
Speaker 4: So the Chuck.
Speaker 1: Do you know the story? I am aware that. Let's see,
John Hughes was a big fan of the Detroit Red Wings,
with Gordi Howe being his favorite player, and he gave
that shirt to Alan Ruts for Cameron to wear because
that would be something that Cameron would never wear. That's
the only thing I know about the story.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So the story I heard is that growing up, John
Hughes was a big Gordi how fan, and it would
have been natural for him to have a Chicago Blackhawks
jersey in fact, Clark Griswold wears one oh location, but
John Hughes was such a Gordy holl fan that he
wanted that to translate to this movie. And the story
behind it is the idea that Cameron and his grandfather
were close and his grandfather was a Red Wings fan
and his dad was a Blackhawks fan, and Cameron, who
hated his dad, essentially sided with his granddad And that's
kind of the fictional backstory there.
Speaker 1: Fantastic another sports thing. Yeah, John Hughes not a fan
of Chicago Cup. But the White Sox did not play
during the day, so they shot the film at Wrigley.
Speaker 5: What was the score?
Speaker 3: Zero?
Speaker 5: Zero winning?
Speaker 3: Which the score nothing there? Who was winning?
Speaker 6: Wow?
Speaker 3: The Bears.
Speaker 4: I've got a little nugget on that. I want to
share this with you. So the Cub Game, which I've
been to a game in rerig actually have been to
two games, actually two Actually the Cub game highlight that
you see on the TV where Rooney's at the restaurant
is from June fifth, nineteen eighty five, where they're playing
the Braves, but the actual footage of Ferris and Cameron
at the game at Wrigley was from September twenty fourth,
nineteen eighty five, when they played the expos So two
different games. All right, let's talk about the lovely Mia Sarah.
Speaker 3: What's he doing?
Speaker 1: He's licking the glass and making obscene gestures with his hands.
Speaker 5: What hot? I don't know what else you want me
to say. I think the word smoke show applies or
absolutely smoking.
Speaker 4: Smoke show sophisticated and it was.
Speaker 6: I think, you know, it really balances off the goofiness
of these other two characters. The fact that she was
she was, she was very sophisticated and and uh, it
was a great casting call.
Speaker 5: What I love about her character is at the beginning,
like when you when you're first introduced to her character,
she's good at acting like she's acting when the nurse
comes in and she starts to put her coat on
and she starts to fold her books up, and the
nurses like Sloan Peterson, and she's like like, it's this
over dramatic, like me really, And then when she's talking
to Rooney, she goes into that weird thing that new
actors do where it's slightly British sounding in their accent.
You know, you're a beautiful, beautiful man ed, but then
for the rest of the movie, she's just a normal teenager. Well,
I don't know how old was.
Speaker 4: She when she auditioned. She was seventeen. They were looking
for somebody older, and they were like, what in no
way didn't think that you could get a teenager that
elegant and sophisticated and beautiful, And she pulled off all three.
Speaker 5: Yeah, she nailed it. She did the great job.
Speaker 4: By the way, I've got some cool tidbits on her.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she was married to the son of Sean Connery
and the son of Jim Henson two different times, obviously.
Speaker 5: But yeah, fairly famous, fairly impactful father in laws. Interesting okay.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and she's also the very first actress to portray
Harley Quinn as a live action DC character. Yeah, DC
character on Birds of Prey. I think it was kind.
Speaker 1: Of she was a CW very Birds of Prey after
the Margot Robbie, but obviously that.
Speaker 4: It was a seedy CW show.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 5: Interesting. Okay, are we going to talk about Jeffrey Jones? Now?
Speaker 4: We got to at some point, Yes, please, let's do it.
Speaker 3: Translation, the game is up, your ass.
Speaker 5: Is mind gets real awkward and it's not awkward because
of Howard the Duck. What I know is that Jeffrey
Jones had some unseemly charges that were filed against him,
and he was ultimately convicted of which is a blemish
on especially this movie and on his amazing performance in
this movie. I guess he actually was released ultimately, but
I think he served some time.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 4: He was arrested for creating pornography with a young male
child and then had to register there's a sex fender
and blah blah blah. And when he moved around, there
were a couple of times that he failed to alert
them that he was moving and didn't check in and
got rearrested twice. And that's all I want to say
about that, all right, But if we can just somehow
move that decide, he does such an amazing job in
this movie. Absolutely, if we can pretend like none of
that happened, we would be praising as one of the
great villains in eighties movies history.
