While Crowe was trying to write his script in its original, golden-girl-centered format, he kept getting interrupted by knocks on his door at his apartment in Santa Monica by a young man named Lowell Marchant. The nineteen-year-old was a kickboxer from Alabama who had just moved in next door. Recalls Crowe, “He would knock on the doors of his neighbors to make friends. And you’d answer it, and he’d be like, ‘Good afternoon, I’m Lowell Marchant. And I would like to meet you. I’m your neighbor, and I’m a kickboxer. Do you know about kickboxing?’ And he would wipe off his palm on the side of his pant leg, and shake your hand. And it was just such a great thing,” says Crowe affectionately.
Crowe, who had been struggling with writing the boyfriend character in the script, mentioned Lowell to Brooks during one of their many discussions, and Brooks, who has great instincts, asked him why he wasn’t incorporating that guy into the character. Soon enough, Crowe “started to write down what [Lowell] said and acted out all the time,” says Brooks. Marchant’s simple, thoughtful gesture—wiping his palm before going for the handshake, says Crowe, “was the first little spark for the bonfire that would become getting the character right.”
At one point, Lowell had been training hard for a kickboxing match that he invited Crowe to attend; Crowe could hear him working out in the parking lot. Crowe couldn’t make it to the match, but he checked in on Marchant afterward, only to discover him bruised and bloodied. Even in that state, the ever-optimistic Marchant told Crowe not that he’d lost, but that he’d almost won the match, and would be kickboxing again soon. “It was this guy who’s just going to put himself out there to be battered,” says Crowe. “But the battle was won at the top, because he had the guts to just put himself out there and offer himself for you. And that’s Lloyd. That’s the guy that loved her best.”
Originally, the plan was for Crowe to produce his own script with someone else directing. “We had our dream list of directors,” says Brooks. “Mike Nichols was one of the names. I don’t know how many we got to actually read it, but we got turned down by everybody,” including The Big Chill director Lawrence Kasdan. “And then at a certain point I said to Cameron, ‘You’re the best director in the world for this picture,’ in a very matter-of-fact way. He didn’t jump at it,” says Brooks, “but he came to it. And it was that simple.” Kasdan might’ve helped Crowe come to this conclusion as well: “You remind me of Lloyd,” Kasdan told Crowe after turning down the chance to helm the film himself. “You should direct it.”
And so it was that Cameron Crowe found himself casting his directorial debut. Veteran Chicago actor John Mahoney, who at that point was best known for his roles in Moonstruck and Tin Men, and would later portray Kelsey Grammer’s cantankerously loveable father on the hit sitcom Frasier, was up for the part of Jim Court, father of the golden girl, Diane Court. “I thought the script was terrific,” says Mahoney. At the time his agent sent him the screenplay, Mahoney was making the John Sayles baseball film Eight Men Out, about the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, costarring with John Cusack. One afternoon during production, Mahoney went up to Cusack. “John, you ought to get a hold of this script; it’s terrific,” he told him. “What’s it about?” Cusack asked, and Mahoney gave him the gist of the plot. After hearing about the teen romance, Cusack was adamant that he was not interested. “No, no, no,” Mahoney remembers Cusack saying. “I am trying to move away from teenage roles. It’s time for me to take the next step.” One couldn’t blame him. Cusack was, by 1989, a veteran of numerous youth movies, including Sixteen Candles, but more notably, the cult classics Better Off Dead, The Sure Thing, and One Crazy Summer. Eight Men Out was to be a pivotal role for him, his performance being the emotional center of the film. “Why go back to high school,” he must’ve thought. But Mahoney persisted, telling Cusack, “It’s more than that, John. You really should read this script.”
John Cusack was indeed “at the end of his rope” with teen roles, says Brooks. But Brooks and Crowe wanted Cusack badly. “We really felt that we had to get him,” says Brooks. Many talented young actors came in to read for the role of Lloyd, including Peter Berg and Christian Slater. “I had seen the character done by a few different people, and it’s very different, in different hands,” says Crowe. Even though other actors had turned in interesting auditions, there seemed to be something about Cusack’s unique energy that would mesh perfectly with the complex character.
