SINGLES (1992) is writer/director Cameron Crowe’s valentine to his adopted hometown of Seattle. This romantic comedy is drenched in the city’s unwashed music scene, or what others would market as “grunge rock.” It’s about the steps men and women stumble over in their journey into adulthood. That order — Seattle, soundtrack, twentysomethings — is what Crowe’s sophomore directorial effort knows best. Almost two-thirds of it holds together, but it’s the last third, the one fresh in our memory, that falls apart.
Cameron Crowe was born in Palm Springs, California in 1957. The Crowes would move around the Coachella Valley before finally settling in San Diego. His father sold residential real estate and his mother, Alice Marie Crowe, taught English and sociology at San Diego City College, where she served as a guidance counselor. Alice was a social activist, her commitment to farmworkers’ rights landing Cesar Chavez as a speaker in her classroom. She bypassed enrolling her son in kindergarten and skipped him over two more grades in elementary school, telling Kim Masters of the Hollywood Reporter in 2011, “It wasn’t that I was a tiger mom and wanted to push my son. He was sort of bored.” Looking for somewhere he fit in, Crowe found his footing in the offices of his high school newspaper. As early as thirteen, he began writing music reviews for the left-wing San Diego newspaper The Door, having found in rock musicians what some of us find in movies: no judgment, no rejection, no matter when he wanted to hang out.
Crowe graduated from high school in 1972, at age fifteen. Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres, who’d met Crowe at a public relations firm in Los Angeles, recalled, “He shyly offered to let me see a couple of his reviews and a story or two. They were good enough that I felt like there was something here … He was obviously a quick learner, a fast thinker and a diplomat. Just a social animal.” Fong-Torres assigned Crowe a piece on Poco, a country-rock group better known within the music industry than they are outside it. This led to Crowe, looking every bit a teenager, being sent on the road with the Allman Brothers Band for two weeks. He would write sixteen cover interviews for Rolling Stone, on acts like Led Zeppelin and The Eagles who journalists of the time regularly dismissed. When Rolling Stone relocated to New York in 1977, it occurred to Crowe that his journalism career had peaked, at nineteen. David Obst, a former Rolling Stone staffer who was an editor at Simon & Schuster, pitched Crowe a book idea the magazine had kicked around, an exposé on the American teenager. Crowe talked his way into enrolling in his hometown Clairemont High School as a senior in the 1978–79 term, a scheme unthinkable within twenty years as gun violence in schools became a national concern (Crowe claimed he received permission to go undercover as a student by sharing tales of interviewing Kris Kristofferson with the principal, who was a fan. A teacher, and later four more, were let in on the ruse.) Crowe’s field research informed his book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, published in 1981.
Universal Pictures optioned the film rights, placing Art Linson, thirty-nine-year-old producer of American Hot Wax (1978) and Melvin and Howard (1980), in charge of producing a movie, and brought on Irving Azoff, who managed The Eagles, as a producer to give the film a pop culture boost. Crowe — so obsessed with Led Zeppelin that he’d initially titled his book Stairway To Heaven — would see a director come aboard and compromise his vision for the high school soundtrack, Amy Heckerling favoring New Wave bands like The Go-Go’s. (Heckerling faulted Azoff, not Crowe, for pushing rock acts onto the soundtrack, including solo songs by former members of The Eagles.) Linson, looking for a cheap writer to adapt a screenplay, mentored Crowe as he switched gears from journalist to screenwriter. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), peppered with Southern California teenspeak and carrying an unexpectedly hard edge, left such a bad taste in the mouths of Universal executives that they held off opening it on the East Coast. Critics were contemptuous. Convinced he’d written a flop, Crowe left Los Angeles on a road trip in August 1982 as his movie opened. Stopping in Tempe, Arizona, Crowe couldn’t resist visiting a theater showing the film. To his amazement, screenings were not only sold out, but teenagers were paying to see it again. Some were already reciting his dialogue, most of it belonging to Crowe’s blissed out teen surfer, Jeff Spicoli. Fast Times at Ridgemont High went from a wobbly release to a late summer sleeper hit to one of the most rewatched youth comedies of the decade.
