Cameron Crowe

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Cameron Crowe (2005)

Cameron Crowe (born July 13, 1957 in Palm Springs , California ) is an American director , screenwriter and actor .

Crowe has been writing articles for music magazines since the age of 15. Among other things, he accompanied the Allman Brothers on a US tour in this role . He later became an editor at Rolling Stone . After his time as a music editor, he wrote several scripts and finally made films as a director himself.

He addressed his youth in the film Almost Famous . The character of 15-year-old William Miller corresponds to the young Cameron Crowe, the fictional band Stillwater contains elements of various bands that Crowe accompanied on tours.

His college experiences inspired him to write the novel Fast Times at Ridgemont High , which he converted into the script of the film of the same name (German title: Ich Glaub ', Ich bin' im Wald .)

For Jerry Maguire he was nominated twice for the Oscar and the Golden Globe as well as for the European Film Award for "Best Non-European Film". He won numerous other nominations and awards for Almost Famous . So he was able to receive the Oscar for "Best Screenplay".

Live and act

Cameron Crowe was born on July 13, 1957 in Palm Springs , California , but grew up a little further south in San Diego on the Pacific coast, where his mother taught sociology and English literature at the local college . His father James was a real estate agent. Crowe has an older sister, Cindy.

Cameron's liberal mother, who recognized the great potential that lay dormant in her inquisitive son at an early age, supported and motivated him continuously, so that he started school a year earlier. Crowe skipped another year of school because after changing schools he was in the wrong class and the mistake was only noticed after he had found his way around. When he then moved to high school , he was significantly younger than his classmates, which, however, quickly turned him into an outsider as a child in the midst of adolescent adolescents. To make matters worse, Crowe, who suffered from kidney disease, was often ill and thus stood out in the otherwise sun-tanned Southern California with his unusual paleness.

His parents, especially his mother Alice, were extremely worried about their children and, in this context, had a strictly negative attitude towards rock 'n' roll music. This happened especially to the displeasure of Cindy, who was of a more rebellious nature than her brother and therefore repeatedly revolted against the tutelage of her mother by openly arguing with her or secretly smuggling records into the house, which she then put under her bed hid. Even the peace-loving young Cameron, who was constantly trying to mediate between mother and sister, could not prevent the mother-daughter relationship from deteriorating over time so much that Cindy moved out of home right after graduating from high school . As a parting present, she left her brother, who had always been very close to her, her entire record collection, with which Crowe also discovered rock 'n' roll. His enthusiasm for rock grew rapidly, only dampened by his mother's disapproval of his new interest, who only allowed him to attend his first concert, Iron Butterfly , after winning tickets on a local radio station.

As a kind of compensation for his lack of social contact with his peers or classmates, Cameron began writing for the school newspaper . At the age of 13 he contributed rock reviews to an underground newspaper , the San Diego Door , which his sister Cindy had brought him to the attention of. A report of a Yes and Black Sabbath concert in the San Diego Sports Arena for this newspaper became his first backstage experience.

His regular high school activities now included the debating club and work on the alternative campus newspaper Common Sense . Through the San Diego Door , Crowe had also met the rock critic Lester Bangs, who, however, had left the San Diego Door to become editor of the national rock magazine Creem . After a long correspondence with Bangs, to whom Crowe sent his reviews for viewing, his articles finally appeared in Creem and Bangs became a kind of idol and mentor for him. Articles for Creem were followed by articles for Penthouse , Playboy , Crawdaddy , Music World , Circus and also for the Los Angeles Times . By this time at the latest, his mother must have realized that her son would not bow to her wishes, which already / still showed him as the youngest lawyer in California, but would go his own way.

In 1972 Cameron finished high school at the age of 15 and made contact with Ben Fong-Torres , the editor of Rolling Stone , during a trip to Los Angeles that same year , with whom he also became a permanent employee a little later. On his way from simple contributor to assistant editor, Crowe interviewed influential music greats like Bob Dylan , David Bowie , Neil Young , The Who , Eric Clapton and the members of Led Zeppelin . He went on tour with a band, the Allman Brothers , for the first time when he was 16 , after being reluctantly released from his mother's care. His contact with the band or Gregg Allman came about only hesitantly, as he initially thought he was the "enemy", an undercover FBI investigator .

