Cameron Crowe
             Cameron Crowe is one of Hollywood's premier filmmakers. He began his cinematic career by penning the screenplay for the wildly popular 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and he made his directorial debut in 1989 with Say Anything . . . , a sophisticated teen romance. Crowe is perhaps best known, though, for the 1996 film Jerry Maguire, which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, and Almost Famous, which earned the Academy Award in 2001.
             Crowe was born on July 13, 1957, in Palm Springs, California. His father was a real estate agent and his mother was a teacher, activist, and all-around live wire. He had two older sisters, but one died during childhood. Crowe was a sickly child, suffering from the kidney disease nephritis, but he was also very bright. He skipped kindergarten and two primary grades. For this reason, Crowe never really felt comfortable with his school peers throughout his adolescence.
             Crowe did enjoy writing for the school newspaper. By the time he was thirteen, he was also writing for the San Diego Door, an underground newspaper, and he soon began submitting articles to the popular-music magazines Creem and Circus. Crowe graduated in 1972 at age fifteen, and on a trip to Los Angeles met Ben Fong-Torres, the editor of Rolling Stone, who hired him to write for the magazine. During his seven years with Rolling Stone, Crowe profiled such artists as the Allman Brothers Band, the Eagles, Peter Frampton, King Crimson, and Led Zeppelin.
             At age nineteen and still boyish, Crowe came up with the idea to pose undercover as a high school student and write about his experiences. At the school he made friends and began to fit in. Crowe described his assignment as "the senior year I never had." Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story is the book that resulted from Crowe's year in high school. It focused on six main characters and chronicles their activities in typical teenage settings such as s...