kid and a wise old guy and their showdown with evil", said Hill. "But if you really look at 'Crossroads,' it's a completely different movie... I knew my most difficult task would be creating real, believable scenes between Macchio and Seneca. They had to be real characters; with an ongoing reality level, to work at all. You have to set the stage, or when your movie shifts gears to fantasy, you lose your audience." Shooting Shooting took place on location in Beulah, Mississippi as well as Hollywood. Blues legend Frank Frost makes a cameo. "I think the blues still speaks to kids today", said Ry Cooder, who performed the music with Steve Vai. "It's so old that it's new." Cooder says the final duel involving Vai "had to be all mapped out, since we had to carefully choreograph the call-and-response of that guitar duel and use it as playback during the filming. Steve Vai is tremendously scientific when it comes to guitar playing, and was able to adapt to that process." The original script ended with Joe Seneca's character dying on a Greyhound bus. Director Walter Hill's father had died shortly before production commenced, and he found filming this scene difficult, so he also shot a happier ending. Both were tested with audiences; the happy ending was chosen. Crossroads was Robert Judd's final film role. He died of stomach cancer in January 1986, two months before the film's theatrical release. Music Ry Cooder spent a year working on the film. He later said: That was an easy film to understand. We’ve all looked at that myth about a white kid going South, and I knew the sign posts along the way. Old time players, juke joints, the lonely roads you go down... These things are all wordlessly spoken of in blues music, which is an encyclopedia of experience. I had songs in my head that dealt with every scene in Crossroads. To mold them into shape for that film was like Blues 101. Macchio was taught to play guitar by Arlen Roth in preparation for filming. Roth writes that he and Macchio would work together for two hours per day, after which Macchio would work with his karate instructor to prepare for the forthcoming Karate Kid 2. Macchio initially hoped to be able to play some of the music on screen himself, but came to realise that the difficult pieces