A Conversation with Dean Pitchford and Brian Austin Whitney (Continued from Above)
BRIAN: You got the idea for "Footloose" from a true story in Oklahoma. Do you owe anything to the people who you get the ideas, storylines, phrases or experiences that they share with you which you may put up on the big screen?
DEAN: No. It was a story in the press, so the idea was out there and wasn’t like I sat next to someone on a plane, and they told me a story, and I took it, and I made that story. It was in the newspapers all over the country about this town having its first dance. And that was really the jumping off point for me. Ultimately, I had to make it much much much more personal. It’s not just about a town where you can’t dance!
BRIAN: It was really a story about a father who had lost his son!
DEAN: Yes, it was a story about a father who had lost his son and a son who has lost his father. And it’s about the two of them clashing. And when I went to Elmore City, Oklahoma which is where the news story had happened, I talked to a lot of people, and I met a bunch of high school kids, and I heard about their lives. Then I had the idea of a boy from Chicago who is thrust into this kind of small town, and everything else from that point on was my invention.
BRIAN: If you’re working on a screenplay and you hear an interesting story you want to incorporate into your work, where is the line on what you can or can’t include?
DEAN: Well, is that story THE story of your screenplay? If it’s not, then it’s okay. Like, if someone says “the damnedest thing happened to me in Amarillo” and they tell you a story and it becomes a fleeting moment in the film, you don’t owe anybody for that.
BRIAN: I once heard a songwriting instructor suggest that you should take your favorite line of your song out and if it didn’t still stand up well without that line, the song wasn’t good enough in the first place. Do you agree?
DEAN: I wouldn’t be that drastic. I would never have thrown out “I’m gonna live forever” but I do think that if at the end of the day all you’ve got is one brilliant line then you’ve got to rethink your song. Or your movie.
BRIAN: I think they meant that, if it isn’t part of the through line, then it should be the first thing to go.
DEAN: Right. If you read any of my lyrics off the page, they read like a short story. You can speak to them, and they will make sense. They will tell a story, and they will get you to the chorus. “Baby, look at me/ And tell me what you see/ You ain’t seen the best of me yet/ Give me time I’ll make you forget the rest/ I’ve got more in me/ And you can set it free/ I can catch the moon in my hand/ Don’t you KNOW who I AM? Remember my name/ FAME.” You know it tracks and tells a story. At no point do I stop pointing toward “Fame.” At no point do I stop telling the story about “look at me, tell me what you see.” If any one of those lines stopped telling that story then that line would have to be jettisoned.
(I share a personal story connected to the song Fame)
BRIAN: I read a quote from you in John Braheny’s (a JPF Mentor) book “The Craft and Business of Songwriting” concerning a Songwriting 101 type question of poetry versus lyrics, and I liked your answer which was, “You need to leave room for the music.”
DEAN: I’m glad you asked me that because I have a little mental post-it note from earlier when you asked me about my mentors and I only acknowledged two of them. My third is Tom Snow, whom I met when I got to California. And he was having hits with Leo Sayer, Olivia Newton John, he’d just written “He’s So Shy” for the Pointer Sisters. Tom was “the” guy. We were introduced and began working together and hit it off immediately. But he was the strictest disciplinarian when it came to what goes into a pop song. And he always wrote grooves -- you know that wonderful groove at the top of “He’s So Shy” (he hums the start of “He’s So Shy”), or listen to what he did at the start of “Let’s Hear It For The Boy.”
BRIAN: Well, that was the heyday of synthesizers and sequencers.
DEAN: But… but… in the music that Tom Snow wrote there was a very strong pulse. And before I came to L.A., a lot of my writing had been for artists like Peter Allen and the film of “Fame.” My lyric writing could be very dense. Tom said to me “Don’t write so much!” He gave me melodies with lines to which I could only fit 5 words or 5 syllables. Then I’d have to get out of the way, because the rhythm was taking over.
It was very illuminating because, like you said, I had to make room for the music. I had to make room for us to be collaborators. I’ve often said that, when I first started writing songs the lyrics would go from the left margin to the right margin and from the top of the page to the bottom. It looked thick.
BRIAN: Like the Encyclopedia Britannica.
