Almost Famous (with Alan Sepinwall)

Unspooled

Film critics Amy Nicholson and Alan Sepinella revisit Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical masterpiece, Almost Famous. They explore the fil

Key takeaways

• Alan Sepinwall draws parallels between his time at Rolling Stone and the character William Miller.
• The hosts discuss the 'agony' of transcribing interviews as a foundational but grueling skill for journalists.

Main topics

• Almost Famous film analysis
• The ethics of film criticism

Notable quotes

Being a critic is like... being a witness to an orgy.

Conclusion

A nostalgic deep dive that celebrates the enduring power of passion-dr

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) The year is 2000. He Speaker 4 (0:03) looks harmless, but he does represent the magazine that trashed Layla, broke up Cream, ripped every album Led Zeppelin ever made. Don't forget the rules, man. This little shit is the enemy. He writes what he sees. Although it would be cool to be on the cover. Speaker 2 (0:21) The movie? Almost famous. Speaker 2 (0:33) and welcome to Unspooled. This is a podcast about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-sees, and in case you missed them, we have covered the AFI Top 100, and now we are checking out movies from three major lists. The Letterboxd Top 250 Films with the Most Fans, the IMDb Top 250, and the New York Times 1000 Essential Films. And we'll be chasing our own curiosity, and we'll be roping in people that we really like right now, because we're on a stretch where Paul's away and I have all control. And I'm so excited to bring in some of my buddies just to hang out with. Anyways, hello. Hi, I'm Amy Nicholson. I'm a film critic for Los Angeles Times. I have written a couple pieces in the past for Rolling Stone, but I am very deeply honored to share the mic today with somebody who's written millions. I'm just going to say millions. Print the legend. It has gone on to be, I would say, can I, I'm also going to say this, print the legend, the most prolific TV critic in America. Great newsletter. What's Ellen watching? A great podcast. TV is good. Hi, Alan Zappowal. Speaker 1 (1:31) Amy, thanks for having me. Speaker 2 (1:32) Well, welcome. Tell me why you have picked the film that we've picked. Can you tell me in like a sentence or two, punchy, punch it up headline? Speaker 6 (1:39) Well, one, I used to work at Rolling Stone for about eight years, and this is the movie about Rolling Stone. And two, I've always loved the writing of Cameron Crowe, and this is just one of my happy place movies. Speaker 2 (1:52) When you become a writer at Rolling Stone, are you thinking, I'm in the footsteps of Cameron Crowe? Speaker 1 (1:57) I mean... I was the TV guy at the music magazine. So in that way, I was the most uncool Speaker 6 (2:05) of uncool because I would be in staff meetings when I worked there. And it's like, they're just hurling around names. And I'm like, I recognized a third of those because they're just talking about bands and artists and other things. And I could usually figure it out from context clues. But it was very much like I loved being there and I loved all the people there. But I definitely felt a lot like William Miller a lot of the time while I was there. Speaker 2 (2:28) That makes sense. I mean, Karen Wood said something I thought that was really interesting about going from being a journalist to being a film writer, which she said. doing interviews, kind of the bane of my existence, doing interviews, taping interviews, transcribing interviews, specifically the transcribing of interviews. That's what taught him how to do good dialogue. Speaker 1 (2:48) Oh, it's agony. It is so much agony. I just finished Speaker 6 (2:52) writing, it's coming out in Speaker 1 (2:53) the Speaker 6 (2:53) fall, a book about the life of Rod Serling and the creator of The Twilight Zone. And a lot of it is me going through archival stuff because he died over 50 years ago. But I did a lot of current interviews and then me going through these interviews with like, big creative people like Guillermo del Toro and J.J. Abrams. And I'm like, and I'm just looking at the transcript and the word for word and it's agony to see like the contorted ways in which I ask these questions. And I've been doing this a long time and I'd like to think I've gotten better at some things, but that less so. Speaker 2 (3:25) Yeah, there's an art to asking a question that I haven't