COMMUNITY
 Alfred Gough |
(Read the previous stories in the series.)
September 2004
Years ago, Southern Maryland native son Alfred Gough III produced plays for the St. Mary’s County Department of Recreation and Parks. Now Gough produces and writes hit television shows and hit movies.
“Smallville,” the Superman-inspired TV series that Gough created with writing partner Miles Millar, is in its fourth season on the WB network. The duo put words in the mouth of another superhero by helping to write last year’s blockbuster film “Spider-Man 2.”
“It’s fun to take these great characters and find the human elements in them,” said Gough from Southern California. “Comic books are our modern mythology. Superheroes are about various elements of the human condition, just like the heroes in Greek mythology. Superman is about his quest to fit in to human society, Batman struggles to keep the darkness at bay by fighting evil. And Spider-Man deals with the guilt over his uncle’s death.”
Gough was born and raised in Leonardtown, graduating from St. Mary’s Ryken High School in 1985. While living here, he said, he often wished that the area had the amenities usually found in the suburbs. “Now Leonardtown has changed so much, it’s almost like suburbia,” Gough said.
He worked in public relations in Manhattan before deciding to try to break into Hollywood. He enrolled in the University of Southern California’s movie producers program, where he met British writer Millar. Between classes the two wrote their first script, “Mango,” about an animal-allergic cop who gets teamed with an orangutan.
“Mango” paid for Gough and Millar’s college tuition when New Line Cinema bought the script for $400,000. After an article appeared in Variety announcing the sale, Gough sent a copy to his father Alfred Gough Jr., attaching a Post-It note reading, “To Al the Elder from Al the Richer.”
Although the cop-and-orangutan story was never filmed, the script established Gough and Millar’s reputations as screenwriters who could blend action with humor. They scripted two movies for HBO and Decade Pictures, “Double Tap” and “Made Men,” before moving to theatrical features with “Lethal Weapon 4.” That led to Gough and Millar working on Jackie Chan’s Old West buddy movie “Shanghai Noon” and its sequel, “Shanghai Knights.”
Both writers were huge fans of Chan and they welcomed the opportunity to work with him. “Jackie wanted to do a Western, so we pitched it to Jackie and the process went very fast,” Gough said. “We wrote ‘Shanghai Noon’ in the fall of 1998 and shooting began in the spring of 1999. And we wrote the sequel before the first movie was released. Both movies were great fun, and we’re proud of both of them.”
While establishing a movie career, Gough and Millar also began writing for television. They were story editors on “Timecop” on ABC and supervising producers on “Martial Law,” which ran for two seasons on CBS. In the fall of 1999 they created “The Strip” for Warner Brothers Television and served as the executive producers of the show, which aired on UPN.
“The Strip” led Warner Brothers to ask Gough and his partner to develop a TV series about Superboy for the WB network. “We didn’t want to do ‘flights and tights,’ but we liked the idea of Clark Kent in high school. No one knew what went on during that time in his life. That story had never been told,” Gough said.
As portrayed on “Smallville,” the future Superman is still developing his powers while struggling with the transition from boyhood to manhood. He relies on the counsel of his adoptive parents Jonathan and Martha, who are much younger than the elderly couple in the comic books.
“We deliberately made Clark’s parents younger so they would have more of an impact. They’re more involved in his life,” Gough said. “The family element of the show is important. If Clark had crashed somewhere else on Earth he’d be an entirely different person.” That type of person is Clark’s friend and future archenemy Lex Luthor, whose father Lionel is a ruthless tycoon. “Lex’s father represents what Lex will become. It’s sort of an essay on extreme parenting. We see how Clark’s character was formed by his adoptive parents and how Lex was formed by his parental relationship, or the lack thereof.”
“Smallville” convinced the management at Columbia Pictures to hire Gough and Millar to write the sequel to the film “Spider-Man.” Although Gough hadn’t read the comic books, as a boy he was a devoted viewer of the webslinger’s cartoon series.
“The ‘Spider-Man’ sequel is similar to what we deal with in ‘Smallville,’ where we’re telling not the back story or an origin, but a story,” Gough said. “It’s the idea that with great power comes great responsibility, and Spider-Man struggles with whether he wants his powers or not. We thought about how you take these characters and take them to the next step, to keep people interested in them.” Gough and Millar wrote a movie script for yet another superhero, Marvel’s Iron Man, but that project is still in development.
Last year Disney began filming “Herbie Fully Loaded,” which Gough and his partner helped write. The story revives the Volkswagen Love Bug in the world of NASCAR and stars Matt Dillon, Michael Keaton, and Lindsay Lohan. “It was fun to do something different, to work on a nonsuperhero story,” Gough said.
“I’m very grateful for my career,” he said. “I’m in a place I always wanted to be. It’s great to be able to do something you love.”