C ameron Crowe has a vivid memory of the day he began filming his own life story. It was the summer of 1999 and he was back in his home city of San Diego, on the same streets where he had spent his surreal teenage years, flitting between suburban domesticity and his new life as a prodigious music writer, spending long weeks in the company of such 1970s gods as David Bowie , Fleetwood Mac , the Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin .

Shooting was about to begin on a scene in which his 15-year-old self – renamed “William Miller” and played by the unknown actor Patrick Fugit – receives career advice from Lester Bangs, the legendary music writer who was Crowe’s hero and mentor, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman . “It’s gonna get ugly, man,” he says. “They’re gonna buy you drinks, you’re go

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