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