‘Almost Famous’: Romancing the Stone
The year was 1973, and I’d just walked through the San Francisco offices of Rolling Stone magazine for the first time. Before this I had been a voice on the telephone, a freelance journalist dealing with music editor Ben Fong-Torres. Now Fong-Torres was taking me to the office of the magazine’s founder and publisher, Jann Wenner. (The hand that shook John Lennon’s hand, I remember thinking, is now shaking my hand.) Annie Leibovitz’s original photos lined the walls. All around me were the real-life versions of names I studied in the magazine’s hallowed pages. I was sixteen, with an orange bag strapped to my shoulder, and I felt every eye in the place on me. It felt like a scene from a movie. Twenty-seven years later, it was.
Standing on the Los Angeles set of Almost Famous, in a room outfitted to look exactly like the old Rolling Stone offices of ’73, I quietly took in a big whiff of my past. Standing nearby was a sixteen-year-old unknown actor from Utah named Patrick Fugit. My orange bag was strapped across his shoulder. I watched him walk the hall-way, every eye on him, moving into an office where he would meet actor Eion Bailey, as Jann Wenner. We were halfway through filming, and it was just one of the daily time-trippingly emotional moments that came with making a movie based partially –— OK, totally — on my life. Personal movies, just like personally based records, have always been my favorites. Albums like Joni Mitchell’s Blue or movies like Francois Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows and Barry Levinson’s Diner are timeless. They make it look easy. But the hardest part –– and I say this with a note of caution to any future inward-looking directors –– is casting yourself.
It is January of 1999, and it’s there in the little ways people are looking at me. The gentle manner with which friends and loved ones place a lingering hand on my shoulder and ask, “How you doing?” It’s there in the extra looks of concern all around me.
They think I’m going crazy.
How I’d gotten to this point, I wasn’t sure. After the surprise success of Jerry Maguire, I’d had a couple decent script ideas. One was an homage to my favorite TV show, Hawaii Five-O. I’d been writing a psychedelic Jane’s Addiction-filled thriller set on Kauai. It sounded good in my head. On paper . . . hmmmmmm. I hit a rough stretch and went flying back into the arms of an idea I’d been returning to for years. It was a warm blanket of a script. I’d been circling it for a long time. It was an autobiographical movie set in 1973, featuring the music I’d loved and a host of vivid characters I’d met as a fifteen-year-old journalist. The problem had always been the character at the center of the script. The one based on me. Again and again, I’d left the “me” character to fill in later. I even gave him a colorless name that screamed, Better name to come –– William Miller. I mean, come on. I can barely listen to my own voice on the answering machine.
Then, in a burst of creativity, it started to fall together. The key had been to get more personal with it, rather than less. I began to write about my own family in fairly raw terms. How my schoolteacher mother had banned rock from our house, how my sister had heroically smuggled it in and how rock changed my life . . . and changed our family. Before I knew it, I had an untitled, 172-page script. I showed it to Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, the heads of production at DreamWorks films, who liked it immediately and in turn showed it to Steven Spielberg. Half expecting them all to consider it more a novel than a film, I had returned to the warm creative waters of the Hawaiian thriller. I was visiting Walter and Laurie one evening when Walter handed me the phone. “It’s Steven,” he said.
“I read your script,” said Steven Spielberg. “Shoot every word.”
And so began the journey of actually making Almost Famous. I began casting each part meticulously, seeing tens upon tens of helpful actors and working on every tiny character in the script . . . except the one based on me. Gail Levin, our peerless and soon-to-be-sleepless casting director, had put feelers out all across America and England. I delayed diving into the videotapes that were starting to flood our office. “I’ll get into it next week,” I’d say, every week. Somehow, next month always seemed like the best month to begin meeting . . . me.
The months clicked by as I carefully cast parts like New York Bellman, Fan #1, Long-Haired Guy in the Lobby and other seemingly crucial parts. Increasingly, Gail would slip in a young actor to play William Miller. The process was always otherworldly. A young, pale, long-faced actor would shuffle in and face me, the older, pale, long-faced version of himself, and we would look at each other, making uncomfortable small talk.
“So, do you like music?” I’d ask, thinking, This is strange.
“Sure,” the actor would say, thinking, This is weird. We’d read the scenes for a bit, and then later I’d invariably tell Gail, “Let’s keep looking.”
“What are you looking for?” she’d ask.
“It’s not quite right,” I’d say. “Now — about the part of the Third Groupie . . .”
We were in New York for further casting when a call came in from Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald. We chatted cheerfully about how well everything was going with the smaller parts.
“Great,” said Walter. “But do you have the kid? Because the kid is in every scene.”
“I’m still looking.”
“We’re running out of time,” Walter implored. A cheap shrink could have figured this one out long before. Very elegantly, in the way only we can delude ourselves, I still believed it was a movie about rock, family, groupies, musicians and music . . . everything but the elephant in the room. “You gotta cast yourself,” said Parkes. “Because the kid is the movie.”
‘Almost Famous’: Romancing the Stone, Page 1 of 2