Cameron Crowe

 ( Official Website ) 

At 22, he came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high-school student and write about his experiences. Simon & Schuster gave him a contract, and he moved back in with his parents and enrolled as Dave Cameron at Clairemont High School in San Diego. Reliving the senior year he never had, he made friends and began to fit in. Though he initially planned to include himself in the book, he realized that it would jeopardize his ability to capture the essence of the high-school experience.

His book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, came out in 1981. Crowe focused on six main characters: a tough guy, a nerd, a surfer dude, a sexual sophisticate, and a middle-class brother and sister. He chronicled their activities in typical teenage settings—at school, at the beach, and at the mall, where many of them held afterschool jobs—and concentrated on details of their lives that probed into the heart of adolescence. This included scenes about homecoming, graduation, social , and sexual encounters.

Before the book was released, Fast Times at Ridgemont High was optioned for a film. Released in 1982, the movie lacked a specific plot or major stars. The studio devoted no marketing to it. It became a sleeper hit via word of mouth. Its reviews were favorable, and the film launched the careers of some previously unknown actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, and Sean Penn.

Singles successfully rode on the heels of Seattle's grunge music boom. During production, bands like Nirvana were not yet national stars, but by the time the soundtrack was released, their song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had to be cut from the film because the rights were too expensive. Crowe had signed members of Pearl Jam, shortly before their burgeoning, nationwide success, to portray Dillon's fictional band Citizen Dick. He also appeared as a rock journalist at a club. Tim Appelo wrote in Entertainment Weekly, "With... an ambling, naturalistic style, Crowe captures the eccentric appeal of a town where espresso carts sprout on every corner and kids in ratty flannel shirts can cut records that make them millionaires."

William Miller's mother figured prominently in the film as well (often admonishing, "Don't take drugs!"). The character was based on Crowe's mother, who even showed up at the film sets to keep an eye on him while he worked. Though he asked her not to bother Frances McDormand, who played her character, the two ended up getting along well. He also showed his sister, portrayed by Zooey Deschanel, rebelling and leaving home. In actuality, his mother and sister Cindy did not talk for a decade and were still somewhat estranged when he finished the film. The family reconciled when the project was complete.

Crowe took a copy of the film to London for a special screening with Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. After the screening, Led Zeppelin granted Crowe the right to use one of their songs on the soundtrack—the first time they had ever consented to this since allowing Crowe to use "Kashmir" in Fast Times at Ridgemont High—and gave him rights to four other songs in the movie itself, although they did not grant him the rights to "Stairway to Heaven" for an intended scene (on the special "Bootleg" edition DVD, the scene is included as an extra without the song where the viewer is instructed by a watermark to begin playing it). Crowe and his then-wife, musician Nancy Wilson of Heart, co-wrote three of the five Stillwater songs in the film, and Frampton wrote the other two, with Mike McCready from Pearl Jam playing lead guitar on all the Stillwater songs. Reviews were almost universally positive, and it was nominated for and won a host of film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Crowe. Crowe and co-producer Danny Bramson also won the Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media Grammy Award for the soundtrack. Despite these accolades, box office returns for the film were disappointing.

In an interview with Pearl Jam on March 9, 2009, bassist Jeff Ament said that their manager Kelly "has had the idea to do a 20-year anniversary retrospective movie so he's been on board with film Cameron Crowe for the last few years." The band's guitarist Mike McCready said in March, "We are just in the very early stages of that, . . . starting to go through all the footage we have, and Cameron's writing the treatment." Preliminary footage was shot in June 2010. A trailer for the movie Pearl Jam Twenty, which featured Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder choosing between three permanent markers in a shop before turning to the camera and saying "Three's good... Twenty is better", was shown before select movies at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival. The film premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and had an accompanying book and soundtrack.