One of my favorite directors, Cameron Crowe is working on an untitled project scheduled to come out next year. It is about a military contractor returning to the site of his greatest career triumphs and reconnecting with a past love while falling for the Air Force watchdog assigned to him. What I'm most excited about is the stellar cast of actors and actresses: Rachel McAdams, Emma Stone, Bradley Cooper, John Krasinski, Bill Murray, Alec Baldwin, and more.
Cameron Crowe was born in 1957 in California. His writing career began as a 15 year-old high school student submitting articles on music to Rolling Stone. His film, Almost Famous, is slightly based off of his own life. It's one of my favorite films, as it is typical Cameron Crowe - an offbeat but charming drama/romance that creates an atmosphere the viewer never wants to leave.
Most of his main characters tend to start from great success and lose everything, having to reevaluate their lives and thus gaining understanding. They are relatable on many different levels. The audience will fall in love with all of them. His characters seem so real and raw - that's why all his films resonate so well with me. They go through real struggles that everyone can understand. For example, in We Bought a Zoo, the father (played by Matt Damon) is trying to cope with the loss of his wife. He needs a change and to focus on helping something, so they move to the countryside to renovate and re-open a struggling zoo. Alright, maybe the audience doesn't relate to renovating a zoo, but we understand the human condition. Going through a loss forces people to make changes in their lives.
In Almost Famous, Penny Lane (played by Kate Hudson) is comparable to Audrey Hepburn's character, Holly Golightly, in Breakfast at Tiffany's. They both are sad yet endearing women looking for happiness in all the wrong people and places. My heart aches for them, as it does for many other characters in Cameron Crowe's films.
Cameron Crowe is the ultimate music guru. He is known for his great soundtracks. On set, he plays the music that will be used in the specific scene during that scene. He makes the actors and actresses listen to it before they shoot. Some actors/actresses like this and others do not care for it. But he feels it sets the mood for everybody.
When a movie is relatively successful, people will do anything to squeeze that extra buck out of it. We have seen sequels, equally unwanted trilogies, creepy dolls and possibly even a book series with the movie poster thrown on the cover. However, one that is hard to ignore is unsuccessful television series based on popular films. Most recently, Matt Damon and Emily Blunts forbidden romance from The Adjustment Bureau is being made into a TV series for Syfy while it's barely been put onto the shelves. Usually when I turn onto Syfy, I either see Battlestar Galactica reruns or original movies where badly animated alligators eat models tanning on the beach. For such a popular movie, I am surprised that they are taking the remake this route and not going for a network station.
This brings up other bad TV spinoffs, usually not even making it past the first season before it gets cancelled. My favorite that I found was one I hadn't heard of before, a spinoff of Ferris Buellers Day off that ran for one season in 1990. They completely break the fourth wall when they introduce Charlie Schlatter as an annoyed Ferris Bueller complaining about the movie based on his life. He even goes so far as to take a chainsaw to a cardboard cutout of Matthew Broderick (below).
Other notably short lived series would be Fast Times based on the famous Fast Times at Ridgemont High (although it did stem Patrick Dempseys career) and the 1976 Delta House based on the cult classic, Animal House. Without the raunchy humor, drug references and foul language that made the movie so popular, the small screen version that was fit for TV audiences did not last long (it also didn't help that they rewrote Belushi's character and introduced his younger brother, Blotto). It is usually the recasting that dooms these series to their single season, as well as the fact that movies are made to follow that one story line and are resolved for the audience's sake at the end of the movie, the series tend to drag them out. I have talked about how the content varies from British to American screens, but the same goes for movies and television. Without the safety of a rating to back up more adult themes, television shows are handicapped by their time slots and broadcast channels. Reasons that shows fail is because they can't show what they want at 8 PM on a saturday when the kids might still be up.
