Cameron Crowe’s “Jerry Maguire,” starring Tom Cruise, has not aged well. Image by by TriStar Pictures / Everett

Remember Jerry Maguire? The character, a sports agent played by Tom Cruise in the Cameron Crowe movie of the same name, became a kind of white-collar superhero when he stood in front of his entire office, having just been fired and left to fend for himself, and declared to his soon-to-be ex-coworkers, “If anybody else wants to come with me, this moment will be the moment of something real and fun and inspiring in this godforsaken business, and we will do it together. Who’s coming with me?” In the movie, this impassioned speech is met with blank stares. The only person who steps up to join him is a young accountant named Dorothy Boyd, played by Renée Zellweger.

Prior to the speech, Jerry was the star of his agency, a hotshot with a roster of more than seventy clients. But in a late-night moment at a company retreat—dramatized by a shot of Cruise in a cold sweat, shaking under a comforter in his hotel room—Jerry has an epiphany, one he is moved to get down on paper, in a mission statement to his colleagues. Typing on a clunky laptop, his eyes glistening in the glow of the screen, Cruise made interoffice correspondence look sexy and brave. All Crowe shows us of the memo itself are the words “Fewer clients, less money.” Jerry walks to a copy shop in the middle of the night to make bound copies for everyone at the retreat, and the clerk somehow recognizes the immense gravity of the situation: “That’s how you become great, man. Hang your balls out there.” The next morning, in the hotel lobby, Jerry is applauded by his colleagues. It’s only later, after returning to the office, that he’s fired, his words having seriously alienated his boss. Those words also help break up his engagement and compel a sensible single mother—Dorothy, the Zellweger character—to quit her stable job and fall desperately in love with him. This must have been some mission statement.

Or not so much, it turns out. This week, a few months ahead of the twentieth anniversary of the film’s release, Cameron Crowe, for the first time, posted the full, twenty-five-page mission statement that he wrote as he was working on the screenplay. Titled “The Things We Think and Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business,” it is only marginally about the specifics of sports management. Its central idea is that the large company Maguire helped build has taken on too many clients and needs to scale back in order to better serve the athletes who pay them. “Less dancing. More truth,” the memo declares. “We must crack open the tightly clenched fist of commerce and give a little back for the greater good. Eventually revenues will be the same, and that goodness will be infectious.” (The words “Fewer clients, less money,” do not appear.) The document promises to spell out how this plan might work, but never actually gets around to it. Instead, it is a collection of odd aphorisms (“Coffee tastes different at night. It tastes like college.”) and vague demands that people listen to the voices inside their heads and follow their hearts. Jerry sounds like a man who’s come unhinged after listening to too many motivational speeches.

As a window into the filmmaking process, the letter is a useful example of the kinds of character- and narrative-building that take place offscreen. The movie asks us, on the strength of the unseen document that marks a turning point in his moral worldview, to see Jerry as a bold and innovative corporate visionary whose ideas are too far ahead of their time for his shallow and cowardly fellow-agents to grasp—and as an alluring romantic able to make Dorothy swoon (“I think, in this age, optimism like that is a revolutionary act,” she tells him). But once you’ve actually read his late-night musings, the fact that he thought they should be professionally bound and promptly read by everyone at his company looks more like evidence of a towering narcissism that is neither heroic nor endearing. A man who felt compelled to tell his colleagues such things as, “The relationship between a phone call and a letter is the difference between a magazine and a phone book. One you leave on a plane, the other you save,” would have reasonably had trouble convincing anyone to follow him out the door. (I think I’d believe this even if I didn’t work for a magazine.) It is, in short, a preposterous document—too bizarre and banal to have realistically moved anyone to applause, but also unlikely, in its substance, to have cost Jerry his job. Probably the leaders of his company fired him because they thought he’d lost his mind.

It’s worth noting that Maguire’s manifesto was based on a real-life document. In 1991, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was then the head of Walt Disney Studios, wrote a twenty-eight-page internal memo titled “The World Is Changing: Some Thoughts on Our Business,” which laid out some of the dangers he saw facing the company. The memo was peppered with semi-meaningless corporate koans, including “In good times, drift can be tolerable. In bad times, it can prove fatal,” and “We must not fool with the public’s expectations … we must deliver on them.” Like Jerry Maguire, Katzenberg fretted that Disney was getting too big for its own good, spending too much money and making too many movies—and his memo didn’t spell out much in the way of practical course adjustments. “So, let’s go back to the drawing board and get back to basics,” it concluded. “And, as we do, let’s not be afraid to admit to others and to ourselves, up front and with passion … that we love what we do.” The memo might have come to seem, to some, like a courageous statement of values, but it’s hard to make much sense out of it, beyond the fact that Katzenberg clearly disliked the movie “Dick Tracy,” which Disney released in 1990. It’s easy to picture his employees huddling in small groups after reading the memo and asking each other: “So, he wants us to do ... what exactly?” Three years later, Katzenberg was ousted from Disney. (He went on to create Dreamworks Studios with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg.)

“Jerry Maguire” was a box-office hit and earned five Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture. But, like the brown suits and aggressively patterned ties worn by many of its characters, it hasn’t aged well. Cuba Gooding, Jr., playing the wide receiver Rod Tidwell, who was notably tiny for a football player back then, looks even less convincing as one today (whether in this movie or on TV, for that matter). Its famous lines, such as “You complete me” and “You had me at hello”—which were mixed into the Bruce Springsteen single “Secret Garden” and played endlessly on the radio that winter—seemed destined, at the time, to enter into the pantheon of great movie phrases, but they never quite made it. Instead, the line that has lasted is the one first issued by Gooding, Jr.’s, character and later maniacally shouted by Jerry: “Show me the money!” For years, the movie seemed like the story of a callow man learning to be good. But seen again, after reading the full text of his mission statement, it’s clear how far he falls short, and how muddled the movie’s ideas really are. “We are sometimes as important as priests or poets, but until we dedicate ourselves to worthier goals ... we are poets of emptiness,” the mission statement proclaims. The movie, meanwhile, finds its happy ending on the set of a TV interview, with Jerry looking on, proudly, when Rod Tidwell discovers that he has been offered a four-year, $11.2-million contract. The priests and poets all get paid. Who’s coming with me?