DEAN: Yeah. And now when I do songwriting seminars I’ll hold up a copy of a song I wrote with Michael Gore for Whitney Houston (a worldwide #1 song) called “All The Man That I Need.” And the lyric for “All The Man That I Need” fits on a piece of typing paper folded in half. It’s that economical. And I had not written like that until I met Tom, and Tom taught me to get out of the way of the music.
BRIAN: You know I learned a lot from Tom Snow, and I probably ripped off a lot of his ideas, (laughing) because that was a time when I was developing my songwriting and production, and I sort of played that role in my songwriting partnership and I have fond memories of trying my best to rip off his techniques.
DEAN: Tom is a master. There’d always been this mentorship kind of relationship with him, and then, when we went to work on the Broadway production of “Footloose,” things turned around, I was bringing him CDs and albums and saying. “This is the kind of contrapuntal, 6-part singing that I see for this number.” I would play him Broadway show tunes and the kinds of forms that you would not find in pop music.
BRIAN: Tell me more about the “Footloose” Broadway production?
DEAN: It ended up being a very nice-sized hit. We ran 707 performances - almost two years - which is a shitload of performances. Then, after the show closed on Broadway foreign producers started picking up on it. Right now, I think there are 6 productions internationally: there’s a tour in the UK, there’s a tour in Scandinavia, there’s a show in Portugal, there’s a show in Warsaw, Poland, We’re going to start a tour in Southeast Asia that’s beginning in South Africa. We’re going into South Korea in 2009. In the United States last year, we had over 450 productions of the show. And we have a new, 10th anniversary national tour that’s beginning at the end of December in New Haven and working it’s way across the country.
BRIAN: Is “Fame” your biggest hit or is “Footloose?”
DEAN: Uhhhh.. in terms of return “Fame” didn’t go to #1, but what really helped “Fame” was that after the movie had come out, there was that television series. The TV series ran for 4 years, and every year that they were on, the Kids From Fame toured Europe during their hiatus. And every year, they made a new album of songs from that season, and the song "Fame" was always on that album. And now the motion picture of “Fame” is being remade at MGM and they’re licensing the song for that.
BRIAN: Are they using the other songs too?
DEAN: The only one that I am aware of that they are licensing from the original movie is the title song.
BRIAN: Any talk of remaking “Footloose?”
DEAN: There has been. It keeps bubbling up. You know “High School Musical,” that phenomenon has caused a lot of people to rethink everything “high school.” And musical.
BRIAN: With Footloose they’d have obligations to you wouldn’t they?
DEAN: No.
BRIAN: Since it was your screenplay, they wouldn’t have any obligations to you if they use your story?
DEAN: They have financial obligations. Those are all spelled out in the contracts.
BRIAN: But they have no control obligations at all?
DEAN: No.
BRIAN: Is that because you’re not in a position to demand that or that it’s just impossible to get that?
DEAN: It’s impossible to get that. If you look at the end crawl on a motion picture, the very last frame that comes up -- if you can freeze frame it and look at it -- is says. “For the purposes of copyright Paramount Pictures or Sony Pictures or whomever is the author of this screenplay.” Unlike my novels to which I own the copyrights, anybody who writes work-for-hire for a motion picture company doesn’t own the underlying rights. They get credited, they get royalties, they get paid their fees, they get DVDs royalties and royalties for broadcast on television, etc. They get all those things, but for the purposes of copyright the studio is the author of the screenplay. If, on the other hand, I wrote Harry Potter, and a studio buys my book of Harry Potter and then I would have more control, because the underlying property doesn’t not belong to them!
BRIAN: Because it’s an adapted screenplay?
DEAN: Exactly. The screenplay could be copyrighted by the studio, but the underlying story could not. In the case of “Footloose,” they acquired underlying rights when they bought my screenplay, because there was no previously existing story.
BRIAN: So if you’d written “Footloose,” the novel, then you might still have a piece of it?
DEAN: Exactly.
BRIAN: You had one project that you weren’t very happy with and that was the movie “Sing.” Since we’ve talked about your triumphs, tell me about this one case where things didn’t go as well.
DEAN: It’s basically “High School Musical.” The high schools in Brooklyn since the late 40s have had an ongoing tradition where the Sophomore, Junior and Senior classes write and build and stage their own musicals, and then they compete. Then the winners from each school to go an inter-borough competition, and perform their shows, hoping to win the championship of Brooklyn. And over the years many many many big stars have worked on Sings. Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon and Barbra Streisand and Neil Simon and so many talented artists who went to school in Brooklyn did Sing in high school. So, it’s a very emotional tradition with them.
