Cameron Crowe

It’s day three of sound mixing for Elizabethtown, and deep inside Hollywood’s Universal Studios, the Alfred Hitchcock dub stage buzzes with activity. Cameron Crowe and his nine-member team fine-tune the movie’s “very fragile” airport scene, bringing the music up here, taking the footsteps down there, swapping Orlando Bloom’s “um-hum” for an “ahh” to make him sound less cynical. In the midst of this, Crowe and his associate producer Andy Fischer juggle other urgent matters. Over the phone, song clearances are negotiated, screenings are scheduled and taglines are debated with the studio (Crowe worries that one of them belittles Kentucky, so he cuts it from the list). Low’s Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker drop by to take in the proceedings. Midday, Crowe is told to expect a call from Van Morrison and to act surprised. “It’s not normally this crazy,” Crowe assures me. (When I return a couple weeks later and Fischer tells me the same thing, I start to question what normal is for them.)

Even though he’s been suddenly thrust into seven-day workweeks to accommodate Paramount’s new deadline, Crowe still has to break from mixing and drive across the studio lot to film a personal welcome for European screenings and promos for online trailers. The room breaks into laughter as he does take after take of “exclusive clip” intros, merely substituting one website for another. Leaving the shoot, he apologizes. “I’m sorry you had to see that. I can’t believe how hard it is to stand in front of that camera. I go right back to the mirror in the junior-high locker room, and you just hate everything you see and you want to be the other person.”

Rushing back to the dub stage, he pauses to introduce me to Melvin, the doorman. It’s business as usual for Crowe—when I arrived earlier, he not only gave me the names of all crew members present, but also their bios. This inclusiveness explains the camaraderie and family vibe on the set. “It comes from loving the team and the work,” he says. “I listen to all the actors, and I listen to grips. I try not to take too much time doing it, but we are a team together.”

What I Really Like is Music

Crowe got his start, not as filmmaker, but as a music-journalist prodigy who—at age 13—was already writing for the San Diego Door. There, he was a sponge soaking up all the knowledge and mojo he could from rock-crit legend Lester Bangs, who took the young Crowe under his wing. Graduating high school at 15, he became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he interviewed luminaries like Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin. At 22, he went undercover and returned to high school for a full year to research Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Before the book was released, Hollywood tapped him for the adaptation. Since then, his adult life has been devoted to film, where he’s achieved commercial and critical success, including an Oscar for his semi-autobiographical Almost Famous screenplay and a Best Picture nomination for Jerry Maguire.

Nonetheless, some 26 years after leaving Rolling Stone, Crowe claims to have never left music journalism. “I do it all the time,” he says. “When I was doing the research for Elizabethtown, I interviewed My Morning Jacket and Jim James for hours and hours—about their music and about Kentucky and all their relationships with their fathers. I can’t help interviewing.”

Asking questions is a crucial way for Crowe to interact and process information. During our extended chats, he repeatedly stops himself from unconscious attempts to turn the interview around. But he had an even harder time on the Elizabethtown set with singer/songwriter Patty Griffin, who plays a small role. “I’d just walk up to her and be like, ‘Everything going OK with the scene? Yeah? OK. Do you ever play ‘One Big Love’ live?’ I never quite found a rhythm where I could just kind of deal with being a fan and process it by interviewing her.”

Griffin’s 1,000 Kisses actually inspired Crowe’s approach to filming Elizabethtown. “After trying different ways of being creative,” he explains, “she had made the decision to go back to basics and to be real simple and from that came her next breakthrough, creatively. And I wanted Elizabethtown to be a little bit like that. Be spare and from the heart, and without a lot of people being assistants to people who are assistants to other people who sit around. Everyone in the room should be making the movie and not living a lifestyle.”

That attitude seeped into the movie and resulted in the quickest work Crowe’s ever done. “It gives it a kind of an urgency,” he explains, “and some things are messy, but like life. I generally will always love the demo of a song more than the actual labored-over song, and I always find a way to get a hold of bootlegs to see the original versions of stuff that I loved. And so I wanted this to be the original version, with no versions after.”

With Crowe, it always comes back to music. Walking into the offices of his Vinyl Films production company—housed at Paramount—there’s a photo of Crowe with his hero, filmmaker Billy Wilder, hanging inside the front door; down the hall is a framed poster of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude; but virtually every other inch of wall space is covered with music memorabilia—photos of John Coltrane, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, Peter Gabriel and My Morning Jacket, as well as photographer Michael Wilson’s What I Really Like Is Music exhibition poster.