Cameron Crowe’s Roadies
Behind the scenes of a rock band on tour: new series on Showtime
Like the young lead of his movie Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe began his career as a teenager writing for Rolling Stone magazine. On his first cover story, about the Allman Brothers Band, he not only interviewed the musicians but the entire road crew. So it’s hardly surprising that Crowe’s first cable TV series would be about a makeshift family of roadies, specifically one that’s employed by a fictional rock group known as the Staten-House Band.
It’s big news that Crowe, who wrote the screenplay to the iconic big-screen teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), based on his novel, and wrote and directed the beloved films Say Anything… (1989) and Jerry Maguire (1996), is making Roadies as a Showtime series of ten one-hour episodes, his first venture into TV production. The show premieres Sunday, June 26, and will be streamable on demand and online.
With an ensemble cast headed by Luke Wilson as the tour manager and Carla Gugino as his ex-wife and the tour’s production manager, Roadies gives an insider’s look at the reckless, romantic, funny and often poignant lives of a committed road crew, chronicling the rock world through the eyes of music’s unsung heroes. Costarring are Imogen Poots, Rafe Spall, Keisha Castle-Hughes (Academy Award nominee for Whale Rider), Peter Cambor, Colson Baker and Ron White. “I always knew that the roadies were more pure music geeks than crews on movies are movie geeks,” Crowe said in a recent interview. “And I wanted to honor that.”
