Vanilla Sky – Hartfort Courant

Not Just Plain Vanilla

Cameron Crowe saw love bloom between his “Vanilla Sky” stars Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz. He won an Academy Award for the script for last year’s “Almost Famous.”

But nothing touched him more than meeting Paul McCartney. To hear Crowe bob and weave through an anecdote about how one of the two surviving Beatles came to write a song for the “Vanilla Sky” soundtrack is to understand the essence of Crowe. His medium is film, but music comes first.

The writer-director professed his love in “Almost Famous,” an intensely personal homage to 1970s rock ‘n’ roll. Long before that, he married a pop goddess, Nancy Wilson, half of the duo Heart.

“Vanilla Sky” is a remake of Alejandro Amenábar’s Spanish-language “Abre Los Ojos” (“Open Your Eyes”). Crowe called it a mind-bending love story, but he would not have attempted an English version unless he heard the soundtrack in his head. “Music always establishes the tone of something before I ever write or make it,” he said during a recent visit to New York. “I was listening to folk songs a lot. I thought Alejandro’s movie was like a folk song – a simple tale that’s a fable.”

Which brings us to McCartney. Crowe wanted to calm addled moviegoers with a pleasant tune at the end of the dream-laced “Vanilla Sky.” He got the word out that he wanted McCartney, and the former Beatle responded.

Crowe has seen fans swoon over Cruise and the rock stars Crowe interviewed for Rolling Stone magazine when he was a high school dropout. (One of those schools was Westhill in Stamford). But Crowe could not forget the reaction of film colleagues when the Fab Four leader walked into Crowe’s Los Angeles editing studio, as promised. “It’s a `You’re at the circus and he’s a freak’ look,” Crowe said.

A giddy Crowe showed him 40 minutes of the movie. McCartney then invited him to a studio across town to listen to his new cuts. McCartney drove himself, and Crowe followed, blabbing to his wife via cellphone that he was actually tailing Paul McCartney to go hear fresh music. To a colleague’s horror, Crowe asked McCartney to write something original for the movie. McCartney responded with his trademark, “Cool, man, cool” and showed up a few days later.

“I’ve written a song called `Vanilla Sky,'” McCartney said, “and if you don’t like it, I’ll call it `Manila Envelope.'”

It’s a sweet-and-sour tune with a warning to not take life for granted. In the movie, Cruise plays a vain Manhattan playboy who meets the girl of his dreams (Cruz, reprising her role from the original). Hours later, he accepts a ride uptown with a woman (Cameron Diaz) he has treated with all the respect of belly-button lint. She purposely steers the car off the road, killing herself and disfiguring Cruise’s character. What ensues is subject to debate. Reality and nightmare blend in a storytelling stew of a man whose skin-deep psyche is about to get a workout. But Crowe wouldn’t divulge the recipe.

One plot development involves Cruise’s character buying an alternative life at a dream factory. “I wanted one interpretation of the movie to possibly be that it’s somebody’s lucid dream that’s purchased, where they asked to be played by Tom Cruise,” Crowe said.

The 44-year-old Crowe still looks like the boyish geek who matured from sychophant to pop authority to auteur. Think a young Gerard Depardieu before too many eclairs.

“Vanilla Sky” reunited Crowe with Cruise, whose enlightened sports agent in 1996’s “Jerry Maguire” helped create Crowe’s only hit. Besides the “pop culture benefit” of having Cruise take a Quasimodo-like turn in “Vanilla Sky,” the director said he and the actor got to hone their shout-out improv on the set. “I’m a writer-director, which allows me to think on my feet, and he’s a big script guy,” Crowe said.

On “Jerry Maguire,” a scene called for Cruise to defend himself against being called a racist. Suddenly, Crowe yelled out an unscripted, “I don’t like black people? I’m Mr. Black People!” Cruise uttered the line without skipping a beat, and it became an indelible moment.

In “Vanilla Sky,” Crowe said that instead of reimagining Amenábar’s original, he would respect its spirit, the way a band would cover a hit song by another group. “Movies made for the sake of being different seem too self-aware to begin with,” he said.

He feels “Vanilla Sky” is his most different work in tone, but “Almost Famous” remains his most ambitious because it was so personal. So was its sour note at the box office. Crowe’s pseudo autobiography of his time as a music journalist took in just $31.9 million at the box office, reverting to a trend in which Crowe’s creations generate critical huzzahs but audience ambivalence. “Say Anything” (1989) grossed $20.8 million and “Singles” (1992) $18.5 million. “Jerry Maguire” was the exception, with $154 million in ticket sales.

Crowe was once quoted as saying “Almost Famous” was mismarketed but only offered this time, “Yeah, I read that.” Perhaps it had to do with the timing. The movie is getting new life on HBO and in an expanded version on DVD and video.

Said Crowe: “I retreat to this position where I go, `Thankfully, there are enough formats where ultimately something is gonna get seen.'”

Courtesy of Hartfort Courant – Ron Dicker – December 14, 2001