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Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical movie, Almost Famous, still sings for audiences 25 years after its initial release. Based on the writer and director’s own tenure as a teen reporter for Rolling Stone, the film earned Crowe the 2001 Academy Award for best original screenplay — but is, above all else, a love letter to music, the director says.
“I’m just so grateful that we had the gift of being able to make it,” Crowe, whose new memoir The Uncool is out on Oct. 28, tells PEOPLE for this week’s print issue.
Almost Famous, which follows teenage journalist William Miller (Patrick Fugit) as he tours with the fictional rock band Stillwater for a Rolling Stone cover story, was “achingly personal” to shoot, Crowe says. He remembers filming parts of the movie — whose ensemble cast also included Kate Hudson, Frances McDormand and Philip Seymour-Hoffman — in San Diego, where he was raised.
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“By the end, Patrick Fugit has lived through all the stuff in the movie in his life,” Crowe says. “He’s kind of fallen in love with Kate a little bit and realized that that might not work out in this particular part of his lifetime, like Penny Lane is with someone else. It’s like all these emotions were there and he was pretty much exhausted — maybe too exhausted.”
But Crowe was set on nailing one particular scene, where Hudson’s character, the groupie Penny Lane, attempts suicide by overdosing on quaaludes. He also wanted to feature Stevie Wonder’s song “My Cherie Amour,” which captured William’s love for Penny Lane despite the situation.
“Patrick’s such a good guy, and I had to do that thing that you hear that directors do. We were trying to get it right,” Crowe says. “I was gonna live or die if I didn’t get the perfect ‘My Cherie Amour’ shot.”
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“I said, ‘Patrick, you know these people that love you and [have] been hugging you and singing you songs and just loving you this whole time? You know, of course, they’re all going to go away. When the movie’s over, you’re never going to hear from these people again. And that’s kind of the way it is. So enjoy it now, none of this is really real and it’s been great, but it’s going to be real over, real soon.’”
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“He started to get completely emotional and I was like, “Okay, let’s start,’” Crowe says. “We move in, and that’s what’s in the movie.”
Despite what it took to get there, Crowe says capturing that scene was an “amazing” memory.
“We did whatever it would take to get us to the story that we wanted to tell, which is about loving music,” Crowe says. “And everybody in that movie loved music.”
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The director also noted the joy of working with actors like Billy Crudup, who played Stillwater guitarist Russell Hammond.
“Find me another person on earth who’s going to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it, but I don’t know guitar at all. So I got six weeks to learn how to play guitar like a rock star. Let’s go,’” he says. “Sometimes if your attitude is right and your purpose is clear, the skies part for you. That was Almost Famous.”
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Crowe’s memoir looks back on his storied film career, during which he helmed other cult classics like Say Anything, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Jerry Maguire. But it was Almost Famous that arguably made him a household name (and which found a second life as a Broadway musical too.)
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Crowe also considers Almost Famous to be a story about his own family, including his late mother Alice and older sister Cathy. He says writing the film prepared him for tackling his own life story in The Uncool.
“I went back to that place where it’s like, ‘I don’t care if anybody ever reads this or doesn’t read it or doesn’t like it or likes it,’” he says. “Of course that’s fantastic. But I’m not writing it for any purpose other than to summon some feeling that music makes me feel.”
The Uncool will be published via Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and is now available for preorder. Crowe will also embark on a book tour, which kicks off in Nashville on Oct. 30.
