JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Mentor Questions Forum A Conversation With Oscar Winning JPF Member Dean Pitchford

I saw the remake of Footloose this evening.

Ya think Pitchford is his real name or some people are just destined by name?

I see you're going by that old one "nomen est omen." haha

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 DVD’s 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 40’s 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 Garfunkle 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 -- they 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 60’s 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 have 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwMikBKJ7dQ

Dean Pitchford Career Highlight Reel

For more information visit www.deanpitchford.com

https://www.google.com/search?q=dea...995j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Songwriter, Director, Screenwriter, Author.