learned. where it's, you just ask a short one. Like one of my beloved mentors is Chris Connolly, the journalist. And he once told me that his, and he used to write for Rolling Stone, that he just likes to say, and then what happened? Like, that's his favorite thing. You just keep saying, and then what happened? Speaker 6 (3:45) Yeah, no, I ask like questions with like three em dashes and a bunch of sub clauses. And like, and I can often see on the face of the people I'm talking to, like them just trying to follow the train of thought. Speaker 1 (3:57) anticipate where the question is going and sometimes they can see it coming and sometimes like huh okay Speaker 2 (4:07) Right? Or the question where you give them all the information to the answer in the question to prove that you're smart. Speaker 1 (4:12) Yes. And then they say, yeah. And you can't really do anything with that. Speaker 3 (4:17) It's a curse. But watching things is a delight. Should we just jump into this? You ready? Speaker 6 (4:23) I could talk about this movie for like 17 hours. Speaker 3 (4:26) Okay. Well, let's try to do it in an hour. Okay. Speaker 1 (4:29) I can do that. Speaker 2 (4:35) So context. The year is 2000 and Cameron Crowe needs a push from his muses. Cameron's wife and his mother, they have spent ages giving him the moral support to finish his most personal screenplay. It's about being a 15-year-old Rolling Stone journalist on tour with a rock group in the 1970s and making a fair amount of mistakes. Now Cameron Crowe is 43 and the pressure is on to follow up Jerry Maguire with something great. We did a recent episode on Jerry Maguire. Loved. Huge hit. Oscar nominations. But he hasn't made a movie since that really super subversive Tom Cruise rom-com became such a sensation in 1996. So he's thinking about this one, but writing this movie has taken a lot out of him and it's taken a lot out of the woman in his life. Nancy Wilson, Cameron's wife at the time, says that helping him write the script was like, quote, being in a support group with no paycheck. Which is why I would like to think there's so much heart in the film's breakout character, Penny Lane. She's the girl who travels with this fictional band Stillwater, not, she insists, as a groupie. but as a support system and a muse to turn this mid-level band into a major success. Speaker 7 (5:38) You're not a what? Speaker 2 (5:40) Not a... Speaker 7 (5:43) Groupie. Oh, groupie? We are not groupies. This is Penny Lane, man. Show some respect. Groupies sleep with rock stars because they want to be near someone famous. We're here because of the music. We are band-aids. She used to run a school for band-aids. We don't have intercourse with these guys. We inspire the music. We're here because of the music. You know, she was the one who changed everything. She was the one who said, no more sex. No more exploiting our bodies and our hearts. Speaker 2 (6:14) Right, right. Speaker 7 (6:15) Just blowjobs and that's it. Speaker 2 (6:17) Teenage actor Patrick Fugit plays William, Cameron's thinly fictionalized alter ego, Francis McDormand and Zooey Deschanel play his mother and sister, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays his mentor, rock critic Lester Bangs, Kate Hudson was supposed to play the sister, but she gets promoted up when the original Penny Lane, Sarah Pauly, drops out, and her other band-aids are Frusa Balk and Anna Paquin. Jason Lee is the singer of Stillwater, and Brad Pitt says he wants to play the guitarist Russell who thinks that he's too good for the band, too good to stay committed to one woman. But six weeks before Almost Famous starts filming, Brad Pitt also quits, and Billy Crudup jumps in. That is lots of major changes for a film that was still even struggling to pick a name. You know, Cameron tried a bunch of titles for this. My Back Pages, Stillwater, The Uncool, Something Real. Just months before the movie opens, Annie Leibovitz does a photo spread of the entire cast for Vanity Fair in costume, and the movie is just called Untitled. Madness to me. But as this was Cameron's passion project, and because Jerry Maguire made $273 million, Columbia gave him a lot of time and money to make the period details perfect. He shot for 92 days at a cost of $58 million, including $3.5 million just in music rights. When Almost Famous opens on September 15th, it makes only $47 million. It does, however, win two Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture, Musical, or