Cameron Crowe

After having been the youngest contributing writer in the history of Rolling Stone magazine, Cameron Crowe parlayed his early success into a filmmaking career that included some of the seminal relationship movies of the 1980s and 1990s. Crowe spent his unusual adolescence as a music reviewer and writer for several prominent magazines, including Creem and Playboy. But when Rolling Stone left the West Coast for New York, he stayed put and wrote a book about his undercover high school experiences, which was turned into the seminal teenage comedy, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982), for which he wrote the script. He soon followed up with his feature debut as a director with "Say Anything" (1989), a surprisingly mature and insightful teenage romantic comedy that stood apart and atop from all the others in the genre. Following a look into the love lives of grunge-era twenty-somethings in "Singles" (1992), Crowe had a huge critical and commercial hit with "Jerry Maguire" (1996), which boasted one of Tom Cruise's finest performances and inducted the catchphrase "Show me the money!" into the cultural lexicon. Drawing upon his early experiences as a traveling music journalist for "Almost Famous" (2000), Crowe enjoyed his greatest critical praise, as well as an Academy Award for his screenplay. Though he stumbled with the New Age-y "Vanilla Sky" (2001) and the critically panned "Elizabethtown" (2005), Crowe had already firmly established himself as a hero of Gen-X moviegoers who appreciated his personalized, character-driven films.