DCM: How did you get involved in the project to film “Wonderland Avenue”?
Fred: I knew Danny. Over the years he had told me about his book “Wonderland Avenue” and that it was his follow-up after his co-authorship of “No One Here Gets Out Alive.” “Wonderland Avenue” was his autobiography, his story. And there was a lot of interest in the film business to make it into a movie. Some people had already optioned it and written a couple of screenplays from it. Most recently Passion Films had bought the rights to it. Passion Films is out of the U.K. Well, they eventually came to me because of Danny. They felt they should get to know me because I had talked to Danny a lot about his book, what was in it, and what was good from a film perspective. You know it’s always a struggle to get something to screen and this is a book similar to a lot of other books where people like them, but for some reason, and at a particular point, they don’ t quite make it. But there’s never been a loss of interest in getting this book to the screen. So Danny consulted with me on it. Then I became acquainted with the people at Passion who had the rights to the book as well as a screenplay that they had done. Yet they were looking for a different approach. There’d already been three screenplays written before the one that Brent and I wrote and they’d mostly followed a linear diary path. So we took more of “A Beautiful Mind” path. We took the spirit of the book and told a dramatic story. But it’s not just dramatic--it’s got a lot of dark humor in it too. Passion liked our approach. We think we finally cracked the code to actually getting this book translated to the screen. How many pages is it?
Brent: The book is 462 pages. All those other scripts were 140 plus pages. The thing is that the previous scripts tried to stay true to the book in a fashion that doesn’t really translate to screenplay form. So the job that Fred and I had was to correct that. Obviously when you’re adapting a book you have to keep the essence of the book and the essence of the story which is what we were working very hard to do along with keeping it under a certain page count for production considerations and things like that. We were able to pull that off finally after, what was it, three scripts Fred?
Fred: Something like that, yes.
Brent: So that was the job.
DCM: You were telling me that Danny had given you other insights into the story…
Fred: Yes, I think the other thing that helped us is I have a very good relationship with Danny and over the years he would talk to me about his time with Jim and The Doors and his time with Ray Manzarek. Ray was like his angel. When Danny was down on his luck after Jim had died he and Ray bumped into each other when Danny was selling all his records because he was broke. It ’s very interesting because when there was no Doors it was Ray and Jim Morrison bumping into each other on Venice Beach. So after Danny and Ray met, he took Danny under his wing and made him his manager. You know he had a second life after Jim’s death. Jim Morrison was like a mentor to Danny and the first thing that you’re struck with in the book is when they first get introduced you get to see that they’re both crazy guys without limits with one obviously quite younger than the other. Danny was 16 or something like that.
Brent: 13.
Fred: 13 right. So Danny became the kid around the Doors’ office and Jim took a liking to him. Over the years, with my knowing Danny, little tidbits would come out about Jim and The Doors that Danny had forgotten or he hadn’t put in the book because he couldn’t find a way to fit them in. We were able to, least of all, keep notes on that stuff and when it came time to translate this into the screenplay it became helpful because a lot of the stuff he brought to my attention was good for bridging uses in the screenplay. There’s a famous scene in the book about Jim and Danny at the Whisky. Bo Diddley is playing and Jim screams out to the audience when they’re paying more attention to Jim than Bo. Jim had a lot of respect for Bo Diddley. He screamed out to the audience, 'This is the man that deserves your respect!' When the audience didn't respond Jim raged on, 'You don't know shit--you're all a bunch of ni**ers! A buncha f**king ungrateful stupid ni**ers!' The interesting thing is in the book there’s never a follow-up as to why Jim did that, what motivated him to say that. But he did tell Danny why, he passed it on to us and we’ve put it into the screenplay because it’s insightful about what motivated the 'N' word usage. It had nothing to do with Jim’s feelings about black people but it was about people ignoring a really great artist.
Brent: The ‘N’ word was used for shock value.
DCM: People have quoted that line and called Morrison a racist.
Wonderland Avenue is a careering autobiography of someone who wilfully, skilfully and enthusiastically abused all the cards that life dealt. Fred: Jim, as we know, knew how to be an eruptive catalyst--especially with audiences. Always going past the edge. A bit too far at times for some, not enough for others. However, he used the 'N' word as a daring ploy in that situation. What he wanted and what he got was to shock and wake those people up. Just look at the context of that situation. The audience was ignoring Bo Diddley, a great artist in his own right, and instead clamoring for Jim. The key here is how Jim set it up. He started off by saying 'This is the man that deserves your respect!' when they ignored him--he then erupted with what he said. Also, think about it. Jim loved the blues and jazz. That's all black-based music. And he dug Jimi Hendrix and his music. So being a racist makes no sense. Being an eruptive catalyst does!