Revising their assessment of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Universal was high on a sequel, proposing Crowe send Spicoli to college. The screenwriter had a better idea. Titled The Wild Life (1984), Crowe’s follow-up was mainly about a high school graduate who can only afford his first apartment by sharing it with a party animal. Crowe wrote the script, Linson and Crowe produced, and Linson directed. Without a director with the discipline and taste of Amy Heckerling behind the camera, The Wild Life had no one to keep its impulses in check. The film’s commercial reception was further damaged by opening against Teachers (1984), an irreverent high school comedy from the point of view of faculty, led by Nick Nolte, which generated better word of mouth. Crowe later referred to his sophomore screenwriting credit as “a disaster. Not that I started out to write a script about women who take their tops off, but it sure ended up that way. It wound up being what Fast Times was a reaction against — an exploitative view of youth.” By Crowe’s own account, the only person in Hollywood interested in his ideas after The Wild Life was James L. Brooks, who’d won three Academy Awards in one night for adapting, producing and directing Terms of Endearment (1983).
Crowe hit it off with Brooks, meeting several times a week with the filmmaker to discuss screenwriting, comedy and plot. In 1983, Crowe had started sketching ideas for a screenplay about a character he hadn’t seen portrayed much in film: a single man in his twenties. Initially set in Phoenix, Arizona, Crowe titled the project Singles. Speaking to Margy Rochlin of Interview in November 1984, Crowe clarified, “I consider myself a single because I can’t picture marriage yet. I just can’t. I still haven’t crossed the line. Singles is about making that transition. It’s about being 21 and saying, ‘Ugh, she wants to get married,’ to being 28 or 29 and saying, ‘So, where is she?’ … It’s not about high school and it is not an ensemble piece. It’s about one guy and it spans ten years.” Brooks heard his protégé out, but didn’t warm to Singles. He instead challenged Crowe to write a romantic comedy with a young woman at its emotional center, a high school graduate who discovers the person she respects more than anyone, her widowed father, is a crook. Renowned production designer Polly Platt, whom Brooks was nudging into producing and directing, produced Say Anything…, Crowe’s directorial debut. Crowe would say of Brooks in 1992, “I owe a lot to him because — no offense — I was headed toward Encino Man.”
After working within the confines of three-act structure for Say Anything …, Crowe wanted his next film to “play more like an album.” His love life would play an even greater role in Singles than Crowe may have anticipated. His romance with guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Nancy Wilson began in 1982, when he met Nancy and her sister Ann to discuss their band Heart contributing music to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (Nancy would cameo in the movie as the Corvette driving woman who Judge Reinhold’s character meets in traffic. Wilson was billed as “Beautiful Girl In Car.”) Wilson lived in Seattle, and Crowe began commuting to spend time with her. This introduced him to KCMU, broadcast from the University of Washington. Speaking to Alexis Sottile of Rolling Stone for an interview published in May 2017, Crowe recalled, “It was kind of the college station, and it was way to the left of the dial. They played a lot of what would later be called the ‘Seattle sound,’ but they mixed it in with all kinds of stuff, like old blues. What in L.A. would have been called ‘cheesy R&B’ was mixed in with Blood Circus or Mudhoney, and I just thought it was the greatest programming ever. Or somebody would tape Kurt Cobain half asleep having a phone conversation and they’d put that on the air. So I fell in love with the whole mix of genres, and I thought, ‘If I get to make a movie up here, it’s going to sound like this.’” Crowe started recording broadcasts and toting them back to L.A. on cassette tape. He moved to Seattle in 1986, marrying Nancy Wilson there later in the year.
Ann and Nancy Wilson’s publicist, Kelly Curtis, managed one of the bands from Crowe’s KCMU tapes: Mother Love Bone. Featuring Andrew Wood on lead vocals, Stone Gossard on guitar, and Jeff Ament on bass, the glam-dusted hard rockers shared the same affinity for Led Zeppelin that Heart did, making Crowe a natural fan. He started spending time with Gossard and Ament. Crowe recalled, “I liked those guys and I liked the fact that they had all these jobs, you know? Being in a band was like a privilege that they didn’t take for granted the way bands do in so many other places. These guys are like, ‘Okay, well, I gotta pull espresso till about 4 and then I’m gonna see my girlfriend for an hour and then I gotta do some messenger stuff on my bike and then we get to play.’ I love that whole spirit, so the beginning of Singles really was back in ’88 when I just started interviewing Stone and Jeff about their lives and how they juggle job versus love versus sex versus music and everything.” In the fall of 1988, Crowe filmed Say Anything … in Los Angeles, settling for some second unit shots of Seattle in his film and Mother Love Bone’s “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” on the soundtrack. Crowe’s directorial debut made both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert’s lists of the year’s ten best films, and word of mouth kept it among the top ten grossing films in the country for six weeks.
