Elizabethtown

[MacGuffin]

Real-Life Elizabethtown Seeks Film's Fans

The namesake city for the upcoming movie "Elizabethtown" is planning an advertising campaign in hopes of luring the film's fans for a visit.

Two ads promoting the Kentucky city will be shown prior to the movie in theaters in a handful of cities, including Indianapolis, Cincinnati and St. Louis, said Sherry Murphy of the Elizabethtown Tourism & Convention Bureau.

The ads will urge people to visit the town that inspired the movie.

"We're taking very, very strong ties to the movie," Murphy said Monday.

The spotlight will continue to shine on Kentucky for its role in the movie.

Staff members of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" taped segments related to the movie in Louisville on Saturday, Murphy was told by a representative of Paramount Pictures, which is distributing the film.

The program, expected to focus either on actor Orlando Bloom or the movie itself, is scheduled to air in the first week of October. The movie is set for wide release Oct. 14.

"What a huge opportunity for our community," Murphy said. "We're just giddy with excitement over this."

[MacGuffin]

Great article written by Crowe himself; even praising Tarantino, Wes and PT Anderson for their use of music in films.


DIRECTOR'S JOURNAL
Moviemaking, from the soundtrack up
Cameron Crowe on how "the right song at the right time" has shaped his filmmaking throughout his career.
By Cameron Crowe, Special to The Times



First we see an empty staircase. Then, a pair of dress shoes slowly click-clacks down the steps. Careful hands withdraw a record and place it on an antique phonograph. An obscured figure begins to compose what must surely be a suicide note. You can't help but hold your breath. The movie is "Harold and Maude," and director Hal Ashby has already done more with that frame than most other directors do in an entire movie. But Ashby has left his masterstroke for last.

We begin to hear the music of a Cat Stevens song, "Don't Be Shy." It's optimistic, a love song to love itself, but in this context it's a magical counterpoint. The whole addictive tone of "Harold and Maude" is created in that one moment. The movie is suddenly epic and funny and full of promise. This is what happens when music and movies come together. The right song at the right time is a powerful concoction that can make a sequence, or even an entire movie. It scratches at your soul. Many years after first seeing "Harold and Maude" in a San Diego theater, I still think about that sequence and that song a lot. Hal Ashby made it all look easy.

It's not.

Music, and particularly songs, can be a finicky partner to motion pictures. After all, both are often attempting to tell a complete story, their way, without the help of the other. But just between you and me, right up through my own sixth film as a director, "Elizabethtown," it's been the prospect of those long afternoons and evenings in the editing room, coaxing that marriage between the right song and the right scene, that's kept me going through the grueling parts of making a movie.

Often at 3 a.m., when lights aren't working, or a production problem has erupted, I'll drift back to that secret thrill — well, it's not so secret, actually. Soon I'll have all this film in a room, along with my notebooks filled with music ideas, and the real fun will begin.

Often an idea for a movie will begin with a feeling, or a song. "Elizabethtown" (which opens Oct. 14) was no exception. I had been listening a lot to Ryan Adams, and Patty Griffin's great album "1000 Kisses," and was traveling with my wife, Nancy Wilson, and her band, Heart, on a tour in 2002. One morning I woke up on the tour bus to see those electric-blue landscapes of Kentucky, my father's home state, and felt a wanderlust. I hadn't been back since his funeral, years earlier, but suddenly I wanted off the bus. Soon I was, lost in Kentucky, driving in a rental car and listening to music I'd brought on CD mixes. I wasn't looking for creative inspiration, and of course, that's exactly when it arrived.

The entire story of "Elizabethtown" arrived quickly over the next couple of days, a tale of love and loss and the discovery of family roots in the aftermath of a very black turn of events in the life of a young shoe designer (Orlando Bloom). It was a story that would start with an ending, and end with a beginning and, I hoped, give a sense of what it was to be truly alive. I had been working on a different screenplay idea. Now, I was veering wildly down the Kentucky corridors and byways, making notes as I drove, feeling that rare inspiration.

