Cameron Crowe Bought a Zoo | SPIKE

The writer/director of '80s hits like Say Anything and Fast Times at Ridgemont High hasn't made a movie since 2005's mediocre Elizabethtown. Now it looks like Cameron Crowe may be nestling up to a zoo-full of animals with the adaptation of the book We Bought a Zoo, a non-fictional memoir by Benjamin Mee about he and his family taking over an English mansion and zoo.

This isn't "typical" Cameron Crowe fare, which is to say, there isn't a coming-of-age story in here, nor is there angsty drama about teens, sex, and relationships. That isn't to say he can't knock this one out of the park, and it would be nice to see him make a film again after so much time out of the director's chair. Vulture fills in some of the details about the movie:

Back in 2006, Mee — then the do-it-yourself columnist for the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper — moved into a run-down twelve-bedroom mansion in the southwest English countryside with his wife, two children, brother, and 76-year-old mother. The catch? Their old manse also included the 30-acre Dartmoor Wildlife Park, a dilapidated preserve that was home to 200 wild animals.

The book is certainly original, and there's already a script written by Aline Brosh McKenna, the writer of The Devil Wears Prada that's getting really good buzz. Apparently Crowe would take his pen to McKenna's script for a rewrite before putting this thing before cameras.

Will this be a good fit for Crowe? Should he focus on young people and their angsty lives? Or is this a nice change of pace?

One thing's for sure: he won't be casting Orlando Bloom.

Right?

Photo: Franco Origlia/Getty Images