While everyone knows throughout his career that Cameron Crowe got wilder, did Cameron Crowe get Billy Wilder?
Although Billy Wilder is an absolute legend of the screen, no filmmaker seemed to revere him more than Cameron Crowe. From the very first line of Crowe’s book on Wilder, the writer praises him with the highest superlative he might bestow as he introduces his mentor as “the greatest living writer-director.” Denying that Wilder was a huge influence on Crowe is to deny that beaches spring from the ocean. The one-liner filled scripts Crowe became known for couldn’t exist without the brilliant dialogue of Wilder’s comedies. Yet these two filmmakers, the elder considered a harsh pessimist while the younger a nearly saccharine optimist, seem like they couldn’t be more opposite. Through Crowe’s well documented praise for the director, it’s clear that he ripped pages straight out of Wilder’s handbook and pasted them to the screen; let’s read a few of them back now.
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Rarely does Wilder’s name appear in discussion without mentioning his film’s frank depictions of sexuality. A director who had to adhere to the Hayes code was forced to be more subtle than modern films. In Double Indemnity for example, the implication that Walter (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) have been together is handled by fading to a different scene at the height of their embrace. When the film fades back, the couple has separated, with Walter is sprawled in a relaxed state on the couch while Phyllis smooths out imperfections in her makeup. Of course, there’s nothing explicit, but Wilder keeps it as obvious as he can to the audience that the crimes Walter is about to commit are done for pleasure, not true love. Yet judgement doesn’t strike Wilder’s characters for their promiscuity. With The Seven Year Itch, the director creates a narrative about a man cheating on his wife without even a hint of demonization to either the tempter (Tom Ewell) or temptress (Marilyn Monroe). They’re both adults that know what they’re doing, and the film allows them their indulgence without casting shadows over their actions. Similarly, Ginger Rodger’s The Major and the Minor age mix-up and Audrey Hepburn’s characters in both Sabrina and Love in the Afternoon have relationships with older men, treated by the screenplay and direction as perfectly valid, if challenging, romantic dynamics. There is even a one off line in The Apartment, Wilder’s masterpiece, that implies Fran (Shirley Maclaine) is interested in women, without feeling the need to reprimand her for it. When Fran tells Bud (Jack Lemmon) that she’s off to meet a man rather than a “girl friend” as he suspected, he is surprised. “I wasn’t trying to be personal. It’s just the fellows in the office were wondering about you, you know, if you ever...” Fran interrupts him. “Just tell them now and again.” Again, we see how delicate a balance Wilder strikes between direct statement and casual discussion. He doesn’t judge his characters for their physical attraction, but rather that attractions become a complication in their lives.
Without a code of decency he must adhere to, Crowe can be more explicit about his encounters, but handles his characters motivations with the same frankness. Of course, there’s the famous pool scene from Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (a script that Crowe penned) which reminds the audience that there’s nothing our male character wants in terms of romance beyond desire. But note the way characters treat sex in Crowe’s directing work. The teenage Diane (Lone Skye) in Say Anything... has a very open talk with her father about her encounter with Lloyd (John Cusack) in which she is not judged or reprimanded for her teen romance. The Band-aids in Almost Famous, while preserving a certain amount of sanctity, also indulge in judgement-less relationships with both the band members and the main character. The young people in Crowe’s films are allowed to be explorers, without the films bringing down punishment for it.
The only real exception to this is Vanilla Sky¸ where the casual hookups of hot shot David (Tom Cruise) lead to near-fatal repercussions from his partner Julianna (Cameron Diaz). However, the consequences he faces there are more tied to his lack of care for people as people in general, not just his casual nighttime activities.
