Page 11 - JIMMY REARDON LETTER TO CHICAGO CRITICS

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We also found ourselves in Evanston at about the same age. I moved there when I

was 16, and each of us had already spent a childhood about as itinerant and

strangely religious as the other.

River, who once sang songs on LA streets to send his siblings to school, read the

very poems I had written as a kid in the same North Side coffee house where I

once read my poems almost 20 years earlier.

The passage of time since 1986 cannot overstate the literal poetic rush, the thrill

my much older self experienced during those weeks of ilming, living life and art

and movies, all of it iction, and all of it true.

As a 40-something man, I was able to reencounter my young teenage self at my

own family dinner table, faithfully reconstructed by our art director, Norm New-

berry, as it had been so long before.

I even got the same sinking feelings I got years back in “real” life, listening to Paul

Koslo playing my own father, shouting at River Phoenix using my father’s own

words to me, in what seemed a lifetime ago, suddenly re-materializing in front of

my eyes; and not only that, I could say “action” and “cut,” which one cannot do in

real life.

Not counting the meeting with his parents, there were only two dialogue changes

River ever asked for. In a scene where he meets Ann Magnuson for the irst time,

he wanted to add the line “I am a irm believer in fate. Everything happens for a

reason.”

I thought this was a pretty interesting line change from a kid at age 16, and asked

why. River said he just wanted his character to say that in the movie, that he just

thought it was important, is all, and that he thought it was true. I agreed to the

change.

The second dialogue change was when he runs off from the nightclub in his fa-

ther’s car with Louanne, telling her he could use a couple of drinks. He said he

didn’t want to say anything about alcohol; he didn’t.

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