Speaker 5: This movie is not this movie without Ed Rooney and
without him as Ed Rooney. Yeah, tell you what, dips.
Speaker 1: You don't like my policies, you can just come on
down here and smooch, my big old white button can't
pucker up, buttercup.
Speaker 7: Paris buemers online too.
Speaker 4: Even the little things that like when he's sprinting by
and then slows down to walk by the windows, and
then sprinting and then walking.
Speaker 1: When he's at his desk at the very beginning, and
you see that he's like flicking little pieces of dirt,
which is slightly ironic because at the very end he's
just completely covered in dirt. He cannot keep that same clean, pristine.
He's great. What I like about the character of Rooney
is that you know he's he's losing control of the
student body to this one bad apple that is Ferris Bueller,
and he is bound and determined to bring him to
heal and to a degree, he's almost obsessed with Bueller.
It's his white whale, and it causes him to go
beyond the pale of what he should do it the
moment he leaves the school grounds, he is out of
reality and out of line. But it is such an
interesting journey that he's on.
Speaker 5: He is on a road to nowhere.
Speaker 4: Just now, with your bad knee, you shouldn't throw anybody.
Speaker 6: You know how many times I say that nine, Oh
my gosh, nine times the word nine.
Speaker 1: Hughes found how he just found it funny because when
you say nine, there's a nasal aspect of it that
comes out that other words just don't have. And it was
also at the time too, right who had computers at
their house, let alone, who had computers that could connect
to other computers and then cause their grades or their
missed absences to just magically go down. I thought that
that whole sequence was one that was I don't know,
it was the initial office sequence of introducing him, of
introducing Eating mcclerk's Grace's character.
Speaker 7: Oh well, he's very popular ed the sportos and motor hits, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, doweebees, dickheads.
They all adorn it. They think he's a righteous dude
in there.
Speaker 1: I just thought that whole thing was funny every time
I watched this film. This is probably my between Ferris's
twenty different outfit changes and Eadie McClure, Grace, Grace Grace.
Speaker 6: What I love the fact too, that that scene where
they're like rustling around in the office and he thinks
he's talking to to Ferris and he's gonna bust him,
and then Ferris is on the other line, but you know,
and then then he thinks he's actually talking to mister Peterson.
Speaker 3: One take.
Speaker 6: That whole thing was done in one take, and because
Edie was holding, she had all this background in improv
and he is so straight laced, he is like he
is used to doing Broadway. This is the script, this
is what you say, and in a little bit of
her rubbed up on him and even just the idea
of like she said, Okay, we're going to do this
thing where I'm trying to help you, but I'm actually
hindering you. So if you go this way, I'm going
to go the other way. Like whatever you do, I'm
going to do the opposite. And they just they're just
kind of fooling around, just trying to figure it out.
And then John, here's the like great moving on one take.
Speaker 1: So I have to bring up Iron Newborn, who was
the He wrote the I'm not going to say he
wrote the score because this film really does not have
an orchestral score per se. It has musical cues, and
he wrote a bunch of these cues that are all
throughout the film, and the one you just talked about
Dave is so subtle, and it's so funny when you
hear it, because when you hear it, you can't unhear it.
He's looking at the phone and he realizes he has
to push the button one to talk to Ferris, and
you hear the death knell of a bell. Yeah, just
so subtle that he knows that, oh gosh, I have
insulted this man to his face and wanting to bring
out his dead grandma.
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay, since we're going to talk about this. I
didn't realize the beauty of this, of that entire sequence
until today. I mean, I always loved what was happening.
But you have a beautiful trans position in those two scenes,
because it's not just one scene. It's you've got a
back and forth between two scenes. And at the first
of the Ed Rooney scene, he's all cool and collected
because he thinks he's got them figured out, and then
it moves into that chaos where they are both they're
both running back and forth, right, and it's nuts. While
that's going on, on the other line, you have Cameron
talking on the phone being very cool.
