Cameron Crowe Returns

6:00 AM PST 11/20/2011 by Kim Masters

One movie tanked, another went off the rails, his marriage foundered. But after six years, the director is back with "We Bought a Zoo," and once again he used rock 'n' roll to get his way.

When Cameron Crowe was courting Matt Damon to star in We Bought a Zoo, he traveled to the set of the Coen brothers' True Grit in Austin and presented Damon with a script, a CD of songs that he'd burned and a copy of Local Hero -- a perfect little 1983 movie in which Peter Riegert played an oil-company executive sent to buy a remote village in Scotland.