Howard '74 talks about 'brutal' Hollywood from the inside

Gregory Allen Howard '74 is the screenwriter for the new movie "Remember the Titans" starring Denzel Washington. He recently spoke with 'Prince' Senior Writer Sophia Hollander.

'Prince': What did you think of Princeton?

Howard: I really liked it. It was great for me. I made friends that have been with me and will be with me for the rest of my life. I wasn't with the Tigertones. I didn't involve myself in that much extracurricular activity. I played freshman football, but then I didn't play any more. Involved in the Third World Center, gave some seminars. Listen, maybe I was a bad undergraduate student but I was there meeting people, growing and studying. Kind of boring.

P: How did you become interested in writing?

H: It was a process I enjoyed and the research aspects of it. I really enjoyed digging through the books and that I could formulate my own thing that I wanted to write about. I like sort of telling these historical stories. I wasn't real creative then. (Laughing) I didn't try to put any profound spin on them. My senior thesis, my hypothesis was that the Newark riot of 1967 was not a riot, that Newark was a colony and it was a colonial uprising. Let me put it this way, in the late 1960s there were numerous riots. Each riot was similar but unique and the Newark riot had all the earmarks of a colony. There was an occupying military force — the Newark police — it was primarily a minority populace that was governed over by someone white. For my grandiose hypothesis, I got a very flattering B and I was quite happy. It was typed on about five different typewriters. I was writing longhand, typing up against a pretty tight deadline. But I really got turned onto writing. The solitude of it and the ability to sort of create your own world — that was something I really fell in love with.

P: What kind of experience have you had working in Hollywood?

H: It's a tough business. It is a brutal — and I do mean brutal — business. I worked on Wall Street briefly and there's no comparison. This is the toughest business I ever heard of or know about because the level of treachery and backstabbing — it's scary. I was just talking to my uncle the other day who said it's like an Elizabethan court. One minute you're in favor, the next minute you're out, someone might poison your food. It's Roman in its excesses and it's Elizabethan. I spend half my time trying to figure out who's in, who's out, who's trying to help me and who's trying to kill me.

My best friend is a director, a sweet guy, a nice guy. He called me up in middle of a project he's doing and said it's war every day. Because everybody has an agenda. For every person who's working in Hollywood, there are 1,000 people who want that job. The crew hates him. They shouldn't. Everybody on the crew seems to think they're the director and [they think], "Let's see if I can screw him up today, see if he's a little tired from last night. Slow him down, get him fired. Maybe I can get his job." It's war every single day. You've got to be like an animal trainer. You have to go in among the lions. There's a sense that the writer is expendable.

I'm known in town as someone who will cuss you out. I got a reputation — not cussing people out — but being difficult. If you stand up for yourself as a writer, you're a threat to the development executives. Because they want someone who's malleable. But if you are, you end up eviscerating your own work and you get fired anyway. I made that mistake a long time ago. I write for me now because you know what? You're going to be fired anyway. [Acting the way executives wanted me to act] turned into disaster and I'll never do that again. It's a tough, tough, tough business. I don't even know if I'm going to be in it for another 10 years. Writers want to become directors — but I don't know about this crap about protecting my vision. It's to remove one prick from the process.

P: When did you eviscerate your own work?

H: A very well known producer who is also involved in the music business was very nice to me about four or five years ago, introduced me to some people. I felt I sort of owed him. I was going to write a movie for him that had been done before — a long time ago — and I was perfectly prepared as an original writer to update it and make it happen. And then right before I started writing, he gave me the exact scenes from the old movie and said, "Do this." It was like, "Oh my God." I was so depressed. But I felt that I owed him. And of course it turned into a disaster. I prostituted myself and I've never done it since. He was really pissed. And then almost tried to deny that he had told me to write the movie just like that.

P: Did it get made?

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H: Of course not. What people don't really realize is a typical studio has 400 projects in development. And they make 18 movies a year, so you can see the odds of any movie getting made. I bet you can't name a screenwriter. They like to keep us anonymous, so that they can abuse us. We're going to have a writers' strike in about eight months. It's going to be over respect and treatment of writers. I like to tell people if you want to find out what it's like to be black in America, work as a screenwriter. You'll find out what second-class citizenship and insults are all about. Every single writer is angry.

P: Was your experience on "Remember the Titans" awful too?

H: Listen, I was free royally on this. I'm really, really happy about "Titans." I'm happy about how I was treated. That was an isolated situation. Generally writers are abused really badly. I'm trying to give a cautionary thing to the students reading this. See, [screenwriting] seems easy. It seems like this is something anyone can do and slide into, but it is very daunting and the writing is a small part of it. But if you love it, you do it, and I love it and that's why I do it.