Perhaps the most apparent films for comparing the two directors are their takes on the industries they were parts of before filmmaking. Billy Wilder, a former reporter, takes a cynics view of journalism in Ace in the Hole, where newsman Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) pushes a story about a small-town incident into a carnival of national proportions in order to get the biggest paycheck. Meanwhile through the eyes of 15-year-old critic William Miller (Patrick Fugit), Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous paints his time as a young music writer as the glory days. While Ace has a camera that looks down contemptuously on the crowd the journalism industry has curated, Crowe has montages of the music scene that romanticizes, almost to a saccharine point, the culture of his job. William could be identified as a stand-in for Crowe from a police sketch, while Tatum in Ace plays mysterious. Perhaps Wilder identifies better with protagonist’s photographer, the doe-eyed Jimmy Olsen-like Herbie who does his best not be corrupted until he sees the true evil of the journalism world. It’s equally possible that Wilder thinks of himself as the villainous Tatum, although many have commented on how Ace in the Hole seems to be satirizing specifically American press and capitalism; Wilder was a writer back in Austria. Both directors see their industry as a dying breed, even if Wilder saw it sooner, in that the writer in both films is strangled by an industry, although William is innocent and Tatum holds his own noose.
These rebellious themes of bad-faith corporations and evil capitalism will echo throughout both filmographies. Crowe in particular saturates his movies with these ideas. While Stillwater in Almost Famous rages against their monetization through pressure to break up the band via t-shirts and airplanes, Aloha’s Brian (Bradley Cooper) uncovers a millionaire’s plot to arm the sky for fun and profit, and even the teenage dimwit Lloyd feels he can Say Anything... when he claims he doesn’t want to “sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” The plot of Crowe’s incredibly self-indulgent Showtime miniseries Roadies follows similar lines as a plot to corporatize and destabilize the band is set against a failing music industry. The inciting incident of Jerry Maguire involves a successful sports agent bashing the corporate treadmill via a memo to his coworkers, and Cruise will be forced to come to similar grips with his executive lifestyle in Vanilla Sky. Even in his most thematically milquetoast work Elizabethtown, Crowe places the professional corporate failure of shoe designer Drew (Orlando Bloom) transforming into a depression impressing fiasco as a reminder of how corporate jobs can eat away at the innards of your whole life and leave you hollow. Yet Crowe still keeps it light; both Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire might say we live in a cynical world, Crowe’s films ultimately disagree.
Crowe was taking from the master of cynicism, and although Wilder didn’t consider himself so, his films villainous viewpoints on industry are noteworthy. In Double Indemnity, insurance agents scoff at anyone trying filing a claim and are always suspicious of their tragedy (although with good cause in particulars of that plot). Ace in the Hole features an entire industry springing up out of a man trapped in a mineshaft, including that man’s wife reveling in the sudden monetary success her restaurant has in her husband’s near-death experience. And of course, no analysis of Wilder’s hatred for corporate America would be complete without mentioning The Apartment, and the sleezy CEO types that low level executive Bud profits off of by renting out his titular living space for their affairs. Bud’s similarity to Maguire is palpable in how he comes to grips with the evil of his action, only Maguire does so in the first act rather than by the third.
There are other small connections between the two that deserve a mention. In both Jerry Maguire and Elizabethtown there are references to two-time Wilder starlet Audrey Hepburn, the latter of which shows footage of her in Roman Holiday. A moment depicting landing gear in Jerry Maguire was actually footage shot by Billy Wilder for Avanti! and repurposed for Crowe’s most popular film. In fact, Crowe wanted Wilder to play mentor sports agent Dicky Fox, though Wilder declined to the faces of both Crowe and Cruise, citing that he was not an actor and would ruin the picture.
Years after this rejection, while Crowe was writing the script for his next film, he approached his inspiration to interview him about writing the book that would become “Conversations with Wilder,” in which he and his hero talk about every one of his great films together. The year after the book was published, Almost Famous, in which the child rock critic gets to meet and talk to his hero Lester Bangs, was released. Billy Wilder died two years after that. Perhaps it is just coincidence that Elizabethtown, a film involving a man grieving the loss of a father figure he barely knew, would be Crowe’s next film project. But then again, maybe not.
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