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One of the best films of the year and the best movie ever about the rock and roll life, Almost Famous is a devoted fan's love letter to the wayward pleasures and naive ideals of Seventies rock music. Mark Olsen interviews writer-director Cameron Crowe. Plus: Cameron Crowe on the movies that inspired him.
Cameron Crowe is a freelance writer. Until last October, he served as music editor for the San Diego Door and is now writing for the Los Angeles Times. He attends San Diego City College. Crowe is going on 16.
Change the name to Billy Miller and this 1973 writer's bio for a Rolling Stone piece could be a rough description of the protagonist of Cameron Crowe's new film, Almost Famous. In making his most personal film to date - a semi-autobiographical tale of a boy reporter adrift in the controlled chaos of a Seventies rock tour - Crowe has also managed to make his finest. Almost Famous incorporates everything witty, heartfelt and handmade about Crowe's earlier films while charting his continued growth as a filmmaker - as opposed to a writer who directs. At the same time he's made the movies' most authentic and acute portrait of the off-kilter realities and moral compromising of the rock and roll lifestyle.
Way back when, Rolling Stone was the leading (or at least the loudest) voice of the post-Sixties rock counterculture. One day an absurdly young Cameron Crowe (he graduated high school at 15) landed an assignment from editor Ben Fong-Torres. "It was dark," Crowe has said by way of explaining how any responsible adult could send someone so young on the road with the likes of Deep Purple or Fleetwood Mac. You can see the continuity between Crowe's profiles and his films in his intense identification with his subjects, which stems from his complete immersion in their worlds.
Crowe spent 1980 posing as a high school student - at 22 he could still pass for 18. The resulting book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, was a unique document portraying the clandestine world of American teenagers from the inside. Adapted by Crowe himself and directed by Amy Heckerling, the film version, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (82), went on to become...