Jerry Maguire’s mission statement? For those who have not seen the film in a while, the memory of that could be a little sketchy. Surely Jerry’s mission statement is the movie’s own legendary mission statement. And in fact Hollywood’s mission statement, summarised by the four brash words that sports agent Tom Cruise is forced to shout by his mercurial, recalcitrant client, the football star played by Cuba Gooding Jr. Show me the money!

Don’t bullshit me with the earnings I could possibly earn in the future, make it happen right now, or I move to another agent … Maybe Cameron Crowe, the writer-director of Jerry Maguire once said it to his own agent. Or maybe his agent said it to him, or felt like saying it – I need my client to be valuable, lucrative and worthwhile, if I’m going to put in all this work in return for 15% down the line: I need him to show me how well his last movie is doing right at this very moment. And Hollywood needs everyone to show the money, show the profits, and put the dollars up on screen.

But Jerry’s actual mission statement is the very worthy personal document we see him working on, over the opening credits, as he suffers something between a quarterlife and midlife crisis. He pulls an all-nighter hunched over a laptop in his hotel room at a sports-agent conference in Miami, writing a personal declaration. He figures that to get back the magic of his profession and his life, the personal touch, he needs to cut down his business to just a few extra-special clients. It is a personal gamble that is to cause him heartache both professionally and personally.

We glimpse only a few words of this document in the film, and in voiceover hear a sentence or two, including the claim: “I have the distinct feeling that what I have written is ‘touchy feely’. I don’t care. I have lost the ability to bullshit.”

Hardly. But now, for the 20th anniversary of the film’s release, Crowe has revealed that to create a deep structure of lived authenticity for the character, he did actually write Jerry Maguire’s inordinately long mission statement and has released it, in full, on his website, complete with the cover that Jerry shyly says looks like the cover of The Catcher in the Rye.

Strained relationship … Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr in Jerry Maguire. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Tristar

Reading it is very weird – like watching a deleted scene in which Cruise just talks for 25 uninterrupted minutes with his customary pop-eyed intensity directly into the camera.

And, curiously, the one phrase that we see on the screen does not appear in the text: “Fewer clients. Less money.” That four-word mantra is of course quickly supplanted by the sexier phrase later on.

This document takes an inordinate time to get to the point. Jerry just vents on all manner of personal stuff: his dad used to run a personal telephone answering service, just before answering machines made these a thing of the past. But he broods on how the machine of money is ruling out personal contact in the sports agenting business, and indeed all business. He talks about his brother who is a (hilariously unlikely) Nasa scientist working on feeding the world with blue-green algae – a man who, it seems, is the model of what personally fulfilling work ought to be.

It is a stream of consciousness erupting from Jerry. And you can see how Crowe probably wrote it in exactly the same white heat of all-night writing frenzy. He says, “I just poured a pot of coffee” and later notes: “Coffee tastes different at night. It tastes like college.” (Good line.)

He overhears someone having sex in the adjoining room:



Next door, someone named David is having sex. I know because his girlfriend or wife just yelled something out in the throes of ecstasy: “Put the top back on, David!” I pause and wonder. What did David open, and why does he now have to close it?

Throughout, Crowe misspells the word “neutral”. Is that Jerry misspelling it, symptomatic of the way he feels alienated from the boring concept of neutrality? Or did Crowe just not spellcheck this text?

Eventually, Jerry comes to the point in terms of economics and says: “Eventually revenues will be the same, and that goodness will be infectious.” In other words, no one really has to endure the unspeakable mortification of having less money, and the quantum of the happiness and goodness will increase as well – and so it proves, in the movie itself.

Well, an interesting if somewhat exhausting footnote to the film. But there was no need for all this verbiage, Mr Crowe. You had us at “Show me the money”.