Cameron Crowe is sitting beside me in the Dorchester, smiling and laughing and making me feel like the World’s Greatest Bitch. Oh, he doesn’t mean to. He’s such a super nice guy, he’d almost certainly be pained to know it. But as he attentively tops up the water in my glass, I can’t help but feel horrid. I want to break down and confess everything.
No, I didn’t lap up the smaltz of Jerry Maguire. My blood freezes at the very name Cuba Gooding Jr. ever since (though that might have happened anyway after Snow Dogs). And yes, I was one of those terrible people who thought Almost Famous was far too amiably Hammer Of The Clods than was decent for a film set against the Bacchanalian excesses of '70s rock. Don’t even get me started on Vanilla Sky.
But whatever one might feel about Mr. Crowe’s propensity for producing bubblegum sweet movies, there’s no sense that his rosy-tinted perspective is borne out of cynical pandering. He is, quite simply, one of the good guys. His latest film, Elizabethtown, a sort of loose buddy piece for Almost Famous, is, expectedly, an unabashedly sentimental fable.
Orlando Bloom stars as a disgraced sneaker designer, whose clueless attempts at suicide are disrupted by news of his father’s sudden death. In the time-honoured tradition of any number of movie city slickers, he travels back to Louisville, Kentucky for the funeral, and before you can say ‘it takes a village’, he’s found a girl (Kirsten Dunst) and, quite possibly, himself.
For Mr. Crowe, Elizabethtown is a deeply personal film based on his own father’s Kentucky funeral.
“I was driving through Kentucky with Nancy (Wilson, latterly of Heart and Mrs. Crowe), staring out the window and I was just hit with a flood of memories,” he explains. “I remembered travelling to Kentucky for my dad’s funeral aged 17 as the male representative of the California relatives if you like. But I’ve always wanted to do something about fathers and sons. I’m not big on this idea that you have to be a buddy to your kid. I remember having to be firm with my son Billy once and the next morning, it was like our relationship had blossomed. There’s a fascinating dynamic there.”
Though semi-autobiographical, Elizabethtown also functions as a great big mythical road journey with a non-stop Americana juke-box, featuring everyone from Rufus Wainwright to Lynyrd Skynyrd, plus original music written by Crowe’s wife, Nancy Wilson. Thus far, she’s participated on all his films since Say Anything back in 1989. So what does the director do when creative differences arise with his musicologist missus?
“Well it’s funny you should ask that,” laughs Crowe. “Because we’ve only just started to have differences. I mean, we play each other everything we get our hands on. Always have done. Always will do. But we have started to argue a little bit about her music. She’s outgrown me I think. I’ll come home and find some screenplay by another director sitting on the table. Oh. By Curtis Hanson. So it’s like, that is it.”
Watching Elizabethtown, one wonders how Nancy finds anytime to do anything else. There are so many songs in the film, it’s hard to imagine how it could be more heavily sound tracked.
“Yeah,” nods Cameron. “And that’s after we took stuff out. When I’m writing a screenplay it also starts out with me compiling a notebook of songs. And it always ends up with the song notebook being twice as long as the actual script. Because I wanted Elizabethtown to be like a folktale or a Garrison Keilor story, I put together a mix tape around an imaginary Great American Radio Station. I love when music and film work together, especially the sly way in which directors like Martin Scorsese and Hal Ashby use music.”
Clearly, music is a lifelong passion for Mr. Crowe. Born in Palm Springs, but raised in San Deigo, Crowe would first enter the exulted realms of rock journalism aged 15, when he began writing music reviews and features for Rolling Stone, Creem and Playboy magazine. During this period, he received spiritual guidance from Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and would interview Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and Neil Young for starters.
Like the soft-focus gaze of Almost Famous, Cameron’s recollections of this extraordinary time aren’t nearly as hardcore as one might suppose.
“I guess there were some people crashing and burning around me,” he admits. “But I honestly never noticed. I think I always just knew to stay away from people with cocaine habits. It’s a drug that does turn people nasty. But then some would say Lester could be nasty. I still getting people saying, ’That’s not my Lester Bangs’ when they watch Almost Famous. But that was my Lester. He was a complicated man – melancholic and excited and happy and sad – but he was always sweet to me. I remember him bringing me to London to see David Essex being launched as a star. He was a good guy.”
Does Crowe think he would have got the same breaks in the current climate, now that the school of ’speedflight wordsperm bullshit’ seems closed for business?
“No, it’s totally different now,” he sighs wistfully. “Magazines have to be commercial so I understand that there isn’t space for flights of fancy. But it’s sad that music writing is now just a consumer guide and not someone getting mad or getting off and letting all their feelings and connections spill out on the page. You can still see the influence, but you don’t really see where another Lester Bangs is going to come from. Blogs maybe. He would have been a great blogger.”
Crowe’s friendship with the unpredictable Mr. Bangs would ultimate prove a useful training ground for his friendship with the late Billy Wilder. What on earth, I wonder, did Crowe and the caustic Wilder have in common?
“See everybody thinks that,” he smiles. “And he did put the phone down on me once before we got to know each other. He’d also say things like ’I’ve seen your movie. It’s good but it’s not as good as Slingblade.’ But while he was a straight-talker, I don’t think we’re that different. People think he’s really caustic and I’m really sugary, but the truth is, we met in the middle. I’m much more caustic than you think.”
‘Hmm. I’m not really feeling it,’ thinks the World’s Greatest Bitch as she shakes hands and slinks away.