A couple of my friends were over here watching a football game a couple days ago. While the game was on I typed a press release for my company’s website, real creative stuff. After completing that, I churned out the first draft of my resignation letter for the aforementioned job. Then I typed some drivel for this very website. Then I threw my copy of The Notebook into my bag and readied myself for the second half of the Lions game. As we channel surfed we found Almost Famous playing, and were immediately hooked. We had to watch the rest of the movie (hard to believe, but the Lions game was not that entertaining).
As I tossed my legal pad on the floor so I could watch the movie Phil asked me why I write so much. I wanted to tell him that with a lot of practice, refinement, and lots of luck that this weak skill may improve over time. I wanted to tell him that when I write a sentence that wastes zero words the feeling of satisfaction is unparalleled. I wanted to tell him that forcing emotions out of another human being through words alone feels good, feels cosmic. But alas, I could say none of these things because my friends are morons. So I got my point across with an anecdote from my childhood. When I was a kid my friends and I would play from 9 in the morning until 9 or 10 at night. During the summer we would have the greatest adventures and exceed the fun quotient by leaps and bounds. We had a group of 7 kids in our regular clique, but once you included other neighborhoods we would have 20 or 30 kids playing tag or football. My friend Zach Long hated leaving the fun so much that he would forgo using the bathroom just so he could continue playing.
On occasion he would crap his pants just to keep playing. We knew that he shit himself because he smelled like Dane Cook’s standup act and because his mom would whip him in front of the neighborhood every time he did it. But you have to commend someone that loved something so much he would defecate all over himself just to continue doing it. This is how I feel about writing; I love writing so much that I would shit myself just to keep writing.
My love for writing fed my need to watch Almost Famous over a football game. I was in high school when the movie came out and I saw myself in William Miller. I was the kid clutching a pencil and a pad writing stories about Third Eye Blind and my undying love of Amy Allen. I sent in pieces to local newspapers and dreamed of becoming A Writer. My room was like William’s. My awkwardness, my inexperience with women, and my immature frame were all William Miller-esque. This movie hammered home Holden Caulfield’s message that “alienation is just a phase.” Miller was my generation’s Huck Finn – except the Mississippi was traded in for Stillwater’s tour bus.
This movie has everything a great movie needs. It has amazing performances. It is beautifully cast and shot. And it is about rock and roll. It captured the transition of rock music from “Art with a chance of revenue” into “Revenue with a chance of art.” It has transcendent performances by Crudup and Hudson. It has ancillary characters that come out of the screen and tattoo your memory with performances and lines that are impossible to forget. The arc of each character is deep, emotional, impactful, and developed so thoughtfully that even Dickens would blush. The movie didn’t waste a scene, a word, or a performance. Everything was necessary and profound. It is a coming of age story in the rock and roll world of 1974. Rock was losing its innocence and so was William Miller.
And more important than all of that, it was a movie about a writer that was written beautifully. Crowe’s gift for witty and heartfelt dialogue continued unabated. If Almost Famous were a novel it would be required reading for every high school student in the country. There are so many perfectly written lines in the movie that I grow angry and jealous each time I watch it.
What do I love about this movie? (Smiles.) Everything.
I forgot how much I loved the movie until I watched it again. I love it because its…
A rock and roll movie.
A movie about a writer.
Portrays how insidious the world’s lows can be and how glorious its peaks are.
Almost Famous is almost perfect.
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“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” –Crowe via Hoffman as Bangs