Word: lane
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...real person, played by Terry Chen) to profile an up-and-coming (fictional) rock band called Stillwater. Trying to get an interview with Stillwater guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), young Miller finds himself traveling with the band and falling in love with the guitarist's pet groupie, Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), all the while remaining bound to the apron strings of his mother (Frances McDormand), a liberal crusader who sees rock 'n' roll as nothing more than a drug-laden detour on her son's path to law school...
...with waist-length red hair, moved to Los Angeles to be with a keyboard player for Steppenwolf. There she became enamored of musicians and their milieu, and when she returned to Portland, she continued hanging out with the bands that came through town. Adopting the name Pennie Lane and a vintage 1940s wardrobe of dresses, hats and gloves, she became one of the era's more notable groupies, playing den mother to a group of attractive acolytes known as "the Flying Garter Girls." "They had to be good students, and they couldn't get drunk, and they couldn...
Around 1973, Crowe and Lane met at a Portland concert. "I could always tell if someone had that star quality," says Lane, who retired from the groupie scene at age 21, received her M.B.A. and now owns a marketing firm in Portland. "He had it all over him, the aura. I said, 'You're gonna be huge! Huge!' He was so cute...
Crowe, who spells her name Penny in his screenplay, says he wrote the character as "a mythical creature"--part the real Lane and a couple of other groupies, part Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment and part Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. He intended to cast Sarah Polley, a restrained actress who has charmed critics in Go and The Sweet Hereafter, "but as we worked on the part, Penny became more obviously Shirley MacLaine," he says, "a kind of deluded comedian, an angel with a broken wing." Finally, Polley walked away during preproduction, and Hudson stepped in. "Sarah...
...rock 'n' roll in the '70s, dancing rapidly toward the edge of a cliff, but Crowe--still a kind of wide-eyed wonder--has given his story and his characters happy endings. We would like to do the same here, and so we return to the real Pennie Lane. "I'm putting it together now," she says. "It's gonna be a retirement home called the Raisin Ranch for aging rock stars and wayward groupies. We're all gonna be deaf because we didn't wear earplugs. So where are we gonna go? I'm on it." She needn...