Say Anything… – Providence Journal

Crowe: No one ever said, ‘Gee, you’re a child prodigy’

HOLLYWOOD — At 31, Cameron Crowe has had more professional lives than many people twice his age.

By the time he was a 15-year-old high school junior, pushed ahead in class by his mother’s insistence that he keep skipping grades, Crowe was writing for Playboy, Penthouse, Circus, Creem and the Los Angeles Times. At 16 he was writing for Rolling Stone magazine, following such rock luminaries as Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young, Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton on the road. Though he later returned to high school, it was to research a book that got turned into the 1982 hit movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, one of the first of the contemporary teen films. Later Crowe wrote the script for The Wild Life. He has just directed his first movie, Say Anything, an unpredictable teenage romance which he also wrote.

Still boyish and effusively buoyant, Crowe looks at his past with a sense of humor. He says with a laugh that “What’s weird is I’ll go visit my parents now and someone my dad’s age will drop by and say, ‘Gee, I read your stuff when I was growing up.’ And then he’ll look at me like . . . ‘Wait a minute! He’s growing younger and I’m growing older! What’s going on?’

“But ’73 is the year my parents say I met (Rolling Stone publisher) Jann Wenner and went on the road with the Allman Brothers and never came back,” Crowe recalls while sitting on a sofa in his office on the 20th Century Fox lot.

“We got to disprove that theory because I went back home to write Fast Times,” he adds mischievously. Nevertheless, between 1973 and 1980 the boy wonder of the magazine trade was on the road.

Mother had him skip grades

If Crowe thinks of himself as a child prodigy, he won’t admit it. According to him, it was his mother’s idea to skip all those grades. “She’s a teacher,” he explains, “and she would say things like, ‘You don’t need fifth grade. Nothing important happens in fifth grade. Trust me, I’m a teacher.’

“What she didn’t tell me was that to be a junior in high school at age 15 is to really set yourself up as like a mascot.

“Those are key years. Not only are the guys advanced in gym class . . . we don’t need to talk about those key factors like body hair and things that just start exploding at that point . . . but the biggest thing is girls.

“Girls are advanced way beyond guys. So, if I’m 15 and I’m asking this girl to the prom – which is what happened – she actually thought it was the funniest thing she ever heard and patted me on the head. . .”

Crowe compensated by hanging out with an older crowd. His sister was working for an underground newspaper in San Diego, so he befriended the staff and started getting assignments. “They’d say, ‘Aww, review this Carole King record.’ And so I started reviewing records. It was great! You’d get the record you reviewed for free, which is,” Crowe says with still-youthful enthusiasm, “the greatest concept I had ever heard of. It steamrollered from there.”

Eventually he met people from Rolling Stone at a concert and they let Crowe write an article, which led to another and another. “No one ever said, ‘Gee, you’re a child prodigy.’ I just remember that when Rolling Stone found out how old I really was they printed it and made a big thing out of it. I thought it was pretty funny.”

Rock stars helped him out

Rock stars, for the most part, didn’t think it was especially strange that a 16-year-old kid was interviewing them.

“They always really helped me out. It was great. They’d say, ‘Isn’t he cute’ or ‘Make me look cool, little guy.’ I think they looked at me as ‘Here is a fan writing about me.’ ”

The ’70s, filled with new music, protests and hallucinogenic drugs, really were fast times. But the baby-faced Crowe recalls that as far as drugs were concerned “I was always the guy that they either hid it from or were very grateful that I didn’t want to do any with them.

“It was also when music was a little more personal to its audience. . . I remember when it was a big thing to hold up a match (at the end of a concert). Now it’s like, ‘Uh, okay, show’s over. Encore.’ You just want to remember a time when it was a little more personal.”

Crowe has approached the films he has written the same way. There’s something more personal, poignant and riskier than you’ll find in most teen movies. He calls it “a kind of naturalistic quality to the stuff I’ve written.” Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which revolved around kids who worked in dreary jobs at shopping malls while trying to grow up, “was a reaction to the Fonzie sensibility (of TV’s Happy Days) that was going on at the time.” It was the second movie to look at contemporary teens sympathetically and realistically (Over the Edge with Matt Dillon was the first) and the first to become a hit . . . a surprise because the studio felt that in order to be successful a teen film needed to reach an adult audience, too. Just before it opened the studio slashed the number of theaters Fast Times would play, but it became a hit anyway.

Fast Times went on to spawn a tidal wave of less ambitious teen sex comedies. “After a point you think, gee, if they put these things in a time capsule, 200 years from now they’re going to believe that every girl lost her virginity on prom night.”

That’s why, at the ripe old age of 31 (“That’s brutal. . . . That is brutal.”) Crowe wanted to fashion Say Anything into “the story of an honest love relationship between two young people. I tried not to do stereotypes.”

He based his characters – a brainy girl who has deep insecurities and a non-conformist who falls so head over heels for her that he can barely think of his kick boxing matches – on real people. Lloyd Dobler, the character John Cusack plays, was based on a neighborhood kid who kept knocking on Crowe’s door, trying to be friends. He’d earnestly say things like, “Cameron, hello. My name is Lowell. I’ve just moved in down the street and I just want to say it’s a pleasure to know you. I am a kick boxer. I am a scientific kick boxer.”

Crowe recalls “I’m looking at this guy thinking, ‘What planet did you get off of? I’m trying to write.’ This happened for a couple of weeks, this knocking on the door. Finally you have to say to yourself, this guy at my door is better than anything I could make up.”

Crowe didn’t intend to direct the $8.9 million Say Anything at first. After producer James L. Brooks missed out on his first two directing choices, “It came down to, do you want to do it or do you want another first-time guy to do it? The other stuff that I’d written had been done pretty much by first-time people, so I thought, ‘Well, I might as well be the first-time guy.’ ”

Directing bug has bitten

It was unnerving for Crowe at first, even though he had hung out on the Fast Times set. “The problem was that I always used to be the guy who loved to hang out with the actors and laugh at the authority figure. And then one day you realize that you’re the authority figure. A chilling thought.”

But the bug has bitten and Crowe, who is married to singer Nancy Wilson of Heart, admits he would like to do it again, though “I think on a smaller scale. It’d be fun to go and do the ‘gorilla project’ next. Most guys start out on . . . ‘Come on over with the camera! Let’s go to the park and shoot something!’ I started on a big . . . well, not really big . . . but the studio movie. So now I feel like I want to go back and do the gorilla movie.”

At least he will if Say Anything is a hit for Fox. The picture could make or break his directing career.

“Aaaah!” Crowe shrieks in mock horror at the thought. But then, realizing that “I’ll always be able to write” and that there always will be one more rock star to interview for Rolling Stone, he calms down. “Put me on the road with Poison, man,” Crowe says breezily, “and I’ll be happy.”

Courtesy of the Providence Journal – Michael Janusonis – April 14, 1989