On March 16, 1990, Andrew Wood was found unresponsive in his apartment, having suffered a heroin overdose. Three days later, the lead singer of Mother Love Bone would be removed from life support at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Crowe received the news from Curtis on his answering machine. Crowe and Wilson headed to Curtis’s house, joining Wood’s friends for a memorial unlike any Crowe had attended before. He would recall the day’s events in a Singles production diary published by Rolling Stone in October 1992. Crowe wrote, “Somewhere around midnight, warming over a barbecue pit, I felt rocked by the whole experience. I’d been working pretty steadily since I was fifteen, and looking back, most of my friends were made through work. They were acquaintances more than friends. And here were these disconnected single people, many from broken homes, many meeting each other for the first time, forming their own family. I was in the process of rewriting an old script of mine at the time. It was called Singles, and that night it took a different course. I wanted to write something that captured the feeling in that room. Not Andy’s story but the story of how people instinctively need to be together. Is anybody truly single?”
Crowe shared his Seattle-set draft of Singles with Art Linson. The producer had hustled for three years to get his follow-up to The Wild Life into theaters, delivering a smash with The Untouchables (1987). Linson followed this with Casualties of War (1989) and We’re No Angels (1989). He landed an exclusive three-year production deal with Warner Bros. Pictures, and in January 1991, Daily Variety confirmed that one of his first projects under that deal would be Singles. The studio assigned Richard Hashimoto, an assistant director in the 1970s turned film producer in the 1980s, most notably with Beetlejuice (1988), to produce Singles with Cameron Crowe. Linson served as executive producer. Despite his success as a writer/director with Say Anything …, Crowe was closer to being a rock journalist than he was a filmmaker, admitting to Henry Sheehan of the Vancouver Sun in September 1992, “Mostly I just love to write about relationships. It comes from journalism, I think, spending a lot of time talking with people. To me, it’s just so much fun to write dialogue. The most fun is writing the stuff between people, where they’ve been communicating or miscommunicating. And relationships seem to be what most of us end up talking about eventually. The difficult thing is it’s hard to find actors to do this kind of material. And I’ve really had a hard time getting the right actors to do my stuff.”
Singles is an ensemble of characters, five of whom reside in the same apartment building in Seattle. Where most feature films use a three-act structure, Crowe conceived his romantic comedy more like an underground EP built around six characters. Linda, who lives in a duplex across town, conducts environmental research for a non-profit and is recovering from a romantic betrayal. She reluctantly agrees to a date with Steve, a city engineer who wants to end Seattle’s gridlock with a supertrain. The first thing Linda says to him is something Polly Platt said to Crowe: “I think that, a) you have an act, and that, b) not having an act is your act.” Janet is a barista. Her boyfriend is Cliff Poncier, who holds down four jobs, most notably as frontman for Citizen Dick, a band whose signature tune “Touch Me I’m Dick” was Crowe’s riff on “Touch Me I’m Sick” by Mudhoney. Comparing herself to the hourglass-shaped women Cliff’s always eyeing, Janet visits a plastic surgeon for a consultation on breast implants. Steve’s buddy Bailey is a maitre d’ very proud of his wristwatch that can hold the telephone numbers of twenty women. Their friend Debbie is so desperate to find Mr. Right that she redeems the gift card to a video dating service the others gave her as a joke.
Crowe wrote the role of the barista for Bridget Fonda, and her part ended up being the easiest to cast. To play the earnest engineer, the director zeroed in on the actor making the leap from television star on 21 Jump Street to movie star with Edward Scissorhands (1990), meeting with Johnny Depp. Crowe recalled, “He said to me that he wasn’t ready to say ‘I love you’ in a movie the way he would have to say it in Singles.” The director would settle for Campbell Scott, son of actors George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst. Scott’s hair was growing back from what some anticipated to be a starmaking film role, a leukemia patient opposite Julia Roberts’s caretaker in Dying Young (1991). For the part of Linda, Crowe had penciled in one of the most fearless actors of her generation. Jennifer Jason Leigh — who’d graduated from playing a sexually curious sophomore in Fast Times at Ridgemont High — opted instead to portray a corrupt narcotics officer opposite Jason Patric in Rush (1991). Choosing another creep, Leigh would menace Bridget Fonda as the roommate from hell in Single White Female (1992). The thriller was filmed right after Singles, but reached theaters first. Crowe cast Kyra Sedgwick of Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990) as Linda, based on her combination of intelligence and vulnerability.