"Elizabethtown's" music arrived almost fully formed too. I knew quickly that the story, named after a town near my father's birthplace of Stanton, Ky., would offer a chance to showcase a lot of new artists, writers like Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Josh Ritter and Kathleen Edwards, who are creating their own mini-movies in songs filled with deep resonance and imagery. I hoped with "Elizabethtown" that I could let the film breathe a little and take the time to let some of their music play. Much of what ended up in "Elizabethtown" was on those first CD mixes I listened to on the road, imagining the movie.

The movie itself contains a road trip and an elaborate mix-map that Kirsten Dunst's character makes for Orlando Bloom's. The map sends him on a trip across part of America, with her detailed instructions to visit specific places and listen to specific songs at specific times. We traveled across five states shooting the sequence, filming the scenes, using Eddie Hinton's "Yeah Man" in Memphis and the gospel pioneer Washington Phillips to score a visit to Oklahoma City, and much more.

My friend Ivan had the job of playing tracks from my iTunes playlist of appropriate songs, gathered in the months of preproduction. Music filled many of our shooting days, and the set pumped with the feeling of a great American radio station playing everything from bootlegs to new music to obscure gems and back again. It was the emerging sound of "Elizabethtown."

Inspiring a character

IT can be a delicate process, finding the right musical world for a movie. Sometimes one or two songs will rise above the others early on to provide a clue. For "Elizabethtown," it was a song by My Morning Jacket called "I Will Be There When You Die." I also kept returning to a largely forgotten 1987 song by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, "It'll All Work Out." Something about Petty's winsome vocal felt like "Elizabethtown."

I played the song about a hundred times on that first road trip. And it soon became a theme for one of the central characters, a flight attendant who specialized in soothing nervous travelers, a chatty optimist named Claire. Claire, and her theme song, soon became the soul of the movie.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the casting process can be matching the music to an actor. On "Almost Famous," I often played the Joni Mitchell song "People's Parties" and asked actresses auditioning for the part of the groupie Penny Lane to imagine the song playing in their heads as they moved through a crowded dressing room making sure everybody had whatever they needed, from a kind word to a perfectly rolled joint.

Though Kate Hudson won the part, one of the actresses who soaked up music best in the audition was Kirsten Dunst. Several years later, she returned and, while waiting to audition for "Elizabethtown," I played her "It'll All Work Out." She felt the song deeply, nodded quietly, and didn't speak again until it was time to act the scenes. Her entrance in the finished movie, with the song playing, is an almost exact replica of her audition in that small room where she first tried Claire on as a character.

"It'll All Work Out" worked out, but the musical lightning doesn't always strike that quickly, or even at all. For every "Sound of Silence," the Simon and Garfunkel song that ushered in the modern era of rock in cinema in Mike Nichols' "The Graduate," there are a thousand-and-one bombastic, too-literal or buzz-killing song selections that can ruin a movie.

The '80s were a particularly barren time for music in movies. Much of that decade was a "Footloose" hangover with soundtrack albums that began to resemble brazen marketing tools more than evocative souvenirs of the movie experience. Many "soundtracks" began to feature desperate attempts at hit songs that were sometimes not even in the movies themselves. Sacrilege! Songs on a soundtrack must appear in the movie! There, I've said it, and we can move on.

With the work of Quentin Tarantino and P.T. Anderson, the passionate use of records in film is on the rise again. Lately it's been Wes Anderson who's shown a mighty music lover's soul with movies like "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums." "Tenenbaums," in particular, even recalled the great touch of Hal Ashby with one amazing moment when Gwyneth Paltrow departs a bus to the broken majesty of Nico's "These Days."

And then there was his stellar usage of "Ruby Tuesday," the very-cinematic Rolling Stones song many, present company included, had dreamed of using correctly. Anderson let his characters simply play the album and the previous song, "She Smiled Sweetly," tracked into "Ruby Tuesday." Quietly, with devastating results, the song simply appeared … and played in its entirety. You can't use a record in a movie more simply, or better, than that.

