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Like the Miller character, Crowe was introduced to rock by his rebellious big sister and grew up in San Diego (his father James, who died in 1989, sold real estate and ran answering services). Crowe skipped three grades, graduated from high school at 15 and became a journalist by sending writing samples to rock critic Lester Bangs (played in the movie by Philip Seymour Hoffman). Writing became both his vocation and his mode of rebellion against his mother Alice, a teacher who banned rock music in their home and refused to buy Crowe a bicycle because "they're too dangerous." ("If she'd bought me a bike, I'd probably have a different job now," says Crowe.)
Assignments for Bang's Creem magazine led to gigs at Rolling Stone, where Crowe felt more like a groupie than a critic. "I always remember that us-against-the-world thing," he says, recalling his days with the bands one afternoon in his office in Santa Monica, Calif., "the way it felt to sweep into a hotel lobby." Says Wenner: "He was such a fan. Artists gave him access because of that." Just as Miller pursues Stillwater's members for a cover story, Crowe wrangled Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin for the cover of Rolling Stone in 1975. But several rock heavyweights are reflected in Stillwater, a band that slides into discord (shades of the Allman Brothers, though no one in Stillwater dates Cher), takes a bumpy plane ride (like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Who) and performs a song called Fever Dog, written by Crowe and his wife, Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson, with a nod to Zeppelin's Black Dog. "There's also a lot of the Eagles in there," says Crowe. "They craved the spotlight, saw it coming, got scared, ran from it, all that stuff."
Some dialogue comes directly from Crowe's old notebooks. "Just make us look cool," the Eagles' Glenn Frey once told him. In the film, Crudup delivers the same line to Miller. "If I'd been completely on top of it, I would've printed that then," says Crowe, "but it's almost better [in the movie]."
Although Crowe never earned a college degree, he did go to high school twice. At age 22, he went undercover, spending two semesters passing as a student to research his novel, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which he later adapted for the screen. Crowe has been educating himself as a filmmaker ever since, with James L. Brooks, the producer of both Say Anything...and Jerry Maguire, as a de facto professor. Not entirely happy with his direction of Singles in 1992, Crowe took a break and began studying the work of other filmmakers. Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, he says, taught him how to make his gonzo structure hold together. Like Brooks, Crowe resists traditional screenplay rules, instead laying out his scenes like chapters or tracks on an album.
His directing style can be equally unconventional. While his camera is rolling, Crowe often shouts out impromptu lines to his actors and plays music on the set to generate emotion, later deleting the extraneous noise from the sound track. (Joni Mitchell's River, for example, was a sure way to make Hudson cry during Almost Famous.) "He throws out a line, and you just go with it," says Cruise. "You find the character as you're going along."