they felt about each other. It didn't seem one bit real! It had a certain coolness, but I couldn't see it.' It was at this point that the director's love of The Wizard of Oz (1939) began to influence the script he was writing, and he included a reference to the 'yellow brick road'. Lynch remembers, 'It was an awful tough world, and there was something about Sailor being a rebel. But a rebel with a dream of the Wizard of Oz is kinda like a beautiful thing.' Samuel Goldwyn Jr. read an early draft of the screenplay and did not like Gifford's ending either, so Lynch changed it. However, the director was worried that this change made the film too commercial, 'much more commercial to make a happy ending yet, if I had not changed it, so that people wouldn't say I was trying to be commercial, I would have been untrue to what the material was saying.' Lynch added new characters, such as Mr. Reindeer and Sherilyn Fenn as the victim of a car accident. During rehearsals, Lynch began talking about Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe with Cage and Dern. He also acquired a copy of Elvis' Golden Records and after listening to it, called Cage and told him that he had to sing two songs, "Love Me" and "Love Me Tender". Cage agreed, and recorded them so that he could lip-synch to them on the set. Cage asked Lynch if he could wear a snakeskin jacket in the film, and Lynch incorporated it into his script. Before filming started, Dern suggested that she and Cage go on a weekend road trip to Las Vegas in order to bond and get a handle on their characters. Dern remembers, 'We agreed that Sailor and Lula needed to be one person, one character, and we would each share it. I got the sexual, wild, Marilyn, gum-chewing fantasy, female side; Nick's got the snakeskin, Elvis, raw, combustible, masculine side.' Within four months, Lynch began filming on August 9, 1989 in both Los Angeles (including the San Fernando Valley) and New Orleans with a relatively modest budget of $10 million. Originally, Wild at Heart featured more explicit erotic scenes between Sailor and Lula. In one, she has an orgasm while relating to Sailor a dream she had of being ripped open by a wild animal. Another deleted scene had Lula lowering herself