Definitive strains

AH, but it's the perfect original song, written specifically for the movie, that remains the holy grail of music in film. Here are a few perfect original song marriages: "Moon River" in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." "Alfie" in "Alfie." "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." One of the towering landmarks of modern music in film was a song that cannot be underestimated in its lasting effect, Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin' " in "Midnight Cowboy." Harry Nilsson covered the song and gave it an extra coat of sadness and longing. While it technically wasn't written for the film, "Everybody's Talkin' " provides a strong lesson in how to write an original song with the specific boundaries of a specific movie.

It's a tricky thing. Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan cracked the code with their Oscar-winning compositions for "Philadelphia" and "The Wonder Boys," but many a rocker has stumbled on the path to similar glory. For an original motion picture song to truly work, it can't be that obviously about the movie. The best original movie songs evoke the feeling of the movie more than the story. "Everybody's talking at me / Can't hear a word they're sayin' " elevated and deepened its film partner, and delivered the bittersweet tone of "Midnight Cowboy." Imagine if the song lyrics had been, "We're hustlers, baby, trying to make it on the streets of New York." The poetic quotient plummets. Suddenly, everybody starts looking a little less timeless.

For "Elizabethtown," Jim James and My Morning Jacket hit the note with a song called "Where to Begin." Against a scene when a family memorial moves into a backyard, it taps the woozy summer feeling of longing, and a tantalizing regret, with the line "… it's the art of feeling naked … in your clothes." I can't imagine the movie without it.

Sometimes the right song works in a different way than it was originally intended. For the soundtrack of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," Jackson Browne penned a song called "Somebody's Baby." It was a romantic portrait of Stacy, the character played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, and it had a memorably poignant chorus. Somehow it didn't fit anywhere in the movie. Late one night, playing DJ at home with a video rough cut, I tried the song on one completely incongruous and unromantic sequence involving an awkward episode of teenage sex. It worked, immediately. Perhaps too well. I've heard that Browne sometimes introduces it in concert like this: "Well, here's a love song I wrote about a girl, and somehow it became an anthem for premature ejaculation."

With "Say Anything," there was one important scene with a boombox that needed a great record. In the sequence, Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) wants to remind his ex-girlfriend of their love by serenading her with "their" song, standing on a hillside and holding his stereo high above his head, pointing it into her bedroom. It was a moment of heartache and rebellion and heroism. No song worked.

Cusack was a huge fan of the Los Angeles ska-funk band Fishbone at the time, and it's actually their "Bonin' in the Boneyard" that he was playing as we filmed the scene. But blasting that song in the finished movie, Lloyd appeared to be a crazed Fishbone fan, forcing his musical taste on a sleeping girl.

Then I came upon a tape of songs from our wedding, nestled in the glove compartment of my car. Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" was one of the songs on the tape, and instantly, every word and note felt written for the elusive boombox scene. I raced into the editing room, and sure enough, the song worked. In fact, it really worked. But the movie had to be finished in days, and we needed to secure the rights to the song fast. Only one problem: Peter Gabriel did not allow his extremely personal composition to be used for movies.

Still, he agreed to look at a videotape of "Say Anything," and a week later, I was given the message to call him. He didn't waste a moment in turning me down in a slightly sad and resolute voice. "Thank you for letting me watch your film," he added, "and I'm truly sorry that I can't give you the approval to use the song."

I was about hang up. For some reason, I couldn't help blurting out the question hanging in the air: "But why?"

"Well," he said wearily, "I just … I didn't feel it was right for when he took the overdose."

"Wait. There's no overdose in my movie."

There was a pause. "Yours isn't the John Belushi film? 'Wired'?"

"No — mine is called 'Say Anything.' "

"Oh the teenage movie," said Gabriel, cheering instantly. "I haven't watched it yet!"

