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Lloyd Hoists the Boom Box
Mon., April 2, 2007
So you don’t have to, I listened to the actor/director’s commentary on my super-deluxe edition of Say Anything tonight and watched the alternate/deleted/extended scenes. The most amusing group of extras concerns the famous shot of our hero Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) hoisting a boom box to serenade his girl Diane (Ione Skye) as she sleeps with the wistful strains of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”
In the movie, it comes together perfectly (if a touch sentimentally) and the image of Lloyd has become something of my generation’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.
What’s amusing is that director Cameron Crowe originally scripted the boom box music to be Billy Idol’s “To Be A Lover” and as the scene was filmed the song actually playing was a then-favorite of Cusack’s, Fishbone’s “Turn the Other Way,” neither of which fits the scene; Idol is too fast, Fishbone too funky. Gabriel’s song works on an emotional level and the lyrics are written as if for the scene.
Even better is that although it seems perfectly obvious now that Lloyd must elevate that boom box with the confidence and pride of a boxer hoisting the championship belt, alternate takes reveal that Cusack and Crowe first tried every other possible combination of Man with Boom Box before settling on the iconic image just as they lost their light of day.
“This is the first round of holding up the boom box,” says Crowe regarding these first few shots, from footage taken on March 25, 1988, and apparently meant to take place across the street from Diane’s house. “He’s not happy about it,” Crowe adds, unnecessarily, over footage of Cusack handling the boom box like it’s a poo-filled diaper.
The next round of boom box takes (a session that included the one used in the finished film) were shot in a comparatively more scenic park on May 2, 1988, although most of them are ruined by inexplicable and out-of-character gum-chewing by Cusack. “I think that the chewing gum and anything of that sort of indifference was going to be wrong,” comments Crowe, when he probably should have just shouted at Cusack, “The world is full of guys. Be a man!”
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