BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Independent rock band Pearl
Jam is 20 years old. And while that may not seem like a long time, in
rock-years it’s practically Triassic.
One of the
group’s most devoted fans is Cameron Crowe, the music-mad filmmaker who
helmed “Singles,” “Almost Famous,” “Jerry Maguire” and penned the script
about hormone-handicapped high schoolers, “Fast Times at Ridgemont
High.”
But Crowe never lost his passion for his first love, which was reporting on the rock ‘n’ roll scene of his generation.
“I think a lot of people knew a lot about Pearl Jam early on,” says Crowe, who’s still surprisingly boyish at 54.
“And
as you see, they took an odd course. They took on Ticketmaster and had
to play their own concerts in the hinterlands, and some of the concerts
were real failures logistically and physically. But what happened — and
this was toward the end of the ‘90s — is those people that went out and
saw them in these strange, out-of-the-way places never forgot that Pearl
Jam came to their town.”
Well, Pearl Jam will be
playing in a town near you on Oct. 21 via PBS “American Masters’ series,
where Crowe has unloaded his considerable talents on the documentary
“Pearl Jam Twenty.”
“What I would love people to
see is that Pearl Jam, kind of in their own grassroots way, redefined
what the fan experience was. They were not a slave really to the first
MTV kind of crashing wave of their success. They really went down, cut
away all the brush, and started all over again. So what I’d love people
to see is that there was no rule book for what they did, and here they
are, still together,” he says.
“And it ends up being a movie not about some tragic failure, but about an odd and unique kind of success.”
Still,
the band has changed, says Crowe. “They talk about that pretty openly
in the film. The band started out as Stone Gossard’s group and really
evolved into Eddie’s (Vedder) band. And one of the things Jeff Ament,
the bass player in the group, told me early on is, ‘I hope this movie is
like group therapy. I want to learn about us.’
“So
we really tried to get the interviews to discuss all that and the
dynamic and how the songs have changed. I know Eddie in particular says,
‘I don’t work so hard at trying to get every song to be
three-dimensional and mean so much. I just want to breathe right now
with the music.’”
Crowe also conjured a
documentary about Elton John. “That’s really kind of a fly-on-the-wall,
real-time account of his album with Leon Russell,” says Crowe.
“But
it’s fun. It’s like journalism — three-dimensional journalism. I just
am so happy to kind of finally have a shape and have ‘Pearl Jam Twenty’
done, because there was so much to draw from. And that’s, I think, the
challenge. And this is — like your ‘Lennon’ film. You always want the
feeling of the artist in the documentary about the artist. It’s always
strange when somebody puts a different feeling on their account of an
artist that they love or are covering. So we wanted it to feel like a
Pearl Jam movie, what the fan experience would be like.”
Crowe
feels he is one of the few properly equipped to make the film. “One of
the reasons why I felt like I was the guy to make this movie was that I
always had access to them and knew them at that (earlier) time very
well. I was a big fan of (their first band) Mother Love Bone. Mother
Love Bone has music in the first movie I directed, ‘Say Anything.’ So I
knew these guys and also knew the pain of them losing their singer in
Mother Love Bone, and I knew them when they were lost and wondering,
‘What’s next? How am I going to get my next job?’
“We
gave them jobs on the movie ‘Singles,’ and what happened was lightening
struck twice. They sent this tape out as demos unsure if they even
wanted to continue as a band, and this surfer from San Diego, Eddie
Vedder, hears the demos and says, ‘I have pain in my life. I have things
I want to write about. These songs touch a nerve in me, and I’m going
to write some stuff and send it up to Seattle.’
“And
this tape arrives in Seattle, and the guys were kind of in shock,
suspicious, inspired and tentative about moving forward, and they
brought Eddie up from San Diego, and this magic started to happen. But I
don’t think any of them knew that it would turn into the success that
it did. So watching them deal with getting caught up in a whole
zeitgeist avalanche was fascinating.”
———
Kelsey
Grammer’s new show, “Boss,” airing on Starz, hasn’t even premiered yet
and has already been re-enlisted for another year. The show, in which he
plays a Chicago mayor who is suffering a degenerative brain disease,
premieres Oct. 21. Everybody knows Grammer as the snobby Frasier, a
character he’s had difficulty shedding. “My off-screen persona was so
different from Frasier’s,” he says, “perhaps some of my hijinks helped
my image. I think some of the appeal of the tabloids, in terms of my
life, is that my own life is so seemingly contrary to Frasier’s. It
seems like an incongruity that fuels speculation that makes me still
interesting.”
———
Kim
Delaney is starring in the Hallmark Channel’s upcoming “Finding a
Family,” premiering Saturday. Delaney, who’s tacked some toughies on her
acting belt, says she was attracted by another quality in this show.
“As soon as I read the movie, it made me cry,” she says. “So I always go
by that. I start with the script, and then I go with the producers, and
then I looked and the character was so interesting. I mean, it’s a sad
story, but it’s also an uplifting story, and it was such a fun character
to play, a crazy character but fun character.”
———
AMC’s
“Mad Men,” the tale of ad men in the ‘60s, has been so successful that
other networks have been accused of copying the time frame. This new
season we had both “The Playboy Club,” (already canceled) and “Pan Am,”
shows that take place around that era.
But Thomas
Schlamme, executive producer of ABC’s “Pan Am,” says the timeline has
nothing to do with it. “Television is just execution. It’s not the time
period it takes place in. It’s not the character. It’s really is just
execution. So all I can really say, it has nothing to do with ‘Mad Men.’
It just has to do with we hope our show is executed in a wonderful way
that will have sort of a wish fulfillment that will attract a large
audience. It’s as simple as that. I think we are all fans of ‘Mad Men,’
fans of but, literally, one had almost nothing to do with the other …
I’ve done in the past didn’t have necessarily anything to do with
another show that might have been successful or not successful in the
past. So it happens to be they are both set in the ‘60s. I hope there’s
lots of shows. It is a great time period. I hope there’s starting to be
shows set in the ‘70s and the 1980s and wherever else we can tell great
stories.”
Distributed by MCT Information Services