Comedy, Best Supporting Actress for Kate Hudson. It gets four Oscar noms, two of which pit Hudson and McDormand against each other for Supporting Actress. They both lose, and it wins one, Best Screenplay. So good for Cameron, good for his muses. And then Cameron Crowe rushes into making Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise, which actually is a hit, but today it is Almost Famous. That is the movie that people hold up as a classic. It is number 103 on the Letterboxd's top 250 films with the most fans. Almost everyone is a fan of Almost Famous. Almost. Here is Cameron reading one of his Letterboxd reviews. Speaker 4 (8:10) Matt Lynch, a man of three stars, says, For all the talk about how desperately uncool this kid is, this movie still seems like the ultimate humblebrag. Well, Matt, you know, if you can reach one person. You've reached one person, but you can't reach everybody. I still feel very uncool and probably why I called the book uncool. I don't know. Matt steps forward and I will call him cool for expressing his opinion with the passion of a three-star rating. Thank you, Matt. And I'm pretty cool for liking you for it, right? Just kidding. I do like you, though. Speaker 2 (8:44) You know, part of why I wanted to get into the whole box office mid-level flop of this. is because when Almost Famous comes out, one of the big conversations is, do critics matter? Because critics loved this movie. They loved this movie, and they couldn't get anybody to watch it in the scale that they were wanting to. It almost became this film about journalism that turns into this navel-gazing moment about journalism. Speaker 6 (9:06) Yeah, I mean, I've been doing this 30 years now. I hit my 30th anniversary of being a professional TV critic last month. Yes, I'm old. And I remember the very first... that I was doing this summer in 96. There was a show on CBS called Easy Streets with Ken Olin and Joe Pantoliano created by Paul Haggis, who later on to create everyone's favorite best picture, Winter Crash. And I watched the show and I just, I loved it. I adored it. It was kind of Sopranos before Sopranos in a lot of ways. And I wrote rave review after rave review of it. And it was canceled Speaker 1 (9:40) after like five weeks. And like, Didn't people read my beautiful words about this show? And so on the one hand, like heartbreak sucks. On the other hand, getting your first heartbreak that early kind of conditions you for this idea Speaker 6 (9:54) of maybe what I have to say is not going to sway the hearts and minds as much as I might want. So all I can do is basically write about what I love and see what happens from there. Speaker 2 (10:06) You know, that's true. I think people always accuse critics of killing movies, but I think what really hurts us, you know, trying to kill movies and failing. Like, you just want to kill Marvel or whatever. Never, never. No, never. We want to help movies survive, and when they don't, that's what kills us. Speaker 1 (10:20) Yeah, no, the worst is, like, if things I hate are hits, whatever. You know, if other people are happy, I'm happy for Speaker 6 (10:27) them, I guess. But if the things I love fail, that bums me out, you know, Speaker 1 (10:32) just for the selfish reason of I don't get to see more of that. but also because I think so many other people would like it. Speaker 2 (10:39) Exactly. I think we can pretend as journalists that we have some sort of say in steering a ship, like, get away from the Scylla, go over to Charybdis. You know, come over here, make more of this. By loving something so much. When it feels like that's not true, it really breaks my heart. Speaker 1 (10:56) Yes, and it's always kind of nice when the critical hit is also the popular hit. Speaker 6 (11:03) And, you know, Sopranos was one of those. That was a big one in my career. But I think overall, it's more coincidence. It's Speaker 1 (11:09) correlation. It's almost never causation. Speaker 2 (11:12) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Cameron Crowe has wondered when he looks back at his old pieces of the kind of stuff he was writing when he was doing, you know, when he when he was setting this movie, sometimes he wonders if he was too nice because that's like the big dilemma in here. Is young William. going to wind up writing a piece about Stillwater that's just, hey, they're great. Speaker 1 (11:34) Yeah, no, and Lester Bangs, I mean, Philip Seymour Hoffman, incredible in