Editing The Buddy Holly Story (section)

==Production==
The actors did their own singing and played their own instruments, with guitarist Jerry Zaremba overdubbing the guitar parts. Busey, in particular, was noted for recording the soundtrack music live and for losing a considerable amount of weight in order to portray the skinny Holly. According to Busey's biography, he lost 32 pounds to look more like Holly, who weighed 146&nbsp;pounds at the time of his death.

The actor's accurate portrayal was aided by knowledge gained from a previous attempt to film part of the Holly life story, the ill-fated ''Three-Sided Coin'', in which he played Crickets drummer Jerry Allison. The film was cancelled by [[20th Century Fox]] due to pressure from Fred Bauer and his company, who had made deals with the Holly [[Estate (law)|estate]].<ref>[http://www.sonymoviechannel.com/movies/buddy-holly-story/details ''The Buddy Holly Story'' Details.] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140824185433/http://www.sonymoviechannel.com/movies/buddy-holly-story/details |date=2014-08-24 }} ''Sony Movie Channel''. Retrieved August 22, 2014.</ref> The screenplay of ''Three-Sided Coin'' (by Allison and Tom Drake) revealed many personal details about Holly, and Busey picked up more during off-set conversations with Allison.

While the story follows Buddy Holly from age 20 to 22 (1956 to February 1959), Busey was 33 when he played the role. Charles Martin Smith auditioned for the role of Buddy, but since Busey already had been cast, the producers cast Smith  to play Ray Bob Simmons because they liked his audition. Simmons and Jesse Charles were character names used in place of [[Joe B. Mauldin]] and [[Jerry Allison]], two of the actual Crickets (1956 to early 1958 Cricket [[Niki Sullivan]], performing on 27 of the 32 songs Holly recorded, is not shown).

The incident in which a [[Buffalo, New York|Buffalo]] disc jockey locked himself in a studio and repeatedly played the same song over and over was loosely based on real-life stunts orchestrated by disc jockey [[Tom Clay]] (and repeated a few years later by [[Danny Neaverth]]), who held up Buffalo's Shelton Square by playing [[Bill Haley & His Comets]]' "[[Rock Around the Clock]]" repeatedly from the top of a billboard, and by [[Joey Reynolds]], who locked himself in a studio playing "[[Sherry (song)|Sherry]]" by [[The Four Seasons (band)|The Four Seasons]] for several hours; those incidents, however, had no relation to Buddy Holly or his music.