Several days later he gave us the OK. I think I'm still celebrating. The yearning in the song matched the defiance in Cusack's face, saying all the things that Cusack, as Lloyd, needed to tell his ex-girlfriend, but couldn't.

Antidote to angst

TINY DANCER" was one of my favorite songs as a young journalist in the '70s, and I'm probably proudest of the singalong scene we filmed in "Almost Famous" because I'd wanted to capture the inner fan that lurks within even the most hardened rockers. I'd often seen those moments on tour when a record appeared on the radio or in a restaurant and suddenly all the tensions could evaporate for the length of the right song. Fandom could break out for those three minutes and blatantly reveal the giddy love of music that powers most musicians, much more than sex or drugs ever did or could.

The scene worked, I thought, even as we were shooting it, because the actors threw themselves completely into that display of unabashed love of rock. (Except, of course, Noah Taylor, who disliked the song enormously but can be seen gamely struggling through the exercise.) Some criticized the scene as a product of rose-colored vision. But in the years since the movie's release, it's been the most grizzled and unsentimental musicians who sought me out most strenuously to say, "That scene happened to us." And then, in a quieter voice, "Don't ever write this, but we once sang along to … (insert guilty-pleasure pop classic)."

The right record can also alter the atmosphere during the making of a movie, often in immeasurable ways. Starting with "Jerry Maguire," I developed a habit of playing music on the set to create a mood. Such is the power of music that it can color almost any situation. Sometimes I'll play the song in a quiet moment to remind the actor of the tone of the sequence, even during their performance. Jeff Wexler, our sound mixer, was horrified when I first did it. Over time, we've worked out a delicate dance where our film audio tracks are always usable later. It's a dance we've come to love.

Tom Cruise acted many of his scenes as Jerry Maguire with the actual music playing, from the Who's "Magic Bus" to Bruce Springsteen's "Secret Garden." Cruise compared it to the job of an athlete. Each song was the equivalent of being passed the emotional football. "Play whatever you want," he'd say, "I'll run with it." This method doesn't work for everybody, or at least not at first. Intoxicated with opportunity, on my first day working with Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs in "Almost Famous," I surprised him by playing Iggy and the Stooges at full volume in the middle of his second take. He looked at me as if his concentration had been shattered to pieces, which of course it had.

"What was that?" Hoffman asked in a measured voice.

"I was playing the music that you're listening to in the scene," I explained. Many faces were now looking at me, staring. "Yeah, I know," said Hoffman patiently. "I was already acting it."

We soon found our language together. Sometimes we worked with music in the take, sometimes we didn't. Hoffman, of course, brings his own audio stimulus. In between each take, he'd slip on headphones and listen to the voice of Bangs himself.

Mining musicians' sensibility

FOR "Elizabethtown," I wanted to cast as many musicians as possible. There's something about music lovers, and musicians, that can seep onto the screen and even give a movie an extra jolt of lyricism. Loudon Wainwright III and Patty Griffin both play family members to Orlando Bloom's Drew. And members of My Morning Jacket make up the band fronted by Drew's cousin, Jessie, played by Paul Schneider. Schneider, who is also a musician, plays a singing drummer. Even Bloom is a big music fan and would often request the music of Jeff Buckley or John Martyn to set the tone for a scene. The music in the movie functions like a character, and a secret guide, a voice whispering in the viewer's ear.

I think I knew "Elizabethtown" would be a very musical endeavor on the first day. The first scene was a funeral discussion set in a graveyard, and to say the scene was lacking life would be more than a bad pun. One of the actors had developed a memory problem, another was twitching from nervousness. Something had to be done. I leaned over to Ivan. "Play 'Don't Be Shy,' " I told him.

A moment later, out of our set speakers crackled that time-honored Cat Stevens song. Suddenly tensions began to ease. The soft irony of the record smoothed the nervousness — poetry was in the air again. Jeff Wexler had been a production assistant on "Harold and Maude." He slipped over to me and nodded his head. "Somewhere Hal Ashby is smiling," he said, and though only the two of us knew the reference, the mood of our movie was almost immediately recaptured with this small tribute to a great moment in movie music history. Our scene was finished shortly afterward.