Speaker 3: Pardon my French, but you're an asshole.
Speaker 5: Asshole, you have Ferris come in and the James Bond
music plays because he is so cool looking, and then
that falls apart. So immediately after you have Ed and
Grace do their comic.
Speaker 3: Vaudeville badoop doo doo, it goes.
Speaker 5: Straight into Cameron and Ferris doing it, slaps the phone.
Why'd you hit me? Well, like, what are you doing?
Speaker 4: We'll have lunch sometime.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's all this. It's this beautiful switch for both
of them, one right on top of the other. Absolute
filming genius.
Speaker 4: Okay. I was just gonna mention what you talked about
there in the movie Theater I remember specifically the place
died laughing number one, when Grace is talking on the
phone going ooh, just trying to buy time, and camera's
going Rooney, calm down, calm down, Roney, and the whole
place was dying. But when it flips back and you
realize that Cameron is the one impersonating mister Peterson and
he said, you know, it cuts to him and he goes, well,
I should say, you do you know the place died laughing?
When you realize, oh that's Cameron, that's not mister Peterson.
Speaker 3: I have a fun fact about that.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, okay, So that voice that Cameron is doing, Yes,
you know what that is?
Speaker 4: Is it the director from Biloxi Blues.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 6: So when Matthew and Alan were in Biloxi Blues, it
was directed by a guy named Gene Sacks, and he
just he was, you know, very matter of fact and
how we talk and how we would do things and
Matthew and it was like, there's never die. Yeah, they
would be messing around. He'd get real upset. He would
just like yell at him. And Matthew had an impression
of Gene Sacks. So that is Alan doing an impression
of Matthew doing an impression of Gene Sacks. And after
you had no idea he was going to do this,
so he just pulls that out. Matthew was like, while
they're filming this, he knows exactly what he's doing, and
he was just wanting to see if he could get
a rise out of Matthew.
Speaker 4: I love it.
Speaker 5: That's brilliant too, because when I heard it for the
first time, I thought it was Matthew Brodrick. I thought
it was Matthew Broderick being mister Peterson. I was like, Oh,
he's just doing a voice. So it's a brilliant acting
choice to go, I'm going to do an impression of
my friend doing an impression, right, It's genius.
Speaker 1: Was this phone trick number one or number two? Because
this film is full of phone gags where they use
the phone gag. This very same gag will get used
later at Shaky's as well. Yeah, where they have person
online one in line too.
Speaker 5: Sorry speaking of that, and I didn't even I like,
we talked about it as this scene is going on.
He's on the phone just before this with Ferris' mom.
He's got the screen right in front of him. I'm
looking at it right here, right after nine times, and
we see the absences going down. I had no trouble
believing this because just a year or two earlier I
had seen Matthew Broderick do the very same thing, except
with his grades arga. He was there with Ali Sheety
changing that what do you want? What you want to be? Yes?
Speaker 3: The pastor was still pens.
Speaker 4: Okay, all right, so you mentioned ferris mom, Cindy Pickett Okay,
Norman resident Cindy Pickett.
Speaker 5: Norman is where we live.
Speaker 4: Yes, for those of no don't know what we're talking
about born in Sand Springs. I believe rais and went
to Norman High.
Speaker 5: Sand Springs is just outside of Tulsa, where Jason grew up.
Speaker 4: Yep, David, you go to Norman High.
Speaker 3: I did go to Norman High.
Speaker 4: You rode in the hallways with Cindy Pickett.
Speaker 6: Apparently something I'm gonna have to I will pull up
bind is blowing as we.
Speaker 3: When did you graduate ninety two?
Speaker 5: Yeah, she's gonna be wa before you got Yeah.
Speaker 4: Okay, dig up some yearbooks, and I'm gonna go and
tell a nugget that many of you probably know. She
and Lyman Ward, who plays Ferris' dad, fell in love
on this set and later got married, married, married.
Speaker 5: Married married.
Speaker 4: It was to love, all right. So we blew past
Jennifer Gray. Let's talk about Jennifer Grafers.
Speaker 3: Bite the Big Ones Jr. Thank you, Genie. I can't
believe this.
Speaker 1: If I was bleeding out my eyes, you guys would
make me go to school.
