Sunday Conversation: Cameron Crowe On ‘Almost Famous’ Broadway, Joni, Townshend, Skynyrd And More

Cameron Crowe’s Oscar-winning 2000 film, Almost Famous, might be the greatest music movie ever made. Featuring a perfect Oscar-winning script and a stunning cast, led by Philip Seymour Hoffman (arguably the greatest actor of his generation), Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson , Jason Lee and more, it has become an absolute cult classic.

Crowe says more people talk to him now about Almost Famous than any of his other films, including the Tom Cruise smash Jerry Maguire. But would that translate to Broadway? Without the cast that came to define the roles.

Crowe knew that for he and composer Tom Kitt to make the play work it would have to be about the sense of discovery. “Pound for pound, you’re not gonna match up with that version of the story. But what you can attempt to recall, it’s the feeling,” Crowe says. “And the idea that you could drop into this world and feel the way it felt, the way it feels to discover music and love it, and want to hold it close and wrap your arms around it, because you feel like at this moment in time, only you are hearing this song in exactly this way.”

It’s not much different than building a song. Every artist will tell you that at its core, a song has to be able to be played acoustically or on a solo piano. That is why Bruce Springsteen can take an anthemic rocker like “Born To Run” and play it only acoustically for an entire tour, as he did in 1988.

You take the art back to the beginning, to its core. Crowe. with the help of Kitt, and others, has masterfully done that, returning Almost Famous to its acoustic base, one built on longing and finding those people who start your journey to the home you will build for yourself as an adult. Along the way to your home you will meet so many essential characters, and Almost Famous, as Crowe, says, is a celebration of, a love letter to, the people who jumpstarted his way home.

I spoke with Crowe and Kitt about Joni Mitchell, why Crowe will never get tired of writing about Lester Bangs, Pete Townshend and how revisiting Almost Famous 20 years later he had a new appreciation for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant.

Steve Baltin: For you who’s interviewed everyone, who is the number one?

Cameron Crowe: Joni Mitchell, 1979. Hadn’t done an interview for 10 years. Had put out the Mingus album, and felt like she needed to explain herself a little bit, and there was a backlog of stuff that she wanted to correct in the record and discuss, but nobody had gotten her to talk about all the stuff. I mean, she’s just a brilliant conversationalist, and it was jaw dropping for me to just say something like, “Let’s talk about Blue.” She tells you, and she says what it was, you know, and where it came from, and I don’t know, she’s just still the best. And Townshend, every time I got to interview Townshend, that was great. But I think it’s Joni. What about you?

Baltin: My number one is Alanis. And as you know, Tom is working on Jagged Little Pill as well. So we were talking about the spirit of collaboration and new challenge. I imagine this has been a blast coming into a new world.

Crowe: A blast. And to be with Kitt, as you so rightfully noticed, he is the man and had all the same references. But also the skills of how to do this and what the kind of rules are, just in case you want to break them, you need to know what the rules are. He’s that guy. And the first time I met him, he’s like, “I will write 500 songs to get to the 20 that we use.” I love that. And he was true to his word. He didn’t write 500 songs, but a lot of them, there’s a lot of outtakes to this. And he was pretty selfless about saying, “Yeah, let’s do something else.” Or, “Let that be a speech that’s an actual scene and not a song. Yeah, cool.” But what’s funny was the actors never forgot the outtake songs. So the other night they were just hanging around like jamming on something with guitars and they started singing all the outtake songs, the songs that we had moved on from or changed or whatever. So we’re standing around going, “Holy s**t, these songs sound really good. What did we do?” I guess one day record all of them. So maybe we’ll have like a B-Sides album or something. But he’s amazing. We’re one of eight things that he’s actually doing at once, but he gives himself totally to all of them. I did get him to talk about Alanis a couple of times and he loves her and he loved that experience of doing that. And he bonds with these people in a heavy way when he does their stories or their song cycles and he brings what he does to it. I just love that we were able to like give him full Kitt reign on a bunch of new songs. It was really fun to watch him go.

Baltin: What were the first responses to the show?