I was approach about doing a movie about the Sing competition. I wrote any number of drafts and went through any number of studio ups and downs. I wished that I were smarter about these things than I was, but it was only my second movie. What I found over the years is that a lot of people -- especially studio heads, especially at that time -- had the idea that, “Oh, those teenagers will buy anything. Make it loud, make it flashy, and they’ll go to it.”
When Alan Parker made “Fame,” the studio didn’t interfere with him. He shot it in New York, away from their prying eyes, and he turned out a very intricate, beautifully shot, quite dark piece. And what made it such a spectacular success was that it didn’t trivialize the experience of being a teenager.
Neither did “Footloose.” I worked with Herbert Ross who by that time was in his 60s had directed or co-directed “Funny Girl” and “Funny Lady” and so many Neil Simon movies. And Herbert came to that material with a great deal of seriousness and a great affection for the characters.
BRIAN: That’s true, John Lithgow could easily have been a caricature, and he never was.
DEAN: No. That was the big saving grace. John Lithgow brought to this part a great deal of humanity.
But when we did “Sing,” there was this attitude prevalent that all you need to do is give the kids a beat and they’ll line up. That was sort of the studio mentality that drove “Sing” off the rails. It was cast wrong, it was directed wrong, I wrote it wrong, I just kept getting broader and broader to accommodate what I was hearing everybody asking for and it ended up being a kind of a caricature of a teen movie.
BRIAN: That leads me to my underlying questions. You’re a guy who had already had ridiculous success, and yet you didn’t trust your own instincts. You let them run roughshod over you. Why?
DEAN: It wasn’t until the fiasco of “Sing” that the lessons of “Footloose” actually coalesced in my mind. Until then, I didn’t know what I knew. I did not know what to stand firm on, or what voices in my head to trust. When all was said and done, I saw the result up on the screen. I went “Ooohhhhh! I wished that I had looked at my mental notebook earlier and reminded myself of what I learned.”
Now, when I was writing songs, I had that experience all the time. I’d write a song and get it cut, and I’d go “YAY, we got a song cut!!!” Then I’d write 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 more songs and the A&R folks would say, “It’s too this, it’s too that, it’s not for her, it’s the wrong beat, you’re using these uptown chords, you’re using this esoteric language, it’s too grown up, it’s too juvenile.” So I was getting feedback all the time from A&R people. The problem is that the feedback I got from “Sing” came too late. It took a year out of my life, and when I finally got that feedback, I went “Oooh! I won’t go THERE again, or THERE again or THERE again.”
BRIAN: At the same time, you were experiencing the lows of “Sing,” you also had the worldwide #1 song with Whitney Houston. Tell me about that. You could have a huge ego, but you must also have the ability to turn it on and off. How have you avoided falling into that trap?
DEAN: I had that experience where I starred on Broadway and I had been out there in a very public way. My ego was fed, certainly. But when I began writing songs and then screenplays and now books, I never again felt like the person who had made it all happen. I saw myself as part of a collaborative team. I’ve often compared songwriting collaborations to a marriage. There are times where you get to come in and strut around and go, “Guess who got a raise today.” And there are other times where you don’t get to strut. You have to step back and let somebody else crow. A director friend of mine said, “There are times when you just have to go limp.”
BRIAN: Go limp?
DEAN: “Go limp!” He said when you’re dealing with someone for whom it’s so important that their ego fill the room, just go limp. So, I do. I just think, “Okay, whatever. Today, it’s all about you.” I save my ego for the collaboration, where I stick up for the work. That’s where I will put my ego in. But if it’s very important for somebody else to be king of the hill on that day in that collaboration, they can have that. I don’t have to have myself validated in this room, with you, at this moment.
BRIAN: But you have to sit back every once in a while, and think to yourself, “Man, I’m pretty awesome!” You have to! (laughs)
DEAN: (laughs) I do sit back and say “Gosh, I’ve had an interesting time.” But also -- in every field of endeavor that I have been in -- I know people who are AWESOME.
BRIAN: That’s true. I can see that.
DEAN: I am having lunch on Friday, for instance, with Cynthia Weil.