Speaker 3: This is so unfair.
Speaker 5: Okay, she's been in a couple of movies at this point.
At this point, she had been in Red Dawn. That's right,
came out at three. She was cast but not had
not appeared yet in Dirty Dancing.
Speaker 4: That's right, that's right. She is the daughter of Joel Gray,
who was a Broadway producer.
Speaker 5: I believe, Broadway actor. Yeah he was.
Speaker 4: He was what's the name of the Is it Chicago?
It may be Chicago.
Speaker 5: I think it was Chicago. He's like the guy character
in Chicago. Anyway, he is also because I didn't see
that one. He is also the guy in Remo Williams
the Chinese. The Adventures of Williams is the because he refused,
he was like, no, I'm not going to get somebody
Chinese to play the guy. But then they did the
makeup for him. He's like, Okay, I can do this.
So yeah, the guy who can dodge the bullets, that's
Joel Gray.
Speaker 4: You move like a pregnant yeck wow, okay, interesting, okay.
Once again. At the time, to me, when I heard
this the first time when I was in high school,
the idea that Genie Bueller and Ferris Bueller were not
only playing brother and sister but actually were in love
in real life and were engaged at the time. Crazy
and had it not been for a tragic car crash Ireland.
In Ireland, I think they were. I think Matthew Brodrick
was driving on the improper side of the road.
Speaker 5: It was intoxicated, and the death resulted in the other car.
So not a good scenario at all.
Speaker 4: No, I think, you know, Jennifer Gray talks about how
like I think Dirty Dancing was completed but maybe not released.
That sounds right, But the accident and the death and
the subsequent success of Dirty Dancing, she could never truly
really enjoy that success because of what had happened. Okay,
I don't know if you guys know this or not.
Jennifer Gray is actually married to Clark Gregg, who played
Phil Coulson from the Avengers movies.
Speaker 5: His first name is Agent.
Speaker 4: Agent Coulson. Yeah. He actually he married her post uh
nose job, so he recognizes her. Nobody else does.
Speaker 5: Uh yeah unless they start her on Friends for the
first time.
Speaker 4: She's kind of smoke show now Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it made her face cuter, but less memorable.
Speaker 4: Less memorable, less recognizable.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think the reason why Jennifer got the parts she
talks about when she walked in to the audition, she
kind of didn't really want it. She was like in
a mood or whatever she was. She kind of walked
in unintentionally being the Genie character, like what is it?
Speaker 3: What do you got?
Speaker 5: Attitude?
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, And there's just this you know.
Speaker 6: I think that's so beautiful because she has to be
just I can't say the word because I work in
the church, right, but she has.
Speaker 3: To be that.
Speaker 6: But you also have to like like her, like like
there's that again. It's a fine line, like you can't
just you have there's a balancing act that always has
to happen, that there's something that you can relate with her,
even in the midst of her just being a.
Speaker 5: Stone cold b Yeah, hi, Genie, who's bothering you? Now?
Speaker 4: They expecting you in class? Probably? Yeah, Her sourpuss attitude
comes out right off the bat. She's like, oh, traffic,
what's his problem?
Speaker 5: The only the problem that I have is that like
she's like I knew it, and I'm like, he was
making faces at you, like shushing you and like winking
at you in the bedroom at the beginning of the movie,
we know you.
Speaker 4: Everybody knows you knew it, Like how did you not?
Speaker 5: What? How did you get confused about what's going on?
Speaker 4: Genie's maybe the only person that has him truly figured out,
of course she does.
Speaker 1: This is something that I think is really great between
the characters is that is that this is a brother
sister relationship. Who doesn't have a brother and sister relationship
where it's like, oh, one of them is trying to
get away. Why does mom and dad love everything that
he does? If I try to do anything, nobody would
even care. And then she goes off screen. And the
sound design is something else that's also amazing in this film.
You hear a car peeling out of the driveway, and
in the establishing shot you see that there's a a
white Fierro sitting out there. Those cars infamously would catch
on fire, and.
