It began with a knock on the door. Cameron Crowe turned the knob, and there was Lowell Marchant, a beaming 19-year-old freshly relocated from Arkansas to Los Angeles. "It's a pleasure to be here in California," he told Crowe. "I'm a kickboxer. Do you know about kickboxing? It's the sport of the future."
To anyone who's passed through adolescence in the last 20 years, that brief recollection is enough to pinpoint the source for Lloyd Dobler, the gallant, determined and, yes, kickboxing hero of Crowe's directorial debut, "Say Anything . . . ," which Fox will release next week in a deluxe Blu-ray edition to commemorate its landmark anniversary. Played by John Cusack, whose performance cemented his status as the thinking teenager's heartthrob, Lloyd is a rebel without an attitude, an individualist because he can conceive of being nothing else.
Lots of guys have crushes on comely valedictorian Diane Court (Ione Skye), but Lloyd is the only one to successfully ask her out. When one awe-struck classmate inquires what kind of man can accomplish such a feat, he says simply, "I'm Lloyd Dobler."
On its initial release, "Say Anything . . ." was put forth as a teen movie, part of a clutch of post-John Hughes high school pictures. But contemporary critics saw deeper truths beneath its surface. Pauline Kael, nearing the end of her tenure at the New Yorker, said it conveyed the sense that Lloyd "stands for something, like Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot."
Crowe still recalls reading her review in a Seattle mall. "I couldn't believe how much she understood about our intentions, and she picked out my favorite scene in the movie, when Lloyd tape-records a 'heartbreak tour' of his doomed love affair with Diane," he said. "It was a body rush to read that review and to have made it under the wire as one of the last few rounds of films she reviewed."
With 1982's "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," Crowe had established himself as a screenwriter capable of capturing the reality of young people's lives, and Cusack had earned his romantic-lead stripes in 1985's "The Sure Thing." But on 1989's "Say Anything . . ." their voices came through with unprecedented clarity.
Cusack had sworn off teen movies before Crowe sent him the script, but his "Eight Men Out" costar John Mahoney advised him to look it over. "I remember telling him, 'John, you have to read this script,' " said Mahoney, who ended up playing Skye's morally flawed father. "He said, 'No, I'm all done playing teenagers. I've gotta move on.' And then when I went to my audition, there he was."
