‘You Killed the Car’
June 16, 2026 at 01:58AMIn John Hughes’s beloved 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, there’s a pivotal scene that depends on three things: Cameron Frye, Ferris’s anxious best friend; Cameron’s father’s Ferrari; and the cantilevered glass pavilion of a spectacular modernist Highland Park home, where the car meets its fate. In an excerpt from his new book Ferris Bueller . . . You’re My Hero, Jason Klamm reconstructs how the scene came together, from the location scouting to the moment the car flies through the glass into a ravine below.
Producer Tom Jacobson remembers it differently. “[Hughes] looks in the woods and says, ‘Whoa, what’s that?’ ” The van stops, and the Rose House reveals itself. “It’s this beautiful glass and steel house. [Hughes says,] ‘That’s really cool, that looks like a Mies van der Rohe.’ ” He was close — Speyer was one of the famous architect’s star pupils. “We look at that back house, and John just completely visualizes the scene,” Jacobson continues. “Visualizes the car going out the window and into the ravine, which is so much better than what he wrote on the page. So this is an example of, like, ‘Oh, there’s something that presents itself to me, and this is what’s going to work.’ ”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/06/15/ferris-bueller-car-crash-scene/
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