Speaker 5: She just she just tears tears off.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: I know we were kind of wrapping up the casting
on Ferris Bueller, but I did want to mention some
of the other characters in the film. I wanted to,
first of all, just note I think this was the
first time that I had ever seen ben Stein. In fact,
I don't even think he was an actor. I just
think he was just a very He was very good
at playing a very dull individual in the film.
Speaker 3: Buehler. Buehler, He's sick.
Speaker 4: My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this
guy who knows this kid is going with the girl
who saw Ferris pass out at thirty one Flavors last night.
Speaker 7: I guess it's pretty serious.
Speaker 4: Thank you, simm No problem whatsoever. Richard Nixon.
Speaker 3: He wasn't necessarily an actor.
Speaker 6: He was there because originally that scene was supposed to
be a teacher off camera, and the way that he spoke,
the kids would laugh. They're like, there's something about when
we put him on screen, and then they said, hey,
do you have like some like speech you could like
like some kind of like letch you could give real
fast And that's where the voodoo economics comes something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, I can. I can talk about smooth
Holly and the terror effact and did it get us
further or did it improve it was further anyone? And
then when he's calling out and then I kind of
noticed that the only time that you actually see, you know,
kind of that Ferris Bueller actually would go to that
school is when they're calling out for attendance and it
shows the one empty seat over there that Ferris would
have been, and of course it's in the back of
the room, which would have been perfect for Ferris Bueller.
Speaker 5: What I love about that scene are there are eight
people with the last name that starts with an A,
one person with the last name that starts with a bee,
and then they jumped a fry.
Speaker 1: One other character, very very minor character, but the actor
is notorious is the English teacher. The English Teacher was
played by Dell Close. You may have remembered him from
the movie The Untouchables. You think you are all untouchable?
You know Dell Close? No way, Yeah, that was him.
Speaker 5: Dell Close.
Speaker 1: Also, he was this improv genius from Second City, Chicago's
Second City Troop, not the Canadian Second City spin off
of that one, but he was. He From the early eighties,
he served on SNL as the house metaphysician to all
of the SNL staff. Many of the show casts at
that time were his proteges. When he died, he wanted
to leave his skull to one of the acting troops
so that they could use it in Hamlet. That didn't happen.
And I'll tell you so, I said, I remembered him
from The Untouchables. I did also want to cast out
that if you remember the nineteen eighty was at eighty
six eighty seven remake of The Blob with Chuck Russell's
Night eighty eight Chuck Russell, Thank You. He played the
reverend character, the kind of the wacky preacher guy who
at the end he has the Blob at the end,
but he also has another Blob story in that. He
was also in the nineteen seventy two sequel to the
Steve McQueen Blob called be Where the Blob, and I
talked with Jeff Johnson about that and David Burns's last
October when we were covering the whole Chuck Russell Blob,
and you can go over there if you're on their Patreon,
you can listen to an extended version where we actually
dive into the Steve McQueen version, and I saved David
and Jeff the trouble of watching the seventy two version
because it's pretty unliele. But anyways, we talked about that,
and the last actress that I wanted to talk about
was Christy Swanson who shows up as Simone now Christy Swanson.
The last time we saw her, she was duck At
in Pretty and Pink, as Jason mentioned earlier, and she
would go on in the film version of Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, and she was in this really little known
West Craven film called My Deadly Friend, which if you
haven't seen it again, I'm gonna have you go over
to a film by podcast and listen to Jeff myself
and the slasher girl herself, Amanda Jantic when we talked
about that film, and I also calculated the airspeed velocity
of a basketball and how fast it would have to
be thrown in order to crush a skull. So check
that one out.
Speaker 5: Nice.
Speaker 4: We love the film by podcast. What is one of
our good buddies.
Speaker 5: One of the things I loved about the text Threat
is that somehow in that process of talking about Christy
Swanson and I found out that there was a Mannequin two,
which I had no idea about, and that she was
the mannequin in Mannequin two, which then made me start
looking at mannequin thinking what would be a good matchup
for this movie where you've got kind of this sort
of a live sort of dead thing. And I was like, oh,
Weekend at Bernie's, And as it turns out, that guy
who is Bernie and Weekend at Bernie's is in Mannequin two.
How weird is that?
Speaker 4: Sounds like a match up to me? There you go,
all right, just a couple of the people I want
to bring up from the cast of Ferris Bueler's Day Off.