BRIAN: Oh, wow.
DEAN: Now, Cynthia Weil is AWESOME.
BRIAN: Yep.
DEAN: You know one of my dearest friends from my Broadway days is Stephen Schwartz. Stephen Schwartz wrote “Godspell” and “Pippin” and “Wicked.” Stephen Schwartz is AWESOME.
BRIAN: Right.
DEAN: I have been in and out of many careers and have had many experiences, and the only thing I use my history of accomplishments for is to remind myself of what I can do. If I get to a point in writing anything -- a book or a lyric or a screenplay -- I will sometimes go into my lyric file, or I’ll pull up an old script and I’ll read a something that I particularly like. And I’ll say to myself, “There, you did it once, do it again!”
I used to have gold and platinum records and I hanged them along the walls of my office, across every piece of available space. And I filled up the room with all these gold and platinum records, and one day I walked in, and I looked at these things that I’d been looking at forever, and I thought, “Well, what’s the point of this?” So I took them all down and wrapped them in newspaper and I put them in the basement. And over the last 25 years I’ve donated them for auctions or given them to charities. I just gave away that collection because it no longer spoke to me.
BRIAN: I bet in some way those other people will appreciate those even more than you would have.
DEAN: I hope so. I hope so. But as somebody once said not too long ago, they walked through my house and they said, “You know if I didn’t know better, I’d never know what the person living in this house did,” and I said “GREAT! Just the way I want it!”
BRIAN: By any chance do you know my friend Harold Payne?
DEAN: Oh… I love Harold Payne.
(We share some Platinum Record winning songwriter Harold Payne Stories between us)
(Then we share some 3 time Grammy and JPF Award Winner Daniel Ho Stories)
(Then we shared some BoyMeetsGirl stories (they wrote “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” and “How Will I Know.”)
BRIAN: I am certainly not in the same circles as you, Dean, but I am really pleased that we know some of the same people.
DEAN: Well it’s amazing what you have built Brian. It’s so nice about what I read on the message boards, because you know I lurk. There’s not a lot that I have to say or ask questions about, but I try to visit and see what people are saying about things, and there’s a real sweetness to this site. People are generally so supportive of each other, and there’s a nice feeling of community.
BRIAN: It’s a rare thing on the internet because most things on the net are nasty and horrible. It’s a lot of work to keep if that way and I am very blessed to be doing this.
(We discuss more about Just Plain Folks and the work we’re doing)
DEAN: A lot of what I did in the past allowed me to do the work and then stay at home and eat popcorn and watch football. Now with my book I’ve been having to do signings. I went to bookstores in Hawaii and Nashville and the Bay Area and Las Vegas, Santa Barbra and New York City. And in those places, I’m actually meeting the people who are the audience for my writing. I’ve been speaking at schools universities and I just got a request today to speak at Belmont University.
BRIAN: Ah, Belmont is fantastic.
(We discuss some people we both know at Belmont University, and we discuss some political work that we’re doing in Washington DC)
DEAN: I’ve always felt that Nashville is more like the music community that I associate with more so than that the California scene or the New York scene. Those scenes aren’t really even scenes anymore. People go off into their studios and go off the work in Scandinavia or Telluride or Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and cut records. I don’t find that feeling of songwriters clustered in buildings and people eating at the same restaurants and all coming together around an industry. It’s not like that anymore in other places.
BRIAN: Even in Nashville it’s not like that as much as it used to be say even 10 years ago. The industry has been decimated in Nashville. It seems like when someone closes something, they don’t close the New York or Los Angeles branch, they close Nashville.
DEAN: I know, I know. It’s sad, but let’s look at the bright side.
BRIAN: Are you ever going to do an update to your travel book on "Hawaii on $5 and $10 A Day?"
DEAN: (Laughs) You know now that books has gone to either $150 a day or $100 a day. It was not my book to begin with. It had been written by two writers in New York, a married couple. And their contract with the publisher called for them to update it every two years, but they had had a baby and had not updated their book in 4 years. That’s when I got a call from a mutual friend in Honolulu.
I was in college at Yale, but I was going to go home for the summer and then return to New Haven in the fall. So, I got hired, and I spent the summer driving on every road, visiting every mid-range and low-range hotel and restaurant and tourist attraction. And anything you could do for free. Every aquarium and museum you could walk into. I had lived there all my life and I’d never done those things, because I was a local.
