All Good People: What Almost Famous can teach us about how we frame our stories
Almost Famous: The Musical is now rocking the plank (with passion) at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. I used the occasion to write an appreciation of the Untitled “bootleg cut” of Almost Famous — my favorite film of all time — on the movie reviewing app Letterboxd. Here’s the piece in full:
This weekend, the first preview performances of Almost Famous: The Musical are taking place at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, California — birthplace of Almost Famous, the film (my favorite of all time), and of Cameron Crowe’s real-life teenage rock journalist dreams that inspired it.
It was, of course, a moment I knew I had to commemorate by rewatching the “Untitled” Bootleg Cut of the film. And, to be clear, Untitled is really my favorite movie of all time. Almost Famous, the theatrical version, is great, but I do often wonder if some of the people who are critical of it would have a better view of the film if they could get a hold of a copy of the out of print Bootleg Cut dvd and see the longer version. (For the record — I literally hand this dvd out to friends when we become close; I still have like ten extra copies lying around, so, I mean, if that’s not incentive to friend me up then what is??)
I watched Untitled with the commentary track, even though I’ve heard it many times before. It features Cameron with his mother, the great Alice Crowe — real life inspiration for Frances McDormand’s character. It’s hilarious and deeply moving to hear them reminisce together about Cameron’s journey deep into the rock and roll circus. His observations and stories and poignant memories — including those hinted at but left out — make the commentary every bit as cinematic as the film itself.
Anyway.
I’ve never really written a longread review of Untitled/Almost Famous. It would be difficult for me to get through. I’d be putting so much pressure on myself to really nail it. But, for the sake of a compromise between my scant remaining sanity and the dangling incentive to get you to either watch or re-evaluate this favorite film of mine, here’s just a small piece of reflection on the film. Just some thoughts on one of its many themes and windows.
I was talking to my mom recently about Woodstock, around the time of the 50th anniversary. At some point in the conversation, the idea came up that the 60s as an era didn’t necessarily end right on December 31st, 1969. They really stretched on a few more years, until right around the time during which Almost Famous is quite purposefully set — 1973. Watergate. The final gasp of Vietnam. And, in Cameron Crowe’s rock and roll world of the time, the very beginning of the corporate stadium rock ethos that would swallow the humbler, shabbier beginnings of the 50s-60s music landscape. As Lester Bangs says in the film, of 1973, it’s “the death rattle…the last gasp…last grope.”
Applying the same thought process that the 60s really didn’t end until around 1973, you could also argue that everything bad and wrong about the 80s began around that same time. It was both the death of flower power and the slow, creeping birth of Reagan rot. The 70s, as a decade, could then be seen as a sort of transitional nothing time, devoid of strong personality. I guess there have been at least one, maybe two, decades since that deserve the same suggestion.
Point is…I’ve always felt that this film is, among so many other things, a powerful course-correction of an often-disingenuous suggestion about both the 20th century’s evolution and about so many human journeys in a larger sense. There is so often this idea of a journey from “innocence” to “experience.” Or, sometimes, it’s not experience that becomes the destination, but instead some whinier connotation of something being not as good as before…where the important point to make is that innocence was the good thing, and it was lost.
And when you look around at the prevailing conservative (read: racist, misogynist, homophobic) attitudes in the American landscape today — which are all acting out from a regressive impulse to take things back to “the good old days” — it’s a perfect example of just how tastelessly tone-deaf and privileged the whole “innocence to experience” story frame has always been. There’s almost no realm of human history that doesn’t get far worse, for far more people, the farther back you look…so to ever suggest that something was better before is, usually, going to mean overlooking just how bad things were before for so many.
The story of William Miller that we follow in Almost Famous is not a story that looks back with rose-colored glasses. That’s not how the film looks back at the late 60s, when a pre-pubescent William finds out that he’s been lied to by his own mother about how old (how young) he is. And that’s not how it looks back at 1973, when 18 year old (actually 17 year old) ((ok, 16)) (((actually, truth is, he’s 15))) William makes his plea to join the circus with Penny Lane and Stillwater, only to watch through Patrick Fugit’s ponderous, sorrowful eyes that there is as much terror as there is wonder to behold here in The Land Where Nobody Remembers Laughter.
See, he doesn’t remember laughter either. Not because he’s “lost” something important — he’s, thankfully, not another whiny innocence-mourner — but because what was there to laugh about in his younger world of the iron matriarchal fist, where Simon & Garfunkel was not allowed to be poetry and even one’s own age could not be trusted?
