Christopher Borrelli: ‘Risky Business’ at 40: Tom Cruise’s Chicago-made movie still has much to say
CHICAGO — On the North Shore of Chicago, there are two homes firmly enmeshed in Hollywood lore. I’m likely not telling you anything you didn’t know. Both were in John Hughes films: There’s the “Home Alone” house of Winnetka, a landmark so well known it’s recognized by Google Maps and has its own Lego set; and there’s the Highland Park home of Cameron in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” a glass sandwich by A. James Speyer, a Mies van der Rohe protege and former Art Institute curator of 20th-century art.
As a teenager, though, I mostly wanted to live on Linden Avenue, also in Highland Park. This home wasn’t glass and steel, and I certainly didn’t know then that it was a real house in a fancy suburb of Chicago. It was more like the Brady homestead, but classier. Palatial, definitely. Big front lawn. Tons of green. Lots of shade. Porsche in the driveway.
Tom Cruise lived there in “Risky Business,” released 40 years ago this month.
Unless they saw Francis Ford Coppola’s semi-successful adaptation of “The