BRIAN: That’s how it always is.
DEAN: Yeah, so my last summer in Honolulu, I totally submerged myself in the Islands. I went to Kauai and Maui and the big island of Hawaii and of course I covered Oahu where I lived. I had to keep churning out 20 pages every two days in order to stay ahead of my notes, because I was collecting so much material.
BRIAN: That’s a good lesson to learn!
DEAN: Yeah it was!
BRIAN: So you basically ghost-wrote their entire book?
DEAN: I actually ghost-re-wrote the “$5 & $10” book, and halfway through the summer, the authors got a contract from their publisher for a second book. This was from Arthur Frommer Publishers.
BRIAN: Oh yeah... Frommer’s gigantic!
DEAN: They were the pioneers of the “Europe on $ 5 and $10 A Day,” “Hawaii on $5 and $10 A Day;” that was Frommer. TWA at the time went to Frommer and said, “We want a guidebook, more of a middle class guide.” And the Frommer publishers went to their people who did the “Hawaii on $5 A Day” and said, “Can you handle it” and they said, “Absolutely!”, then they turned around and sub-contracted it to me. So, it fell to me to write that book.
The first book wasn’t so hard, because I already had a lot of that info from the existing book. But the TWA book, I wrote that from the ground up. That’s why I had 20 pages to send off every other day.
BRIAN: Well, you were really a pioneer then, because that was at the starting edge of what has now become a giant industry of travel writing.
DEAN: Yeah, yeah.
BRIAN: You’re a pioneer on something you probably don’t even think about.
DEAN: I don’t even think about it. At the end of that summer, I did not want to stay at another hotel room with a little coffee maker on the desk and Magic Fingers on the bed. I’d had my fill of that. I knew that I didn’t want to be a travel writer.
BRIAN: Have you ever tried to write the entire song, music and lyrics?
DEAN: Actually, I recently did. I was asked by a charity, an annual breast cancer charity, the producers of which I’ve known for a while. They called me and said, “We feel it’s about time we had our own theme song.” And the collaborator I asked to work with me suddenly had a family emergency, so I began to experiment with musical ideas to support my lyric. And the next thing you know, I’d finished the song. It’s called “One Heart,” and, for two years now, has served as the finale for this breast cancer fund raiser.
BRIAN: And that’s the first complete song that you’ve written after all these years?
DEAN: That’s has been performed, yes. I’ve also done gag songs for birthdays, that’s it.
BRIAN: That’s surprising.
DEAN: I’ve been lucky to have had amazing collaborators. Some people, like Michael Gore would say, “Don’t say anything, don’t sing anything,” Peter Allen would ask, “You got a melody?” So I would work with all sorts of collaborators and try to take the temperature of the room. Do you want to hear what I am thinking? Do you want me to clap the rhythm, or do you want me to shut up? And sometimes they’d say “Shut up shut up, shut up,” and other times they’d say, “No, please, help me get me started.”
BRIAN: Here’s a question we ask everyone we interview. When was the first time you heard one of your songs on the radio?
DEAN: Well, “Fame” was my second recorded song, so it would have to be the first I heard on radio. I don’t remember when I first heard it on the radio, though. I’ll have to think about that,.
BRIAN: You may not remember because you’d already had some major successes, so it might not have stuck out as much for you as it might have for some other folks.
DEAN: You know what? There’s something else about that, too. John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote a song in their musical "Flora the Red Menace" that Liza Minelli introduced in act one where she gets a job that she really really wants to get. And instead of singing some big, brash, bright song, she sings a song called “A Quiet Thing.” And in that lyric she sings "When it all comes true/ Just the way you planned/ You’d think you’d hear a choir sing/ No it’s a quiet thing."
BRIAN: Interesting!
DEAN: And it’s always made an impact on me. Sure, if you do something in front of an audience and it gets applause, that’s noisy. But when I had that moment when I read an e-mail telling me that my first book had been bought, or hearing a song on the radio for the first time, I didn’t run out in the streets and yell, “Turn your radios on, turn your radios on!” I have a feeling it was a quiet thing.
BRIAN: What a great line for you to pull out to answer that question! That’s one of the best answers ever to that question. Can you think of a mistake you made that in hindsight you might be able to help others avoid?
