THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 2001

Focus on Santa Barbara

The city's annual film festival is using Oscar season to lure Hollywood's top talent.
By Josef Woodard

If this year's panels are well-stocked with Oscar nominees, there are also individual tales of merit. Last year's script panel included Native American Sherman Alexi, writer of "Smoke Signals," whose wit and minority perspective gave the panel balance. This year's panel includes Gregory Allen Howard, who scored a success, after years of effort, with "Remember the Titans."

That film's commercial achievements, and the story's central social conscience, have earned its filmmakers widespread respect. Howard spoke on the phone last week from Manhattan, where he was receiving the humanitarian Christopher Award.

Howard feels a sense of "validation" about the success of "Titans," in part because it had been "rejected by all the studios, at least twice." The project was also a highly personal one, begun after he moved back to Virginia from Hollywood in the mid-'90s. He had gained a sense of career solidity after working on sitcoms, doing rewrites and working on "Ali."

After countless rejections, even as a made-for-cable movie, Howard thought it was a dead project. "It was a period sports movie," Howard explains. "That's death enough right there. And then you add in a social drama, a civil rights story, and my God, no wonder I was getting thrown out of offices. But I was so blinded by the story, I wasn't paying any attention to any of that. Oddly enough, those are the very elements that made the movie a hit."

Fate took a turn when Jerry Bruckheimer stepped in. Howard toned down his original rough language and they were shooting within 18 months.

Howard's writing career began in sitcoms in the '80s, which he views now as a good training ground. "You have to get to the point, which helps in screenwriting, which relies on an economy of words to convey your point."

He also wrote a well-received play, "Tinseltown Trilogy," produced in Los Angeles in 1991 at the Tamarind Theater. Still, writing for the screen, on his own creative terms was always the goal. "To be honest, I've never been very successful at the assignment game," Howard admits. "I got maybe 12 assignments while I was in Hollywood, but as far as moving those assignments forward, I don't understand what the process is. Development is a farce. It's torturous and it breaks your spirit and gets you confused."

"I'm not even competent at pitching. Just for me, pitching is a fraud. I don't know what I'm going to write until I write. For me to go in and tell people in a room that this is what I'm going to do in every act is a fraud, because honestly, I don't know if I'm going to do that."

"Titans" was a Disney project, and Howard's Disney connection continues with a current Civil War-based story he's writing. "My big thing is that it's gotta move me. Then I can write something that moves people."

Success in Hollywood breeds confidence and a sense of inclusion, at least in temporary waves. At the Santa Barbara Festival panel, he says, "I'll be up there mouthing off. I buried my fear with 'Titans.' I'm not afraid of being put out of business anymore."