Cameron crowe autobiography almost famous

How much does Cameron Crowe love rock & roll? So much that the former Rolling Stone writer married a rock star (Heart’s Nancy Wilson), while his movies — from Say Anything … to Singles to the Oscar-nominated Jerry Maguire — practically ooze the music. Here, the 43-year-old writer-director talks about his latest, Almost Famous, the intensely personal story of a rock journalist’s coming of age.

EW: Why do a ’70s movie now?
CROWE: The story was slipping away, I was starting to see the ’70s as kitsch. I tried to tell it in different ways over 10 years, but it didn’t work. This time I wrote nakedly about my life and family. Unfortunately, that became the right tone.

Unfortunately?
Because the only way to do it was to be raw. But, also, I just love music. I write scripts with music blasting and my perfect day is buying bootlegs. I’ve always been that guy.

It shows — like in Singles when Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott pore over his record collection.
Or even John Cusack making a mix tape to impress Ione Skye in Say Anything … The first thing I did when Tom Cruise said he was going to be in Jerry Maguire was I pulled him into this room and played him the Who’s ”Magic Bus” from Live at Leeds, and said, ”This is what the movie is going to feel like.”

In Almost Famous, which names have been changed to protect the innocent?
The band [in the movie] was all the ones I wrote about. The Who, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, the Allman Brothers, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Ronnie Van Zant from Skynyrd singled me out from a lot of press buzzing around in 1973. For some reason he loved my writing and tried to sponsor my stuff. He actually was the first guy that I knew really well who died, and I could never write about him afterwards. I was supposed to do his obit and I couldn’t. I was shattered. I couldn’t even listen to Skynyrd for 20 years after [the plane crash that killed Van Zant and two other band mem

Writer/director Cameron Crowe‘s autobiographical rock odyssey “Almost Famous” turns 20 next year, yet the film still holds up well as a snapshot of 1970s counterculture. Famously, Crowe, who won a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for the film in 2001, based his nostalgic road movie on his own experiences as a journalist at Rolling Stone in the time of Ben Fong-Torres.

Now, Crowe has revealed the story that actually inspired “Almost Famous,” which is a piece he penned for a shuttered magazine called Live! in 1996 — the same year his film “Jerry Maguire” was released. Crowe has shared that story with TheWrap, whose Steve Pond was also a rock critic in the 1970s. Reading the opening paragraph of the story, you can almost certainly hear Frances McDormand (Oscar-nominated for her iconic turn as a sheltering, truth-talking mother) admonishing Patrick Fugit:

“‘There will be absolutely no rock music in our house.’ With those epic words, my mother and father ushered in 1968. My mom was an English teacher, and early on she spotted the threat that rock posed to all those finely-bound books lining our cabinets. My sister and I lobbied hard, assuring them that drugs and promiscuous sex were not what our music was about. Rock was our poetry. Yes, came her reply, but ‘it’s the poetry of drugs and promiscuous sex!’ Of course she was right, but few were as good at feigning outrage as my sister and me.”

The publication of the story is timed to the world premiere and San Diego opening of the “Almost Famous” musical this weekend. Read the rest of the “Almost Famous” story over at TheWrap.

“Almost Famous” is still in the news. Recently, Cameron Crowe found himself defending the film against critics suggesting that the Penny Lane character (played by Kate Hudson, also Osca

American filmmaker and journalist (born 1957)

Cameron Bruce Crowe (born July 13, 1957) is an American filmmaker and journalist. He has received numerous accolades including an Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Grammy Award as well as a nomination for a Tony Award. Crowe started his career as a contributing editor and writer at Rolling Stone magazine in 1973 where he covered numerous rock bands on tour.

Crowe's debut screenwriting effort, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), grew out of a book he wrote while posing for one year undercover as a student at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Later, he wrote and directed the romance films Say Anything... (1989), Singles (1992), and Jerry Maguire (1996). Crowe directed his seminal work, the autobiographical film Almost Famous (2000), which is loosely based on his early career as a teen writer for Rolling Stone. For his screenplay, he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

His later films have received varying degrees of success. He directed the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky (2001), the romantic comedy Elizabethtown (2005), the family-friendly We Bought a Zoo (2011), and the romantic comedy Aloha (2015). He has directed the music documentaries Pearl Jam Twenty (2011) and The Union (2011), produced David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019), and created the Showtime series Roadies (2016).

Crowe has written two books, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1981) and Conversations with Wilder (1999). He also a

2000 film by Cameron Crowe

This article is about the film. For other uses, see Almost Famous (disambiguation).

Almost Famous is a 2000 American comedy drama film written and directed by Cameron Crowe, starring Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson, Patrick Fugit, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It tells the story of a teenage journalist, played by Fugit, writing for Rolling Stone magazine in the early 1970s, touring with the fictitious rock band Stillwater, and writing his first cover story on the band. The film is semi-autobiographical, as Crowe himself was a teenage writer for Rolling Stone.

Despite the film performing poorly in theatres, grossing $47.4 million against a $60 million budget, it received widespread acclaim from critics and received four Academy Award nominations, including a win for Best Original Screenplay. It was also awarded the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Roger Ebert hailed it as the best film of the year and the ninth-best film of the 2000s. It won two Golden Globe Awards, for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture (Hudson).

It has since become a cult classic and, in a 2016 international poll conducted by the BBC, Almost Famous was ranked the 79th greatest film since 2000. In a Hollywood Reporter 2014 list voted on by "studio chiefs, Oscar winners and TV royalty", Almost Famous was ranked the 71st greatest film of all time. A stage musical adaptation of the film opened on Broadway in November 2022.

Plot

In San Diego 1969, child prodigy William Miller struggles to fit in. His life is further complicated after learning that his widowed college-professor mother Elaine has falsely led him to believe he is twelve years old. William is actually eleven, having started the first grade at five years old,