Brent: The important thing about this story and the information that we were able to get from Danny, especially the inside stuff, is that it shows a different side of Jim Morrison that most people have never seen. Most know him as the one-dimensional Jim, the crazy, poet, artist kind of guy.
Fred: The self-destructive drinker.
Brent: Self-destructive and all the wild stuff he did, but what we were able to get shows a completely different side to him, a side that was caring in many ways, almost nurturing in some fashion.
Fred: Philosophical, humorous, intellectual, introspective.
Brent: Which is what he was with Danny. He took Danny under his wing and coached him along. I think he liked Danny a lot simply because Danny was a younger version of himself really.
Fred: Precocious. And who had similar dysfunctional family issues.
Brent: Yeah. So…
At the age of thirteen Danny Sugerman - already the wayward product of Beverly Hills wealth and privilege - went to his first Doors concert. He never looked back. He became Jim Morrison's protege and - still in his teens - manager of the Doors and then of Iggy Pop. He also plunged gleefully into the glamorous underworld of the rock n/' roll scene, diving head first into booze, sex and drugs: every conceivable kind of drug, every day, in every possible permutation. By age of twenty-one he had an idyllic home, a beautiful girlfriend, the best car in the world, two types of hepatitus, a diseased heart, a $500 a-day heroin habit and only a week to live. He lived. DCM: I can see how Danny can fit in with somebody like that. I have the greatest respect for him. I think he’s done more for Doors fans than any other single person has. It’s so cool to see the development of a project like this and letting it tell the other side of Jim Morrison that the Oliver Stone movie in ‘91 just didn’t tell.
Fred: I take issue with that movie because I think it was too one-dimensional of Jim and unfortunately that was a big shortcoming. But thanks to Danny we’re able to show that Jim was very philosophical, and he was, like Brent said, nurturing and rather strict about Danny finishing school and hitting the books and introducing him to all the great authors and giving him many books to read. Reading was everything to Jim and it was his recommended way of acquiring knowledge. He became like a teacher to Danny and you know that had a profound effect because the first time Danny saw him he was mesmerized by him. Danny first saw Jim at a concert and he didn’t know what he was expecting to see. He was just going to a concert and of all people he sees Jim Morrison on stage dancing in that strobe light effect and to him it was mesmerizing. It was like watching the visitation of a supernatural spirit, shamanism. He was just blown away. There was no other life, no other place that he wanted to be. He was transcended at that moment, which the Doors’ music can do to someone, and it had a profound impact on his life to the point that, as he tells in his book, he took the big stakes of being with either his family or with Morrison and The Doors. He put his stakes on Jim Morrison and The Doors. That had a consequence when Jim died. There was no Doors, there was no Jim, and Danny went into a denial period where he entered a self-destruction race as hard as he could. The strange thing is the harder he tried to be reckless the more he got elevated into life; he met Ray, Ray gave him a job, he became successful at the job, he made a lot of money, he got an expense account, he got a brand new car, he crashed it, he bought a new one, he got into heroin, he became addicted and he just kept going and going and going. He became Ray’s manager, he became Iggy Pop’s manager and it seemed like no matter what he did he couldn’t fail. He couldn’t fail in spite of the destruction of his own person. His career skyrocketed whether he liked it or not. Of course he liked it. And then he came to a crashing end. When you first open the book it tells you that he has a week to live…and he survives. That’s the best part of the screenplay where Danny’s got a week to live and he’s been told by the doctor that he’s got to kick the habit. But he’s in such a dire physical state they’re not even sure that he can survive kicking his drug habit. This is where the earlier loss of his father’s love turns around; in fact, he’s saved by his father’s love because his father put him into the hospital and into a detox unit. Dr. Pulman and Danny are at odds with each other. Danny is in denial about Jim’s death and the fact that he’s addicted. Slowly but surely, like peeling an onion, Dr. Pulman gets these layers off Danny so that he really does have a true self-examination. ‘Breaking through to the other side’ was surviving for him. He realized, as he said in the back of the book, that if Jim had had a second chance he probably would have broken through to the other side to survive as well. The other thing is, through this journey of his youth, by the end of the book 16 people have died. And it’s reflective of his book with Hopkins, “No One Here Gets Out Alive.” It’s hard to survive the life that Jim went through and here Danny picks up the baton and runs with it. But in Danny’s life he’s going down a different path. It’s like, whereas Jim was part of an act as well as part of something he couldn’t control, Danny just deliberately and without any prejudice tested how far he could go with no limits and he survived. Surviving was the wisdom Danny acquired from Blake's statement: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Brent: His whole thing really was that he was searching for acceptance because he didn’t get very much from his family in his early life especially as a young boy. His father had left when he was a youngster and then an abusive stepfather raised him. He was looking for somebody who’d just accept him for who he was and when Jim Morrison came along that was the guy that accepted him. Finally Danny felt at home. Later on when Jim died Danny had this thing inside him that just continued the saga. But he didn’t know where to stop so he just took it to the limit. First he needed acceptance from Jim. When Jim died he got it from Iggy Pop in a lot of ways, he also got it from his girlfriend Tiffany, and then he was looking for it from Ray who became a sort of surrogate father to him in an odd sort of way. Eventually this self-destructive thing got to the point where it was totally out of control. He was almost dead, and like Fred said, he was saved by the love of his father coming back to put him into rehab. When given two choices by Dr. Pulman, Danny chose life as opposed to death. But it took a lot to break the pattern. He kept going and going until the brink of death before he finally realized that this path was no good and that although his heroes had died on this same path it wasn’t necessary for him to die also.