The director revealed that pop superstar Paula Abdul not only nailed her audition as Debbie, but was born to play the part. Whether scheduling became an issue or Crowe had second thoughts, Sheila Kelley, of NBC’s L.A. Law, was cast. Jim True, a Chicago theater actor, accepted the part of Bailey. Crowe was a big fan of Soundgarden, which in early 1991 was the closest Seattle had to a nationally recognized rock band. (Crowe would declare, “The guys in Nirvana used to hang out at Soundgarden shows going, ‘We’re not worthy! We wouldn’t be anything without you guys!’” The former rock journalist cited Soundgarden as the best band he’d seen perform live.) Crowe’s friendship with their gentle lead singer Chris Cornell convinced the director that Cornell could play Cliff, something that never got beyond the talking stages. Soundgarden performed in the film and Cornell later made a non-speaking cameo as himself. Crowe had his work cut out convincing Matt Dillon to take the part of Cliff. The director recalled, “He was saying, ‘I like the script, but have you seen my movies?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re great!’ ‘I’m kind of the star of my movies.’ So I told him it’s a role Jack Nicholson might have done, like in Terms of Endearment. He said, ‘Ehhhh I dunno.’” Dillon would be Quentin Tarantino’s first choice to play Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction (1994), but the actor would dither over joining the ensemble of Tarantino’s sophomore film too, losing the job to Bruce Willis. A jazz music fan unfamiliar with his character’s influences, Dillon credited his decision to join Singles with meeting Cliff’s bandmates. Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, formerly of Mother Love Bone, agreed to appear as members of Citizen Dick, along with their new lead singer, a quiet surfer from San Diego named Eddie Vedder. They would settle on naming their band Pearl Jam. In February 1991, after the first day’s rehearsal was complete, Crowe and the cast convened at the Off Ramp Café, where Pearl Jam played their second ever gig.
Singles commenced filming in Seattle in March 1991 on a production budget of roughly $9 million. This was just below the $10 million that screenwriter Nora Ephron would be given for her directorial debut, This Is My Life (1992). This was a low budget by studio standards. Crowe involved his friends wherever he could. He added Jeff Ament to the art department, using the bassist’s handwriting for the titles and plundering the walls of his apartment to dress Cliff’s pad. Crowe recalled Ament’s residence “had pages of music magazines, and exotic record-store promotional posters, and I just said, ‘Can we use all of this stuff in the movie?’” Eddie Vedder would write and Pearl Jam perform “State of Love and Trust” for the soundtrack, the tune overheard in the scene where Linda and her co-worker Ruth (Devon Raymond) dance at The Vogue. Another Seattle band, Alice In Chains, appears on-screen rocking “It Ain’t Like That” and “Would?” for the scene when Linda and Steve meet, shot in a warehouse on Pier 29 which the production converted into a nightclub. Soundgarden performed “Birth Ritual” at Central Tavern, where Steve sulks after breaking up with Linda. Exterior shooting took place at the Coryell Court apartment building in Capitol Hill, which most of the singles call home. Since the building was only a two-story walk-up, the crew filmed Janet and Cliff’s elevator scene on a soundstage. Using styrofoam, they fabricated a fountain for the courtyard. The Java Stop was shot in Pioneer Square, on the ground floor of the O.K. Hotel. Linda and Steve’s first date, where he talks her into meeting for water, was shot inside and outside the Virginia Inn, which as of this writing is unchanged from how it looked in 1991.
