Part of why Lloyd and Diane’s love came across so powerfully may have had something to do with Skye’s offscreen attraction to Cusack: she has admitted that she had a crush on him during the production. (Skye was particularly “turned on,” she has said, in the scene where Lloyd teaches Diane how to drive stick.) “I had a boyfriend,” Skye said to Cusack in a commentary-recording session for the film’s DVD, “and you had just fallen in love for the first time, but it feels like, in another life, we would’ve been this great love. But we did it here,” Skye said, “forever.”
The movie’s title derives from a conversation between Jim Court and his daughter, where he tells her that she can say anything to him. But the title has within it, suggests Mahoney, the contrast between the way Jim Court loves Diane, and the way Lloyd Dobler loves her. In terms of Lloyd, “‘say anything,’” says Mahoney, “means, ‘I will always understand you.’” As opposed to what it means to her father, who will listen to her, but still get her to do things his way. Diane can say anything to Lloyd, and “she won’t be ridiculed, or put down,” says Mahoney. “He will always understand her.” Which, of course, only makes Jim Court begrudge Lloyd Dobler all the more. “She’s getting a mind of her own,” says Mahoney, “and Lloyd’s helping with that. Lloyd is almost a Pygmalion and she is his Galatea—but Mr. Court was always the Pygmalion before. To have that taken away from you,” says Mahoney, “is going to breed a lot of resentment.”
Eventually, Jim is indeed able to manipulate Diane into breaking up with Lloyd. “You’re gonna be part of an international think tank,” he tells his daughter, “he’s gonna be kicking punching bags.” And her father’s sudden investigation by the IRS only strengthens Diane’s resolve to stick by her dad, and to ditch Lloyd. The scene in which she dumps him (famously giving Lloyd a pen as a sort of consolation prize—maybe she really is more like a game show hostess than we thought) is one of the most honest and haunting breakup scenes in all modern movie history. Lloyd tries to convince her logically not to do it, but the desperation cracks through in his frightened voice. In due time, he is standing in the rain, talking to his sister on a payphone (Joan Cusack was actually on the other end of the line), and he utters the dejected remark that Premiere magazine called one of the 100 Greatest Movie Lines of All Time: “I gave her my heart, and she gave me a pen.”
Diane won’t take his calls, which means that, soon enough, Lloyd will appear outside her bedroom window, in the middle of the night, with a boom box hoisted over his head. Cameron Crowe remembers how the scene first came to him: “I was in Seattle,” he says, “and my wife and I were heading out to do something. I was ready to go, and Nancy said, ‘I need twenty more minutes.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll go back and write for another twenty minutes or so.’ I was sitting there and I could hear somebody playing music across the block,” he says. “And there is something amazing about the way music travels in the wind. And I just thought, what if this guy could send out a signal? He can’t talk with her, but he can communicate with this message on the wind. Kind of like a homing pigeon sent to her, except it’s music. And so I wrote that, and immediately it felt right.”
Soon after, Crowe brought the pages of the scene to James L. Brooks. “I remember sitting by his desk,” says Crowe, “and he was reading while I was sitting there. And he goes, ‘This boom box [scene]—this is big…this is big.” Like Scarlett O—Hara shaking a fistful of dirt at the sky and shouting, “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again,” like Rocky Balboa running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Lloyd Dobler and his boom box would be unforgettable.
But before the shot could achieve its mythic status in the annals of famed movie imagery, it had to be filmed. Crowe had always envisioned Dobler holding the boom box above his head, but Cusack didn’t want to do that because, as Crowe recalls, he “was really adamant about not wanting [Lloyd] to be subservient to her.” It was, says Crowe, as if Lloyd would be thinking, “‘She dissed me! I’m not gonna be some punk whose just going to wimpily offer up my wimpy offering. She’s going to have to meet me halfway.’ So we tried versions where he was not holding it over his head.” They tried an idea of Cusack’s: to shoot the scene with the boom box on the hood of his car. But that image didn’t work, says Crowe, because “there wasn’t enough at risk. It was kind of like a guy sharing his music with you.”