Wonderland Avenue is Danny's tale. Excessive, scandelous, comic, cautionary and horrifying, it chronicles the 60s dream gone-to-rot and the early life of a Hollywood Wild Child who was just brilliant at being bad. DCM: Does the screenplay follow the same time period as the book? I know Danny’s incredible story continues on past the book.
Brent: We stuck to the book. The screenplay ends when Danny emerges from rehab and he’s pretty much recovered.
Fred: We didn’t want to take it beyond the book although there are stories after that. Either way it ends the same so we figured okay we’ll stop at the end of the book. And don’t forget we had to tell the story in 120 pages so there’s enough just in that book alone. The other thing is we went after the Tiffany/Danny story, their love relationship and the meaningfulness of it. It started out as a fun trip at drug/drinking parties and turned into a situation where Danny was in the hospital about to die and trying to kick his habit, Tiffany was pregnant with his child, she then OD’d and Danny was spiritually destroyed. He had a hard time dealing with that and even talking about it to this day. It was a very meaningful relationship for him. And even when talking to Danny about Jim and the songs, the words from “The End” can get him going emotionally: ‘It hurts to set you free but you’ll never follow me.’ For Danny that was the epitaph of Jim’s passing and something he finally came to realize, with Dr. Pulman’s help, at the end of the book (and movie).
DCM: What’s the procedure for the movie to come together?
Fred: Diverse Talent Group took the project on, they signed us and they’re going around to a couple of studios that I need to keep confidential as part of the submission process. Diverse is also trying to attach talent to the project, which will be either an actor or a director. We've already gotten interest in the project, there are discussions about whom to attach and there's studio interest, so that’s where we’re at right now.
'Wonderland Avenue' is not just a book. It's the rock n' roll saga. An authentic, true to life FEAR AND LOATHING in Los Angeles. DCM: With “The Doors” movie things got out of control with the portrayal of somebody different from reality. Will this project be monitored so that it doesn’t make a similar mistake? That’s a big concern. I put the press release in our newsletter and people have emailed me about that.
Fred: The good news is that I’m attached to the project as a producer, which will get me plenty of say over that issue. And also I don’t think Danny is going to let anybody smudge up what he wrote, what his life was about, or what it meant. Danny really trusts me and that’s why it ended up here. There’s nothing to really play around with. It’s just such an unbelievable story to begin with. If you went in and pitched it nobody would believe you, but somebody has lived this story, I’ve met his brother Joe and other people that have known Danny. They’ve told me the stories and either witnessed them or have good second-hand knowledge. In this case the truth is stranger than fiction. The truth of the book is what we’re going for. We don’t want to mess with it because if it becomes fictitious it just won’t be meaningful to what really happened.
Brent: The other thing is the script has been written in such a way that it retains the essence of the book. It doesn’t skip around. Anybody watching or reading this story will see a beginning, middle and end as it should be. It’s quite easy to follow but it still has the emotional impact as well as a lot of dark humor, which is appealing. Executives will certainly try to do their thing as usual but fortunately with Fred running the show that will be kept to a minimum. But it’s not going to need to be messed with much anyway. As writers we cross our fingers.
DCM: So will you be in the project to the very end?
Fred: Yes.
A sobering, scarily exhilirating and often heart-breaking sad account of a teen rebel rocketing off into a self-destructive frenzy. DCM: I’m certainly excited about it. The Danny Sugerman story is every bit exciting as the Jim Morrison story.
