Dibs On The Otis Redding

A had read Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity about a year or two before they made a movie about it, and ever since I had heard about the making of the film I was really, really eager to see if they would attempt to film my favorite scene in the book where audiophile Rob is presented with the opportunity to buy hundreds of rare singles worth thousands of dollars for a measly fifty bucks, and turns it all down because, as a fellow record collector, he can't screw over another passionate record collector like himself, no matter what kind of a scumbag that guy may be.

Well, the scene didn't make the final edit of the movie, and when I saw it in the theater, I was rather disappointed.

But it did, however, make it onto the deleted scenes on the DVD.

Years ago Joe and I used to tear through the local trading post looking for people selling their vinyl collections from their homes, and I think we went to maybe one or two stranger's houses plowing through their records but never really coming up with anything worthwhile. Like Rob, we had discovered that most of these people were mild-mannered middle-agers (while at the time Joe and I weren't even in our 20's) with nothing much to offer but Barbra Streisand albums and maybe even a stray Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack. In the book, Rob was expecting the same thing when he saw the wealthy, straight-laced fifty-something woman answer the door when he went to her house responding to her ad to sell her husband's records. But he was completely not braced for what he was presented with in that immaculate collection. I loved his internal dialogue, sadly left out of the scene in the film, for obvious reasons. But you can see it all on his face, and his reactions are priceless.

But damn, why can't I ever be presented with such a dilemma in my lifetime?