You have Louie Anderson, who barely gets seen.
Speaker 6: And he was supposed to have like he had a whole,
a whole.
Speaker 3: Thing that was on the cutting room floor.
Speaker 1: And Johnny's you can see all the flowers, all the
flowers at the end that are in the hallway. I
mean there's tons of them, and Louie only showed up twice.
Speaker 4: And then you've got Larry Flash Jenkins, who we talked
about when we did Fletch. Please go and Fletch. But uh,
the real person I want to talk about is Charlie Sheen.
Speaker 5: Wait wait, wait, what about the partner of because the
guy who was in Fletch was the was one of
the two guys in the garage that stole the Ferrari.
Speaker 4: Yes, Richard Edison is the name of the other guy.
Speaker 5: He just passed away like last year, right, yeah, I
think so.
Speaker 4: I didn't know that.
Speaker 3: You speak English. What country do you think this is?
Speaker 4: But he's what country? Do you think this is it?
He's funny, great, Everyboddy in this movie. It's so iconic.
We know all the all the players right exactly. But
Charlie Sheen has a brief cameo. He had been in
Red Dawn with Jennifer Gray yep, and actually John Hughes
wanted Amelia Estevez to play Cameron, and Emili Estavez turn
him down, so he ends up, Okay, well we'll bring
your brother in and Charlie Sheen plays old Beck Garth Volbach.
Tell me the nugget, because when you told me this
the other day, my mind was blown.
Speaker 1: Well, this was actually something that Dave had thrown out
in the text thread, and I said something along the
line of I knew it was something Vulvov, but I
couldn't quite get it. And of course Dave he nailed
the name down perfectly. But I think, as David already said,
the first cut of this film was two hours and
forty five minutes. I mean, it was a long first cut,
probably the longest first cut that the editor Paul Hirsch
had ever done before, and which I kind of find
hard to believe with Star Wars. But anyways, so a
lot of stuff got cut out, and you'll notice that
that name still shows up in the film because the
tow truck that takes Rooney's car away is the Rullback
Towing Company and it's his dad that's doing the car
setting toeing the car.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: I don't know how that was actually related back to
Charlie Sheen's character other than this is what was said
on the director's commentary by John Hughes and Dave. I
don't know if you had any more about that than there.
Speaker 6: Was even supposed to be like a like a side
story that they were the people that the mom was
showing the house too, which I know about how that works,
if you know, if you're moving to town but you
also own a toy company. But they said that that
was part of it. I don't know how that would
have fit.
Speaker 4: To the damn vant people.
Speaker 5: Wow, and he's already in for drugs.
Speaker 4: Why don't you seek your thumb up your butt?
Speaker 7: Uh?
Speaker 4: Okay? Anything else? On casting for Ferris Bueler's Day Off.
Speaker 1: One last thing I had to make it right. I
was trying to hold off. I should have said this
back when we're talking about Alan ruck, but I have
to pull it out that He is the Ferris Bueller
Star Trek reference. He played Captain Harringman in a Star
Trek Generations. He was Captain of the Enterprise NCC seventeen
zero one B model Nice. I had to pull Star
Trek out somewhere.
Speaker 4: Hey, if you haven't listened to our Star Trek motion picture,
what the heck happened? Whereas me and d and Chuck,
you need to go back and listen to that.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, guys, that does it for this part of the matchup.
We will be back next week for part two of
Ferous Bueller's Day Off versus Adventures in Babysitting. We will
talk about casting for Adventures in Babysitting, We will talk
about music, we will talk about tidbits, and then we
will give our final judgment on which of these two
movies is better. And I know you will all just
on the edge of your seat figure out what we're
going to say about that. So see you all next.
Speaker 4: Week, and we promise we'll talk about Adventures Babysitting too.
Speaker 1: SI. Last cast person that I want to talk about
has to be Simoon because.
Speaker 5: Oh, I'm sorry, Yeah, get give the Himlake, Dave. No,
we've all done it. You just did. You didn't need a.
Speaker 4: It's like when it happens in church, you can't stop it.
Speaker 1: It's like laughing in church. It's like the worst.
Speaker 3: I've never come back. Just please,