7 Astounding Yet True Facts About Say Anything...
Last weekend, Seattlest revisited the other Shorewood High School for our 20-year reunion. And it's been 20 years since Lloyd Dobler and Diane Court left Lakeside High, so on our flight to Milwaukee, we got reacquainted with Cameron Crowe's Say Anything.... Singles gets the Seattle-centric attention, but Say Anything... is the movie where Seattle first caught our eye, several years before we actually moved to the land of the Gas 'n' Sip.
FACT: Seattle landmarks in the film include the Alaskan Way Viaduct, Auditorium Cleaners, Wallingford Custom Framing, Westlake Center (identified in the movie as Bell Square), the Guild 45th (showing Cusack's Tapeheads), and Waiting for the Interurban, which we're pretty sure Diane and her father drive by the wrong way.
FACT: Does Stone Gossard count as a local landmark? He almost made it into the film as a taxi driver flirting with Diane on her way to graduation. He actually made it into Singles.
FACT: Lloyd Dobler could've been played by Kirk Cameron, Robert Downey, Jr., or Christian Slater. Diane Court could've been Jennifer Connelly. Lawrence Kasdan could've directed. And Rebecca—a.k.a. Lloyd's friend who isn't Corey or D.C.—could've been played by Julia Roberts. Instead she's played by Pamela Segall, now Pamela Adlon and probably most famous for being the voice of Bobby Hill on King of the Hill.
FACT: The boombox scene gets all the attention, but according to Ione Skye, if she hadn't been dating Anthony Kiedis and Cusack hadn't been in love with someone else, they would've gone home together after they filmed the sequence where Lloyd teaches Diane how to drive. Ah, the romance of stick shift.
FACT: Speaking of the boombox scene, the shot used in the film was the last take of the last shot on the last day of filming. And it took a while to figure out what song would be playing. In the screenplay, Crowe said it was Billy Idol's "To Be a Lover." On set, Cusack was blasting Fishbone's "Turn the Other Way." At some point, Crowe asked the Smithereens to write a song. They came up with "A Girl Like You," but Crowe pulled it from the film because the lyrics mirrored the plot too closely. (It was the Smithereens' first top 40 hit, though, when it came out on the album 11.) Crowe stumbled across "In Your Eyes" on a wedding mix tape he'd made for his wife, and Peter Gabriel agreed to let them include it once the studio sent him a copy Say Anything... instead of the John Belushi bio-pic Wired, their initial shipping error. And at first, during the scene when Lloyd is leaving his sister's apartment to go to England with Diane, they were going to play "In Your Eyes" again, but Cusack and Crowe decided that was "too pussy." So we get the Replacements' "Within Your Reach" instead.
FACT: "The rain on my car is a baptism," a line we quote occasionally for no real reason when it rains while we're driving, was inspired by a line in Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns. We'd long suspected it, but were glad to hear Crowe confirm it.
FACT: Say Anything... hit cult status when it was released on video. The studio wasn't sure who would want to see the film, but Siskel and Ebert gave it two enthusiastic thumbs up and goosed its box-office performance. Pauline Kael was another fan, admiring Crowe's gift for "oddity and fringe moments."
OPINION: Say Anything... is one of the great Hollywood romances, teen or no (screw you, AFI!). We figure Lloyd and Diane are celebrating 20 years together in some alternate reality while Mr. Court can make do with the pen.
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