like three scenes in this movie, keeps Speaker 6 (11:39) telling him like, you need to be unmerciful and honest. You cannot make friends with these people. They just want you to like help market them more or less. And, you know, I listened to the audio book of Cameron's memoir last year, and it's really good. And like the he's not exactly William Miller. Some aspects of his story and his family are different. But you do get that same sense of like. He was able to get into all these places because he was nice, because he was so clearly a fan, albeit one who was very smart and could write as eloquently as he always has. But like that's the niceness and the open heartedness of it is what got him in. And it's what gets William in. And there's, you know, he would not have had this access otherwise. They still water doesn't even want to let him in the back door when he first shows up when Speaker 1 (12:27) they're opening for Alice Cooper. Speaker 2 (12:30) No, Black Sabbath. I think it's Black Sabbath. Speaker 1 (12:32) Yes, yes. Speaker 2 (12:34) No, it's true. The niceness is rough. Like, I have found myself as a critic becoming aloof at social events because I don't want to make friends because that feels tough. You can't make friends with people in this world if you have to review them. It's hard when you do it a long Speaker 1 (12:48) time and you meet these people and you interact with them, you're going to become friendly with some of them. Literally, five minutes before I came on here, I was texting with, like, the producers of a show. with whom I once did a project. They helped me out with a book. And so I'm texting them saying, I like your show. And they said, oh, that's great. Will you be able to review it? And I thought, huh, I guess I will because I'm my own boss now, but I will have to in my What's Speaker 6 (13:17) Alan Watching review, like have a caveat of just so you know, I like this, but I did work on this project with them. So, you know, take that for what you will. But it's hard. Like I know critics who never want to meet anybody. that they're reviewing. And I respect that. And that's almost certainly easier than the way I've tried to do it where I do interviews and Speaker 1 (13:37) I do other stuff. Speaker 2 (13:39) Yeah, it's tough. Like, I was really influenced once watching that Roger Ebert documentary where he talks about being friends with Scorsese and also trashing Scorsese. Speaker 1 (13:48) Yeah. Speaker 2 (13:49) And I thought, that's my role model, if I can work up the nerve to do that. But I think instead I just avoid talking to people altogether because, yeah, you are really concerned about this idea of, here, let's listen to even, like, Lester Bang's Warren about it in this, about creating fake friends. Speaker 7 (14:04) God, it's gonna get ugly, man. They're gonna buy you drinks. You're gonna meet girls. They're gonna try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs. I know, it sounds great. These people are not your friends. You know, these are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars, and they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it. Right? And then it just becomes an industry of cool. I mean, I'm telling you, you're coming along in a very... Dangerous time for rock and roll. That's why I think you should just turn around go back, you know and be a lawyer or something Speaker 7 (14:44) I can tell Speaker 1 (14:45) from your face that you won't. I mean, it's a funny thing to say, like for someone who has chosen criticism as his profession, but I'm a people pleaser. Like I'm really, I feel deeply uncomfortable when I like am in a room with people who like whose stuff I've written negatively about. I don't like it. And yet, you know, you've got to be honest because if you're not giving your own opinion, then there's no value to you. What is your point? Speaker 2 (15:11) Yeah, it's true. Like, I'm really nervous because coming up, I have to go to a premiere of a movie to refresh it in my memory because I saw it at Cannes and I trashed it. And it's like a small event. And I'm like, oh, God, I can't believe they're making me go into this room of people who already know I don't like their movie just to watch it again in front of them. Oh, Speaker 1 (15:27) my God. Speaker 2 (15:28) I'm so nervous about that. Speaker 1 (15:30) Yeah, I've done I've done set visits. I did one once for Aaron Sorkin's show Studio Speaker 6 (15:34) 60 on the Sunset Strip, which is just this infamous bomb. And I had written incredibly negatively about it. And I was recapping it at the time, like week after week of this. And so there was a set visit midway through the year for like the entire Television Critics Association. So it's like a few dozen people in a room with Aaron Sorkin. And somehow I wind up seated next to him. And every answer he gave, he was looking me dead in the eye, regardless of who was asking a question. 