Crowe knew how important the shot was to the story, and he knew that he didn’t have it yet. He and Cusack had made a promise to each other to try it one more time. It was the final day of the Say Anything shoot, and they were hurriedly filming the scene where Lloyd guides Diane away from the broken glass in the 7-Eleven parking lot. Cinematographer László Kovács noticed a little park across the street where the boom box shot could be filmed one last time’if they were able to shoot it before darkness fell completely. It was the last shot of the last day of the shoot. “The sun was going down,” says Crowe, “and we only got a couple of takes, but at the last possible moment’it was the one. And what you see on Cusack’s face is his desire not to be subservient, our journey to get the shot right at the end of the movie, and the story of the movie—all of this is happening on his face, and you just knew it.” Of course, in the shot that ultimately became the shot, Cusack is indeed holding the boom box over his head. Lloyd Dobler “holds it over his head,” says Crowe, “because it’s his final stand. And there is no way he cannot give it everything.”
With one image, the scene captured the bigger themes at play in the film. Says John Cusack, “The interesting thing to me was that when I did it, it was a sense of defiance in the character’s face…a mixture of hope and defiance…He wasn’t going to accept his station, his class in life. He wasn’t going to be denied.” The song playing from the boom box when that shot was captured was the angry “Turn the Other Way,” by alternative rock band Fishbone. “That was what got me there,” says Cusack, a Fishbone fan. In an earlier draft of the script, the song was Billy Idol’s rockin’ “To Be a Lover.”
But it was clear to Cameron Crowe, as soon as he got into the editing room, if not sooner, that “of course, Fishbone didn’t work. It seemed like he was a crazed Fishbone fan outside her window, making her listen to new Fishbone. You would see it and it would be so unromantic…like, ‘Go away! I’m trying to sleep! I love that you love this music, but not right now with the Fishbone!’” So Crowe had different songwriters try to write a song for the pivotal moment, “sensitive,” says Crowe, “like, ‘I wanna be in your life.’” But these proved, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be cheesy. Over and over, different songs were considered for the serenade. “I tried everything,” says Crowe.
And then, one day, he was driving to work, listening to a tape of the music from his wedding to Nancy Wilson. “And the last song on it was ‘In Your Eyes,’” a Peter Gabriel hit from his 1986 album So. “I’m driving and I hear this, and I’m like—holy shit. It’s about everything the movie’s about. ‘I drive off in my car,’” says Crowe, quoting one of the lyrics—“he’s got a car there.” Another of the song’s lyrics fit tonally as well: ‘and all my instincts, they return.’ “It’s about instinct,” says Crowe of the boom box scene, “it’s about pain. It was achingly all there. I was shaking driving to the editing room. And I come in with the tape and I said, ‘We gotta try this song.’ And of course,” says Crowe, “it was the only thing that ever worked. We watched it for the first time and it was kind of like, whoa. Now we have to get that song.”
Which, as it turned out, would prove to be quite a challenge. Peter Gabriel wasn’t exactly some local college-town indie singer who needed the exposure—he was one of rock’s more revered musicians, and he didn’t often give out his songs for use in films. “I went in to see James Brooks,” remembers Crowe, “and I said, we found a song and we have got to get this song, and it’s Peter Gabriel, who doesn’t really give his music.” Actress Rosanna Arquette, who was dating Gabriel at the time and for whom the song was written, was championing the film
makers behind the scenes, but it was still going to be tough. Peter Gabriel agreed to watch a copy of the film, but, says Crowe, “told us up front that he probably wasn’t going to let us have it; people had asked for it, and the song was very personal to him.” The tape was sent to Gabriel, who was in Germany. Crowe got a message to phone him—the verdict was in.
“And so I called this number,” says Crowe, “and there is this small, kind of distant, long-distance voice. And he sounded kind of sad. He said, ‘The song is so personal—I just have to say no. Thank you so much, and good luck with it. I’m sorry, the answer is no.’” Crowe, for whom everything was riding on permission to use this song, “was stunned.” But right before he hung up, he did something that would change everything.