Nothing ever beats the power of the human voice in a movie, speaking words that matter, but the right music can sure be a powerful ally.

The right song at the right time.

I looked around the cemetery, the green hillsides shimmering with layers of light. "Don't be shy … just let your feelings roll on by…. " All around me, equipment was being packed up. "Elizabethtown" had just begun, and there was a whiff of magic in the air. An elderly man, an extra in the funeral scene, came over to me. "I like that you play music when you're making your movie," he said. "What else you got?"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact Cameron Crowe at calendar.letters@latimes.com

[modage]

Many "soundtracks" began to feature desperate attempts at hit songs that were sometimes not even in the movies themselves. Sacrilege! Songs on a soundtrack must appear in the movie! There, I've said it, and we can move on.

i love crowe.

[polkablues]

It looks like Orlando's making his move here.

[ono]

It looks like he just ran into a wall.

[ProgWRX]

FWIW one of my film school professors, whom ive become friends with, went to an Elizabethtown junket last week in LA. He saw a shorter cut (2 hours) and he enjoyed it a lot. He said that he'd still cut a couple of things but overall he really liked it. Although he is a fan, he also disliked Vanilla Sky, so he seems objective. He also had the chance to interview Cameron and really enjoyed talking to him. Im trying to get my hands on the footage, if i can ill try to encode it and post it or something.

[Bethie]

I saw a tv spot for Elizabethtown last night and again tonight while watching The Daily Show. They were both different ones.  8)

[polkablues]

I saw a tv spot for Elizabethtown last night and again tonight while watching The Daily Show. They were both different ones.  8)

I have the feeling "We peaked on the phone" is going to join the growing pantheon of oft-quoted Crowe dialogue.

[Ghostboy]

There's a screening for this on Monday and then a junket on Wednesday...and I'm having a lot of trouble convincing myself to go to either.

[ProgWRX]

why? id go in a second  

feel like youll be dissapointed?

[Ghostboy]

The trailers have been making me cringe, and the bad reviews haven't helped.

And I know I shouldn't judge a movie on the trailers, but still...

[ProgWRX]

might as well go and makeup your mind  especially if you dont have to pay for your ticket  

my professor was prepared to be dissapointed, because he disliked Vanilla Sky... and he enjoyed it. Although he said that obviously it wasnt perfect (or close to.)

[MacGuffin]

Kentucky Fried Movie
After lackluster festival reviews, director Cameron Crowe scrambles to get his heartfelt romantic comedy ''Elizabethtown'' in shape for general audiences. Will they show him the money? by Christine Spines, EW

Cameron Crowe is having a quintessentially Cameron Crowe moment. If he had written it himself, an Elton John song might be playing over the scene and you, the fired-up audience member, would suddenly be singing along under your breath, rooting for the shaggy underdog to survive the firestorm that has engulfed his world, turning his life from comedy to high-stakes drama without his consent. In typical Crowe fashion, his rescue would probably come in the form of a soulful, beautiful woman with great taste in music who shows up with just enough good humor and good sense to remind him why he loves his life and that none of that other stuff matters. It's been a rough week for Crowe, 48, who recently screened his new movie, Elizabethtown, at the Toronto film festival, and watched critics have at it like a piñata. Crowe, a best-screenplay Oscar winner for Almost Famous, has been a critics' pet ever since he made his directorial debut with Say Anything... in 1989; which may be why he felt confident enough to take the risky step of entering the festival with an unfinished cut. His much-anticipated wistful black comedy follows a shoe designer (Orlando Bloom) whose professional fall from grace is cushioned by a new romance with an eccentric stewardess (Kirsten Dunst) and a reconnection with his Kentucky roots following his father's death. But reviewers at Toronto reacted with something close to outrage, complaining the film was manipulative instead of moving, cloying instead of charming.

