Daily Dialogue — March 9, 2014
“In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the… Anyone? Anyone?… the Great Depression, passed the… Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?… raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. ‘Voodoo’ economics.”
— Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), written by John Hughes
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Lecture.
Trivia: Deleted scenes: — Ferris asks his dad on the phone about bonds his father purchased when he was born, he then takes one of them from a shoebox in his father’s closet, cashes it at the bank with his girlfriend (telling the hard-of-hearing teller they are pregnant with a jeep), and uses the money to pay for his day off. It was removed because it made Ferris look like a thief rather than a lovable rogue — Ferris orders something in French on the menu, and after everyone at the table tastes it, he is informed by the snooty waiter that he ordered “sweetbreads”, which is a French dish made from the thymus gland. It was removed because it showed the waiter getting the better of Ferris, but later in the movie when Ferris is recounting the day to Cameron, he remarks “we ate pancreas”.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Another piece of trivia: “Ben Stein’s famous monotonic lecture about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was not originally in Hughes’s script. Stein, by happenstance, was lecturing off-camera to the amusement of the student cast. ‘I was just going to do it off camera, but the student extras laughed so hard when they heard my voice that (Hughes) said do it on camera, improvise, something you know a lot about. When I gave the lecture about supply-side economics, I thought they were applauding. Everybody on the set applauded. I thought they were applauding because they had learned something about supply-side economics. But they were applauding because they thought I was boring…It was the best day of my life’, Stein said.”
Comment Archive