Roadies – Vanity Fair

Cameron Crowe on Why Roadies Feels Like Coming Home

Everyone on the set of Roadies has a Cameron Crowe story. “I had one of his movies tattooed on my body,” rapper turned actor Machine Gun Kelly (who prefers to be called Colson Baker in this context) told me when I visited the set in May. Then he leaned back, pulled up his shirt, and revealed the words “Almost Famous” inked across his lower torso. Luke Wilson, who plays the tour manager on the Showtime series, credits Crowe’s humor for shaping the work that he, brother Owen, and Wes Anderson would go on to do. The trio made their first film, Bottle Rocket, in the same building as Crowe’s Jerry Maguire; the young, starstruck Wilson brothers even got to participate in a table read with Tom Cruise.

Almost Famous—which Roadies star Carla Gugino calls her “all-time favorite movie”—defines fandom as “to truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts.” Roadies is about a band’s crew, not its fans—but that wholehearted, full-throated love of music is still hardwired into the show and the people making it. On the series, the Roadies engine runs on love for a fictional band, Staton-House; behind the scenes, the beloved Crowe—who still makes mixtapes for his cast and even for every episode—is the one inspiring devotion.

Surrounded as he is on set by a loving cast and crew, Crowe is coming off a particularly rocky patch of his three-decade career in Hollywood. After rising from the ranks of rock-critic wunderkind to Fast Times at Ridgemont High writer to Tom Cruise whisperer and Academy Award–winning screenwriter for Almost Famous, Crowe made a string of films that received mixed reviews—Vanilla Sky, Elizabethtown, and the outright scorched Aloha, which faced harsh accusations of racism last year. Roadies, which began production as Crowe was still wrapping up Aloha, offered a shelter from the storm. “We were operating under the radar filming in Canada,” Crowe says of making the pilot. “And the cast and crew really built a family together.”

There are no dark Aloha clouds hanging over the set of Roadies, which marks the writer-director’s first foray into television. Crowe is relaxed, charming, and at ease with his cast and crew. Gugino jokes that on this set, it’s hard to tell the difference between the two: actors, dressed in the relaxed wardrobe of the roadies, mingle with actual crew members; on this set, there’s electrical tape hanging from everyone’s belts.

On Roadies, which begins its 10-episode first season on Showtime June 26, we follow the members of the Staton-House crew through a tour of U.S. arenas. Like any other Cameron Crowe project, it features an accessible everyman hero—played here by Luke Wilson—sharp, lived-in dialogue, and enough music to fill multiple soundtracks (more on that later). But it’s not just the expanded scope of a TV season that makes Roadies feel different; Crowe is working in close collaboration with executive producer Winnie Holzman, of thirtysomething, Once and Again, and My So-Called Life fame. (J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk also serve as executive producers on the show.) It’s Holzman’s voice, as well as Crowe’s, that comes through in particular scenes featuring Imogen Poots’s Kelly Ann, who serves as the beating heart of the series.

“Sometimes I stand back and turn to her and say, ‘This feels like a scene from My So-Called Life,’” Crowe says. “That was my first experience with Winnie’s writing voice. It’s so personal, and written from a perspective and a feeling deep inside her leading lady’s heart. She’s a great influence on me.”

His male protagonists may be his most iconic creations, but Crowe has always had more in mind for his supporting characters. Even the babysitter in Jerry Maguire had a complicated backstory, he says, and each of Lloyd Dobler’s female friends in Say Anything is intriguing enough to be the star of her own offshoot.

In making the jump to television, Crowe says he finally has the freedom to flesh out those fascinating side characters. “That is one thing that he and I have talked about, the fun and interesting aspect of opening up a character,” Wilson adds. “I always go back to The Sopranos, how you can really see the whole person. You don’t just have, like, ‘O.K., this guy’s a mean guy. O.K., this guy’s a kindhearted guy. O.K., this guy’s a liar.’ You get to see really nuanced, real characters.”

The Roadies crew bus is full of characters with their own rich stories to tell. The band, Staton-House, barely appears on-screen at all. Instead, it’s a story about the people waiting in the wings, under the stage, and away from the spotlight’s glare. Their casual work-family conversation—be it during a late-night drive or the repetitive process of setting up and tearing down a stage—is the most pleasurable aspect of the entire series.

Crowe knew the general outline of the 10-episode season before filming began. But unlike many show-runners, he is constantly tweaking and refining his scripts. “You can be inspired by an idea on a Thursday, film it on a Friday, and have it on the air the next month,” he says.

“His system’s wild,” Baker says, chalking up the ever mutating Roadies scripts to Crowe’s journalism background. Anything you say around him could end up in a Cameron Crowe script; decades after leaving Rolling Stone, the kid’s still taking notes. “He never lets a moment pass without documenting it,” Baker explains. “So if he’s just fucking writing everything down that’s happening, that’s real. You’re just going to get a full, authentic script. The scripts change every day because of that.”

Crowe confirms that he goes home every night with his “pockets filled with pieces of paper, or journals with more pieces of paper stuffed in them.” It’s no wonder that Crowe—whose first hyper-realistic script, Fast Times, was based on his experience posing undercover as a Clairemont High School student—should glean his best ideas from real-world conversation. “At the end of the day, I always transcribe the notes and that is a joyous process that did begin in journalism days.”

And in addition to the bits of dialogue he absorbs, Crowe—who has been on the road with his fair share of bands—says “every story line is something that we saw or experienced or know to be true.” An Episode 3 plot involving a music blogger played by Rainn Wilson is lifted directly from the time Led Zeppelin invited a rock journalist on tour and “then proceeded to prank him within an inch of his life.” It’s that authenticity that informs what Crowe calls the “stolen moments” of Roadies, those snatches of conversation that often have nothing to do with the central plot.