William, age 15, comes from a past he doesn’t look back on fondly (and oh, how I relate to this) and enthusiastically begs to bear witness to a seemingly enthralling present (and oh, how I relate to THIS) where rock’s supposedly glorious dumbness has been sabotaged by delusions of artistic grandeur, yet another disingenuous innocence-to-experience framing that his journalistic eye seems to intuitively see through. He observes a rock world where women have always been degraded and commodified and traded for cases of beer, where the masculinity has always been consistently toxic, where emotion has always been numbed out by novocaine everywhere except on the stage, where the best art has always been made by the biggest assholes.
All that’s really changing here, as far as he can see, is that a creeping corporate monopolized future threatens to make it all a little more expensive. A little more wasteful. A little more boring.
But it’s not — it’s never been — a journey from innocence to experience. If anything, it’s more like a journey from evil by accident to evil on purpose. THAT’s the journey from rock and roll of the 50s and 60s to rock and roll of the 70s and 80s. And, when you think about it, that’s SO MUCH of human history, in both the macro of whole eras and cultures and the micro of our individual lives. (Really, only evils as deeply pervasive as racism are exceptions to this — racists have always been evil on purpose.)
Again, I guess I can’t really fault a sect of movie lovers who haven’t taken away this idea from the theatrical version of Almost Famous, when there’s just not as much meat on the bones as there is on the Untitled version. But I’ve always been disappointed when I see the cynical take from someone that the film, and Cameron’s filmography in general, has some sort of cringe sentimentality to it. “The Tiny Dancer scene, eyeroll!” “‘You are home,’ eyeroll!”
Consider that early in this film, you’ve got Lester Bangs — the cinematic stand-in for the real Crowe mentor who was infamously critical of all that rang phony or cheesy or false in the rock world — holding up a Yes record in a radio station and saying, “Yes? No.” And then, a few scenes later, William is officially welcomed into the backstage access world of the rock and roll circus to the strains of “I’ve Seen All Good People,” a song from the very band Lester Bangs was just criticizing. This is no accident! This is the world of an intentional filmmaker, who is far more aware of what’s hip and what’s not than he’s ever given credit for. And he’s using that line in the sand between Cool and Uncool not just in the more obvious device of uniting the smarter journalists against their vapid rock star counterparts. He’s also using that line as a way of nudging you, at the very moment William joins the circus, and whispering in your ear, “All is not well here…”
It kind of reminds me of a lyric from a song that appears late in the film (and this is a good note to end on). It’s the scene where the band and William are walking a long airport corridor, just after their brush with near-death in the air. The scene is cued to an obscure live acoustic rendition of Cortez The Killer by Neil Young. No words are heard in the scene, but Neil’s harmonica has never sounded sadder — it conjures the perfect hung over bummer vibe that Crowe has spent the film hinting at as part of his grand 1973 Turning Point thesis.
Even though no lyrics are heard in the scene, knowing them really helps to draw out the mood. Cortez The Killer is one of Neil’s most mystifying, cosmically vague songs, and I’d only embarrass myself if I tried to fully dissect it. But I think about that scene in the film, and these particular lyrics come to mind:
Hate was just a legend
And war was never known
The people worked together
And they lifted many stones
In a song speaking of the title character’s empire (if Neil was going for historical accuracy, he’s really talking about Montezuma’s empire, but the song’s shifting tense and fever dream perspective are so elusive that I’m choosing to interpret those lyrics as referring to Cortez) the notion of “war [never being] known” in the land of someone named Cortez The Killer is laughable, in the best half-looking down, half-winking Neil Young sort of way. Clearly, a lot of people had to die by Cortez The Killer’s hand before hate could be just a legend in his supposedly utopian land. It’s like Trent Reznor’s “empire of dirt” — a spit-shined, bullshit legacy, worth maybe nothing at all.
That’s a perfect thing to suggest about Stillwater the band — who are really stand-ins for the meat and potatoes, heartland-pleasing, soon-to-be-corporate-stadium-filling rock and roll world at large circa 1973 — at this moment in the film, just after William has used what could be his last uttered words on this mortal coil (if the seemingly crashing plane should actually wipe out on them all) to berate the band with his up-to-now withheld critical judgment of their wavering spirit and intentions. They’ve always gone on, he says, about “the fans, the fans, the fans…” But she was their biggest fan, and they threw her away!
The band was never innocent — they just began to notice their own evil. And even William — the boy who was younger than he knew — was never innocent, even though he had now become experienced. He had just finally had enough of withholding his own judgments on all the hypocrisies and lies he always saw.
We all wake up at some point. And that one moment, whenever it comes…well, I happen to think very sincerely that it’s the only moment in peoples’ lives when they ever really change. Just that one time, in the poorly-framed, spit-shined journey from “innocence” to “experience.” You used to be evil by accident, and then you woke up. And you changed, either by deciding to be evil on purpose, or by deciding to speak.
