Trailer
Plot summary
Elaine, a widowed college professor, starts her son William in school early and forbids rock music at home, and he struggles to fit in with his classmates. His older sister Anita leaves for San Francisco. By 1973 William is fifteen and selling freelance pieces to small music magazines. The rock journalist Lester Bangs pays him to interview Black Sabbath, and at the concert he talks his way backstage, where the guitarist Russell Hammond and Penny Lane, who leads a group of female fans called the Band-Aids, take an interest in him. After reading his work, an editor at Rolling Stone hires him to travel with Stillwater and write about the band.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Almost Famous (2000)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Brad Pitt was originally set to play Russell Hammond, but he and Crowe decided during rehearsal that it was not the right fit. The line I am a golden god, written for Pitt, stayed in the script for Billy Crudup; Crowe said it came from Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant on a Riot House balcony.
- Crowe took the film to London for a special screening with Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and Plant, after which the band granted him the right to use one of their songs, the first time they had consented since Kashmir in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
- The scene in which Russell jumps from the top of the Topeka party house into a pool came from something Duane Allman really did, off the third floor of a place called the Travelodge in San Francisco, while the man who owned the place came out shaking his fist.
- Stillwater was the name of a real band signed to Capricorn Records in Macon, Georgia, so the film's producers had to obtain permission. Real Stillwater guitarist Bobby Golden said their lawyer got in touch, and that when the filmmakers wanted it for free he refused.
- Sarah Polley was originally cast as Penny Lane but dropped out when Brad Pitt did. Natalie Portman and Kirsten Dunst were also considered before Kate Hudson was finally cast for the role.
- The film performed poorly in theaters, grossing $47.4 million against a $60 million budget, yet earned four Academy Award nominations with a win for Best Original Screenplay, and Roger Ebert hailed it as the best film of the year and the ninth best of the 2000s.
- In 2021, Rolling Stone published the film's fictional article Stillwater Runs Deep, credited to William Miller and backdated to August 30, 1973.
