Memories Are Complicated: A Conversation with ‘Spinning Gold’ Writer-Director Timothy Scott Bogart

What do Donna Summer, Parliament, Gladys Knight, The Isley Brothers, The Village People, and Bill Withers all have in common with the rock band KISS? They all rose to their musical heights under the watchful ear of the music industry's most colorful and brilliant music executive, Neil Bogart, founder of Casablanca Records, the most successful independent record company of all time. Along with a ragtag team of young music lovers, Neil and Casablanca Records would rewrite history and change the music industry forever. Their mix of creative insanity, a total belief in each other, and the music they were creating, shaped our culture and ultimately defined a generation.    

Music biopics are difficult to do - from appeasing film lovers to music lovers, you need to seemingly get the facts and tunes right, or else...

Thankfully, the team behind Spinning Gold took this music biopic to another level, led by writer-director Timothy Scott Bogart, who also happens to be the son of famed record executive Neil Bogart. No stone is left unturned in order to serve the narrative structure, presented and creatively delivered, by Tim and his team in front and behind the scenes. This story and performances are meant to be seen on the big screen and heard through the best speaker system you can find as Tim takes us down Neil's memory lane filled with the earworms generations since have come to love.

Timothy Scott Bogart recently spoke with Script about writing the musical biopic based on his father, what's important to show and withhold as a storyteller, using musical numbers to progress the story, the importance of casting real artists, and more. Plus, Tim shares incredible advice for those writing a biopic, especially when you happen to be related to the subject matter.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: I love this line from Neil at the top of the movie, where he quips, “Memories are complicated,” and I feel that just sets the bar of what this ride we're gonna be on with him. And how do you kind of share and withhold some information from the audience, I’m curious what was that discovery process like for you in terms of telling his, your father's story, his legacy, and the impact that he had on their music industry? And also knowing how and when to tell the story and frame it in the narrative that you did?

Timothy Bogart: Yeah, that was tough, but any biopic is tough. A music biopic is I think particularly tough, because music fans are particularly tough. You gotta get your facts straight. As I was trying to figure out where the hell this story begins, what door do I enter? What door do I leave? I think movies like this are much more sculptures than they are paintings, right? It's like what do you not show? And along the way, it just sort of struck me. Every time I described a story or described one of these moments, I was always describing it in the way my father had described it. And it suddenly hit me that the coolest version of this movie was if he was the director, [laughs] if he was the director of photography, he was the costume designer, which would mean if you're this character, who is like the Neil Bogart character in the film, is in essence, taking us through his life to some degree, as an attempt to justify the sum of his life, that his own perception of reality would be what drove our experience of it.

And what I mean by that is, when he remembered something as being exciting, it would have been in his mind the most exciting that exciting ever was, but if it was the darkest, it would have been the darkest that dark ever was. So, it was told in extremes to me. And once I made that choice, that it was really his perception of reality, that allowed me to heighten the essence of what I think he wanted us to get out of that scene.

And I love what you just said about what I didn't show, because I think there are things he didn't want us to see, or things I think he was very much a sleight of hand going, ‘Look what I did here, but don't look at this bad thing I did over here.’ And so, I think that became a very important storytelling technique. Now, I do say, or I have the character of Neil say, right at the beginning, "Everything you're about to see is true. Even the parts that weren't." And a lot of people immediately grab on that and go, ‘OK, great. So, you're gonna play around with history?’ The truth is, I really don't. I use so closely to what really happened. What I think the Neil character is saying is the essence of what happened or what it might have meant to him or the things you might think it was about, was actually not what it's about. Because there's a much more personal thing that he didn't want us to know yet. He didn't want us to know, at the beginning of the film, how scared he was, or how close to disaster Casablanca was, once he gets that he didn't want us to think it was his fault that they were so far out on the edge. He was struggling with that. But the truth is, the actual historical facts are the facts.

Now, what we also say, right at the beginning is, ‘Memories are complicated,’ as you said, you remember what you need to remember, and you forget what you need to forget. And I think that's also true. And the way as a writer that I crafted this was through an enormous amount of interviews with everybody who had possibly opened their door to me, and everybody I asked did, which I think was a testament to how important he was in their lives. And I'm talking about from executives like Clive Davis to obviously the musical acts, to the executives in between, everybody opened their doors to me and their memories to me. 

And what I quickly discovered was how odd the perception of memory is, because the way I would talk about it often is that it'd be like being in Studio 54 on any night, and if you're on one side of the dance floor, you saw a version of that night, if you're on the other side of the dance floor, you saw a completely different version of the night. Now both events happened, and the people on the floor were the same, but there was definitely a different experience. And as I would interview people, the other funny thing about memory is people tend to make themselves the leading player of their stories. [laughs] So you know, people who were there, suddenly, were the only ones there, or someone told them to do something, they were the ones who invented the light bulb. And so that was interesting.

