Superfan recreates Ferris Bueller’s room
Doc follows artist’s journey as she tracks down period items seen in 1986 comedy
Bueller ...? Bueller ...? Thanks to the new documentary Ferris’s Room, fans of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off can find out what exactly it takes to recreate the titular teen’s bedroom.
The film follows artist Sarah Keenlyside as she travels to Chicago to do just that as part of the celebrations for the 30th anniversary of John Hughes’s big-screen ode to skipping school.
Keenlyside features many of Ferris’s prized possessions, including his baseball, synthesizer, IBM 5160 computer, Bryan Ferry poster and the mannequin he rigged in his bed to fool his parents.
“In my naivety, I thought that in a collectible world and through the magic of eBay that all these things could be found. I really thought that people would still have these posters. But I assume that the people who have these posters don’t want to let them go,” Keenlyside told Vice, adding that she scoured the eCommerce site, crowdsourced the materials and spent hours rewatching the film for the project.
“In some cases, I couldn’t even find references for the posters other than the movie. In many cases I mocked them up.”
For Ferris’s computer, which allowed him to change his number of school absences, Keenlyside contacted Syd Bolton, who runs a personal computer museum in Brantford, Ont.
“He let me walk out of his museum with one of his prized computers,” Keenlyside said. “And not only that, he programmed it so it will count down the absences and has Ferris’s student card information on it.”
Ferris’s Room makes its worldwide premiere June 2 at the Hot Docs theatre in Toronto and airs June 5 on Hollywood Suite.