Coming of Age Films—Almost Famous

In many respects, Almost Famous [2000] by Cameron Crowe, was a fairy tale. Imagine—you’re in high school and music is your life. And you’re particularly drawn to all the cool magazines that write about music—you’ve even had a couple of things published in the smaller magazines. Then imagine you get the chance to tour with a super cool group and write about them for Rolling Stone. It’s the 70s, music is SO driving the teen culture—and you’re 15 and you don’t just get to observe it and fantasize about it, you’re smack dab in the middle of it.

This is a film that won the Oscar for best original screenplay. So it’s way more than ‘just’ a teen coming of age film. Take a look at the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nayCaqWioS0

If you get a chance, watch this film. It’s full of lessons on how to construct a story.

Almost Famous takes us back to the main character, William, when he was a kid. It lets us see his family life—his mom and his sister. His mom hates rock music so much his sister hides her collection under the floorboards in her bedroom. Then, when she leaves home with her boyfriend, she leaves William her collection. The sister and the mother are both fun characters, but it’s William’s journey at 15 that becomes the center of the film.

There’s reason to not like the mother in the film—she’s uber-strict. But she’s also a mother who lets her 15-year-old go on the road with a rock band. So she’s insightful as well as to what’s important to her son—she just loves him to death.

Looking at the character of the mother in Almost Famous is a good lesson in terms of the fleshing out of your characters. She’s not the focus of the film at all—but her presence informs our understanding of her son, and hence, his journey. It would have been so tempting to just have the mother be your stock, disapproving mother character. But she’s not that. At all. She’s multi-layered and you could see building this entire story around her.

And that would be a good exercise. Imagine this film with HER as your main character. Well, it wouldn’t be a coming of age film, would it? Or would it? Why should coming of age films be restricted to the young? But no matter how you label it, it would be a film about a mother’s struggles letting her son go. You can see the plot changing, can’t you? Instead of lamenting what’s happening to her son, she follows him. Maybe she even tries to dress younger—like one of the groupies—to gain access to the band’s followers. Maybe she spies on her son just to be sure he’s OK. Maybe she finds herself romantically drawn to one of the band members. The possibilities are endless.

It’s just this kind of exercise that will help you flesh out the mother in your story. The film doesn’t have to be about her at all—but imagining that will give you more of an insight into who she is, and the more you know her, the richer a character she is in this film about her son.

So much work goes into to creating these characters—that is, IF you want your characters to be remembered and to move the story forward.

Copyright © Diane Lake

26Sep21

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