"Titans" was the best experience I've had by far. Even more surprising, what I wrote ended up on screen. I pinch myself and feel very blessed that what I wrote ended up on screen, because even if you write it, generally what happens is executives look at it as a block. Ninety-five percent of the cases, people take little pickaxes and start chipping away at the block. Anything that has an edge gets hacked off, and by the time it's ready to become a movie, it's a ball. Why? Because they're afraid of offending people. That's why movies are crap. It's the development process. Some people equate development to sex. It's fun and we should do a lot of it.

I don't want to frighten or bore people, but suffice to say, you turn in a script generally and people will often look at it like it's alien excrement — they're amazed and don't know what to do with it.

P: Do you have an example?

H: I wrote a script called "The Harriet Tubman Story." They really liked it, I won't mention the studio. So now they got a good script, they want to do something. The president in the executive meeting said, "We have this wonderful script about this woman who does all these heroic things," and he said, "You know I was thinking there's only one person who could do this: Julia Roberts."

The lone black executive said, "But [Harriet Tubman] was black." And the president said, "But it was so long ago, no one will know it." That was an actual exchange. No one else said anything. David Mamet refers to studio executives as unemployable people who find employment. Not all of them are bad. Some of them are my friends. I try to put them out of my mind. (Laughs.)

I wrote a script for Columbia Pictures about five years ago called "Walls Come Tumbling Down." It was about the Negro baseball league and they loved it — jumping up and down in the aisles. I got in conflict with the director who was hired after I rewrote the script. The director was a little insecure prick and we went to war from the beginning. I was new and I didn't realize that even a hack has more clout than a writer. So I walked out. They studio called and said, "Come back." This director just waited for an opportunity to get at me. So he said to the studio, "The star wants a rewrite and Greg's written out. He's tired." And he convinced the actor. So the director said, "We just got to get someone else." I didn't know about any of this. It happened in a day. I was over at Columbia and I'm in the foyer and in the office are agents from my agency pitching [another writer] on my project. The secretary was talking loud to try and cover up what they were saying, but I could hear. They walked out, looked at me, and looked at the floor and left. So then I go in to see the executive, and I said, "How could you do this to me? I'm pitching for the integrity of the script here." He said, "Greg, are you going to get up at 5 in the morning [and be the director]? You've got to get up at 5 in the morning and enter the lion's cage."

P: How did you get the idea for "Remember the Titans?"

H: Alexandria [where Howard lives] is integrated and I came from a place that was not integrated — Los Angeles. I asked everyone how integration happened, and they said a high school football team integrated the city. The script tanked when I sent it out. Nobody wanted to buy it, but we got a call from [producer Jerry] Bruckheimer.

P: Not exactly what Jerry Bruckheimer usually does, no?

H: But timing is everything, maybe, in life, and he had just set up a division called Technical Black which handled his human movies, the ones on a smaller scale. They were looking for a small-budgeted human story, and Jerry's a sports nut. I was initially concerned, but considering nobody else wanted the script, I was just happy they bought it. Eighteen months later they made it. It's just a miracle.

P: How was Alexandria different from Los Angeles?

H: It makes you so cuckoo. Everybody [in Los Angeles] is nuts and it's really refreshing living in a town where people don't know anything about entertainment.

I don't like being stopped by the police, repeatedly. Of course [in LA] I was. It builds up and builds up and makes you angry. The LAPD is arrogant, full of hubris. Never an apology or anything. Multiply that daily, weekly, monthly . . . I haven't been stopped once in Alexandria. Not once. And that's refreshing. I don't get that tension I used to get.

P: What was the most rewarding part of researching "Remember the Titans"?

H: There's a character named Big Julius — a black defensive lineman — and he becomes friends with this white player. They became deep friends and it was very moving talking to him because they bridged a big gap to become friends. He said he had his doubts that he could feel [the white player] was his friend, and that was quite moving.

To do a true story — it's almost like investigative journalism. You've got to crawl through the manure to find the diamond. People always say, "This will be great for the movie," and whenever they say this it's always the worst thing. You have to sit there and nod, and every so often they say something that will just electrify you. They give you a gem.

P: Such as?

H: When I was talking to Coach Bill Yoast, he was going, "This will be great, this will be great, this will be great." And then he said, "Well, my daughter was mad when I was passed over [as head coach], and she said, 'Coach, I'm going to write the administrator a letter!'" That was a gem. You couldn't invent that.

P: How did you begin writing creatively?

H: I'm going to be honest with you. One day I woke up and I could write. It's probably tied to this relationship I was having. I was involved in a torturous relationship. This woman had just pulled my heart out of my chest and diced it up and spread it out in front of me. The next day I could write. It opened up something for me emotionally. I know some people — Truman Capote started at 14 and God bless him. That little finishing school up in Cambridge, work at the Lampoon and at 22 years old, they're story editors at "Seinfeld." No such luck for me. Those who learn must suffer. Those who create must suffer. There has to be a well of emotion that one can draw from.

The day after that woman broke up with me, I could write. I'm not joking. [Before that experience] I'd sit down in front of a computer for, like, three hours, and nothing would come out. I mean nothing. There was almost a wall.