But I was able to rely on some wonderful things like George Clinton, who has an encyclopedic mind, and I could talk to him about events. And he would be able to recite the setlist from a particular show they did. And ultimately what I did is I did enough triangulation of interviews around each event that I do believe I was ultimately able to get to the center truth, even though if each version of it might have been a slight variation on the theme, only because that's how it was voiced to me by the memories that I believe these people really hold whether they remember it accurately or not [laughs] that's something as a storyteller, you can only kind of draw from the facts that are there, but we tried very hard. There's two or three things that I know definitively, I said, I'm going to change that, because I need to do that for architectural purposes or timeline purposes. But it's not a movie that's fiction, it's very much a real story. And every one of those crazy events absolutely happened.

Sadie: How do you know where to place those musical numbers in service of the story?

Tim: In this movie, that was also one of the first ideas that I committed to, having been an enormous fan of music biopics, I do tend to think musicals and music biopics all tend to have a little bit of the same problem when it gets to the songs, which is you got all this story going and then we stop. And we sit in an audience, and it may be a wonderful performance, and it may be an incredible bit of choreography, but the story tends to stop most often. And I thought, since this wasn't a movie about that particular act, it's not the Donna Summers story. It's not the Parliament story. It's not the KISS story. It's the story about this guy, that to stop to hear these songs, I thought would do great disservice to the narrative drive.

So early on, I looked at the songs that I felt were historically the ones that occurred at most consequential plot point turning points of his life, but also ones that by the very nature of their content, were perfectly accurate. By way of example, “Midnight Train to Georgia” was a transformative song for Gladys Knight. But it was also the song, at which point my father left Buddah Records to form Casablanca Records; left New York to move to Los Angeles; left one woman to be in love with another - and to use that song, not only as source, but as a score, to drive that narrative is something. I think that's like an eight-minute song now in the movie, because it becomes something else. It's never about to sit back and watch.

Even the beginning, I always wanted, because I'm so fascinated about the writing process across the board, and my brother, Evan Bogart, who did the score with Justin Gray, but did the music production is an incredibly talented songwriter. And I've sat in those writing sessions just in awe of him and his colleagues how they craft a song in the moment like an hour, suddenly, there's this thing. As a screenwriter, it takes much longer. [laughs] But I thought that was a really cool thing to explore. And so, in each one of our big music numbers, I'm sort of looking at another part of it. With “Midnight Train to Georgia” I wanted to explore songwriting and origin of creation with “It's Your Thing with Jason Derulo playing Ron Isley, I wanted to show how the kernel of a sound can become quite another sound through production and producing.

So, each one of those songs certainly are fantastic songs, but they really are meant to drive narrative and I sort of built my structure, both about the story and then cherry-picked the songs that I think helped most serve the story. And the writer and director me really did work in very good collaboration [laughs] as I was figuring out, well, what do I write? And what do I shoot? In essence, it had to be the same idea, because it was such a specific visual choice.

Sadie: Right, it makes me recall that scene where Peter Criss presents his song “Beth” and it's just such a pivotal moment for both the band, for him, and obviously your father. The sound design on this is also very fantastic and pointed down to those moments where we hear the needle on the vinyl, signifying pivotal moments of Neil’s journey and arc. What was the process of working with your sound designer, and fine tuning those nuances throughout the movie?

Tim: Brian Berger did the mix and worked hand in hand with again, Evan Bogart and Justin Gray. And of any project I've ever worked on, we spent a long time building, mixing, rebuilding, remixing, and it's funny, or not funny, so much this was done still in the height of COVID - not being able to experience it in a theater created a very different result. And we finally started putting it in a theater, we really had to go back and experience what Atmos can do. You're doing a music movie. We broke every single instrument down separately, so we could suddenly go, ‘No, in this moment, I just want to hear those little tom-toms there, just that little bell there.’ And it wasn't just mixing the song, each one of the stems from the song became part of the sound design, each bass line, each drum kick.

So, the dance with that was incredibly challenging. And the slightest little nudge one way or the other really impacts the way you walk away from the film. It worked hand in hand between just traditional sound design and music design. And ultimately, as we got closer and closer to the end, they became very much the same thing, where Brian Berger our mixer, and Evan and Justin really worked hand in hand together to ultimately deliver what I think is a really superb encompassing mix.

Sadie: Right, and delivering those fantastic emotional cues. This film is very much character driven with a diverse cast of performers and notable musicians at that. In terms of casting the right people for these parts, who also happen to be musicians themselves, you certainly could’ve made them into caricatures, and thankfully you didn’t – but how did you go about choosing the right voice for each role?