Crowe: I wasn’t sure it was all going to shake out. When people started coming in to see it, it was terrifying. And this is Jeremy really. Because he knew live theater so well, you can’t overshoot and overwrite and then cut it down in an editing room. You can’t do it. It’s got to be present and live and already slimmed down. So he was brilliant for that. And then Kitt just comes in and sits at the piano and says. “I read that memo you sent me about what a band aid really is.” And so I thought about this. [laughter] Or I told him, my mom, when I was a kid with my sister, we were trying to sneak rock into the house. My mom saw Simon & Garfunkel do “Mrs. Robinson” on like a Smothers Brothers comedy special or something. And, in some ways she was a hip mom. But she was like, this is a code for drugs and sex. Like, ‘Coo coo ca choo’ that’s like a code. They’re trying to stick a hand in your pocket and take your money by selling you drugs and sex. This does not elevate humanity. And so I wrote this all out for Tom in an email, like my memories of my mom and stuff. You know, and then he comes back with this song ‘Rockstars Kidnapped My Son,’ where he includes that and the feeling of it. And then, you know, we can change a word or two or a line here or there. But essentially, Tom is like a truth and soul machine that you feed the facts into. And he comes out with one of these songs. And I’ve always loved having a kind of shoulder to shoulder experience with the people that I work with. I’m really collaborative that way. So to find two dudes, or three, that we all clicked together. It was hard, but really in the end, it was unvarnished fun. And they’re just big music geeks like us. It’s all about the same thing, it’s about loving music and the spirit of family. It still feels like a miracle, even though we had this great team, it still feels like a miracle that the play gives the hardcore fans of the movie an experience that doesn’t feel exploited, knocking on wood here. If you put love into it, something’s gonna feel good about that eventually, because it’s coming from the right place. And it’s the same thing with the play, because we knew pretty early on that we’re gonna come to the Old Globe Theatre with it, which was like a mile away from where I first met Lester Bangs and from where I lived across the street from the Old Globe. So it all felt like less of we’re going to adapt a movie for Broadway. It felt more like, “Okay, we’re going to take this into another format. Let’s do it with a lot of truth and just like the odd ironic fact that all of this happened in the same neighborhood as the play where we’re gonna show it.” So I don’t know, it just, it feels like it all happened for the right reason. And to see people picking up on that just is really kind of, I don’t know, I feel really grateful.

Baltin What matters to you from childhood when you were 30 is different than what you appreciate when you’re 50. So going back and working on this play did you find that the things that were important or that really stuck out surprise you at all? Were there new things that 20 years ago wouldn’t have been as important but now were more so?

Crowe: Wow, just a stunning question. I felt that a couple of times. Like I just had this feeling that “Simple Man,” the Lynyrd Skynyrd song, which is basically just something that plays in the background of the movie, really needed to be in the play. And I’ll be honest with you, a lot of people on the stage as we were doing it were like, “This song doesn’t really belong. It does not have the vibe of this section.” But I had this feelings like Ronnie Van Zant was so supportive to me as a super young, kind of insecure guy. He really gave me a sense of a big brother. Even though all of that stuff that Lester said is true, don’t make friends with the rock stars. But I was having such trouble on this Allman Brothers story. And Ronnie Van Zant was like, “Hey, man, let me help you. Let me talk to you about why Gregg Allman is fantastic.” And just like, “You’re a young guy. And I love music just like you love music. And here’s my background.” And I just kind of bonded with this guy who really helped me for no personal reason, he was just on tours that I was writing about the other bands on. I felt that his voice really needed to be there in this play. And what’s funny was the scenes around it morphed a little bit. And just at the point that I was feeling like I needed to cut “Simple Man,” we watched it and it was like Ronnie’s voice so strongly, the way I first heard it, was present in the play. And I just had this feeling of like that needs to be here to be truthful about what that original experience was. The sense of community and loving music and the people you meet along the way that don’t necessarily have an agenda, but they’re there for you. He belongs there. And that to me was really satisfying. And just sometimes the voices of that were really strong on this. But the biggest sense of it, I think, was feeling the strength of the mother character and the longing for the world to treat her kid properly was there in the movie and maybe even stronger in the play. And that made it fresh for me because I have raised two boys now, boys that didn’t exist when we made the movie. But mostly, I just love the characters and the people that still feel really vivid to me from the day and like kind of paying tribute to the sense of community that happened back then. It’s still pretty strong in my head. So I’m glad to kind of see them in the hands of these actors, and the cast, it’s really cool. They’re really good. And they’re so different from the movie, but yeah, I could go on and on and I won’t. [laughter]

Baltin: How did you approach making this version different from the film?

