Ferris Bueller, Influencer - The AtlanticFerris Bueller’s Day Off has avoided a midlife crisis for good reason: It’s a timeless portrait of popularity and truthiness." data-next-head=""/>Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has avoided a midlife crisis for good reason: It’s a timeless portrait of popularity and truthiness." data-next-head=""/>Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has avoided a midlife crisis for good reason: It’s a timeless portrait of popularity and truthiness." data-next-head=""/>

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Has there ever been a less villainous villain than Edward R. Rooney? The dean of students at Shermer High School, and the principal antagonist of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, could have been up there with Hans Gruber and Keyser Söze in the pantheon of movie baddies. Facing off against Ferris Bueller, perhaps the most famous school skipper in cinematic history, Mr. Rooney has the makings of an all-timer. He is deluded. He is depraved. He is dangerous in the way that supervillains tend to be: He has much less power than he wants and much more than he deserves.<br>Fortunately for Ferris, though—and unfortunately for Ed Rooney’s spot in movie-villain Valhalla—Shermer’s embattled dean is also a thorough fool. Mr. Rooney is the kind of guy who, hearing that the score of a baseball game is nothing–nothing, wonders who is winning. He is wrong, not just casually but chronically: a dean who spends the day stalking a student, an adult who does battle with a kid, an administrator so intent on enforcing the rules that he repeatedly breaks the law. Ferris Bueller, a film about road trips and rebellion and coming of age, is, at its edges, an epic; Mr. Rooney—a villain who serves as comic relief—seals its status as a farce.<br>Ferris Bueller’s Day Off premiered in the summer of 1986; even as it celebrates its 40th birthday, though, the film keeps refusing to show its age. It owes some of its perennial-classic status to Ferris himself (and to Matthew Broderick, the baby-faced actor who plays him). But it owes some of its endurance to Ed Rooney and his off-kilter brand of villainy. For everything Mr. Rooney is wrong about, after all, he gets one thing notably right: He’s right about Ferris. He intuits that the teen’s “illness”—rumors of which will spread, with a kind of virality, among the citizens of Shermer, Illinois—is a hoax, and indeed it is: Ferris is spending a sparkling spring day not sick in bed but gallivanting around with his best friend and girlfriend in tow. Mr. Rooney’s knowledge does not mitigate his foolishness; it does, however, add dimension to his villainy. His pursuit of Ferris may be wildly unreasonable; it is also rational.<br>Mr. Rooney is one of the few characters in the film who are immune to Ferris’s charms. He is one of the few who see Ferris as the film’s audience does: a performer going to his own absurd extremes to enable his day of school-skipping. He is also one of the few who understand the stakes of Ferris’s fun. “The last thing I need at this point in my career,” the dean tells his secretary, “is 1,500 Ferris Bueller disciples running around these halls.”<br>Shermer’s dean knows the same thing its famous student does: Popularity is currency. It is celebrity. And his insight helps explain why Ferris Bueller has endeared itself to so many generations of viewers—and today feels strikingly prescient. Ferris does not merely have a high school full of friends. He also, as the film progresses, draws fans—or, as we’d call them now, followers. He is more than the film’s central character. He is its influencer.<br>When Ferris Bueller premiered, its success was somewhat unlikely; teenage truancy is not, on its own, the stuff of comedy gold. But it was another movie from John Hughes, bard of American adolescence, and it did the same thing that made Hughes’s previous films so beloved: It honored teenagers. Hughes, famously, drafted the original Ferris Bueller script in a single, caffeine-fueled week. Paramount, just as famously, green-lighted the thing pretty much immediately. But Hughes spent the time between Ferris Bueller’s drafting and its filming engaged in constant revision, in some cases making changes that were deeply consequential.<br>Read: The emotional legacy of The Breakfast Club<br>A new book, released in commemoration of the film’s anniversary, offers some startling insights. Ferris Bueller … You’re My Hero: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Day Off, by the comedian and author Jason Klamm, is a work that, like the film it celebrates, might be easy to underestimate. An origin story of Ferris Bueller and an analysis of its impact, it is largely an oral history, and it certainly benefits from the more than 100 interviews that Klamm conducted with the film’s creators and crew. It is most revelatory, though, because of the access Klamm had to various drafts of the film’s ever-evolving script: iterations showing the extent to which Ferris’s character was subjected to honing, rethinking, editing, re-editing.<br>In an...