Crowe documented the highs and lows of making Singles in his production diary. On February 24, 1991, the day the actor arrived in Seattle, Crowe was alarmed enough to write that Campbell Scott looked like a leukemia patient, which suited Dying Young, but was jarring for Singles. Crowe was confident Scott’s scalp could be repaired with a hairpiece. By March 13, Warner Bros. voiced concerns to Crowe about how emaciated the leading man looked in dailies. Crowe was tickled to be working with Bridget Fonda, noting on April 1, “For months, in person or on the telephone, we’ve discussed every aspect of Singles. Like a dry young Barbara Stanwyck, she nailed down every small detail of Janet’s life. Seeing her finally do the part, I realize she’s deceptively low-ball. From three feet away, it appears like she’s not even acting.” In contrast, Scott had either heard about or was picking up on the dissatisfaction with his performance, and had become prickly. On April 10, Crowe wrote, “Finally, the confrontation with Campbell. The hostile humor is creeping into his performance. ‘And who are you?’ he says, when I try to talk with him … A few minutes later, while the camera is rolling, Campbell cavalierly flips off camera assistant Shawn Hise as he snaps the slate. (Shawn looks wounded; he’s a Campbell fan.) That’s it. I take him aside and tell him again to knock off the endless sarcasm. Campbell goes off, his voice booming. He’s pissed off at the way actors are treated. He wants me to understand him … The sheer volume of his voice is astounding. And then it sort of sinks in — He’s yelling at me. I cut loose myself. I start yelling at him. It’s freeing, and he backs down. In fact, he seems grateful … He tells me he respects me, he thinks I’m a great writer. Pointedly, as thirty waiting crew members pretend they’re not listening, he doesn’t add the occupation I’m currently pursuing — directing. Maybe I’ll just be a writer. This part of it, when blood is in the water, is not my favorite.”
Singles held its first test screening in Glendale, California on November 6, 1991. Crowe was so anxious on his way to the theater that he got ticketed for speeding. The realization that the fate of his film rested with four-hundred moviegoers between the ages of seventeen and thirty-four who'd been recruited at the mall did nothing to calm him. Crowe clocked each member of the audience he saw leave their seats. “I die with every walkout. I study the way they walk. Are they going to the bathroom? Will they come back?” The numbers that came back, in Crowe’s words, were “average.” Screening the movie for a friend whose opinion he trusted, Crowe was told, “I’m with the movie, and then something gets lost. You don’t ever fully explain why Steve and Linda break up.” Warner Bros. footed the bill for Crowe to return to Seattle for reshoots. In one new scene, Campbell Scott crawls into a phone booth in a nightclub and phones Linda’s answering machine asking for a second chance. Warner Bros., uneasy with the title Singles, floated Leave Me a Message as an alternative, along with a number of popular songs, like Addicted to Love. Crowe held his ground. Studio co-chairman Terry Semel attended a second test screening in Marina Del Rey on January 23, 1992, seeing the picture for the first time. Watching the crowd more than his film, Crowe believed the audience were engaged during the comedic first half, but as it turned more dramatic, with his two couples breaking up, Crowe noticed more walkouts, including two fifteen-year-old boys. Warner Bros. had seen enough. The studio pulled Singles from its planned February 1992 release.
The same month that Warner Bros. pulled Singles from its release calendar, Nirvana's Nevermind hit #1 on the Billboard album charts, bumping Michael Jackson’s Dangerous from the top spot. The explosive success of Nevermind led journalists to file breathless articles on the Seattle scene, which along with Nirvana, was launching Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden to national prominence, with Temple of the Dog riding the wave. Journalists labeled the new sound “grunge rock.” Warner Bros. had a new question for Crowe: why wasn't Nirvana in the movie? (Crowe had worked in a cameo for TAD frontman Tad Doyle as a dude Janet misdials and talks dirty to on the phone). With grunge rock dominating the airwaves, Epic Records, the label releasing the film's soundtrack, pressed Warner Bros. to let them push records, cassettes and CDs into stores immediately, whether a movie was out or not. The demand for a soundtrack forced the studio to concede with Crowe on a title: Singles. His journal entry for April 9, 1992 read, “The hometown music that helped inspire the script is now our best ally in getting the movie released.” Singles hit shelves on June 30 and went on to break into the Billboard top ten album charts, selling two million copies. In spite of hopes for another Nevermind, the album was a hit. Consisting of thirteen tracks, it kicked off with what became a hit for Alice In Chains, “Would?” Paul Westerberg, who’d dissolved his band The Replacements, agreed to score Singles and supply incidental music. In his first work released as a solo artist, Westerberg contributed “Dyslexic Heart” (played in the trailer, and several times in the film, including the opening credits) and “Waiting For Somebody.” Crowe threw in “May This Be Love” by Jimi Hendrix and a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore” by Ann and Nancy Wilson’s acoustic project The Lovemongers. The album’s closing track came in by accident, with Chris Cornell recommending a band from Chicago that Soundgarden had shared a bill with. Crowe phoned their frontman Billy Corgan to inquire whether Smashing Pumpkins had anything for Singles. Of three demos, Crowe approved “Drown,” which, by the end of the year, reached #24 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart, the biggest hit for Smashing Pumpkins to date.
