Cameron Crowe

I thought that was the most gentle way to teach me a lesson early on.

Yeah, it was a cover story in Rolling Stone.

It was also the Playboy interview.

And I did some other stories for Cream and some other publications.

It was a David Bowie factory I had going for a while because he wasn't talking to anybody else.

Life puts you at a crossroads and you go one way and it turns into 18 months with David Bowie.

I had no assignment.

He said to me, hold up a mirror to me.

I want to see what you show me.

So like spend some time around me.

Ask me anything you want.

I want to see the mirror that you hold up.

And that's what I did.

I'm not sure he appreciated totally the mirror that I held up to him.

But he did know that it was an accurate portrait of what he was going through in those 18 months, which are kind of referred to as a lost weekend when he was living untethered in Los Angeles and not sure if he was going to become a movie actor for a while.

He fired his manager and he was just kind of learning what was going to be next and trying to reinvent.

And he was playing around with this character called the Thin White Duke.

And one day he put 12 pages of an autobiography in my hand and signed it and said, I wanted you to have this.

And it was called The Return of the Thin White Duke.

He never finished it.