“Almost Famous” Cameron Crowe's 2000 semi-autobiographical coming of age comedy drama was a critic's darling and a commercial flop. The story, which earned Crowe an Oscar for the best original screenplay, is set in the early 1970's and tells the tale of a teenager traveling with a rock band and covering them for a music magazine. William Miller (Patrick Fugit) is a San Diego teenager obsessed with rocknroll. He writes for a local underground music paper and sends his work to his idol Lester Bangs (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), then a journalist at Rolling Stone. Lester hires him to write a review of a Black Sabath concert, where he meets and befriends the members of an up and coming band called Stillwater, as well as a gang of groupies who call themselves “Band Aid”, led by the beautiful, mysterious Penny Lane (Kate Hudson). Ben Fong-Torres, the editor of Rolling Stone, not knowing that William is still underage ,asks him to travel with the touring Stillwater and write an article about the experience. William's overprotective mother Elaine (Francis McDormand) reluctantly agrees to let him go, and suddenly he is on a bus with his idols, surrounded by drugs, groupies and any other excessive vice known to man. Touring with Stillwater William will grow up fast, lose his virginity, become disillusioned with his idols and other rock stars, form friendships with some of them, have the time of his life and feel both love and betrayal. Along the way he will bury some old family hatchets and learn that underneath all that glitz and glam, rock stars are only human, with all their virtues and failings.
Jason Segel collects puppets