“I just kind of blurted out, ‘Why? Why?’ And [Gabriel] kind of sighed, and he said, ‘Well, it’s not really the way I envisioned this song—and then he takes the overdose, and you hear it, and it just didn’t match up for me.’” Crowe was puzzled—there was no scene like that in Say Anything. “I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. Takes the overdose?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, isn’t this [Wired,] the John Belushi film?’ And I said, ‘No! No! Mine is the high-school movie!’ And he goes, ‘Oh, the high-school movie—I was going to watch that tonight.’” Crowe saw his chance. He seized this unexpected opportunity to try to convince Peter Gabriel why he should let him use the song. “I was like, ‘Oh, fantastic! Listen, there’s no overdose in this movie.’ I’m pitching really hard’‘It’s something completely different than that.’” Two days later, Peter Gabriel called Cameron Crowe and said yes. “It was snatched from the jaws,” says Crowe, “and nothing else would’ve worked. To this day, I know nothing else would’ve worked. And it unlocked everything about the movie that needed to be unlocked at that point. It was really the turning point.”
Getting Peter Gabriel’s consent was a major victory, but then there was the little matter of actually paying for the song. “I think no picture of that budget ever paid more for a song than we did for ‘In Your Eyes,’” says Brooks, who once estimated it cost between $200,000 and $300,000, in 1989 dollars. “I really think, in terms of percentage of budget for one song, we may be the champ. It took a lot of heavy lifting with the studio,” Twentieth Century Fox. “It was hard,” says Brooks, “but righteously so.” Because, in many ways, it made the movie. “The song,” says MGM’s Becky Sloviter, “is unparalleled in terms of the yearning in it. Any other song,” she says, matter-of-factly, “would not have worked.”
And any other song, it seems, would not have allowed Lloyd Dobler to penetrate Diane Court’s heart in such a way that she comes running back to him. Soon after the boom box serenade, Diane discovers that her beloved father has been cheating the elderly out of their savings. “He is truly amoral,” says John Mahoney of his character, Jim Court. “The only shred of humanity he really had was that relationship with his daughter.”
The complex character of Jim Court is just one of many sophisticated structural elements that make Say Anything such a layered, compelling piece of drama. “A lot of teenage films turn the parents into cartoons,” says Mahoney. “This was a real flesh-and-blood person who turns out to be extremely flawed, but whose personality is so multifaceted that it’s almost like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice—you can hate him one minute, love him the next, understand him the next, despise what he’s doing the next.” Diane Court may lose her virginity in the backseat of Dobler’s Chevy Malibu, but she loses a different kind of innocence when she learns the truth about her father. “I think he represents sort of a warning that things might not always be what they seem,” says Mahoney. “There was so much more to James Court than what you actually saw. You know there are raging waters roiling beneath that character.”
Once Diane sees everything clearly, she knows just how badly she needs Lloyd. Finding him in his kickboxing studio, forcing herself into his still-angry, reluctant arms, she pleads with him. “I need you,” she says, desperately. “Do you need someone,” Lloyd asks hesitantly, “or do you need me?” Before she can answer, he gives in to her embrace, and says, “Oh, I don’t care.” But she reassures him: “I need you. I need you.”
There are many Gen Xers who believe that Say Anything helped shape their romantic ideals. Perhaps that’s because the love that the movie’s protagonist Lloyd (John Cusack) feels for Diane (Ione Skye) represented something entirely new in a teen film.“This is a very different kind of knight and white horse,”says the film’s executive producer, James L. Brooks. “It’s not ‘I’ll take you away,’ it’s ‘I’ll enable you to be you.’ Which is extraordinary. If you’re a terrific girl, and you’re brilliant, that’s what you’d hope for. It is the thing you can’t even dream of. You can dream about a soul mate walking through the door, but you couldn’t dream about the guy who allows you to have a soul.”