Brent: Yeah. Also the story deals with Jim Morrison to an extent. It would have been very easy to tell a Jim Morrison story but that’s not what this book is about. We had to tell Danny’s story, which is what we’ve done.
Fred: “No One Here Gets Out Alive” was a great biography and the movie was something else unfortunately. The main thing about Danny that really impressed me a lot and why I really admire him and like him so much is that he, and Jerry Hopkins, resurrected the Lizard King with “No One Here Gets Out Alive.” Until then, Jim was kind of nowhere. But he and The Doors had a profound impact on music and poetry. They were multi-dimensional: Rock ‘n’ roll, blues, jazz, psychedelic and poetic, and all in one band which is such a mind blower. I saw Jim when I was a kid and he knocked me out. But then Jim died and the Doors’ music seemingly sunk into the 'big sleep'. I remember being in Paris and going to the grave and kind of remembering seeing him and The Doors and what an impact they had on me. I still listen to them almost every day now. The thing is Danny brought them back into our consciousness. He resurrected them so that they’d never be forgotten nor the music lost. Now the thing is, the lyrics and music are timeless. They were a unique band, they don’t get old, they don’t get stale. Even when they were created they had their eye towards the universal impact of what they were doing so that they wouldn’t be buttoned as a group of the 60s. Everybody likes the lyrics, they love the sound, the profound subtext to the meaning of the music and the words and it’s all just timeless.
DCM: It is. It’s a great body of work. And to get back to what you were saying about Danny Sugerman being the one who resurrected The Doors with his book: We wouldn’t be talking now if it hadn’t been for “No One Here Gets Out Alive.” That’s the book that hooked me. Doing what I do, if it hadn’t been for Danny taking me under his wing several times himself I probably wouldn’t have kept doing it all these years.
Fred: We owe him a lot. Even the surviving Doors owe him a lot. The stuff going on now, what you read about, is unfortunate but this happens and I just hope they all take a breath and realize what this guy’s done for them. It would be great to get this thing into a motion picture because you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and there’s a lot of pathos. It also has a very searing point to make about an unusual, bright, precocious youth and his journey to manhood in a very short period of time with one of the most profound rock ‘n ’ roll singers and poets of our generation or any other generation to come.
DCM: This is a good spot to draw to a close.
Fred: Well we’re working very hard, we have a very good agency, we’re at a new beginning with this and we’ve finally got a script that we’ve been very lucky with. My partner has been very helpful. I’m a half-decent writer with another half-decent writer and the two of us together…
A literary great! WONDERLAND AVENUE captures with ringing clarity and horrifying awareness. The absolute pinnacle of pop excess. Brent: We make a whole decent writer!
Fred: Just by the reaction of Passion and the reaction to Diverse, their reading it and getting back to us in a week’s time, it’s proof that there’s something there.
DCM: Before you go…those scenes that you’ve added in, that weren’t in the book, could you talk about any of them?
Fred: Actually it’s too early and I don’t think the studios would want to give away certain things until the film gets to screen. We don’t want to show our cards until the game’s been played.
Brent: It’s like telling what’s in the package before the Xmas gift is opened.
DCM: You can’t blame me for trying though.
Fred: There are some really good gems that Danny passed along. We got them in there--some from when he was with Jim and The Doors. Great moments. There’s a lovely one in the screenplay that wasn’t in the book. Jim has decided to go to Paris though no one really knows. He does something to Danny that tips Danny off and it kind of shakes him up a little bit but Jim does it in a humorous way where you think, Well okay, he’s gone but he’ll be back. Then the moment comes. It punches you right in the gut when Danny finds out that Jim’s passed away.
DCM: Are there any tidbits that aren't in the screenplay that you can tell us?
Fred: Sure. Danny once told me that when Jim was feeling down one day he said, 'Do you think what we've done will mean anything when we're dead and gone?' A bright-eyed Danny said without hesitation, 'Shit yeah.’ So shit yeah, man. Look what Danny did to keep Jim, The Doors and their music alive!
DCM: Thanks Fred, Brent. I appreciate this. As I said Danny’s been there for me and I admire him. Anything I can do to help, I’d be glad to pay back tenfold.
Fred: I’d like to pay him back just for what he did for The Doors ‘cause I saw them twice in New York but after Jim passed away I lost sight and it wasn’t until “No One Here Gets Out Alive” came out that I read it and got hot for them again. I started listening, saw the movie and then the renaissance happened. Now it’s got a life of its own that will never stop because it’s entered the universal mind.
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