Crowe flew to Cusack’s hometown of Chicago to try to convince him to take on the role. Upon meeting the actor in person, Crowe’s feelings about the rightness of the actor only intensified. He remembers walking into a coffee shop “and just seeing Cusack sitting there,” says Crowe, “turned away from me with a bandana on, in a big coat, hunched over this table. And he’s so much bigger than I thought. I just looked at him, and I knew that was Lloyd. I felt it. You rarely ever feel that, but I felt it, and it was kind of like, well, we don’t make this movie if we don’t make it with this guy. This is Lloyd.”
Elisabeth Shue was considered for the role of Diane Court, and Jennifer Connelly was a strong runner-up to play Lloyd’s golden girl. Both had popular films to their credit, but the role was won by Ione Skye, who had given a daring performance in the little-seen 1986 teen drama River’s Edge. Skye, whose father was the 1960s Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan, was primarily raised by her mother, and thus had little problem relating to Diane Court, who is raised by a single parent. John Mahoney did win the role of her father, Jim Court, the morally challenged man who loves his daughter so blindly that he steals money from the residents of the nursing home he owns so that Diane never wants for anything.
Say Anything was shot in the spring of 1988 in Los Angeles, with location shooting in Seattle, where the film was set. It was Cameron Crowe’s first directorial experience, and “it was kind of a learning process for him, I think,” says Mahoney. So green was Crowe that when he directed his very first scene on his very first day, he filmed it as a wide shot, and was getting ready to move on to the next scene when one of his producers kindly informed him that he also had to film other elements of the scene—things like close-ups—before moving on.
Some Kind of Wonderful star Eric Stoltz was on board as well, not as an actor, but as a production assistant. “Cameron and I were friends,” says Stoltz, who appeared in Fast Times, “and I was always telling him that he should direct. And when Cameron told me he was going to direct, I said, ‘I want to help out,’ even though there was no role for me.” Stoltz recommended noted first assistant director Jerry Ziesmer (Apocalypse Now), and Stoltz already knew Say Anything’s cinematographer, László Kovács, who had lensed Mask. “So,” explains Stoltz, “I said, ‘Look, I know your whole crew, I’d like to work as a P.A. and just help out, and be around.’” He did the things any P.A. would: “I brought everybody their coffee, and I brought them to the set.” But unlike a typical P.A., he had a cameo in the film, playing the party monster Vahlere, a fun-loving dude “in a chicken suit,” says Stoltz. “At that point, my agents and managers were saying, ‘Hmm, this isn’t the career path that Tom Cruise is taking.’”
The young man playing Lloyd Dobler was the only person who had ever been a perfect fit for the role: Crowe got his dream Dobler. John Cusack had agreed to play the role, but only if he could bring a very specific complexity to Lloyd. “I didn’t want to play a good-natured optimist with no shadow,” reveals Cusack. “I said, ‘I will do it, but we’ve got to put the shadow in there, otherwise I’m out.’ And Cameron, to his credit, wanted to do it,” says Cusack. “It was kind of a presumptuous thing to say as a young actor, but that’s how I was.” (Says Dan Aykroyd, who later worked with Cusack, “He’s just one of these pure artists that knows what he wants and goes for it, and has great conviction and great integrity.”)
Explains Cusack, “I grew up in Reagan-era America…Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan took over, and she was in that white dress, and he was talking about Armageddon and nuclear war, and it was a dark, nihilistic time. Eve
ryone has made it this sort of revisionist kind of thing about ‘morning in America,’ but it was a nasty time. It was depressing, and there was doom in the air. So I didn’t want to do some character that was completely unaware of that state.” Lloyd’s optimism, says Cusack, is something that “people understand to be a heroic choice. It’s not someone who doesn’t understand darkness or depression or the nihilism of America in the eighties. It’s precisely because he sees all that and then chooses to do what he does anyway that I think makes him an interesting character. That was a collaboration between Cameron and me on the character.”