DEAN: Uhm... like George Bush I don’t feel I’ve made any (both of us laugh) okay I’m not going to say that, I’m not going to say that! I think I made a lot of mistakes, I made some real boners. What I would say is that I didn’t let any one of them destroy me or keep me down for very long.
BRIAN: So even the catastrophic mistakes you thought were terrible didn’t really turn out to be so catastrophic.
DEAN: Right.
BRIAN: You’ve worked with some of the biggest names in the world in your fields. Are you ever still star struck?
DEAN: There’s a term in magic to describe the pause between taking physical action and that point when something happens that the mind can’t wrap itself around. There’s this LEAP that causes people to go “Ooohhhhh!” Right? Magicians call that the “wonder gap.” It’s that space between “I don’t know how you do what you do, oh my God! what you did is just astonishing!” And when I began in the business, a lot of my encounters were characterized by the "wonder gap" moment where’d I’d meet someone who was a wonderful singer or fabulous producer or terrific writer or awesome songwriter, and I was finding myself doing that “Oh my gosh I don’t know how you do what you do, it’s incomprehensible to me, my mind can only comprehend up to a point and then there’s this Grand Canyon of experience between you and me,” and I just sort of fall down in awe of that.
Now, I am not saying I have reduced the space between me and them, but what I’ve discovered is that the creative journey is very similar. When I meet people who do something I admire, I’m fascinated by their journey, but I no longer hold back and go, “Oh, I am not worthy to talk to you.” I see them in the way I hope that people see me, which is a human being who just applied him or herself really hard and sought to learn certain truths. And then I want to ask questions. But I don’t have that thing where my tongue won’t work and I can’t make sense. I am curious to hear how people have done those things that I have admired because I know what my journey has been like.
BRIAN: That’s how I felt about talking with you in that I couldn’t wait to ask you questions about all these things you do. There are a couple musicians I still hold off on meeting, however because I’d hate to finally meet them and then sound really stupid when I spoke to them!
DEAN: Or you’d hate to find out that they’re really pricks! (laughs)
BRIAN: (laughs) Yeah, I’ve actually had that happen a few times, but most of the time they’re very nice. The concept of Just Plain Folks is how no matter whether we’re famous stars in our field or someone just getting started, we’re all more alike than different with the same goals and aspirations and hopes. In the end “We’re All In This Together.” Your response seems to illustrate that.
(I share a story about our first Just Plain Folks event that mixed famous artists and writers where something that happened demonstrated that point).
DEAN: I just read a story on the website about that artist who was a busker who went to the concert by the artists from “Once.”
BRIAN: Yeah, that was Stephen Bacon. Isn’t that a great story?
DEAN: It’s amazing! I wrote him a post and told him congratulations about the songwriting, but your prose is pretty fantastic, too. Don’t ignore it!
(I give him some more background on Stephen Bacon. You can read the entire story at this link:
http://www.jpfolks.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/656431 )
BRIAN: I’ve spent some time keeping him pumped up and telling him that, “You’re never going to be hotter than when you’re hot!”
DEAN: (laughs) I am going to write that down. I was very fortunate that I came to my songwriting career after spending 6 or 7 years cutting my teeth and paying my dues as a performer because I didn’t have that feeling like, “Oh my gosh I am so super-talented! Here I am 19 years old, and no one can make an album without my contribution! Instead, I knew how hard it was. I had friends who were out of work. I knew how hard I had to work for my first career and how hard I had to work for my second career, and when I see people who are just starting out, one nice thing works out for them and they buy a condo and two years later have to sell it, it always saddens me. Instead of doing the next job and the next job and the next job, they decided to stop and cash their checks.
BRIAN: You’ve been a good example of someone who just keeps relentlessly moving forward.
DEAN: I just never believed I’d get another job!
BRIAN: That’ll help then!
DEAN: Fear is a motivator!
BRIAN: Do you still feel that way? I have to think that your success has removed that, and your number one concern is no longer about cashing a check?
DEAN: That’s not my number one concern.
BRIAN: That can actually work against you. Some people who don’t have to work might not be as hungry as they once were?
