We Bought a Zoo

The eclectic career of Cameron Crowe has encompassed a wide variety of occupations, including journalism, writing liner notes for albums and filmmaking. As a teenager, the California native began writing freelance pieces for such publications as Playboy and Creem. By age 16, Crowe was on the staff of Rolling Stone, profiling such artists as Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young and Kris Kristofferson. He made as “undercover” return to high school in 1979 to research a book on teen life. The result, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”, was optioned by Universal Studios before it hit the bookstores and Crowe was hired to write the screenplay adaptation. Amy Heckerling’s 1982 film version was an honest and entertaining evocation of suburban high school culture and remains vastly superior to the slew of similar teen films (including Crowe’s sophomore scripting effort 1984’s “The Wild Life”) that followed in its wake. “Fast Times” is also notable for its impressive cast, including Judge Reinhold, Ph be Cates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, Anthony Edwards and Eric Stoltz.

Crowe moved to the director’s chair with “Say Anything” (1989), a superior, insightful study of teen angst finely acted by John Cusack, Ione Skye and John Mahoney as a seemingly perfect father whose exposure as a crook shatters his daughter’s world. The equally engaging “Singles” (1992) saw Crowe shift his focus to a slightly older (twentysomething) age group embarking on the adult life in Seattle. Good performances, fine comic timing and a soundtrack featuring the music of Seattle’s popular rock scene, however, failed to translate into box-office success.

Crowe waited for four years before returning to the big screen, writing, directing and producing “Jerry Maguire” (1996), a mature examination of the fall and redemption of a flawed but essentially noble sports attorney. Partly inspired by the films of Billy Wilder, particularly 1960’s “The Apartment”, “Jerry Maguire” opened to excellent notices and a healthy box office. It also provided star Tom Cruise (as Jerry) with one of his best screen roles, tapping a depth and vulnerability rarely seen in the actor’s performances. The feature also provided star-making turns for Cuba Gooding Jr (as Jerry’s one loyal client) and Renee Zellweger (as the love interest), and introdued a pair of oft-quoted lines of dialogue: “You complete me,” and “You had me at hello.”

Crowe followed up with a dream project, “Almost Famous” (2000), which followed the adventures of a teenage rock journalist (Patrick Fugit) as he travels with an up-and-coming but also unraveling band and falls for the sweetly seductive groupie—or “band aid,” in her parlance—Penny Lane (Kate Hudson). Although fictionalized, the writer-director mined his own life to create a true-to-life portrait of the world of early 1970s music, infused with an affecting tale of self-discovery, first love and disillusionment. While critically acclaimed, “Almost Famous” proved to be somewhat disappointing in its box office but it brought the filmmaker a Best Original Screenplay Oscar and eventually garnered a widespread audience.

Crowe followed by reteaming with Cruise on the off-kilter, reality-questioning “Vanilla Sky” (2001), an Americanized version of the 1998 Spanish film “Open Your Eyes” that, despite a fine performance from Cruise, was a bit too oblique and overly symbolic to be embraced by a mainstream audience. Returning to more “Jerry Maguire”-esque territory, Crowe’s next original effort as writer-director was “Elizabethtown” (2005), another romantic, humanistic fable built largely, like “Almost Famous,” on Crowe’s personal experiences. Inspired by his encounter with a ribald clan of family members in Kentucky he never knew but encountered upon his father’s death, Crowe crafted a story around a hotshot young sh designer (Orlando Bloom) made suicidal by the “fiasco” of his failed multi-billion dollar effort, but finds himself re-examining his despair when, forced to go to Elizabethtown to claim his father’s body after an unexpected death, he is warmly received by his distant kin and encounters a beguiling, optimistic flight attendent (Kirsten Dunst) who gives him a new perspective on life. Though over-long and over-reliant on its otherwise impeccable music, “Elizabethtown” was a welcome return to the kind of emotion-fueled, character-driven story Crowe tells so well.

Though known for his sentiment, Crowe was a devoted admirer of the master cynic himself, director Billy Wilder, and after unsuccessfully attempting the veteran into taking a small role as Tom Cruise’s mentor in “Jerry Maguire,” Crowe struck up a warm but probing relationship with the wily, self-mythologicizing raconteur Wilder that as eventually translated itself into the insightful and often mesmerizing book Conversations With Wilder (2000). —TCM