“My father’s life was a very visible one,” says writer/director Timothy Scott Bogart, son of 1970s record producer Neil Bogart, the co-founder of Casablanca Records. “That was my playground. I grew up, literally backstage at these concerts.”
Neil Bogart signed such artists as Donna Summer, George Clinton, KISS, the Isley Brothers, the Village People, and Gladys Knight. “The storytelling I saw being done as a child was infectious. Everything that they did was creating something beyond just the music. I just fell in love with it.”
At the age of 12, Timothy’s father died. Perhaps looking for a creative outlet, he actually wrote his first screenplay at this young age. “It was terrible,” he jokes, “but it was 120 pages, it actually had a beginning, middle, and end. I think all of it was an escape. I got lost in the fantasy and loved making little movies and writing little stories.”
Timothy credits “being exposed to that extraordinary visual world [his father] created” as the foundation for what led to his career as a Producer, Screenwriter, and Director. “Almost everything I did had somebody struggling with loss,” he says in hindsight. I kept doing stories about other things, but ultimately, they were about children struggling with the loss of a parent.”
Only a year or two after the death of his father, Timothy recalls people “banging on the door trying to get the rights” to his father’s life story. The family wasn’t ready to share this information. They turned down Broadway musicians, television shows, and movies. “As I started looking at this as being something I wanted to do with my life, I took on the mantle of being responsible of being the guy saying ‘No.’ Part of that was, I didn’t know what it was.”
After decades of pondering what the story could be and how it might be best represented, Timothy decided to take on the responsibility himself, as the writer and director of Spinning Gold, the story of Neil Bogart.
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