Cameron Crowe may not have been born on the West Coast (his actual birthplace is Palm Springs, in the middle of the desert) but he was certainly raised on the shores of the Pacific Ocean - in San Diego, where his father was in real estate and his mother was a college professor. Crowe’s films have focused on the high-octane world at the edges of America: professional sport in Jerry Maguire; the world of rock ‘n’ roll in Almost Famous; the New York art and publishing scene in Vanilla Sky. But, from his early days as a reporter with Rolling Stone (whose staff he joined at the ridiculously early age of 15), the writer/director began to feel that something was being left out of the America he saw (and, for that matter, portrayed) in his articles and in the movies. And what was missing, he felt, were the people who don’t live in a big city by the sea.
CAMERON CROW’S NEW MOVIE ELIZABETHTOWN BRINGS TOGETHER ORLANDO BLOOM AND KIRSTEN DUNST IN A FUNNY, HEART-WARMING TALE OF LOSS AND
REDISCOVERY - NOT TO MENTION A TRIP INTO THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND. HAL HAYES REPORTS.
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“When I was a lot younger and writing for Rolling Stone,” he recalls, “I’d be in a place like Arkansas or Oklahoma or Texas and fans would come up to me and say, ‘Why doesn’t your magazine write about people here?’ Now it’s ‘Are you going to mention our city in your movie?’ I didn’t want to write a story that could only happen in a huge city that everybody knows. I thought, ‘What about the people in between? What about the people in Elizabethtown, Kentucky?’”
The script that Crowe wrote - and the movie that he subsequently made - is very much about the people who live in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. It’s also firmly anchored in another American myth: that of the road trip. That means that Elizabethtown is also about roads and getting places on them using maps, so I should probably specify that Elizabethtown is a real, mid-sized town (pop: 18,200 according to Rand-McNally) 60 miles south of Louisville (a name you shouldn’t even try to pronounce if you don’t want to be immediately identified as an outsider). I should also add that, if you want to get there, there’s a particular exit from Route 65 you should be darned sure not to miss (the film, which is stuffed with such local details, will tell you which one: 60B).
Just when things can’t get any worse and Drew is busily converting his exercise bicycle into a means of committing suicide, he gets a phone call from his sister. His father. Mitch, has died on a trip back to the Kentucky town he came from: Elizabethtown. Their mother (Susan Sarandon) is freaking out: what Drew needs to do is come home, then go down to Elizabethtown and collect the body.
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