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| Image: Paramount Pictures |
When Ferris and Cameron pick up Sloane from school, the day off is officially underway! Arriving downtown, Ferris pulls the Ferrari into a Chicago parking garage for safekeeping while they explore the city. It’s here, at A1 EZ OK Park, where we meet two FBDO characters identified in the credits only as “Garage Attendant” and “Attendant’s Co-Pilot.”
The keys are handed off to the attendant along with a five dollar tip to encourage “extra special care” of the car. Cameron is hesitant to leave his father’s Ferrari in anyone’s hands; let alone the hands of a garage attendant whose character he clearly sees as questionable.
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| Image: Paramount Pictures |
Nonetheless, Cameron follows Ferris and Sloane out of the garage and down the sidewalk to begin their day off. As they walk away, another attendant (the “co-pilot”) is seen hopping into the Ferrari’s passenger seat as it exits the garage and speeds in the opposite direction, driven by the first attendant.
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| Image: Paramount Pictures |
But who are these garage attendants? What more do we know about them beyond their brief scenes in the film?
Attendant’s Co-Pilot
The “co-pilot” is a character slightly less significant than the first attendant, so we’ll naturally know less about him. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, his name is never specified; however, the novelization of FBDO gives him the name Sam White. The film script describes him as a tall and skinny man with “a knit hat full of dreads” [Scene 103].
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| Image: Paramount Pictures |
The co-pilot, as we know him in the film, is played by Larry “Flash” Jenkins – an actor with other credits including television roles and a memorable part in the movie Fletch. Jenkins passed away in 2019 at the age of 63.
Garage Attendant
The garage attendant who interacts directly with Ferris, Cameron and Sloane is played by Richard Edson.
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| Image: Paramount Pictures |
You may recognize Edson from some of his many other acting credits including roles in Do the Right Thing and Desperately Seeking Susan. Edson was also the original drummer in alternative rock band Sonic Youth.
Although the garage attendant is also unnamed in the film itself, the FBDO novelization gives him the name Igor Puggha and describes him quite differently than the character we see on screen. According to the book, Igor appears to be “about seven feet tall and vaguely human” while sporting shoulder length hair, gold teeth, and a goatee. Although this characteristic is not specified, when asked a question, he responds with “da” for “yes” which could suggest an Eastern European ethnicity.
Furthermore, the novelization mentions that Igor had served an unspecified amount of time in the Illinois State Penitentiary where his love of cars began. While incarcerated, Igor passed the time reading car magazines and gained a specific interest in the Monte Carlo – a challenging street race in Monaco. It is a fantasy of driving in this race that Igor lives out speeding through the streets of Chicago in the Ferrari.
The FBDO script describes this character in similar terms – although in less detail and without a name. In the script, he is a larger individual – 6’6” and 240 pounds – with shoulder length hair, goatee, earring, gold teeth and “an IQ that equals his hourly wage.”
. . .
While all of this information is certainly interesting, I’m even more intrigued by a small detail from the film that has surprisingly received little to no attention by FBDO fans over the past forty years. That detail is the name patch on the garage attendant’s shirt.
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| Image: Paramount Pictures |
In the most common version (wide-screen) of FBDO, we get only a brief look at the name patch when we see the garage attendant for the first time (seen above). In the open matte version of the film, however, we see a clear shot of the patch which is cut off in the wide-screen version.
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| Image: Paramount Pictures |
At first glance, the cursive script appears to read “Sczmch” or “Sezmch” – a series of letters that essentially amount to nonsensical gibberish. But I wasn’t content to write this off as silly and meaningless filler text – this had to mean something. After staring at this text on multiple occasions and countless online searches for those specific letter combinations, I continued to come up empty.
Even though this particular open matte shot is the clearest available look at this patch, I recently decided to try a different angle. Skipping forward just a handful of frames, a new detail became evident – one that would very quickly clarify the questions I’d been poring over.
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| Image: Paramount Pictures |
There’s a bit of a “corner” as the final stroke of the script is completed. If this last letter were an “H”, the stroke would most likely be smooth. This slight “corner” leads me to believe that this is actually the letter “K” and not an “H.” Additionally, there is enough of a curve to the top of the second letter in this shot that I am confident this letter is an “E.”
That said, working with “Sezmck” still provides no answers … so here is where I will exercise a bit of assumption. Let’s assume that the camera angles don’t quite give us a perfect look at the next to last letter. Or, for that matter, maybe we assume the threading is slightly imperfect here. Either way, let’s say that second-to-last letter is an “E” and not a “C.”
Now we have the name “Sezmek.”
According to multiple sources, “sezmek” is a Turkish word for “intuit,” “sense,” or “anticipate.” One source clarifies further by defining sezmek this way: “to guess correctly [that] something [is going to] happen.”
Turkish. A language from Eastern Europe. A fact that reflects similarities to the description of this character from the FBDO novelization.
Nothing in the entire film could possibly exemplify “sezmek” like the feelings in the gut and thoughts in the head of Cameron Frye in this exact scene. Despite Ferris and Sloane trying to convince him otherwise, he knew.
He knew something was about to happen.
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| Image: Paramount Pictures |
And that something was that his father’s Ferrari was about to be taken on a joy ride by a garage attendant named Sezmek.