![]() “He just wanted to come in and say that we’d always been on his mind and good luck. A few months later, Pitt walked in the door of Crowe’s office and said he was driving past. I think he was also uncomfortable with the age difference between Russell and Penny Lane.” But maybe there just wasn’t enough on the page. “He had fallen in love with the idea of the character. “I knew had never fully fallen in love with the character,” Crowe told Origins. Just loosening me up and geeking out about Cool Boarders, but really just spending the time to get to know me, make me feel comfortable.” And he’s like, ‘You’ve got to show me how to land that trick’. “So, I was like, ‘Well, Mr Pitt, I can do these tricks’ and he was like, ‘Wow, you can land that trick? I’ve only got this one and that one’. Do you play Cool Boarders?’ I, by the way, had been playing a f***load of Cool Boarders. Pitt started to talk to him about a snowboarding video game called Cool Boarders to help him feel at ease.įugit told Uproxx, “He was like, ‘Hey, man, I’ve been playing this game, Cool Boarders. He told Vulture he remembered Rachael Leigh Cook was in the waiting room, as was John de Lancie’s son Keegan.įugit was told he would be screen-testing with Pitt, and he was, understandably, nervous. When he got the call back, he was ecstatic just to be flying to Los Angeles in first class, he told Vulture in 2020. Fugit was a teenager from Utah with no acting experience when he auditioned on tape. Pitt was still attached by the time Patrick Fugit came on the scene. “We kind of geeked out about music and everything and he was slowly kind of putting on the Russell Hammond persona. “So, I called him with this to play Russell Hammond and we spent about four months working on it. And Meryl Streep was being considered for the role of William’s mum, which McDormand ultimately played.īut the big one was Brad Pitt, who was in talks for Crudup’s eventual role of Russell Hammond, Stillwater’s charismatic frontman.Ĭrowe told the Origins podcast that he had previously met Pitt around the time of his 1989 rom-com Say Anything. Later on, Canadian actor and now Oscar-winning filmmaker Sarah Polley was attached. ![]() There was a version of Almost Famous that would’ve had three very different stars in the roles that went to Hudson, Billy Crudup and Frances McDormand.Ĭrowe revealed in a 2020 podcast marking the film’s anniversary that Natalie Portman was originally in the running for the magnetic groupie with a sad soul. No doubt if Hudson had never landed the role, she still would’ve found a way to be famous famous and not just almost famous, but she wasn’t the first choice for the role. Within a couple of years, Almost Famous wasn’t even a “cult” hit, it was a hit hit, often appearing on lists of iconic movies of that era.īut that memorable close-up image of Hudson as Penny Lane in her violet-tinted sunglasses almost wasn’t to be. Remember, Crowe did shoot all that footage. A year later, the studio even released an extended version of the film, adding another 41 minutes to the runtime. The film came out at a time when the popularity of DVDs surged, and it had a second life on the home entertainment circuit. While it may not have made a buck in those dark days, rave reviews and a successful awards season, including four Oscar nominations and a win for Crowe for his screenplay, ensured Almost Famous had longevity beyond those early bums on seats metrics. The film is credited with launching Kate Hudson's career. ![]() It also claimed relations between Crowe and the studio, Dreamworks, were strained. The LA Times remarked that Crowe went silent once the dismal numbers started rolling in, despite his loquaciousness before the release – “he refuses to come to the phone now to discuss it”, the paper wrote. When the movie was released, it finished its opening weekend in third place, behind a rerelease of The Exorcist. ![]() And it didn’t pay off – not at first anyway. Principal photography ran to 92 days, compared to the average of 50 to 65 days. ![]() The LA Times wrote Crowe’s commitment to detail necessitated reams and reams of film for the 172-page screenplay, which was about 50 per cent longer than the average. Given the cast was relatively low-key at the time – Almost Famous was Hudson’s break-out role so she wasn’t yet commanding much cash – most of the budget was spent on the production. Well, according to a contemporaneous report from the LA Times, the plan wasn’t to pay US$60 million, that’s how much it cost after Crowe went over budget by US$15 million. So, he was hot property and the prospect of his semi-autobiographical story – Crowe was 16 when he went on the road with the Allman Brothers for a Rolling Stone feature – was enough for the studio to stump up US$60 million ($96m). ![]()
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