The price Crowe had to pay for Warner Bros. to put Singles back on its release schedule was to convince his Seattle friends to perform at an invitation-only event to promote the film. Speaking to Jason Adams of Entertainment Weekly in September 2011, Crowe recalled, “I had to go on Lollapalooza and beg the guys in Pearl Jam to play the party. I was Willy Loman on the Lollapalooza tour. You know, it wasn’t fun and I never like asking people a favor. I just don’t. I’d rather do a million favors than ask for one. But here I was asking them on their day off to play the show. They said yes to help me get the movie released.” Taped on Thursday, September 10, 1992, MTV’s Singles Scene became one of the most infamous productions in the history of the network. As guests arrived at the Park Plaza Hotel Ballroom in Los Angeles to see Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains perform, Eddie Vedder and friends took a page from The Replacements. Crowe continued, “Eddie had some surfer buddies around and I think they needed to blow off some steam. They showed up to play this live MTV premiere party-concert drunk. Like, really drunk. And I’d never seen Eddie drunk. I mean, I’d never seen him drink!” Speaking to Eric Weisbard of Spin for an oral history of the party published in August 2001, Crowe recalled, “It was populated mostly by studio executives and their children, who wanted to see the Seattle Sound. They were playing covers, and somebody got into a fight, and Chris Cornell got into it, and I think Kim Thayil got into it. I remember Eddie yelling, ‘Fuuuck! What the fuck is this?’ and studio executives grabbing their kids and streaming out. I was seeing this whole thing to get the movie released going down the tubes.” The party would be one of the shortest of all time, MTV editing a fifteen-minute set from the debacle and airing it the following week. Pearl Jam performed three songs, with Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and Ben Shepherd, and Alice In Chains’ Jerry Cantrell, joining them for a cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin' in the Free World.” Crowe and his crew commemorated the event with t-shirts, which read “Singles Premiere Party” on the front, and on the back, “Nobody Died.” Ironically, the moments that would’ve promoted Singles honestly—twentysomethings in freefall—were cut from broadcast.
Nirvana had its own grievances against Singles. Interviewed by MTV in Seattle, along with bandmates Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, Kurt Cobain attempted to unpack Nirvana’s relationship with the movie: “They asked us to contribute a song about a year ago, and we said ‘no.’ And so you know what they did? Instead, they hired some cover band and did one of our songs. So we have no choice but be a part of this Singles family.” Based on a rumor, Cobain believed a few bars of “Come As You Are” were in the movie. On the suggestion that Singles was a rock movie carpetbagging off Seattle’s music scene, Grohl interjected some diplomacy. “Well, you know, pretty much everyone who’s seen it has pretty much said it’s a love story. It’s really just a love story that takes place in Seattle.” Nirvana’s music never made it into Singles. Speaking to Alexis Sottile of Rolling Stone in May 2017, Crowe addressed the band’s involvement. “I really liked ‘Immodium,’ and I wanted to use that. That was the one that I thought belonged in the movie … We were working towards it and I think I might have sent them a videocassette when Kurt was in Hawaii, I remember that. There was a time when we were just trying to figure out which of the songs would work. And then I found this cassette the other day in a box of stuff from Singles, when we were putting the expanded album together, and it said, Nevermind: Early Mixes … So we were on track to have Nirvana in the movie too.”
