The Leonardo Chronicles by Rose Anderson

'I was watching Entertainment Tonight, they were interviewing him after he got nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. 'Then it was River Phoenix, who I didn't even know about,' Carroll told Tiffen, talking about the string of actors mentioned over the years.

In reality, he was a fan of the book and got to meet Carroll, but Phoenix was never cast in the version of the production that actually made it to the screen. It became part of the overarching mythos surrounding River Phoenix that the Stand by Me star was going to play Jim, but then died of an accidental drug overdose in 1993. Ultimately, Leo's proven acting chops combined with his physical resemblance to Carroll ('I wasn't quite as thin!' the writer later protested) earned him the part over a slew of his peers. Leonardo DiCaprio had only made a couple of movies (not including the scenes he shot for Drew Barrymore's femme fatale thriller Poison Ivy that were left on the cutting room floor), but the 20-year-old actor was already Oscar-nominated, for What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and had even already starred in a coming-of-age tale adapted from a memoir, This Boy's Life. But the years kept going by, and the project kept changing hands. The decades-long journey to bring Jim Carroll's gut punch of a memoir to the big screen was finally at the casting crossroads, and it was time to fill the role of the former teen basketball talent, hustler and heroin addict who splashed onto the literary scene chronicling his demons and became a celebrated writer, poet, punk rocker and all-around New York cultural icon unto himself.įrom Matt Dillon and River Phoenix to Ethan Hawke and Eric Stoltz, the 1980s' freshest faces had all been ready to get dirty at some point over the years.

Seemingly every hot young actor in Hollywood wanted to star in The Basketball Diaries at some point.

The Leonardo Chronicles by Rose Anderson