Together, Crowe and Cusack worked on ways to bring this shading to Lloyd Dobler. Says Cusack, “We would write things into it like, ‘I met her in a mall—I should’ve known the relationship was doomed.’ The idea of going to a mall for me, as a teenager—I felt like I was going to the end of the world. I hated the consumer culture, I hated the version of a teenage person that some of those other [eighties teen movies] wanted me to be.” Cusack was reading J. D. Salinger books at the time, and he says that the characters in those works “were sort of my heroes. And so then Cameron and I wrote [Lloyd’s famous speech] about not wanting to ‘buy or sell or process anything,’ and then you had to have a comment on the military—so he says, ‘Well, I can’t work for that corporation.’ And just in that one quick line, he puts [forth] his entire view of the military, and what that means’just another corporation.”
“John Cusack,” says Eric Stoltz, “really did not want to make a teen film at all, but I don’t think he could deny the wonderful script. And so I remember he was always fighting to make it darker, and Cameron was open to it, but able to maintain his vision as well.” Crowe has always been inclined to think in terms of music. “I think Cameron actually said, ‘This is like the Lennon and McCartney thing,’” Cusack recalls. “McCartney writes the love songs, but Lennon gives it the ballast. That was what Cameron and my versions of Lloyd were in some way, and we would sort of switch it around—Cameron and I would love the same things when we would find the breakthrough in the characters. It wasn’t like he wanted only the simple love songs and I wanted only the dark content—as they said, Paul McCartney loved John Lennon because he was ‘kind of a John guy.’”
The 1980s were a particularly interesting time in which to consider the questions of “optimism as a revolutionary act,” as Crowe has often put it, in terms of teenagers. “Punk had kind of been integrated, and MTV had come along,” says Crowe, “and so a lot of what was the cultural possession of youth had been co-opted. In other words, TV took your rock and made it pretty and fun, and not particularly that private elixir that belongs only to you. It was marketed and co-opted,” says Crowe, “and it was a time when true rebellion, I think, had gone underground. So where do you strike out? And what do you make your own in a time when your Boomer parents are claiming all the things that you want to claim as your own? What’s yours?” In Crowe’s script, he was sending a message that the late 1980s teens were not angry per se. Rather, they were optimistic and positive, and would get angry only if their positive view of what the world could be didn’t come to pass. “And that felt different,” says Crowe. “It was kind of fresh. [Lloyd] is going to be the guy that says, ‘I’m going to fight with my own tool that I believe in, which is optimism.’”
Lloyd Dobler’s life isn’t so fabulous—he’s an army brat whose parents are gone most of the time, and he lives with his older sister (played by Cusack’s real-life sister Joan). Yet he’s brave enough to see the hope shining through. “He could’ve felt the borders on his life as really restricting and ominous,” says James L. Brooks, “and he didn’t.” His optimism is only one of Dobler’s endearing traits: he’s a true, old-fashioned gentleman, he’s comfortable in his own skin, and he’s man enough to have two best female friends, Corey (Lili Taylor) and D.C. (played by Brooks’s daughter Amy, against his wishes).
Lili Taylor remembers the excitement of preparing for her role as Corey, Lloyd’s passionate songwriting gal pal whose many musical tirades against her ex-boyfriend include the unforgettably melodramatic ballad “Joe Lies.” “Cameron Crowe wrote the songs,” explains Taylor, “and his wife, Nancy Wilson from Heart, taught me how to play the guitar, which, needless to say, was a fantastic experience. Clearly,” Taylor adds, “Cameron tapped into some deep collective chord with Corey’s songs. At that age, everything is so intense, including the difficulty dealing with hurt feelings. Corey came up with this brilliant way of coping by singing to the world how Joe had wronged her.”
In one of the character’s more memorable moments, Corey tells her friend, “Lloyd, I’m a good person, but you’re a great person.” Says Taylor, “When I speak about Lloyd, it is hard for me to separate John Cusack from the equation. What makes Lloyd/John great is his vulnerability, his openness, his bravery, his humanness—warts and all—and his sense of humor.”
