Almost Famous – NY Times #1

Back to the 70’s; The Extraordinary Adolescence of Cameron Crowe

For Cameron Crowe, it has always been about rock ‘n’ roll. That has been the story of his life and work, starting with his precocious stint as a teenage journalist with Rolling Stone magazine in the 70’s, right on through his current filmmaking career as a writer and director. In all his films — from ”Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (his impressive 1982 screenwriting debut), which details the normal adolescence he never had, to ”Almost Famous” (his newest and most autobiographical film), which describes the extraordinary adolescence he truly had — rock helps people come of age.

In ”Fast Times,” it’s about making out to the second side of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album; in ”Say Anything” (1989), his directorial debut, it’s about losing your virginity while listening to Peter Gabriel’s ”In Your Eyes” and losing your adult inhibitions while listening to Steely Dan’s ”Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”; in ”Singles” (1992), it’s about falling in love while listening to your entire record collection; and in ”Jerry Maguire”(1996), it’s about releasing your fears while listening to Tom Petty’s ”Free Fallin.”

But in ”Almost Famous,” which opens Wednesday, rock is a religion. For the winsome William Miller (Patrick Fugit in a poignant debut), Mr. Crowe’s 15-year-old protagonist and alter ego, it begins with glimpsing his entire future while listening to the Who’s rock opera ”Tommy.”

”Rock,” Mr. Crowe says, quoting a line from the film, ”is your other friend in the room.” Mr. Crowe even thinks and speaks in terms of rock: ”This movie is like my greatest hits,” he says recently while eating a hamburger in his memorabilia-filled Santa Monica office. ”But the execution is different.”

Yes, ”Almost Famous” becomes deeply personal, as Mr. Crowe, 43, recounts his first writing assignment for Rolling Stone in 1973: going on the road with an American band (in this case the fictional Stillwater) and as a result missing most of his senior year of high school in San Diego. Through it all, he explores his youthful impressions of the rock ‘n’ roll circus; his tender friendship with the brilliantly cynical critic Lester Bangs (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman); his first infatuation, with a mesmerizing groupie called Penny Lane (Kate Hudson); and his difficult but loving relationship with his overly protective mother (Frances McDormand).

Although the script had been kicking around since the late 80’s in one form or another, Mr. Crowe kept it under wraps. It wasn’t time; he wasn’t ready.

What he was really waiting for, he says, was ”a body of work” to give him confidence.

Then came ”Jerry Maguire,” his breakthrough hit, and the rare opportunity to conduct a series of lengthy interviews with the legendary director Billy Wilder (published late last year as ”Conversations With Wilder”).

It’s as if the Q & A with Mr. Wilder (whom Mr. Crowe worships as the master of bittersweet truth) helped him to finally tell his personal story about the liberating impact of rock. He wooed the cagey and elusive Mr. Wilder, and got him to open up, by befriending him — which was his way as a rock journalist. Now it was time to bare his soul on film.

Yet there’s more Francois Truffaut in ”Almost Famous” than Billy Wilder. Not surprising, considering that the French director is a more appropriate model for a filmmaker dealing with the pain and exuberance of adolescence.

It doesn’t take long to recognize this, either. In the very first scene, in which Mr. Crowe stages his mother’s attempt to persuade him to grow up and be like Atticus Finch in ”To Kill a Mockingbird,” there’s a theater in the background showing ”Stolen Kisses” — Truffaut’s 1968 masterpiece about the coming of age of Antoine Doinel, his alter ego. From the outset, Mr. Crowe not only wants us to know that his aspirations went beyond his mother’s (though he too cherishes ”To Kill a Mockingbird” and pays homage to it with a nostalgic tableau in the opening titles), but that William is his Antoine Doinel.

Come to think of it, the very title, ”Almost Famous” — which Mr. Crowe resisted until after the film was completed and DreamWorks made him come up with something better than ”Untitled” — evokes Truffaut as well. It sums up the state of grace one finds in early Truffaut.

”That’s the theme of my movies: the victory of the battered idealist in a cynical world,” Mr. Crowe says.

But this is no mere homage; it’s a genuine and euphoric coming-of-age story that captures the early-70’s rock scene through the eyes of a buoyant insider: the music, the touring, the groupies, the glamour, the camaraderie. And the loneliness. Rock can be a circus of disappointments as well as dreams — which is why William suffers the pangs of unrequited love and hero worship when he gets too close to the people he’s writing about.

To this day, Mr. Crowe defends his cozy interview style despite the journalistic compromises it entails. He says he has gained valuable trust and deeper insight as a result of having befriended the people he has covered. And he comes off as sweet, sincere and unassuming. He’s still the enthusiastic fan, whether the subject is music or movies. Though his personality comes through in all of his films, in ”Almost Famous” we get the complete persona, through William.

Still, Mr. Crowe’s biggest fear was that his alter ego would come off as too much of an observer. ”I always found that the people who come in like gangbusters or with their big theories — ‘I’m going to play the role of your interrogator and I’m damn good at it!’ — make the situation more about themselves than the subject,” he explains. ”So I always wanted to blend into the woodwork. Why not be the one guy the band trusts to write about what’s really going on? Which I did. For me it was always about writing about people I wanted to spend time around.”

But William is much more than an observer; he is the heart of the film, and it is through his eyes that the audience learns how he and Stillwater overcome their growing pains. Unlike the Allman Brothers Band, the real, hugely popular group Mr. Crowe first covered in 1973, Stillwater is an average band on the rise with lots of promise. Billy Crudup, in his most endearing role, plays the band’s guitarist, while Jason Lee plays the likable lead singer. Their Led Zeppelin-like clash of egos and flirtation with stardom threaten to destroy the band, but William, playing guardian angel, reminds them of the joy that drew them to rock in the first place. In return, Stillwater becomes his wings over America.