The early months of 2016—when Roadies was moving into full-time production—were a particularly fertile time for reflecting on the world of rock ’n’ roll. The show’s music-loving crew, already reeling from the death of David Bowie, was filming the day in April when Prince died. “See the Jacaranda?” Gugino said pointing to the brightly colored flowering trees lining the paths of the Manhattan Beach studio. “The day Prince died, the petals started to fall. It was literally purple rain.” A few days later, a reference to Prince’s home, Paisley Park, made its way into a script. And a month after that, when I walked into Baker’s trailer, the newly converted Prince fan insisted we watch the entire “Purple Rain” guitar riff together before sitting down to talk.

The flexibility of Crowe’s scripts allows the show to expand and contract to fit the strengths of its cast. Baker—one of the show’s more inexperienced performers—didn’t just see his roadie character, Wes, get increasingly more screen time. (“It just started happening,” he says with a gratified smile.) The musician also says that Wes began to reflect Baker’s own larger-than-life personality and effortless charisma. “Everything after the pilot was so much like me.” And Rafe Spall, who plays the band’s stuffily British business consultant, went from buttoned-up to full-blown comic relief after Crowe discovered Spall’s knack for stammering, mannered dialogue.

On Roadies, the Almost Famous comparison is unavoidable—Baker says that’s exactly why he “refused to not get this role.” But Crowe’s love of music has infused every single one of his films; Roadies is just the first time since Almost Famous it’s been so central to the plot. Like Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown, Crowe makes a location-dependent mixtape for every episode of the show, a playlist infused with the character of whichever city the show’s fictional band happens to be playing. There are also character-dependent soundtracks. (This isn’t new; Crowe has been making his actors mixtapes throughout his film career. It’s how he wooed Matt Damon to make We Bought a Zoo.)

“He’ll play music while you’re doing a scene, then cut it off right before your talking point,” Baker explains. “He’ll play music to set you in a mood or to get your vibe on track. Nirvana is constantly associated with me.”

While the actors’ mood music won’t necessarily appear in the show, the incredible Roadies soundtrack is filled with bootlegs, demos, and rare recordings that Crowe and his staff have hunted down. For example, a particularly haunting version of Jeff Buckley covering Bob Dylan’s “Farewell Angelina” plays in Episode 2. Astonishingly, in an age when almost anything is available on the Internet, a clean version of this track does not exist online, though it may crop up eventually on a Roadies soundtrack.

“That was the hardest song to acquire,” Crowe confirms. “Nora Felder, who works with us, did some magic in tracking down the piece of music. It was part intense fandom, part dedication, and part detective work that will hopefully catch the attention of even the most hard-core music fans.”

And thanks to the fictional crew’s inability to hold down an opening act for their band, a rotating roster of musical guests gives Roadies an excuse to feature two full performances per episode. The acts range from classic (or “O.G.,” as Baker puts it) performers like Lindsey Buckingham to up-and-comers like the indie Brooklyn band Lucius.

The concept of the rotating bands not only gives Roadies a fun marketing angle—a blend of both original-to-the-show and remixed tracks will be released on iTunes along with each episode—but also allows Crowe to poignantly revisit his favorite theme: devotion. As the real bands play during fictional sound checks, in backstage dressing rooms, or writing at a piano on an empty stage after a show, the roadies gather to watch with the wide-eyed wonder Crowe has always captured so well. “This is the way a crew member often experiences music,” Crowe explains. “And those stolen moments are the ones you tend to remember forever.”

When major filmmakers have come to television in recent years—Martin Scorsese with Boardwalk Empire, Steven Soderbergh with The Knick—they have done it in bold and gory fashion, making the kind of high-stakes television that demanded to be taken seriously. Despite its TV-MA rating, Roadies, with its gentle, work-family vibe, is at its core a tenderhearted Crowe production, more Parenthood or Friday Night Lights than Vinyl. Will the modern TV audience fall in love?

Wilson credits Showtime’s David Nevins with giving their team the room to make it happen. Unlike the “head of Sony”—perhaps a nod to the harsh leaked studio e-mails that buried Crowe’s Aloha before it even opened—Wilson says Nevins is “not just a businessman. This is a thoughtful person. It seems like a thoughtful group of people, so it’s nice to know that you’re working for the kind of people that care.”

And if anything will help Roadies succeed in a TV world where it’s tougher and tougher to make an impact, it’s this dedicated, passionate crew circling Crowe. People like Baker, who called the Roadies casting director late at night on Christmas Eve (“legitimately the most inappropriate time to call”) to beg for the part because “my heart was like, ‘Fucking go.’” Or Gugino, who claims “with just full honesty, if I had nothing to do with it, I would be so fucking excited to watch this show.”

Sixteen years after Almost Famous, and barely a year after being moved to publicly apologize for Aloha, Crowe still inspires this Lloyd Dobler–level of devotion. On Showtime, a network known for standing by its shows season after season, he may finally have the room to build up that devotion for a new generation—or at least remind the skeptics who bailed after We Bought a Zoo why they fell in love to begin with. Crowe himself puts it, “Fandom is about having heroes. At this time when heroes are hard to find, to quote Fleetwood Mac, it’s good to remind people that the world is filled with touchstones that can inspire you again and again.”

That may be the only true currency peak TV has left.

Courtesy of Vanity Fair – Joanna Robinson – June 23, 2016