Proving that there is a career path for former rock journalists, ex-Rolling Stone scribe Cameron Crowe has made a series of increasingly charming and bittersweet comedies, punctuated by the odd big budget studio picture.
Crowe wrote the screenplay for Amy Heckerling's teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and then directed Say Anything… (89), another seminal teen movie. He then grew up a little with Singles (92), a massively successful film that practically defined a zeitgeist. The film was a sweet look at the love lives of a bunch of twenty-something's, set in Seattle during the ‘grunge' explosion. It could hardly fail.
He then wrote, produced and directed the hugely popular Tom Cruise movie Jerry Maguire (96) about a sacked sports agent who decides to go it along with a single athlete (Cuba Gooding Jr.). The success of Jerry allowed Crowe to commence work on his most personal project to date, Almost Famous (00), an affectionate look at life on the ro...
Proving that there is a career path for former rock journalists, ex-Rolling Stone scribe Cameron Crowe has made a series of increasingly charming and bittersweet comedies, punctuated by the odd big budget studio picture.
Crowe wrote the screenplay for Amy Heckerling's teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and then directed Say Anything… (89), another seminal teen movie. He then grew up a little with Singles (92), a massively successful film that practically defined a zeitgeist. The film was a sweet look at the love lives of a bunch of twenty-something's, set in Seattle during the ‘grunge' explosion. It could hardly fail.
He then wrote, produced and directed the hugely popular Tom Cruise movie Jerry Maguire (96) about a sacked sports agent who decides to go it along with a single athlete (Cuba Gooding Jr.). The success of Jerry allowed Crowe to commence work on his most personal project to date, Almost Famous (00), an affectionate look at life on the road with an up-and-coming rock band seen through the eyes of a high-school music journo who's offered the chance to cover the band for Rolling Stone magazine. Set to a soundtrack of wonderful Seventies music, the film made a star of Kate Hudson and features a great cameo from Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Almost Famous was followed by Vanilla Sky (01), a remake of the Spanish thriller Abre Los Ojos. The film was a sci-fi mystery which again starred Tom Cruise as a publisher whose life takes a turn for the surreal after a terrible car crash. Crowe's most recent work is Elizabethtown (05), starring Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom as unlikely lovers brought together by fate.