DEAN: The kind of money that one makes by writing young adult books is a fraction of having a song on the radio. When I hired my agent, she said, “You know you’re not going to make the kind of money you made as a songwriter!" And when I signed with a publisher he said, "This is not the kind of money you’re used to.” But you know what? I just want to have fun now. This sounds like the next chapter, excuse the pun, and I think that I want to have this adventure now. To have written this book, to have sold it, to have it bought as an audiobook, to get the job of reading it as an audio book, then to have it do so well in sales and THEN to get a GRAMMY nomination for it! I mean, I am having a ball!
BRIAN: Well, that sets up my last question. Tell me about “The Big One-Oh,” and tell me about your upcoming “Captain Nobody”?
DEAN: The Big One-Oh is a young adult book which started as a screenplay idea that I then turned into a novel which Putnam/Penguin bought. It’s about a nine-year old boy about to turn ten who, through a series of circumstances, decides to throw himself his own 10th birthday party which is themed as a house-of-horrors birthday party and ends up a catastrophe that eventually brings out the entire Fresno police department and fire department and emergency services. It’s the most horrible birthday, and at the same time, it’s the best birthday a kid could ever hope for. So, it’s "Home Alone" meets birthday.
BRIAN: And where did this story idea come from?
DEAN: A number of ideas got pickled together. When I was 6, my older brother, who was in first-grade, had a birthday party. We convinced my mother to take all of the partygoers to a movie theater near our house that was playing a horror movie which she did not know about. It was called “The Giant Claw.” (I laugh) We thought it was going to be so cool. It was about a humongous eagle that swoops down over cities and kills people, grabs them and crushes convertibles full of rowdy teenagers until it’s shot down by the United States Air Force at the end. My mom -- not knowing anything because in those days you didn’t have IMDB and you couldn’t go and check what’s the content of the movie -- she took our word for it, and we all went off to see the movie, maybe 14 of my brother’s classmates. The girls were kind of, “Ew, gross!” and the boys thought it was really nifty. Well, nothing really happened until the day after the birthday party, and then the phone calls began to come in. All these mothers were calling my mom to say, “What movie did you take my child to see?” because apparently all these kids were waking up in the middle of the night screaming and pointing at the sky...
BRIAN: THE CLAAAAWWWWW!!!!!
DEAN: So my mother is like, “SEE WHAT YOU'VE DONE!!!” But secretly my brother and I thought it was pretty amazing. So, the idea of a birthday party that was terrifying and yet memorable was the genesis of this book. It’s doing extremely well domestically; it’s been nominated for “Book of The Year” in 4 States, and now the Grammy nomination. It’s been sold to sub-publishers all over the world.
And “Captain Nobody” is sort of in the same gene pool. It’s targeted for ages 9-14, and it’s the story of a ten-year-old boy who has grown up in the shadow of his 18-year-old brother who is a SUPER sports hero. At the beginning of the book, in making the winning touchdown of his final game of his senior year in the climactic biggest game of his career, this little boy’s big brother is knocked into a coma. He goes into the hospital and the entire state holds its breath. And during this time, the younger brother assumes this identity --Captain Nobody--and without even meaning to, he starts saving lives and solving crimes. Then HE becomes the hero.
BRIAN: Is it already finished?
DEAN: It is. I am actually sitting here looking at the galleys. They’re going out to reviewers and librarians and wholesalers. And it’s coming out the summer of 2009. We just also sold the audio rights to Random House, the same people who did the audiobook for “The Big One-Oh,” so probably in late January I’ll go into the studio to record it.
BRIAN: I figured it was you on the recording, but you have a very young sounding voice.
DEAN: By the end of that book I devised probably 18 voices to do all the characters and different classmates.
(We then discuss Jim Dale’s epic Grammy winning work on the Harry Potter books where he had to keep 275 different character voices straight and Tom Chapin’s many Grammy wins in the same category as well.)
BRIAN: Well thank you for this epic length interview. It was fascinating. I doubt I can do any justice to all the things we discussed without just posting all of it.
DEAN: Well, I left out all the salacious parts!
BRIAN: Well I want to hear about those too in the next interview. I only got through about 1/3 of my questions for you. If you win the Grammy, we’ll have to work next on getting you a Tony Award so you have the complete set!
DEAN: I like the way you think!
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Thanks to Dean for his patience and generosity! It was a blast!
- Brian Austin Whitney, December 24th, 2008
