When Cameron Crowe returned from Toronto, he was greeted by the sorts of gloomy looks that implied he had just lost his wife or his house or his screenwriting Oscar. Or, heaven forfend, his music collection.
Orlando Bloom, left, Susan Sarandon and Judy Greer in "Elizabethtown."
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Movie review: Trip through 'Elizabethtown' doesn't always stay on course
Post-Gazette Family Film Guide review of "Elizabethtown"
"I came back and people were saying, 'How are you?' " When he insisted he was fine, they persisted with a pitiful tone, "No, come on, Toronto. ..."
His memory of Toronto was of a standing ovation after a 10 p.m. gala screening of "Elizabethtown," not to mention the teenage girls and young women who were in full Beatlemania thrall for star Orlando Bloom.
But "Elizabethtown" became one of the movies with bad buzz (although Terry Gilliam's "Tideland" and Guy Ritchie's "Revolver" had nearly fatal buzz), partly due to the movie's length and ambition. Crowe since has cut 17 minutes, saying it felt a little long and he wanted to reshape the ending.
"It's odd that the editing process on this movie has become so public, but I'll openly say the reason it took so long is there were elements that I wanted to save, like Susan's speech and the road trip, especially, and the all-night phone call," between Bloom and Kirsten Dunst. Susan is Susan Sarandon, who plays Bloom's newly widowed mother and has an unusual speech at a memorial service.
"There were some delicate mathematics to do with the structure of the movie and when we got it right, it said all the things I wanted to say," Crowe says, by phone during a publicity stop in Chicago.
The original ending (consider this a spoiler if the longer cut ends up on the DVD) allowed Bloom's character to redeem himself with the fictitious Mercury Shoes, where an athletic shoe he designed lost the company nearly $1 billion. In the first version, the shoes find a fan base and live up to their promise. In the second, they're still the focus of a fiasco.
"We took the shoe victory out and it was headed for that because I think the more I watched the movie with audiences, I realized that was sort of a have-it-all ending, which is never what I intended," the writer-director says. "I wanted it to be a whimsical, ironic victory for the shoe and not, well, that shoe becomes a success and hey, here's Kirsten Dunst, too."
The new ending, without that redemptive element, better teaches the lesson: "Greatness, sometimes, doesn't come hand in hand with success, not immediately." Crowe and his wife, Nancy Wilson of the rock band Heart, watched both versions, and he thought the second one peaked at the perfect time and declared, "It's done and that's the final version."
Asked if Crowe regrets allowing the movie to be shown in festivals before its national release, a marketing tool becoming more commonplace, he says, "I couldn't plan for it, nor do I regret it. It was sort of the personality of this experience."
This movie was a particularly personal one, though, for Crowe. His father, James, unexpectedly died of a heart attack, like Drew Baylor's dad in "Elizabethtown."
"I'm not the guy who went through everything Drew went through, certainly, but I did have a father who died suddenly in Kentucky and I went back to kind of represent my side of the family and got hit with a walloping hurricane of love from people that looked like strangers who looked like me, and that was something I never forgot.
"That and seeing that, in fact, it wasn't this terrible mistake that it was my dad there in the [funeral parlor] room and that I felt like I was whisked from witnessing a really tragic end to the beginning of something new when I saw his life being celebrated so much by the family in Kentucky."
Crowe's father, a residential real-estate agent, died just as his son's star was starting to ascend.
In 1989, Crowe's "Say Anything" had been released with little fanfare, but its fortunes changed after a rave from Roger Ebert and the late Gene Siskel, the most influential pair of critics in the country. Crowe's father was sharing that good news during his Kentucky visit when he died.
Since that time, Crowe has become a favorite of critics and audiences alike with "Singles," "Jerry Maguire," "Almost Famous" and (not so much) "Vanilla Sky." His early days as a writer for Rolling Stone were dramatized in "Almost Famous," which earned him an Oscar for original screenplay.
It sometimes seems as if writers hold Crowe to a higher standard; he's the A-student in the room who can't get by with slipshod or less than stellar work. Does he agree?
"I appreciate the interest and I appreciate the faith, and if they don't get it the first time around, I would be honored if people checked it out later down the line on TV or wherever and saw that there were layers to this movie. And hopefully they picked up on something we were trying to do."
Yes, he listens to music when he writes ... and when he's filming and editing and driving, taking a break from writing. "Because that's, of course, where you get your best ideas when you don't have a free hand."
Ask what's on his personal play list and he says opera, adding, "No, I'm kidding." He calls My Morning Jacket from Kentucky his favorite band and singles out Joni Mitchell's "Songs of a Prairie Girl," along with the music of Beck and a band called The Clutters.
The 48-year-old was born in Palm Springs and raised in San Diego but he demonstrates an appreciation for the heartland in "Elizabethtown." Some of that comes from being on the road, some from being a fan of heartland storytellers such as Larry Brown and Garrison Keillor.
"I thought, boy, it'd be really great to just send him a copy of this movie, which I tried to do and I guess he's really busy," Crowe says with a laugh of Keillor.
"They weren't able to schedule the time to do it, but I've always loved in his stories where he would have all these threads and all these characters and you loved the environment but you didn't totally know what the point of it all was, not fully, until the last line. And he'd say something like, 'And she twirled and twirled and twirled until everybody realized they were in the perfect rhythm of the Earth itself, and that's the news from Lake Wobegone.' ... And it ends real quickly in that poetic rush."
That's what he was hoping for, with festivalgoers in Toronto, Venice, Italy and Deauville, France. "Even in those faraway cities, people's reactions around the world are pretty much the same to movies. I knew that it wasn't ending quite on that sharp point, so that's what I was chasing more than anything else."
Accompanying him on that chase was Bloom, whom Crowe says loves those fans who scream for him or camp out for hours on the remote chance they might see him.
"He's one of the few guys -- and I know this from journalism days, too -- who values their young fans. It's so funny, how often you'd see it in music where musicians that had young fans would say, 'I know, the young girls, but Eric Clapton came to one of my shows once.'
"Where Orlando is, like, I love my fans and I want to take them with me for the whole ride, like Paul Newman. ... You just gotta look at a guy like that and say, cool, wise."
Crowe met Bloom while directing a 30-second Gap commercial, and the pair vowed to collaborate again. "He just has a certain kind of generous wisdom with a little sadness built in, and I thought that would be good for the part. He doesn't look like me, though, or so I'm told."
First Published: October 14, 2005, 4:00 a.m.