Singles opened September 18, 1992 in 1,073 theaters in the U.S. This was a smaller platform than two wide releases that opened that month, Sneakers launching in 1,731 theaters and The Last of the Mohicans in 1,491. Its release signaled that Warner Bros. wanted to see if word-of-mouth might build an audience. Reviews were mixed. Dave Kehr of the Chicago Tribune wrote, “At its best, Singles feels marvelously unstructured, moving between story threads and sampling the evolving lives of its characters with the casualness and fluidity of a film by Jean Renoir. At its worst, Singles deteriorates into randomly associated sketch-like scenes, which build to facile punchlines (Cliff installs a stereo in Janet’s car that blows out her windows) that betray the integrity of the characters and the realities of the situation.” Kehr gave the picture 3 stars out of 5. In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert added, “Singles is not a great cutting-edge movie, and parts of it may be too whimsical and disorganized for audiences raised on cause-and-effect plots. But I found myself smiling a lot during the movie, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with recognition. It’s easy to like these characters, and care about them.” Ebert also gave Singles 3 stars out of 5. In the pages of LA Weekly, Arion Berger wasn’t a fan. “Crowe’s best qualities — a journalist’s ear, a director’s eye and a player’s competence — seem to have gone the way of the Knack, leaving trite symbolism and spurious pronouncements.” Singles opened against Disney’s pairing of Kurt Russell and Martin Short in Captain Ron, while in limited release, Husbands and Wives, which documented a couple played by Allen and Mia Farrow breaking up as the actors were in real life, arrived amid a firestorm of controversy. Singles spent three weekends among the top ten grossing movies in the country and its fourth at #11 as exhibitors began dropping it. It sold almost as many tickets as Captain Ron, but the perception was that Cameron Crowe’s valentine to Seattle had failed to reach a broader audience.
Sixteen months after Singles exited theaters, a wave of romantic comedies about twentysomethings grappling with adulthood opened: Reality Bites (1994), Sleep With Me (1994), The Brothers McMullen (1995), Kicking and Screaming (1995), Beautiful Girls (1996) and Swingers (1996). Five are classics, while Sleep With Me — starring Meg Tilly, Eric Stoltz and Craig Sheffer, with a riotous cameo by Quentin Tarantino — plays a lot like the album Crowe envisioned, with six different screenwriters scripting six social gatherings which anchor the story. Cameron Crowe was critical of his attempts to employ a similar episodic structure, confiding to Scott Tobias with the AV Club in 2000, “I have my problems with Singles. To me, Singles is the least successful of the movies I’ve been lucky enough to make. It was meant to be Manhattan, a movie I loved, set in Seattle. It stayed in the can for a year until the studio released it on the heels of the so-called ‘grunge explosion,’ which created some problems of perception. But there were also some casting issues and some screenwriting problems I never quite solved. Pulp Fiction solved the vignettes issue in a way that made my jaw drop. I thought, ‘Fuck!’ If I had done Singles later, I might not have made some of those mistakes. I would have been one of the many movies that ripped off Pulp Fiction instead. Singles didn’t aspire to define a generation. It aspired to be my tribute to Manhattan. So there’s a little frustration there. I hope that someday, as time goes on, it can live on as a snapshot of that period, because Seattle is not the same anymore.”
Singles delivers a strong left hook at the opening bell by virtue of its raw soundtrack. A nightclub scene in which Alice In Chains perform as Steve attempts to pick up Linda is the sort so many movies get wrong. Crowe’s dedication to not only record his bands live on set (no lip-synching in Seattle) but also pick music indicative of place and time gives the movie punch. Compared to the hit soundtrack, the music in the movie is even more eclectic, reflecting Crowe’s KCMU tapes, with Muddy Waters’ “Little Girl” and R.E.M.’s “Radio Song” giving the movie a jolt. When it comes to Crowe sharing his record collection with the viewer, Singles stands shoulder to shoulder with his best films. Another underrated element here is Campbell Scott. Few actors ever become stars, and Scott didn’t, but his character is the one which Crowe has the greatest familiarity with, and Scott delivers Crowe’s dialogue exceptionally well (“Bailey, you got twenty numbers of twenty girls you will never call, never date, never see in the daylight. Twenty numbers that exist only to make you feel like a guy who can go out and get twenty numbers,” is perfect). It says a lot about Crowe as a writer that the hardest character to write — Steve, uncool among the cool — is the most compelling. In a film with its casting miscues, Scott is the right call.