Crowe: Person for person, and element for element, you could get very intimidated by a movie that actually bombed in the theaters. It’s Almost Famous that kind of came to mean something to these people. It’s really all I hear about. I don’t hear about Jerry Maguire that much anymore at all. It’s Almost Famous that people, if they know my stuff at all, they want to talk about. And I’m with them. But you know, pound for pound, you’re not gonna match up with that version of the story. But what you can attempt to recall, it’s the feeling. And the idea that you could drop into this world and feel the way it felt, the way it feels to discover music and love it, and want to hold it close and wrap your arms around it, because you feel like at this moment in time, only you are hearing this song in exactly this way. And it means something to you, and you own it, and it belongs to you. And if you can get that feeling in a theater, I kind of felt that when I went to the adaptation of Once. And I kept thinking, like, if there’s a way to get across that feeling, then we’ve done something. It’s like playing a record for a friend. You want to share that feeling. And so if the play could get to that stage where you want to share that feeling, then I think we’re okay.

Baltin: What to you is the most perfect song ever written?

Crowe: At this point, I would say “Slit Skirts,” Pete Townshend.

Baltin: To me, it’s Tom Waits, “Take It With Me.” That is a song that is never going to be a commercial hit, but people hear it, and it makes them cry. So how gratifying has it been to you to do something as personal as Almost Famous, to know that you put so much of you in this, and now 20 years later, there’s enough interest you can do a play?

Crowe: Yeah, if you try and write a song that’ll make people cry, I doubt that you’ll ever get there. It’s kind of like the personal is sometimes the universal. Or at least, it’s something that you can’t question, because it’s true to you. So you either not put it out there, or put it out there, ’cause it’s so raw. And generally, it’ll either really not work, or it’ll really work. And it is that personal stuff. It is the achy stuff. And the whole thing or the original thing of Almost Famous the movie was, we had a credit line of one, ’cause of Jerry Maguire. And I just knew that I’d never get another chance to make this movie. There’s no way anybody would ever make a movie about loving rock, and being a rock journalist in my family. No way will that get made, if I wait another minute. And nobody’s potentially ever gonna come see it, but I gotta do it, ’cause Lester Bangs, I’ve never forgotten him, and I want to write about him and stuff. It is in the end, not somebody yelling “show me the money,” but it’s somebody aching, because their story got denied by the band that they come to trust as friends, and what the f**k do you do now? You’re stuck in an airport, and you run into your sister, and that all happened to me, and I just felt the world was lost. And out of that came a desire to tell that story, and that’s what people remember now. It’s wild to me. My sister saw it the other night for the first time, and she was really moved, and that was really satisfying. I said, “Do you ever wanna agree to apologize to your mom at the end of the play?” And she’s like, “Never” [laughter]. So it’s true to her, I’m good with that.

Baltin: Talk about how you approach doing the music for this show when you are dealing with Cameron, who’s literally been around every great artist that ever lived.

Tom Kitt: I have the same exact experience of geeking out and Cameron is someone who I’ve told many times has been instrumental. Certainly is someone who just has always been so moved by his work and has spoken to me personally but also as an artist, the kind of sensibility that has washed over me from his work. I’ve always just wanted to speak to the human experience the way that he does so honestly and poetically. And then you take the music knowledge and put that on top of it and his virtuosity in terms of how he speaks through music and his work. I just had to keep pinching myself that I was actually interacting with him and working with him. And I knew that I was going to learn a lot from him and that’s exactly the case every time he spoke. Then I also felt like because of my experience in the world of musicals and also, I have a great love and I would say it’s probably one of my favorite and most inspiring periods is the 1970s and the music that came out of that time and was at the center of this element, of this experience, I really wanted to for myself dig into my influences and what I love about that period and try to bring an original voice to that period for today. And obviously, having Cameron and his knowledge and passion by your side, you felt like your impulses were always gonna have a really good chance of being true and authentic.

Baltin: Almost Famous, obviously is an Oscar-winning film, there’s a story that exists to it. So talk about how you were able to sort of merge your musical influences with the existing vision.

Kitt: Absolutely right. And we had a real prolific early period. A good chunk of the new songs were written in our very first work sessions. And what was great was that I was definitely channeling the period but the songs felt up and now. And to be able to put Cameron’s thoughts and his ideas and the characters into the songs, we would just discover those moments together and always kind of geek out when we felt like we got something we were both excited about. I think the key was to say, I’m not trying to write something that feels like it’s looking back. I’m trying to write something that feels very much in the present and for these characters now but wants to use the colors and the sensibility of the period that we’re evoking. So it definitely was something where I wanted to bring a contemporary sensibility that this story and these songs are gonna speak to audiences today, which judging from sitting in the audience I feel like it is.