”The movie’s about how society changes around ’73, when everything else is changing too, in music and movies,” Mr. Crowe says. ”It was becoming that much less personal. Corporate takeover, marketing. Less and less for one person and more for global audiences. Stadium concerts, everything becomes huge.”

To provide material for the band, Mr. Crowe collaborated on a half-dozen songs with his wife, Nancy Wilson, who with her sister Ann once led the band Heart. The result is a cross between the Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd. ”These are guys who came from somewhere else to L.A., who have built a following by playing a lot. I took Billy aside and played him a rare Bruce Springsteen track called ‘The Promise’ about a garage band. I told him, ‘That’s Stillwater.’ Almost famous, almost there, bubbling below the radar.”

In ”Almost Famous,” Mr. Crowe defines the music of this era as a means of escape as well as a way of connecting with people. Most of the behemoths of the period are present on the soundtrack (the Who, Yes, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Black Sabbath), but the spirit of the film resonates more closely with the melancholy music of Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, Todd Rundgren and Elton John.

And Mr. John’s ”Tiny Dancer,” an early ballad about falling in love with the ”seamstress for the band,” holds the most personal appeal. It occurs on the film’s soundtrack at a pivotal moment, when Stillwater seems on the verge of breaking up. The mood on the tour bus is somber. Then the song fortuitously comes on the radio, and everyone slowly joins in, smiling and surrendering to the plaintive melody.

”I was on my first date in ’71, and we went to see Elton in San Diego,” Mr. Crowe remembers. ”A date that did not go well. He was so connected to those songs. He became the sound of doomed romance and love, because I knew I wasn’t going to get this girl, and there was Elton singing and playing the piano. And ‘Tiny Dancer’ came out and that piano intro reminded me of that concert and that girl. And it was always a part of this story that I wanted to write. We could’ve lost every other song in this movie but ‘Tiny Dancer.’ ”

The adolescent Mr. Crowe ultimately did lose his heart to the groupie depicted in ”Almost Famous” (though her real name isn’t Penny Lane.) In the film, Hudson conveys the character’s elegance, street smarts, sexuality and vulnerability. (Mr. Crowe says Ms. Hudson eerily captures the cool facade of the era, calling her a cross between her mother, Goldie Hawn, and Claudette Colbert.) William is drawn to Penny’s seductive flamboyance and she to his refreshing honesty and capacity for intimacy.

THERE’S nothing like an autobiographical film to shed significant light on a body of work. ”Little bits of this story get told through every one of my movies, except the events involving my family,” Mr. Crowe says. ”They’re all coming-of-age movies.”

In ”Jerry Maguire,” the sports agent played by Tom Cruise tries to carry on the idealism of his wise old mentor while battling his obsession with success (”Show me the love” versus ”Show me the money”).

In ”Singles,” two couples (Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott, Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon) rediscover the joy of their relationships after a series of disillusioning distractions.

And in ”Say Anything,” Mr. Crowe’s favorite of his films, John Cusack and Ione Skye find refuge together in their own secret world, while John Mahoney, who plays her amiable but secretive father, learns about openness from the younger generation.

”I really caught something with Cusack,” Mr. Crowe says. ”He saw the anger in his character, and I tried to temper it, making him more lovable. The collaboration brought out the best in both of us. We were both so stubborn. I try to play the Cusack role myself sometimes, to air out the sweetness. I guess the goal is to bring the ghost of John into the room when I’m writing and directing as much as possible.”

Mr. Crowe achieves a different sort of truth in depicting his mother and Lester Bangs, who died in 1982. They are really the soul of ”Almost Famous,” because they nurture William’s sense of purpose and keep him anchored in reality. Ms. McDormand plays Elaine as caring, concerned and cool. In fact, in this celebration of uncool, she is the only cool character, as a result of her self-assurance.

She may be clueless about rock, but she can quote Goethe and spout lines like ”Adolescence is a marketing tool.” She can also go to pieces on the phone when she’s lonely, yet admit to her son how much she loves him.

Bangs is a whole other story. He curses the death of rock with his rueful ruminations and warns William not to become friends with the band, but as the film wears on he’s reduced to a lonely man living with his records. ”The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool,” Bangs confides to William.

”What’s so remarkable about Cameron is that he gets to the truth about so many people in this picture through a knowledge of cynicism and a way of working through it,” says the filmmaker James Brooks, who has mentored him as a director. ”This is the gold ring — to make something this personal and yet so mainstream.”

But Mr. Crowe has also cut a version that runs 45 minutes longer than the one that will show in theaters — and that captures a completely different mood.

”It’s a lot about letting the music play, and you feel the length of the tour,” he says. ”But at two hours, you’re left wanting more in a good way with the release version. It’s actually more powerful.”

Not to worry; Mr. Crowe promises that the longer version, called ”Untitled,” will find its way onto the DVD next year, alongside ”Almost Famous.” ”It’s like the bootlegs I buy at the swap meets with the longer tracks on it. If you like it, bring it on.”

And bring on his next film, ”Vanilla Sky,” a love story reuniting him with Mr. Cruise. Mr. Crowe describes ”Vanilla Sky” (which will also star Penelope Cruz and will begin filming in November) as a complete departure from his coming-of-age stories. He bristles at the notion that it has taken him too long to confront more adult issues.

”I’ve come of age,” he says. ”It’s time to sort of move on. I have kids now, and there’s something challenging, as a writer, to tell yourself, ‘Even if you love those kinds of stories, you’ve got to push yourself and build other muscles.’ I still want to make movies about adults and adult problems. I want to try other stuff out.”

Courtesy of NY Times – Bill Desowitz – September 10, 2000