Almost Famous|Newport Avenue, Ocean Beach — The Street the Titles Walk Down

Three and a half minutes into Almost Famous, the film stops being about a house and starts being about a town. William and his mother walk a flat commercial street of low storefronts, and behind them the Strand's marquee stands over the sidewalk. That is Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach, four blocks of San Diego that Cameron Crowe knew as a kid and came back to when he made the most autobiographical film of his career.

The street has not been tidied since. Newport still runs west toward the water in a straight line, still ends at the sand, still smells of fryer oil and salt in roughly equal measure. Antique dealers and surf shops occupy the flat-fronted buildings. The Strand stopped showing films decades ago, but the building and its projecting marquee remain the tallest thing on the block, which is why they read so cleanly in the shot.

Crowe shot the film across ninety-two days, most of them around San Diego and Point Loma. Ocean Beach gave him the version of home a fifteen-year-old would want to escape, and would then spend an entire movie trying to describe.

Walk it east to west in late afternoon and you get the light the scene has. Stand at the corner beneath the marquee and the composition is simply there, waiting, with nothing rebuilt for you.