There are two gods whom filmmakers aim to please: critics and audiences. Having faltered with one, Crowe is now counting on regular moviegoers for redemption. Even before he hit the festival circuit, Crowe had begun assembling an alternate, shorter cut of the movie, just in case the longer one didn't play. Now, he has his work cut out for him, with only three weeks to whittle his 135-minute Toronto version into the kind of tight, emotionally resonant crowd-pleaser his fans have come to expect. But even though Crowe is confident he'll be able to iron out the wrinkles, the sting of bad reviews lingers, especially with a film as nakedly personal as this one, which was inspired by Crowe's experiences in Elizabethtown, Ky., after his own father's death in 1989.

Today, Crowe is peering out the front windshield of an Almost Famous-style rock & roll tour bus. He's making another pilgrimage to Elizabethtown, where he's come to premiere the eponymous movie he shot here last summer. He's excited and a bit nervous as a police escort of four squad cars form a caravan leading him into town.

Crowe's eyes widen as a crowd of hundreds appears on the roadside, waving homemade signs and cheering his arrival. (Cue Sir Elton.) There's a guy holding a boom box above his head paying tribute to John Cusack's lovelorn serenade in Say Anything.... Two middle-aged women display a banner saying ''Show me the movie!'' Then there's the teenage girl with a glittery poster bearing the Almost Famous catchphrase: ''It's All Happening! Thank You, Cameron.''

For what seems like miles, diehards of all shapes and sizes line the rainy streets to hail Crowe for speaking to them in ways entirely personal to each of them. How else to explain a droopy-lidded man standing in the rain with a tiny, weeks-old infant tucked into the crook of his tattooed arm, holding an Elizabethtown poster in his free hand, and wearing a T-shirt proclaiming ''BEER: Helping ugly people have sex since 1862.'' Crowe, clearly stirred by the outpouring, turns to face his wife (and Elizabethtown's composer), Nancy Wilson, from the band Heart, who came along for moral support. ''Well, I'm glad you're here,'' he says with a slight strain of melancholy, ''so it's [proof] that it's actually real.''

For many moviegoers, Crowe is the guy who defined first love (Say Anything...), the grunge generation (Singles), what it means to be a man (Jerry Maguire), and the lonely heart of rock & roll (Almost Famous). They'll forgive him a misfire on Vanilla Sky, a misguided detour into darkness that ill suited his sunny sensibility. But now it's time to deliver the goods, and expectations are primed for Elizabethtown, Crowe's return to what he does best: young love and personal reinvention.

Crowe is one of the few writer-directors making idiosyncratic, personal movies within the mainstream studio system, and he can scarcely afford another flop after 2001's Vanilla Sky underperformed at the box office ($101 million is actually peanuts for a Tom Cruise movie) and failed to deliver his usual rhapsodic reviews. He is a true Hollywood anomaly in that he has steadfastly resisted all temptation to make a quick buck as a director- or writer-for-hire in between his personal movies, à la Steven Soderbergh. Crowe tells stories that come from the inside out, turning his preoccupations and life experiences into modern folk tales. Still, after a summer where Hollywood sent out a desperate APB for more original filmmaking, even brand-name directors like Crowe only get so many strikes. And after the screening at Toronto, where Elizabethtown went from festivalgoers' must-see list to the not-for-me or, at best, the wait-and-see list, the onus is now on Crowe to make sure Elizabethtown fills theaters and leaves the door open to a future full of the movies only he can make.

No stranger to doomsday predictions, Crowe takes solace in his experience with films that have prevailed over a din of bad buzz. ''With Fast Times [at Ridgemont High], they didn't want to put the movie out and it tested really poorly,'' says Crowe, who made his screenwriting debut with the teen sex comedy directed by Amy Heckerling. He was similarly vindicated when he later released a longer director's cut of Almost Famous on DVD to high praise after the studio-mandated shorter cut generated lackluster box office. ''It was very similar [to Elizabethtown]. Many things I've written have had a tough little curve.''

