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Charles Edward Pogue - Crusader for Creative Rights
by Candy Cruz
(January 2001) |
Writers everywhere are encountering developments reshaping the industry. With the absorption of studios into mega-corporations, Internet productions, and a Writers' Guild strike looming, it can be difficult to determine what can, can't, and should be done. The Scriptwriters Network was fortunate therefore to have Charles Edward Pogue as the guest speaker for January.
In addition to writing successful films like The Fly, Psycho III, D.O.A., and Dragonheart, Pogue was recently elected to the Board of Directors of WGA West. He is not shy about telling the truth, and thus has earned the title "pit bull of creative rights."
Even with his activist reputation, Pogue is a writer first, and has been since childhood. A voracious reader with over 6,000 books in his library, he has a fondness for adventure stories and pulp fiction. Throughout his professional acting career, he found the acting training gave him an understanding of dramatic form, which served him well writing stage plays and scripts.
His first screenplay was optioned by his neighbor who worked for a production company. Coincidentally, Pogue's friend, actor Larry Drake, had a part in a film from the same company. Through Drake, he met the director of the film. She read Pogue's script, and gave him some helpful notes. Pogue did a quick polish, and the resulting draft got him an agent.
Pogue's first two films were for Tarzan producer Sy Weintraub's Sherlock Holmes movie series. Only three films of the series were made, all written by Pogue. "It was a wonderful experience," he recalls, "I had incredible power! Actors like Denholm Elliot, Ian Richardson, and Brian Blessed were approaching me, asking if they could change a line!"
His agent, unsure how best to utilize Pogue's talents, set him up with a manager. That manager brought him the short story of The Fly. The two took their pitch to the studio head of 20th Century Fox - who was also the husband of the director who helped Pogue at the beginning. The studio liked the script, but didn't want to risk funds. So, Pogue and his producer, Stuart Cornfeld, who had a relationship with Mel Brooks during The Elephant Man, brought it to Brooksfilms. During production of The Fly, Pogue was bounced on and off the film. The final product was rewritten and directed by David Cronenberg, "but a lot of me is in the picture - I'm proud of it." He adds that he'd only met Cronenberg once - after the movie was out.
His next assignment was Psycho III. Although the sequel was not a 'perfect' film, Pogue cites the great experience of working with director/star Anthony Perkins. Creative resolution of differences was the hallmark of the production. The two wanted the story to be like the original Psycho. The studio wanted more blood, though - and the challenge was to add carnage without degrading the film into a slasher flick. Then, the studio demanded a 'DePalma'-type twist ending! The solution, while creatively creepy, undermined the original point of the film, the "journey to light" - and served as a harbinger of things to come.
Disney offered him a multi-picture deal, including a remake of The Thief of Baghdad.Pogue worked on the Baghdad concept for six weeks, only to have the pitch shot down. Pogue made another deal with Tri-Star, and began work on the remake of D.O.A. Differences on story direction caused him to scrap the project with Tri-Star and try once more with Disney. Michael Eisner himself stated that D.O.A. was the best script he'd read that year, but "the real Development Hell began at Disney," Pogue reveals. "They put lots of people between you and the end result." The best script Eisner had read that year was nonetheless subjected to endless notes and additions. To make matters worse, Pogue indicates that he felt the film's directors, a husband-and-wife team, were camera technicians who championed style over substance. The result was a movie "full of plot holes and bad rewriting."
In 1990, Patrick Read Johnson, a young director handled by the same agent as Pogue, pitched him a story about the partnership of a knight and a dragon. Pogue was instantly enthralled with the idea and told his agent: "Make it happen!" He and Johnson hammered out a very complex story in a week. "The script wrote like white heat. It poured out of my fingers. It was the easiest thing I ever wrote." Even though he'd originated the story, Johnson was thrown off the film after a year, because the producers didn't want to trust a first-time director.
The experience of making Dragonheart proved a painful one. Pogue says unabashedly, "In my opinion the director had no poetry in his soul; a mediocre director and a mediocre human being. Hollywood is very good at giving incredible power to insecure, loathsome, and self-loathing people and this insecurity manifests itself in intellectual bullying, where if they can't usurp your talent or take credit for it, they try to destroy it." The largest problem was the producer, a onetime champion of the script, who now refused to fight for the integrity of the story. The result was incongruous scenes, conceived by the director, such as the village of starving peasants running toward the dragon, shouting "Meat! Meat! Meat!" while an army of pigs ran underfoot.
