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Watching the witty, often breezy autobiographical work of director Francois Truffaut helped inspire Almost Famous, but Crowe found his film's muse nearly 30 years ago. At the same time that he was embarking on his journalism career, a striking young Portland, Ore., woman, standing 5 ft. 10 in. with waist-length red hair, moved to Los Angeles to be with a keyboard player for Steppenwolf. There she became enamored of musicians and their milieu, and when she returned to Portland, she continued hanging out with the bands that came through town. Adopting the name Pennie Lane and a vintage 1940s wardrobe of dresses, hats and gloves, she became one of the era's more notable groupies, playing den mother to a group of attractive acolytes known as "the Flying Garter Girls." "They had to be good students, and they couldn't get drunk, and they couldn't be heavily into drugs," says Lane, who asks that her real name not be divulged. "Of course, they could smoke pot."
Around 1973, Crowe and Lane met at a Portland concert. "I could always tell if someone had that star quality," says Lane, who retired from the groupie scene at age 21, received her M.B.A. and now owns a marketing firm in Portland. "He had it all over him, the aura. I said, 'You're gonna be huge! Huge!' He was so cute."
Crowe, who spells her name Penny in his screenplay, says he wrote the character as "a mythical creature"--part the real Lane and a couple of other groupies, part Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment and part Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. He intended to cast Sarah Polley, a restrained actress who has charmed critics in Go and The Sweet Hereafter, "but as we worked on the part, Penny became more obviously Shirley MacLaine," he says, "a kind of deluded comedian, an angel with a broken wing." Finally, Polley walked away during preproduction, and Hudson stepped in. "Sarah is like a Bob Dylan song, more '60s than '70s," says Crowe. "That's why it didn't work. Kate Hudson is Zeppelin."
Like a devoted son, Crowe had pursued Meryl Streep to play his mother. "I played all these Meryl Streep movies, and I played Neil Young to her silent shots, and I thought, How great!" he explains. Streep turned him down, making room for McDormand. Then, shortly before filming began last year, Brad Pitt--Crowe's choice to play Russell Hammond--opted out, and Crudup took over. "He was so lucky that the big stars he wanted for this movie ended up not doing it," says David Geffen, a partner in DreamWorks, which is releasing the film, and a friend of Crowe's since the '70s. "They would've unbalanced the movie."
Until now, Fugit, the 17-year-old actor from Salt Lake City, Utah, who snagged the role of Crowe's teen self, has been seen mostly in bit parts on television. "Usually I played a jerk," he says. "I did a made-for-TV movie--I was a jerk and got eaten by ants. On Touched by an Angel, I burned down a mentally-retarded kid's house."