“My father’s life was a very visible one,” says writer/director Timothy Scott Bogart, son of 1970s powerhouse record producer Neil Bogart, the co-founder of Casablanca Records. “That was my playground. I grew up, literally backstage at these concerts.” Neil Bogart signed such artists as Donna Summer, George Clinton, KISS, the Isley Brothers, the Village People, and Gladys Knight. “The storytelling I saw being done as a child was infectious. Everything that they did was creating something beyond just the music. I just fell in love with it.”
At the age of twelve, Timothy’s father died. Perhaps looking for a creative outlet, he actually wrote his first screenplay at this young age. “It was terrible,” he jokes, “but it was 120 pages long, but it actually had a beginning, middle, and end. I think all of it was an escape. I got lost in the fantasy and loved making little movies and writing little stories.” Timothy credits “being exposed to that extraordinary visual world [his father] created” as the foundation for what led to his career as a producer, screenwriter, and director. “Almost everything I did had somebody struggling with loss,” he says in hindsight. “I kept doing stories about other things, but ultimately, they were about children struggling with the loss of a parent.”
Only a year or two after the death of his father, Timothy recalls people “banging on the door trying to get the rights” to his father’s life story. The family wasn’t ready to share this information. They turned down Broadway musicals, television shows, and movies. “As I started looking at this as being something I wanted to do with my life, I took on the mantle of being responsible for being the guy saying ‘No.’ Part of that was, I didn’t know what it was.”
After decades of pondering what the story could be and how it might be best represented, Timothy decided to take on the responsibility himself, as the writer and director of Spinning Gold, the story of Neil Bogart.
Insider Access to Story
“Sex, drugs, and rock and roll was interesting and easy, but I didn’t know that was the only thing it should be,” says Timothy. “It wasn’t until 1999 that enough people had asked and I became a relatively successful producer that I decided I would do the movie, produce it and write it. I wasn’t planning on directing it, but I thought I had the best insight to write it.” Knowing he had access no one else could get, he set up the idea with a studio in 1999. “Didn’t have a script yet, but we assigned the rights and an option, but then we had to figure out, what is the story? Do you just do sex drugs and rock and roll? Do you just do Casablanca? I went off for a couple of years and just did interviews.”
Timothy acquired hundreds of hours of interviews, with people like Clive Davis, Donna Summer, Gene Simmons, and George Clinton. “Every one of those conversations just kept opening my eyes to, really the most remarkable thing any child can do, this forensic exploration of their parent.” Years into the research, Timothy had an idea, “If he was alive, what was the story he would tell? That led to this construct of this unreliable narrator trying to justify the actions of his life. Saying, yes I didn’t give all the money I should have to KISS, but what look what I did for them. Or, maybe I made Donna Summer something she wasn’t, but look at why. It became this justification of a life.”
Neil and Timothy Bogart. Photo courtesy of Spinning Gold
In addition to this conclusion, Timothy’s perspective on the story and his father changed over time, as it naturally would, spending twenty years thinking about this specific subject.
Stories Change Over Time
“I think if you were to read the first drafts back in 2000 or 2001, it was a very similar movie, but it was so much about the bigness of the events and grandeur of the insanity of how they achieved the events, the remarkable success and remarkable lows, it was the neon version of it.” Timothy adds, “The older I got, and having a child myself, and understanding what being a parent meant to a child, and being afraid I wasn’t going to be a success, and learning my father — who everyone saw as a massive success — was on the verge of disaster almost every day of his life. I think his character became far richer about much smaller, more intimate things.”
This made its way to the screen in terms of how the character Neil Bogart interacted with the women in his life and his deep friendships with the artists he worked with. “The earlier versions were more about the art than the artists, so I think it became much more personal as I struggled to figure it out over the years.” With so much research behind the project, Timothy thought a handful of times about making the story a series rather than a movie, but he ultimately decided to make it a movie. This way, he could focus on his father’s story rather than the overall world or those decades, which is what might have happened with a series.