Taxed with double duty as unit production manager and producer, Richard Hashimoto was unable to offer Crowe something he desperately needed for Singles: a creative partner grounded in writing and casting, someone like James L. Brooks, who’d produce Crowe’s next film, the blockbuster Jerry Maguire (1996). Crowe needed a producer like Brooks to tell him that the last third of his script didn't work, and needed to rethink his entire paradigm for Singles. While Campbell Scott delivers Crowe's dialogue superbly and is a fine surrogate for the writer/director, craft can't untangle the film's structure, which is a mess. The most talented actor in the cast, the one whom Crowe wrote for, Bridget Fonda is the strand worth following. She's the lead in name only, playing a plain barista (when Janet asks Steve whether she’s the type of Amazon woman Cliff drools over, he tells her, “You’re from the high plains, Janet.”) As written, Janet has no desire we want to see fulfilled. In 1997, Fonda turned down the title role in the television series Ally McBeal, and it’s easy to imagine a version of Singles in which Janet is working on ending gridlock, not Steve. Sitting right there in a movie titled Singles is a hopeless romantic trying to get people out of their single occupancy vehicles to join a community, sacrificing freedom for companionship, a vision that belongs on Janet’s lips, not Steve’s. Even without Janet and Steve trading places, a stronger producer could have coached Crowe to steal from Manhattan (1979) more than he does by basing his Seattle romantic comedy on four characters instead of six. Neither Bailey nor Debbie is tethered to the film, and much of Jim True and Sheila Kelley’s performances ended up on the cutting room floor.
Singles runs 99 minutes, and the first 60 are consistently funny. Crowe gets excellent work from actors he puts in as pinch-hitters, with Paul Giamatti, James Le Gros and Jeremy Piven lighting up their scenes. Piven appears as a pharmacy cashier and gets the biggest laugh in the movie. Crowe also excels at writing scenes that take place in or around doctor’s offices, or environments where characters realize someone else is about to make a major life decision for them. This leads to a cute in which Bill Pullman — kicking off a Nice Guys Finish Last trilogy that continued opposite Jodie Foster in Sommersby (1993) and Meg Ryan in Sleepless In Seattle (1993) before Pullman escaped the friend zone winning Sandra Bullock in While You Were Sleeping (1995) — plays a plastic surgeon who talks Bridget Fonda’s character out of cosmetic surgery. When we realize that Pullman isn’t coming back, Singles starts to come apart. It’s not that Pullman is a better actor than Matt Dillon, but his shy surgeon is absolutely the more compelling character to pair the neglected barista with. Crowe is putting his arms around air when it comes to both of his couples, forcing an unexpected pregnancy on Linda and Steve that feels desperate and continues the film on its spiral. As for Janet and Cliff, both characters are sweet and goofy but lack depth, and after an hour, become faint. Crowe makes the right mixtape. He doesn’t find the right mix of people.
Video rental category: Romantic Comedy
Special interest: Fictional Bands
This production history draws on Cameron Crowe’s “Making the Scene: A Filmmaker’s Diary” (Rolling Stone, 10–1–1992), Rachel Abramowitz’s “Take Two” (Premiere, August 1992), and Kit Boss’s “Camera Obscura: Cameron Crowe Tells the True Stories of the MTV Generation” (Seattle Times, 9–13–1992). Also cited are Margy Rochlin’s “Cameron Crowe: Stalking the Wild Life” (Interview, November 1984), Alexis Sottile’s “Cameron Crowe on the Singles Soundtrack, Chris Cornell” (Rolling Stone, 5–18–2017), Patrick MacDonald’s “Rock Singles” (Seattle Times, 8–30–1992), Tom Green’s “Long Way from Ridgemont High for Crowe” (Chicago Sun-Times, 9–28–1992), Bill Forman’s “Swingin’ Singles” (Creem, June-July 1992), Eric Weisbard, Jessica Letkemann, Ann Powers, Chris Norris, William Van Meter, and Will Hermes’s “Ten Past Ten” (Spin, August 2001), Scott Tobias’s “Cameron Crowe” (AV Club, 9–13–2000), Greg Mariotti’s “Who the Hell Is Ricky Fedora?” (The Uncool, 6–7–2002), Henry Sheehan’s “Singles Seen” (Vancouver Sun, 9–14–1992), Susan Morgan’s “Crowe’s Feat” (Details, September 1992), Tim Appelo’s “Saturday Night Fever” (Entertainment Weekly, August 1992), Jason Adams’s “Pearl Jam’s drunken MTV debacle: Cameron Crowe looks back” (Entertainment Weekly, 9–16–2011), “Singles Filming Locations” on The Uncool, and Shirley Cobain’s YouTube channel.
Hey Joe, thank you for this… I never saw the movie singles but reading about all the rock ‘n’ roll connections. It’s like discovering Neil Young and Rick James hung out in Canada before Buffalo Springfield, or that Paul had Jane Asher as a girlfriend who is connected to Peter and Gordon or that the Beatles wrote a song for the stones which launched their careers etc. etc. etc. a great read brother thank you! Peace! CPZ