By the age of about 18, however, Crowe's enthusiasm for a career in rock journalism slowly waned and he began writing a series of articles on contemporary youth life for Rolling Stone . When Rolling Stone Magazine moved its offices from the West Coast to New York in 1979 , he decided to stay behind and thus give up his permanent position at Rolling Stone , but to continue to work there as a freelancer. In the following period, his main focus was on a book about growing up teenagers in the late 70s, which was thematically a continuation of his series of articles for Rolling Stone . For this reason, he returned to high school as a senior researcher in 1979 at the age of 22 . Fast Times at Ridgemont High , the later title of the book, which was a largely comedic transcription of real-life experiences that Crowe made with "peers" during his research at high school, became a bestseller and the basis for the film adaptation by director Amy Heckerling , for which Crowe also wrote the script. The finished film, which opened in theaters in the fall of 1982, was a great success and served as a career springboard for many later stars, including the likes of Sean Penn , Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicolas Cage .

Crowe's next project was the script for The Wild Life , which amused some high school graduates' imagination of wild adult life against the problems of real life. Although the film was thematically linked to Fast Times , it did not quite achieve its success in 1984. Undeterred, Crowe followed the lucrative topic of youth films and gained his first directorial experience in 1989 with Teen Lover (OT: Say Anything ), a film adaptation of his own script. The sensitive, but also with comedic aspects, story about the outsider who seeks the relationship to the unapproachable beauty of his school, was again more successful with the audience than it had been with Wild Life .

In 1992 he directed Singles , another youth film based on his own script, which this time as a romantic comedy shed light on the single life of some people in their mid-twenties in Seattle's vibrant music scene. In terms of success, Singles also fit well into the series of his previous films, having been well received by both viewers and critics. This was mainly because Crowe relied on believable and multi-layered characters in his films at a time when teenage comedies were mostly made up of sex jokes.

However, Crowe's greatest success to date was in 1996 with Jerry Maguire . With the story of the successful single sports agent who lost his job due to a crisis of meaning, but then fought for a new place in life at the side of a fresh love, he had ventured into more adult territory for the first time. Although all options were open to him after this success in the film business, he took almost two years off to write a book about the legendary director Billy Wilder . After Bang's death in 1982 and his awakened interest in film, Wilder had advanced to become a new idol figure and source of inspiration. Conversations With Wilder therefore became a compilation of various interviews with Wilder, which were intended to document his thoughts and preserve them for posterity and were published in November 1999.

Crowe's private life was just as successful as it merged more and more with professional life and both areas benefited from each other. This connection was driven by Nancy Wilson , a rock musician he met while filming Fast Times in 1982 . Both got on so well in private that they married in 1986. A large part of the film music in Crowe's films originated from their joint work, which was always of particular importance there. The marriage resulted in two children, twins William James Crowe (named after Billy Wilder and Cameron's late father James) and Curtis Wilson Crowe (a tribute to his wife and Pearl Jam manager Kelly Curtis, who first introduced Crowe to his future wife ). The birth of the two boys coincided with the filming of Almost Famous , probably the most personal and intimate work of his work.

With Almost Famous , Crowe worked in an almost autobiographical way on his career in rock journalism around Rolling Stone Magazine , an extremely turbulent, if eerily instructive, period of life that lasted about ten years. It had taken him almost 20 years from the first idea to the point in time when he felt mature enough and had the courage to begin the “masterpiece”. The courage and work with talented (young) actors such as Patrick Fugit (William Miller), Kate Hudson (Penny Lane), Billy Crudup (Russell Hammond), Frances McDormand (Elaine Miller) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (Lester Bangs) took off more than paid for him. Crowe had previously received several smaller regional and national awards for his films, he was already nominated with Jerry Maguire in five categories (including "Best Screenplay" and "Best Picture") for the Academy Awards. However, he only received an Oscar in 2001 for Almost Famous in the “Best Screenplay” category, after the film was already a complete financial success. The Oscar was preceded by a very coveted Golden Globe for “Best Film” in the “Comedy / Musical” category. Kate Hudson's acting performance was honored with a Golden Globe for "Best Supporting Actress". To round off Crowe's moment of success, he achieved with Almost Famous what he had never succeeded until then despite great efforts and which he would therefore not have dared to dream of: the reconciliation between his sister and her mother within the family after years of icy silence.

In the aftermath of Almost Famous , however, Crowe was by no means resting on his laurels, but instead released his fifth film, the more contemporary Vanilla Sky, in December 2001, which was the first to be remake. The action revolves around a playboy from a wealthy family, who is torn from his complicated network of relationships by a tragic car accident and who then seeks the way back to an orderly (love) life. With this film too, Crowe had great success again. Although the film did not receive any awards, it cast its spell on viewers and critics and ensured a very satisfactory box office result. Crowe's latest work, Elizabethtown , is a tragic comedy.

Filmography (selection)

as a screenwriter

as a director

as a producer

Fonts

literature

  • Patrick Hilpisch: Cinema Goes Pop. Popular culture in the Cameron Crowes films. Büchner-Verlag, Darmstadt 2009.

Web links