Knowing the studio would exclude him from the publicity for Dragonheart, Pogue hired his own public relations agent. He also had friendships with several magazine and newspaper reporters, who were happy to talk with him. Fortunately, everyone in town had read Dragonheart, and thus he emerged with his reputation unscathed - a rarity for writers. An in-depth feature in the Los Angeles Times showed in detail how he, as the writer, didn't have to clout to maintain control of his movies. "I don't mind fighting battles of artistic differences," he explains. "The problem is I'm always fighting battles over a lack of rudimentary common sense." From that moment on, he was cast as an advocate of writers' rights.
Pogue maintains common sense is the basis for the Guild's demands in the upcoming contract negotiations. "At issue are things that should be happening anyway, such as writers being present at rehearsals and on the set," he says. During the question and answer session, the issue of the director's vanity credit popped up immediately.
"There are Three Great Lies in Hollywood," he answers. "One: The Auteur Myth - That the director is the author of the film. Two: The Director's Vision - If the director is doing his job right, he has no vision - he only has a point of view toward the vision of the script. Three: 'A film by' credit. No one person makes a film." Pogue points out that the vanity credit is actually a divisive issue among the directors themselves. "The idea is to change the culture so everyone sees how ridiculous the vanity credit is," he suggests.
Creative issues, says Pogue, also affect financial issues. "Money follows power. Are you making less money and working harder for it? Are you tired of being replaced, or sharing credit, or your films being ruined? Is your career getting shorter? It's because you have no power. The rise of the directors is the result of studios and producers abdicating their power to them," he says. "Another problem is the producers are young too - and it's not the youth, it's the fact they don't know their business. They don't have literary or drama skills, they have no history of the business, and they have no cultural reference points beyond their own generation."
The expansion of the Internet is intensifying the need for stronger policies for compensation and residuals. Studios have been actively hiring writers to do Internet-only work for $100-$200 a script. "A lot of new technologies are affecting what we're paid and how they're going to pay us. We don't want to be left out in the cold," Pogue says.
Questions were raised about what writers could do before and during the strike, should it indeed happen. For television writers asked to contribute extra scripts before the deadline, Pogue remarks that Guild president John Wells has advised not to do the additional work. "You don't want to help (the studios) get through the fall season without you." He informs Guild members that they can not sell their work to anyone during a strike, not even a non-signatory production company. Non-members could possibly sell their scripts to non-signatory companies, but Pogue stresses that those writers should be very careful not to inadvertently jeopardize their career. Anyone with questions about what is and is not acceptable can contact the Guild for guidance. One positive note is that should a strike happen, writers can continue to approach agents for representation.
Pogue's own writing process is very thorough. "I live and die by the outline," he declares. He builds extensive, detailed outlines, sometimes spending more time on the outline than the actual script. The final outline averages 30 pages, with bits of dialogue. There is up to six months' worth of intense research. The themes he's attracted to involve flawed heroes - characters trying to maintain or regain their passion and idealism. "I always like the hero who goes somewhere, who has to rise up to be heroic. Being a hero has to cost you something, there has to be sacrifice and suffering to make the winning worth something," he says.
Ever the truth-teller, when asked where he sees himself in five years, he answers: "Either the business will probably throw me out or I'm going to throw the business out. It's getting harder and harder to maintain any cohesive vision writing a screenplay." On the other hand, novels, he reveals, have a great, little known benefit for the scriptwriter: "Write the novel version first; that way you always own the copyright on the novel! Then you'll always have it pristine the way you want it." The scriptwriter, he continues, always has the option to write the novelization of the script if he owns separated rights to the story. "Writing the novel of Dragonheart was a luxuriating, glorious time in my life - I never had a happier time writing. It was wonderful realizing I didn't have to stop a scene at three minutes!"
In this time of uncertainty, it is critical for writers to get the information that will help them make informed decisions about their career and their craft. For this reason, the January meeting with Charles Edward Pogue was important, gratifying, and one of the best ways to begin the new year.
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