Because of his unique personal character, the kind of girl Lloyd would fall for would have to be extraordinary. Certainly, she’d be beautiful, but that’s not what would draw Lloyd to her. Says MGM vice president Becky Sloviter, “Diane Court was the first on-screen example I had ever seen where a woman was valued for her brain, not just her looks. Her defining traits were her intellect, her ambition, her work ethic and her good nature—that defined her. She’s ‘trapped in the body of a game show host,’ but Lloyd was a fully formed character,” says Sloviter, and Diane’s intelligence is “why he loved her.”
Diane is the smartest kid at Lloyd’s school, but she also might be the smartest kid in the country: she wins a prestigious fellowship in which one American student is chosen to study at a university in England. Diane’s extreme intellect, and her closeness to her loving yet smothering father, serves to separate her from her peers. (After her high-school graduation, most people sign her yearbook by saying they wish they’d gotten to know her better.) Diane’s talents have served to isolate her, and as bright as her future is, she’s also a bit afraid of it.
Ione Skye (likely because she never became particularly well known) doesn’t get a lot of credit for this, but the actress’s portrayal of Diane is one of the movie’s richer elements. “One of the great things in the piece,” says Cusack, “is a great and underrated performance by Ione.” Like Molly Ringwald before her, Ione Skye managed to be both stunningly true to life (she seemed so much like a real kid, right down to her subtle, endearing lisp) and yet, at the same time, dramatically compelling. “The character embedded itself in her unconscious,” says John Mahoney, “and she was so true to it.”
Diane owes much of her success to her well-meaning but domineering father (Mahoney). His intentions are admirable: he wants Diane to be able to achieve anything. But he pushes her, relentlessly, toward perfection, and their relationship is unsettlingly close. Jim devotes his entire life to his daughter (after his divorce from her mom, “he never remarried,” Mahoney points out), and will go to any lengths, even immoral ones, as the film later proves, to give her the life she deserves. “He was willing to sacrifice anything and everybody to make sure that she got what she wanted,” says Mahoney. It isn’t hard to imagine how Jim Court feels when his prized daughter agrees to go on a date with Lloyd Dobler, “this kickboxer who dresses like a bum,” says Mahoney, “and is everything ostensibly in direct contrast to what he wanted for his daughter. Lloyd was a nightmare for him.”
But as Crowe had intended, Diane Court is smart enough to know that this “nightmare” guy, whom no one expects anything of, is the one who can love her the right way. Buoyed by his purposefully embraced optimism, Lloyd asks Diane to go to a party with him. They stay out all night, he treats her like a gentleman, he watches over her (she is particularly impressed when he walks her around a pile of broken glass in a 7-Eleven parking lot), and through it all, Lloyd makes her feel safe and adored, without smothering her. His willful optimism shines through, and allows him to win the heart of the seemingly unattainable golden girl. “I mean,” says James L. Brook
s, “it’s why she loves him.”
When developing the script for Say Anything, there was an essential truth about the film’s romantic structure—a truth that Brooks and Crowe used to refer to as “the secret.” Brooks believes that Say Anything may have been not just the first, but perhaps the only, movie “where the guy who loves the girl loves her completely, realizes that she has more potential in the world at large, and is totally happy spending his life supporting her superiority in key areas. I don’t think I have ever seen it apart from that movie.” Everything in the film’s story structure was driven by that, suggests Brooks, “the way he functions in the relationship. And I think that was great terrain.” Before Say Anything, he says, “no movie like it had happened, though God knows hundreds of thousands of relationships like it have happened.”
It’s this kind of love, the secret, that you can see in Lloyd’s awe-filled face as he watches Diane make her valedictory speech; in the joyful, nervous energy that permeates his every move when, phone in hand, she agrees to go out with him; and later, in Lloyd’s trembling lips when he shivers from the emotional power of making love to her for the first time. (You even see it in the movie’s poster, says Brooks, the one that features Ione Skye laughing, her head thrown back, and John Cusack gazing at her adoringly. “It’s there,” says Brooks. “The secret is in the picture.”) When Lloyd is asked by Jim Court what he wants to do with his life, Dobler first replies with his now-famous “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career” speech, but then later he says, all defenses down, “What I want to do with my life, what I want to do for a living, is be with your daughter. I’m good at it.” It’s all part of a story that, says Cusack, “gave a good portrait of selfless love.”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 33