Exclusive GITS Q&A: Pen Densham (Part 1)
Screenwriter, producer, and director Pen Densham has written a book called “Riding the Alligator: Strategies for a Career in Screenplay Writing,” published by Michael Wiese Productions. A few weeks back, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Pen and we ended up having a terrific wide-ranging conversation about the craft of screenwriting, the creative process, evolutionary psychology, teaching, writing from passion, and many other subject areas. We covered so much good terrain, I have decided to break up the Q&A into three posts: today, tomorrow, and Wednesday. First some background on Pen:
Pen Densham is a successful award-winning screenwriter, producer, and director, with an extensive track-record in film and television. Pen is responsible for writing and producing some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters, such as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, along with some of its longest-running television series including “The Outer Limits.”
Starting with his first job in show business, riding atop a live alligator for a theatrical short film made by his parents, Pen has spent his lifetime in the business of entertainment, selling films and television series, as well as hiring, mentoring and collaborating with A-list writers along the way.
Pen has written “Riding The Alligator” with one clear goal in mind: to write the kind of book he would have loved to have read when he was starting out as a writer-filmmaker. Pen is also an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California’s prestigious School of Cinematic Arts.
Today we focus on how Pen got into filmmaking and the backstory on two of his movies Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Moll Flanders:
ON HOW HE STARTED DOWN THE PATH TOWARD MAKING MOVIES
My parents made films in England when I was a little kid. And the magic of that had made me want to cast spells and just grow up and be a normal kid. I yearned to create.
I left school at fifteen very much frightened of myself, insecure, unsupported, but there was one teacher who liked me. My spelling was terrible, he ignored it. He said I was creative. I could look back after the success of Robin Hood and say it was that guy who gave me enough battery power to keep me going until I’d actually found myself.
ON ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES
When I pitched Robin Hood to the studios, they all laughed at me, and said that’s a cool idea, but no one’s ever going to do it. “We don’t want guys with swords and tights” — this was predating the Men in Tights movie. They saw it as hackneyed and cliché — “We need men with guns.” I ended up writing Robin Hood because one of my assistants at that time sought me out and said, “You know you should write this.” And I’m saying to myself, “This is crazy, I’ve been turned down by everybody.” He said, “No, this is good. You should write it.” So I started writing a page or two, gave it to this assistant whose name was Mark Stern — he now runs the SyFy channel. Mark was the reason I wrote Robin Hood, his enthusiasm for it. I share that story with students because I want them to see the obstacles I overcame thanks to passion and also thanks to allies.
ON MOLL FLANDERS
The Moll Flanders movie was a similar thing. I was listening to an NPR radio program that was talking about an orphans home in England where they were going through the archives and found letters from women who’d left their children on the doorstep hundreds of years ago. And I thought what does a woman write to a child in that kind of horrific abandonment. I started to write the ending of the movie before I even know what it was. The ending was something like, “Now child that you’ve heard your mother’s story, what say you?” And the child says, “You can throw me out on the street before I deny that woman is worthy of my love.” And the other party says, “Then prepare thyself, I am that woman, I am your mother.” I knew I wanted to write that story because I wanted a woman to tell her daughter the absolute unvarnished truth about her, and still be loved. That’s all I knew. The only person I told about the idea was my writing assistant, actually my secretary. I didn’t dare tell my male partners because I knew they’d laugh me out of the room. So I wrote the script in secret, I wrote it with this woman reading my earliest pages. Then she came to me two days in and gave me a copy of “Moll Flanders,” pointing to the preface which said, “Memoirs of a Thief and a Whore who ended up living well in Virginia.” And I said, “Oh my God, maybe I can take this character to speak the story I want to tell.” That’s how the movie started.
ON PERSISTENCE AND PASSION
Most of the time, if you do something, it causes something else to happen. Going out to meetings is the same process. A lot of people don’t go out to meetings and I say, go into a meeting any way you can get it because you just don’t know what might come up. And that randomness theory… luck comes to people who keep pushing forward. So in a way, luck comes to the persistent and the passionate, more than it’s going to come to the people who give up. 100% not trying is a 100% guaranteed failure.
For more information on Pen and his new book:
The book’s website.
Michael Wiese Productions website.
Amazon website here.
More tomorrow from Pen Densham.