The illusions of success and failure and the precarious line that separates them have become recurring themes for Crowe both on screen and off. It's no wonder, considering he soared to the top of the magazine journalism world at the tender age of 16, writing cover stories for Rolling Stone, and has occupied the upper echelons of moviemaking ever since Say Anything.... So it's probably no accident that both Jerry Maguire and Elizabethtown revolve around characters whose thriving careers face sudden death. Even Say Anything...'s Lloyd Dobler was defined by his failure to have any ambitions beyond love and, similarly, Singles' Steve Dunne (Campbell Scott) became a depressed shut-in when his work project was nixed by the mayor. It's almost as if his movies are anxiety dreams with happy endings, writ large.

Back on the bus en route to the theater, Crowe has fallen under the spell of the lush, neon-green Kentucky countryside, which inspired the movie in the first place. ''Nancy was on tour [with Heart] and I woke up one morning and it was like this outside the window,'' he says. ''And I said, 'I have to rent a car and drive around.' That's where the whole movie came from.... My dad was stationed at Fort Knox nearby and this is the route he would drive into town.'' For Crowe — or any guy, really — writing about his feelings for his father was the emotional equivalent of touching the third rail. Even today, he's still tentative about copping to the script's personal origins. ''I could have just as easily said, 'I made the story up,''' he admits, as if that temptation is still with him right now. ''But I figured, f--- it. Tell the story of where it came from, because wouldn't my dad love this movie that's largely about his state and the feelings we had?''

In some respects, the film almost plays like a mixtape of moments — some new, some culled from his other movies. When Bloom's bottomed-out shoe designer immerses himself in the seemingly alien world of his long-lost Kentucky relatives planning for his father's funeral, he is able to reconnect with the most alive parts of himself and the memory of his father. Dunst's stewardess is an effervescent free spirit, hell-bent on healing Bloom's ailing heart even while hers could use some mending itself. Surrounding them is a menagerie of kooky lost souls that includes Susan Sarandon as Bloom's mother in denial of the death of her husband.

Since the male lead would essentially be playing Crowe in his mid-20s, the writer-director struggled to find an actor who could balance the pain of losing a parent with comedy. Though he had first shown the script to Bloom, with whom he'd made a Gap commercial and become pen pals, each sending the other music and postcards over the years, he ended up initially casting Ashton Kutcher because of Bloom's scheduling conflicts. ''I had a bunch of work sessions with Ashton and then the work sessions started to end on a slightly less high-fiving note,'' Crowe says, carefully. ''It wasn't quite jelling.''

Kutcher soon left the project, and by that time, Bloom was available. From the moment he stepped into the role, Bloom was keenly aware he had entered into unfamiliar territory. ''This was the first time where I was playing a real guy, a real character in a real experience. I wanted to do a contemporary movie, because I started getting the sense that people thought I was a one-trick pony,'' The Lord of the Rings star says, doubled over with exhaustion in a Kentucky hotel room after pulling an all-nighter on the set of Pirates 2 and 3 and flying in for the premiere. ''I felt so proud to be in a movie that was trying to take a risk. Not everyone will necessarily... It might fly over some people's heads or nail them right in the heart.''

The experience has made Bloom sanguine about his attitude toward his own future in Hollywood. ''It's bizarre to me that Kingdom of Heaven could open at number one, make over $200 million worldwide, and still be considered a failure,'' says Bloom of the expensive, much-anticipated 2005 summer epic whose domestic box office fizzled out at a disappointing $47 million. ''Now I think that's actually really cool because for me, it's part of the process. That's what gets you the scars, those fights. It's a notch here, a notch there, and it becomes some sort of life in itself. You [just] don't want to shrink from it.''

Dunst, who first impressed Crowe when she was a runner-up for Kate Hudson's role in Almost Famous, felt an immediate kinship with her character. She was cast early, after a typical Crowe audition, in which he played the music he'd picked out for the film to see how she responded to it and, more important, how the music sounded played against her image in close-up. ''You have this video camera in your face and I would react to different songs he would play,'' recalls Dunst, who rarely auditions but agreed because of Crowe's indelible female characters. ''Cameron wrote a beautiful role. She's messy, wise, and sad. And the words came easily to me.''