Tim: I mean, that was also one of the early decisions that I also knew. There were some decisions I made, I knew I was being different about the approach, and I knew that some people would not like it, but I thought it was still the right choice to make, and in this case, I wasn't casting Donna Summer. Donna Summer was a creation of my fathers and this woman named LaDonna Gaines, who played the part in life of Donna Summer. I wasn't casting Gene Simmons, I was casting, this kid named Chaim Witz, who played the part of a guy named Gene Simmons, and Stanley Eisen played a part of a guy named Paul Stanley, just like Neil Bogatz played a part of a guy named Neil Bogart. George Clinton was a three-piece suited doo-wop guy before he came the Godfather of funk. All these people created alter egos for themselves, which I truly think were the most real versions of themselves, but they were creations.

And so, part of the decision early on was if I'm just replicating and mimicking the image, and the sound and the movement of the creation, then I'm kind of missing the point, which is that's something they created, these are the dreamers who had the dreams of that. And so, by choice, I didn't want them to look alike. I didn't want them to sound alike. I wanted them to be completely other beings, who would then create with costume and hair and makeup, a fictional version of themselves, which is a little bit what this kind of island of misfit toys became. 

Once I made that choice, it was then about who's the essence of these people? And then you're looking at Ron Isley going well, the essence is one of the most explosive most dynamic performers of his day. Well, that's Jason Derulo. Who's the wild Mad Hatter like George Clinton? Well, that's Wiz Khalifa. And for the artists who were not as well-known at the time when they interacted with my father, I thought well, who would my father cast, he would look for more undiscovered stars and break them in this movie. And so while Pink Sweat$ certainly has a following and Ledisi, she has a following, and Sam Harris, lead singer of the X Ambassadors who plays Paul Stanley, it allowed us to feel like we were discovering new people, which I thought was equally important than just, here's a mimic of a person, who looks and sounds like that. That wasn't this movie, it may be another person's movie and a good choice of that, but that wasn't what I wanted to do.

Sadie: Yeah, I really appreciate that you’re carrying that thorough line of what your dad did with his career through this movie and those artists. We definitely need more undiscovered artists out in the forefront in something like this.

Tim: Yeah.

Sadie: Is there any plan in the future to adapt this into an actual stage musical? I feel like it's just it's like screaming to be one.

Tim: It should hit the stage next year. We have been developing it for many, many years. But we've always wanted it to come after the film. And my brother Evan and I have been writing it for a while. In fact, the song that ends the film, “Greatest Time of My Life” is the opening song of the Broadway show. And so, we thought that was a little tip of the hat to what was to come by ending the movie with how the Broadway musical begins.

It will explore other stuff that we didn't get to do in the movie, it will come through a slightly different door. It will be a fascinating combination of original songs and these songs that we know and the way they interact with one another, which everyone said is a terrible idea. You can't do it. And I think the song “Greatest Time of My Life” which has all those other songs as part of the architecture of it, I think proves that it's a pretty cool idea. We think. But that's next for sure.

Sadie: That's awesome! And what a fun hidden easter egg for this movie but also using the song at the end as a prelude for the Broadway musical.

Tim: Yes!

Sadie: General advice for writers who are tackling a true story that perhaps happens to be related to the subject matter at hand, similar to you – what was your Nort star when chipping away at your dad's story? I'm sure you undoubtedly unearthed things that you didn't want to know about your father and things that maybe you did want to know, but how do you frame that against that narrative?

Tim: That's such an important question for anybody tackling this. Ultimately, if there's stuff you don't want to know, you probably shouldn't tackle it. I mean, that's kind of first and foremost, I wanted to know everything, I think the ultimate kind of advice I would give is, you have to become not related to the subject. And as a storyteller, people would always say, ‘You're showing your dad’s warts and all. He's a womanizer. He's a gambler. He's an addict.’ As a storyteller, I thought that was fascinating and incredible stuff to draw from - as a son, meh. [smirks and laughs] But I'm not the son, I'm a storyteller, and sort of finding a messy character that's human and flawed, is I think, what we all look to either find or create.

And the moment you put on blinders, because you don't want to go down that road, I think it's such a disservice. I would suggest that if my father wasn't a gambling addict, there would have been no success. So that's both a flaw and his superhero power. And to say, ‘but I don't want to mess with the flaw,’ well then you don't have the superhero power.

I think, being honest about what the intent is probably the most important thing. My intent was to celebrate a fascinating collection of real people who somehow lived a fairy tale. And it really happened at a time when maybe fairytales were possible. Maybe they're not anymore. But the journey to get there had to be through the truth of who these people really were and to embrace the messiness of that, because ultimately, I think that's what audiences do connect with - something that feels true - and the moment you start shaving down the edges, it becomes less and less true, and as a result, less and less relatable.

Spinning Gold is only in theaters on March 31, 2023