Cameron Crowe, American director, producer, and screenwriter
Cameron Bruce Crowe (born July 13, 1957) is an American director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. Before moving into the film industry, Crowe was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for which he still frequently writes.
Crowe's debut screenwriting effort, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, grew out of a book he wrote while posing for one year undercover as a student at Clairemont High School in San Diego, California. Later, he wrote and directed another high school saga, Say Anything..., followed by Singles, a story of twentysomethings that was woven together by a soundtrack centering on Seattle's burgeoning grunge music scene. In 1996, Crowe landed his biggest hit with Jerry Maguire. After this, he was given a green light to go ahead with a pet project, the autobiographical effort Almost Famous. Centering on a teenage music journalist on tour with an up-and-coming band, it gave insight to his life as a 15-year-old writer for Rolling Stone. For his screenplay, he won an Academy Award. In late 1999, Crowe's second book was published, a question and answer session with the film director Billy Wilder entitled Conversations with Wilder.
After the success of Almost Famous, further films followed including the psychological thriller Vanilla Sky (2001), the romantic comedy Elizabethtown (2005), which was a disappointing commercial and critical failure, the family-friendly film We Bought a Zoo (2011), and the romantic comedy Aloha (2015), which, like his prior foray into the genre, proved a disappointment. He also directed three musical documentaries, Pearl Jam Twenty (2011), and The Union (2011), about the making of the Elton John/Leon Russell album of the same name, and David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019). He also created the TV show Roadies, which ran for one season in 2016 on Showtime.