While shooting, Crowe played music to help the actors access the characters' emotions. It's a technique the director hit upon courtesy of Tom Cruise. ''We were doing the scene where Jerry Maguire's writing the mission statement and I started playing this song by His Name Is Alive and Tom was like, 'Keep it playing!' and he acted to the song and it was great,'' recalls Crowe, who appointed his assistant to be the on-set DJ, playing mostly Jeff Buckley and Simon and Garfunkel for Bloom, and Rilo Kiley and Rufus Wainwright for Dunst. Still, there are risks involved: Play the wrong song and the mood is dead. ''Kirsten came hard with her own opinions on what should be playing,'' Crowe says. ''I put on the Monkees and Kirsten just stopped and said, 'I can't do this.' She's a really hardcore music fan so sometimes it felt like being her DJ.''

Though Crowe puts on a brave face and says he doesn't give much power to Elizabethtown's naysayers, he reveals flashes of vulnerability when defending his movie as if it were his child who just got beat up after school. ''This movie is definitely a populist film, not created for cynics,'' says the director, who insists that non-industry audiences have responded positively in test screenings. ''It's the nature of this one that it's tough to get all the pieces right.... And you saying something is a 'work-in-progress' is like handing everybody a red pencil and saying, 'What are your notes?'''

Even after Toronto, Paramount, the studio releasing Elizabethtown, has refrained from the usual panicked meddling. ''Reviews are what they are. You live with them, hopefully learn from them, and move on,'' says Gail Berman, president of Paramount Pictures. ''We're on the same message since we began. The populist reaction to the movie is overwhelming. We're going on this journey with [Crowe] and believing in this process.'' In other words, Crowe has final cut.

In the new version, Crowe says he's honing the focus on Bloom's character and trimming the memorial scene, in which Sarandon's character busts out with an odd stand-up comedy routine. ''It's going to be 18 minutes shorter,'' he says. ''I cut down a lot of the goodbyes toward the end. There were two choices about how to do the movie: as a double or a long single CD. The way it was shot suggested you could make it more of a spell-creating experience [where] you go through some of this stuff almost in real time.''

Crowe, a self-described ''warrior for optimism,'' continues to battle what feels to him like an encroaching tide of cynicism, insisting that moviegoers, the real people, have got his back. His bus arrives at the theater and he is greeted by three little girls holding a banner that says ''Welcome Back to E-Town. Small town. Big heart. Just like you!'' He smiles and waves. For now, at least, his instincts are confirmed: This is humanity putting its best foot forward. The besieged protagonist of this story has found the warm embrace of an audience primed to love his movie, right here where it was born when he came to say goodbye to his father for the final time 16 years ago. ''I like that someone might come up to me and say, 'Did the father die to save his son's life?' It sure beats sitting around in a room with buddies, going, 'How do we do the heist movie for the millionth time?''' Crowe says, before stepping off the bus. ''This movie chose me. And if it works out that I get slaughtered for a movie that came from my heart, I can live with myself.''

[Ghostboy]

Man, I tried to keep an open mind...but this movie seriously was anathema to my sensibilities. I haven't really watched a Cameron Crowe film since Vanilla Sky came out, and I really liked him back then. I have a feeling I've sorta outgrown him, but still, putting myself in a 2001 mindset, this is really pretty subpar. There's one really good scene, an extended phone call between Bloom and Dunst that soars with goofy romantic exuberance, but the rest of it is either bland or downright nauseating. I feel like I need to go watch Broken Flowers to cleanse myself.

[Pubrick]

There's one really good scene, an extended phone call between Bloom and Dunst that soars with goofy romantic exuberance

I have the feeling "We peaked on the phone" is going to join the growing pantheon of oft-quoted Crowe dialogue.

polkadamus