Cameron Crowe names the only regret of his career: “I still feel bad about it”
As origin stories go, Cameron Crowe definitely has one of the very best; after all, if the story of how you grew up and made your career is interesting enough to be turned into a hit film, then you’ve led a fairly fascinating life without doubt.
Crowe was the Californian youngster who graduated from university at just 15 and was so obsessed with rock and roll that he was writing pieces for legendary rock publication Rolling Stone within a year. As the magazine’s youngest ever contributor, he would end up interviewing artists including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Eric Clapton and David Bowie.
And it’s Bowie, the artist who straddled some 50 years of popular music, that represents pretty much the only regret of Crowe’s professional life – a career that really took off in the early 1980s as he penned the cult comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High and then wrote and directed the zeitgeist-capturing John Cusack movie Say Anything.
He then repeated the trick with the slacker-grunge hit Singles in 1992, which featured a soundtrack that became more famous than the film itself, packing in songs from bands like Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden – but it was without doubt the sports agent drama Jerry Maguire that sealed Crowe’s reputation.
With a stellar turn by Tom Cruise in the lead role, it was nominated for five Oscars, including ‘Best Picture’, and led to phrases like “Show me the money” being repeated in pubs and bars all over the country. That success allowed Crowe to start putting together the inspiring story of his own life with Almost Famous four years later, the film that would earn him an Oscar for ‘Best Screenplay’.
By the end of the century, Crowe had carved out a reputation for making movies that brought film and music together more successfully than anyone else, and in crafting Almost Famous, he was initially so keen for Bowie to feature that he wrote him a part.
Crowe told the New York Post that he originally wanted the Thin White Duke to play a musician named Rocky Fedora, “A Peter Frampton–type character who’s working with this British, Brian Epstein–style publicist named Russell De May.”
But due to the story changing, rewrites taking place, and the number of side characters involved, it didn’t come to pass, something that Crowe deeply regrets. He added, “I still feel bad about it. It was really tough to lose that character, and to lose Bowie.”
Given the time Crowe spent with Bowie and the anecdotes he assembled, it certainly seems a big miss. Bowie had invited the then 18-year-old Crowe to follow him around while gigging and recording in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, a period in which the enigmatic British artist was surviving solely on milk, red peppers and cocaine.
Crowe would witness chaotic, drug-fuelled evenings with Bowie and then spend the days at home with the singer, his wife and their young son. The time, according to Crowe, was a surreal experience; Bowie telling him that a swimming pool was possessed by Satan in one moment, then giving him a songwriting masterclass the next.
“I don’t know how that could ever happen today,” Crowe concluded. “Somebody as famous as Bowie telling a kid, ‘Spend a year and a half around me and hold up a mirror.’ There was no assignment. I was just winging it.”