“It was hard to sculpt out so many other spectacular stories that were in the script and got cut right before we shot (such as a sequence on Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly”), because I kept thinking, ‘There’s too much movie in this movie!’ Ultimately, what I think I landed on was the story about this person who happened to live in this crazy fairy tale. In an open-ended series, it might have eluded that.”
The Father vs. The Character
“As a writer, what I write on Monday, I hate on Friday,” jokes the screenwriter. “I have been known to sit down, write a film, get to page 120 and go, ‘That’s where it starts!’ Then I threw out 119 pages. I have writer friends who could never do that.” This lack of preciousness with the material also helped him separate his father from the character of his father.
“One of my early experiences as a director was directing terrible, low-budget television. I would agonize over the script that I had written and then get on set and say, ‘Who wrote this? It doesn’t work at all!’ So I realized the writing was a tool for the journey, not the end. Very quickly, it became not about my father, just this interesting character I luckily had the rights to.”
In terms of technicalities around the rights and whether or not someone is a public figure, Neil Bogart is considered a public figure, so he could be used as a character in other screenplays (assuming they’re not slandering his name). That said, the non-famous people in Neil’s life — his wives for example — were not public figures, which meant Timothy had a better insight to get those stories correct on the page, and do so with permission.
Gladys Knight (Ledisi) Photo courtesy of Spinning Gold
“It’s not so much a legal thing, but to do something right about people’s life and all of the artists involved, that was important. Getting the music rights, it was helpful to have those relationships. The flip side is, when it is you and it is your family, people think you’re whitewashing it and I hope that’s not the case. I actually thought so much of what made my father successful was born in the remarkable flaws that he had.”
Likewise, these flaws and mistakes — methods of “understanding the human condition” — were fascinating to Timothy the screenwriter and less appealing to Timothy the son.
Writing for the Sake of Writing
It’s unclear to the screenwriter why writing became his passion, or “a muscle [he] had to exercise,” but for him, it’s a 365-day per year activity. “If I’m not writing something everyday, I feel I lose that muscle. It’s something scratching at me, something that’s interesting. Sometimes I’ll do thirty pages and say, that’s nothing. The act of writing is an incredibly crucial muscle. If you’re a writer, you must do it, even if you write bad stuff. That’s as crucial as good stuff, but if you write no stuff, you’re not a writer.”
“Early on in my career, it became a life thing, not a career thing.” Logistically, Timothy often wakes up at 4 am, while the world sleeps, to sit down with a cup of coffee and then he’d write for 4 – 5 hours before he stepped into his job as a producer. “There are hundreds of scripts I would never show anybody that were complete thoughts, but those are just writing exercises.”
This seemingly limitless well is also something he can refer back to if something is missing in a future script (he uses an email filing system as reference for a quick search). “I have always seen writing as the ultimate creative outlet. It doesn’t take any money to do it. It doesn’t take anyone else to help you do it. If you want to do it, you can do it. You are completely in control. It’s vital for storytellers to just write.”
Whenever Timothy looks back on old works, he’s almost never looking for plot, but some kernel that connects deep inside of himself. “I’ve never been able to chase genre or success. It’s always come from deep inside me — something I feel like I have to say — and voice is everything. When I write something, it’s because I have to write it. If it really interests you and you can express why, it will likely interest others.”
As for perseverance, Timothy acknowledges “It’s a hard business that will kick your ass daily, with a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re looking for, don’t know what works, but think they know both those answers, and ultimately, the only road to success is perseverance. You have to have a stomach of leather to take one thousand NOs because all you need is one YES. They’re hard to come by but the only one that can drive to that place is the individual who perseveres. But when I feel kicked in the teeth, I remember, this is who I am, it’s not what I do. So if it’s who you are, and not what you do, then you only have perseverance to protect the very essence of who you are.”
This interview has been condensed. Listen to the full audio version here.
