Page 10 - JIMMY REARDON LETTER TO CHICAGO CRITICS

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timistic. Even more disheartening for me was that I could see he felt that as the

star, he should somehow be able to rescue the situation. At 17, he was so young;

he thought that could be possible.

Instead he got more and more discouraged as we

waited month after month for the new music to be

chosen, the narration to be inished. In his book IN

SEARCH OF RIVER PHOENIX, author Barry

Lawrence writes that this period of waiting had a

profound and powerful effect on the young actor’s

life.

YOU MAY IMAGINE the constant and thrilling joy when I returned to Evanston

and Chicago after so many years to direct the novel I’d written about these places.

I was returning to the city I’d left at 17 on a Greyhound bus heading West to Hol-

lywood, and I was making a movie.

Since the screenplay was taken verbatim from the novel, not a word was changed

from the novel, I was actually directing the script of a nineteen year old, astonish-

ing myself that it worked at all.

It was a marvel to me to see our crew and actors walk and ilm on the streets where

I walked and lived when I went to Evanston Township High School.

I even got to cast Bill Ditton, my former acting teacher at Evanston Township High

School, who danced in the scene at the prom.

The greatest reward of all was the company of that brilliant young actor River

Phoenix, who was playing the role of me as a kid, and in the back and forth of our

discussions about almost everything in the universe, a kind of education took

place; about the movies, about each other. I was in constant fascination that the

teenage actor playing me as a teenager came from a background so totally different

from mine, and yet, though we had grown up in literal worlds apart, the ilm

brought us together, as ilms do.

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