Jim Court’s lies catch up to him, and he is sentenced to nine months in jail. His daughter doesn’t want to see him, not even to say good-bye before she goes off to England. But Lloyd makes Diane visit her father in the prison yard. For the intense scene in which she begrudgingly says good-bye to her father, “they wanted Ione to cry,” says John Mahoney, “and she couldn’t do it. They had somebody there who was sort of goading her, and trying to reduce her to tears. And [Skye] said to me, ‘I can’t—I’ve already cried—don’t they realize that when [my character] found out about you, I spent nights and nights weeping and crying about what’s happened and what you did, and I am over it now? Now I am here to say good-bye to you, and it would just be gilding the lily for me to be crying.’ I think they ended up squirting stuff in her eyes so they could squeeze a tear or two out of there, but they were disappointed because of that, and she couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t understand her point of view.”
Once Diane has made peace with her father, it’s time for her and Lloyd to go off on their adventure together. (Lloyd is, as he has told a scornful Jim Court, “the distraction that’s going to England with her.”) When, bag in hand, he leaves his sister’s apartment to go to the airport, he turns the stereo up as loud as it goes. The moment serves as a bittersweet good-bye to the life he has known. The song he turns way up is, fittingly enough, by Fishbone. “The studio said, ‘When he leaves at the end of the movie, he should play Peter Gabriel’s song again,’” Cusack says. “And Cameron, to his credit, said, ‘No—that’s not what that’s about. It’s a moment of him leaving his life behind, and that would be too sentimental, or manipulatively romantic.’ The way he is leaving the house at the end and then turns the stereo up, with my sister [there]’there are these traps you can fall into where you can get into the easy sentimentality of love,” explains Cusack. “And Cameron and I, I think, tried to navigate those in an incredibly thorough way. There wasn’t much that happened in the movie that was by accident. It was all pretty thoroughly hashed out.”
The last scene of the film finds Lloyd and Diane sitting on an airplane. Their hands are gripped tightly together over their shared armrest. Diane has a great fear of flying, and it’s her first airplane ride. Lloyd comforts her as they nervously await that “ding” signifying that the seat belt sign has been turned off, and that they’re free to roam about the cabin—and the world—together. When they finally hear the comforting tone, the screen goes black and the credits roll. It’s reminiscent of the last scene in The Graduate, where Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin and Katharine Ross’s Elaine are heading off on a bus to somewhere, their uncertain future left as concerns for another day.
There was originally to be more dialogue after the seat belt sign goes off, but when Crowe read the scene aloud over the phone to another of the filmmakers, he stopped after the ding, realizing that was the natural ending to the scene—and the film. “Whenever I’m on a plane,” says twenty-six-year-old Nebraska public relations exec Danelle Schlegelmilch, “and I hear that ding, I always smile. When they were making that movie, they couldn’t have imagined people would be thinking about that scene so many years
later whenever a seat belt sign goes off!” It’s a hopeful feeling we’re left with as Diane and Lloyd head off into the great unknown together, but that’s the thing—it’s unknown. “I don’t know for sure what is going to happen to them when they get to Europe at the end,” says Cusack. “I think there is something heroic about taking a chance, but it is never guaranteed that it will work out.”
There are also no guarantees in the movie business, and Cameron Crowe was anxious about how audiences would receive his film’s noble, brave, yet decidedly different protagonist. “What I worried about at the time,” says Crowe, “was that people might laugh at Lloyd because he wasn’t ‘cool.’ I was very nervous going into the first preview.” Crowe’s fears were assuaged: “The first audience understood it.”
Say Anything is a movie about teenagers, but it isn’t a typical teen movie, and Twentieth Century Fox didn’t know quite how to market the film for its April 14, 1989, release. Ultimately, the PG-13 film was promoted in a relatively light, frothy way, something that Brooks thinks prevented it from receiving the kind of serious attention it deserved. “I still think if it had been marketed differently it could’ve been an Academy picture,” says Brooks. “There was nothing in the marketing from us that said, ‘What we’re doing here is a very good picture.’ It was marketed as if its ambition was to be a Friday night special.”
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation Page 34