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And because hair health is not one size fits all, Nutrafol offers different formulas for both men and women at any age or stage of life. Now, the Nutrafol woman's formula has been upgraded to its most advanced version, yet it is 100 % vegan, biotin free. and comes in a smaller capsule size to make your daily routine easier. See thicker, stronger, faster-going hair with less shedding in just three to six months. Right now, Nutrafol is offering our listeners $10 off your first month subscription and free shipping when you visit Nutrafol.com and enter promo code UNSPOOLED. That is Nutrafol.com spelled N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L.com, promo code UNSPOOLED. Speaker 3 (18:53) So how do you think William does? Speaker 1 (18:57) I think he does well by the end. I mean, the snippets that we hear of the article he writes are really, really Speaker 6 (19:05) good. And one of the fun things that happened while I was still at Rolling Stone was for one of the anniversaries of the movie, Cameron and a couple of my coworkers got together and wrote the entire story. So they took the snippets that were in the movie and then they expanded it into the full Stillwater feature. But like what you hear is good and he's honest about it and he is observant and he's able to be a fly on the wall. And like you can tell there's moments where he's going to Speaker 1 (19:29) he's going to blow it and he's going to try to be too nice to them because that's what he wants to do. But I think he gets it. He does it right. Speaker 3 (19:37) I think so, too. I mean, there's moments when I'm watching this movie Wednesday there on the party Speaker 2 (19:43) scene, you Speaker 3 (19:43) know, where he's watching him try to connect with what's real, getting really high, hanging out. Russell's just like, you know, I Speaker 2 (19:50) think probably using drugs as a way to even live in the own moment, because I can only imagine when you're a rock star trying to figure out where your place is. You don't know how you feel about fame all the way. You want to be cool, right? So you're not wearing fame necessarily. You're like, no, no, no, I don't feel it. I don't feel it. But he's like, hi. It's like he can feel the full weight of what's happening to him. He can let himself access what it's like to suddenly be famous. Speaker 1 (20:14) Yeah, and it's just so, when I rewatched this with my family to prep for this a couple weeks ago, it's so, like, striking to look at what Speaker 6 (20:22) celebrity would have been like in 73 versus now. If Russell Hammond was a rock star today and he, like, goes to somebody's, like, house in Topeka. and watches the kid there feed a mouse to his snake, everyone would have a camera out, everyone would be filming anything, there would be nothing honest within it, it would all be performative. And some of it's performative, some of it is clearly like Russell, because he's been so stung by the argument he's just had with the other guys in the band, that he's like, I want to connect with what's real. But still, it's more honest than I think anything you could imagine happening today. Because everyone is so connected and everyone is building their brand. It's, yeah. You couldn't, Speaker 3 (21:05) this Speaker 6 (21:05) couldn't happen. Speaker 3 (21:06) Yeah, we're making our life less interesting by recording all of it for posterity. Yeah, but no, you're right. You hear him kind of, there's a little bit of playing to the crowd when he's wasted on top of the roof. I mean, we've got to list the seed. The golden god. Speaker 7 (21:20) How do you know when it's kicked in? I am a golden god! Speaker 7 (21:36) And you can tell Rolling Stone magazine that my Speaker 4 (21:40) last words were I'm on drugs Speaker 3 (21:56) Oh, okay, wait, no. These are my final words. These are my final words. I dig music, and everyone's underwhelmed. They're like, eh. And he's like, okay, I'll try this one. I'm on drugs. And of