Vanilla Sky – Erie Times News

‘Vanilla’, ‘Famous’ Movies to Crowe About

Cameron Crowe, the phenomenally successful author of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and writer-director of “Say Anything” and “Jerry Maguire,” has been doing double duty this month. He’s promoting “Vanilla Sky,” his big-star remake of the Spanish movie “Open Your Eyes,” and the DVD release of his most personal film to date, “Almost Famous.” And though Crowe is the only major movie writer-director who started out as a teen reporter for Rolling Stone, he’s not an MTV addict but a loopy traditionalist.

His acclaimed 1999 book, “Conversations With Wilder,” a series of interviews with the legendary Billy Wilder, spins out one of the threads that links “Almost Famous” and “Vanilla Sky.” Wilder taught Crowe how important it is to sew the history of a character into the action. In Hollywood studio conferences from the MTV ’80s on, a character’s off-screen past is relegated derisively to “back story.” Of course, back story is what makes the stuff up front resonate and sizzle — whether it’s Barbara Stanwyck’s history of sexual manipulation in Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” or the whole lost pageant of silent-era Hollywood in Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard.”

Crowe ran into New Hollywood’s bias against back story when he made his final edit of “Almost Famous.” Out went the scene of his alter ego’s embarrassment at being found out as a pre-pubescent in a high school shower room; snipped away were moments that placed the hero’s eccentric mother in the world everyone lives in. They return in the “Almost Famous” DVD, on a second disc that contains a version of the movie called “Untitled” — not merely the theatrical version with outtakes, but another complete edit of the movie.

“Vanilla Sky” could be seen as a cinematic essay on the concept of back story, in movies and in life. Whatever you think of “Vanilla Sky,” its funky, all-run-together ad line does it justice: “LoveHateDreamsLifeWorkPlayFriendshipsSex.” It’s a gothic romance with satiric and sci-fi elements mixed in, centering on how snap decisions — including love at first sight — affect a character’s present, future and what used to be called destiny.

In a New York City hotel room, Crowe exudes a steady hum of enthusiasm over all his recent efforts. He is especially protective of “Almost Famous,” saying he loves the way the extended version on the DVD fills out “the back story alluded to in the theatrical version, in the Wilder sense of sugarcoating that pill so the audience feels they know that character without realizing they’ve swallowed the concept of the character.”

But he also recognizes that when he test-screened “Untitled” in theaters, “By the end, people were exhausted. The whole point of the movie was veering off the rails.” To Crowe, perfecting the film ultimately became a matter of including different strokes in different formats.

As a one-time star byline in rock journalism, Crowe is aware of former colleagues’ criticisms that “Almost Famous” was “a little too fairy-tale and rose-colored.” The actual script, as well as the “Untitled” cut on the DVD, offer, as Crowe puts it, “more of everybody’s point of view — or more of a God’s-eye view. You see all the lives, but when we cut it down you basically see the kid.”

Crowe has only one regret about the theatrical edition. “It’s a personal thing, but the reason I wanted to make the movie is the image of Kate Hudson’s character dancing in the trash of the arena. It should have gone on longer, and that’s my mistake — I cut it short. The whole battle when you’re editing a movie is like when you’re writing a piece. An editor says something isn’t moving your piece along, and you say: ‘Wait, that’s the most important thing about it.’ Someone will say: ‘You’re running behind: Do we really need Kate Hudson dancing in the trash?’ These are the things I go to war over.”

“‘Vanilla Sky,'” he says, “was fueled by ‘Almost Famous’ in lots of ways,” although it’s almost a matched opposite. With ‘Almost Famous,’ Crowe had “a walking textbook of research which was stuck in my head. Not with this one. This one I came at as a fan.

“Right before I was doing ‘Almost Famous’ I saw ‘Open Your Eyes,’ and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I wanted to write something that had the same feeling: haunting and modern. I thought I couldn’t say no to it — that’s when you know you have to do something.”

Tom Cruise, who would star in Crowe’s remake, introduced him to “Open Your Eyes” “just as something cool to see.” Cruise had done the same thing with “Trainspotting” when he was making “Jerry Maguire” with Crowe. But after this particular expedition into movie coolness, they got the idea that they could do “Open Your Eyes” “without destroying the original movie.”

Crowe sees and hears his movie concepts simultaneously, and the song that ambled into his skull when he was thinking of “Vanilla Sky” was country singer Julie Miller’s “By Way of Sorrow.”

“I heard her doing this song on the Mountain Stage radio show, and to me it felt like this guy alone in Times Square. It’s a very simple folk song, but it’s about loneliness. It reminded me of this much-bootlegged interview Elvis Presley did when he was just getting started, and this radio guy was going after him — hardballing Elvis, asking, ‘How are you dealing with your sexually based success?’ Elvis responds, ‘I’m lonely, man. Sometimes I’m lonely even in a crowded room.’ And around our house, this became like a running joke: ‘How are you doing?’ ‘I’m lonely, man, sometimes even in a crowded room.'”

Even though Miller’s song and Elvis’s line never made it into the finished movie, they gave Crowe a hold on the character at the center of “Vanilla Sky.” In the story, the collision of a new, true love (Penelope Cruz) and a recent lust (Cameron Diaz) turn around the life of a handsome playboy (Cruise). The details of the character’s life in the remake reflect Crowe’s continuing fascination with journalism. Cruise’s character has inherited a publishing empire that includes three magazines — TV Digest, Rise (a Maxim knock-off) and The Review, which is modeled on the New Yorker.

In a speech cut from the movie, Kurt Russell, as a prison therapist, asks, “What is reality in a world where most people feel their biggest dose of reality is reality TV? I deal with murderers every day. What’s a life in a cartoon culture?”

Crowe is adamant about giving his fantasies some real-life traction. When other people were making the choice to take the World Trade Center towers out of their movies, Crowe decided “I couldn’t imagine it. Even if it’s tribute, they’ve gotta stay in. They’re like a character I wouldn’t want to cut out.”

Equally poignant now is an interchange between Cruise and Russell:

Russell: “My favorite Beatle used to be John. Now it’s Paul.”

Cruise: “I’ve always liked George best.”

Asked how he felt when he heard the news of Harrison’s death, which happened the day before this interview, Crowe said, “The oddest thing of all is that Paul McCartney did the title song. And the title always reminded me of something Paul McCartney would have written without the movie. But you know what I felt? I felt instantly like, once again, pop culture comments on a movie that’s about pop culture — how dare you try to capture a moment in time, because things change so fast? But I felt really glad that the hero professes fandom for George Harrison.”

Courtesy of Erie Times News – Michael Sragow – December 18, 2001