Inside story on the film on Gin Blossoms’ Hopkins
Brian Smith has been wanting to share the story of Gin Blossoms founder Doug Hopkins, who wrote the Tempe rockers’ breakthrough hits “Hey Jealousy” and “Found Out About You,” in a feature film for years.
But then, Hopkins has been in his head “pretty much every day” since the guitarist’s death by suicide in 1993 shortly after receiving a gold disc for “Hey Jealousy.”
In 2007, Smith shared his memories of the kindred spirit he considered a best friend in an emotionally devastating first-person remembrance titled “Jesus of Suburbia: A holiday tale, of sorts” for the weekly Detroit publication, Metro Times.
Now, he and Maggie Smith, his wife and writing partner, have adapted that initial article into a screenplay titled “Lost Horizons” (after one of Hopkins’ contributions to Gin Blossoms’ quadruple-platinum smash “New Miserable Experience”).
The film, to be produced by Sarah Platt and Mike Tankel, is now in preproduction.
The movie’s soundtrack will feature Doug Hopkins music
The director and cast have yet to be selected. But Jonathan Daniel of Crush Music has been brought in as the music supervisor. And the soundtrack will feature both Gin Blossoms classics and lesser-known Hopkins material, including new recordings of his songs by former bandmates Jesse Valenzuela of Gin Blossoms and Mark Zubia of Chimeras.
The Smiths, who live in Tucson, previously collaborated on film adaptations of Brian’s “Spent Saints & Other Stories” (as a 12-part series for Amazon Prime) and “Tucson Salvage,” a documentary based on Brian’s Tucson Weekly column.
Brian, a veteran of the Arizona music scene whose bands include Gentlemen Afterdark and the Beat Angels, started working on his first pass at a Hopkins screenplay more than a decade ago.
“That script stalled out and then my wife and I began writing this film in earnest about two and a half years ago,” Brian Smith says.
Doug Hopkins’ story has resonated with music fans for years
Meanwhile, Brian’s article in Metro Times kept generating interest every year around the anniversary of Hopkins’ death, Dec. 5.
“Of all the stories I’ve ever written, that one got the biggest response,” he says.
“For years, I was getting emails from people around the world who took the time to write to say it was such a beautiful piece and how the Gin Blossoms, particularly the Doug songs, changed their lives.”
As they were working on the screenplay, Maggie says, “We really wanted to show the empathy and the generosity of the person, not just the brutal alcohol truth that most people know. So we began interviewing and paying particular attention to the women in his life.”
The film will focus on many facets of Hopkins’ life
The film begins with Hopkins, who was 32 at the time of his death, being fired by his bandmates during the recording of “New Miserable Experience” due to his struggles with alcoholism and includes brief flashbacks to his childhood.
“So the backdrop tension is them rising up the charts as he is struggling more and more with his alcoholism,” Maggie says.
“But really, we told it as a love story between him and Sandra, his partner in the last few years of life. We felt that’s what we could bring as a husband-wife writing team to the story. And that’s what the producers, as a male and female, liked.”
It also underscored a quality that helped make Hopkins who he was.
As Brian says, “There was a side to Doug that was pure love. And by telling the love story, we see that side of him, often through the point of view of Sandra. So we get to see the beauty and the tragedy.”
In the end, they arrived at what Maggie calls “an equal balance” between Hopkins’ perspective, his sister, Sara Bennewitz’s perspective and Sandra’s perspective as someone “slowly losing the battle with her partner going the way of depression and alcoholism.”
Brian Smith kept himself out of the screenplay
Although Brian figures prominently in the first-person Metro Times story on which “Lost Horizons” would be based, he didn’t make it to the screenplay.
“That story, I wrote in first-person because it was a way to show the alcoholic side,” he says. “Because I am an alcoholic. And Doug was an alcoholic. That was more of a device. But I can’t write a movie and put myself in it. That’s gauche.”
He laughs, then adds, “Not only that, but there are characters in the movie,
like Lawrence Zubia (of Hopkins’ postGin Blossoms band, Chimeras), who are more important to telling the side of Doug that wasn’t the drunk, that wasn’t the guy who committed suicide.”
Other qualities that made his firstperson account of Hopkins’ final days so compelling remain.
“That article shows the intimate, empathic and complete way that he knew his friend Doug,” Maggie says. “He didn’t know just the persona or the myth and legend. He knew the real person. And that’s the person we strive to get across. So that’s what Brian had to offer as a really dear friend.”
For Smith the story ‘has to be right’
Seeing his dream get this close to becoming reality has been “super exciting,” Brian says. “I’m also really nervous because we want this to be accurate to Doug’s life and his heart and accurate to those who loved him. It has to be right.”
Part of getting it right involves acknowledging the many sides of Hopkins’ personality.
“He was brilliant and scathingly witty and writerly,” Brian says. “He was troubled, super shy. He could be a different person to different people. And it made for a really difficult character sketch from a writer’s point of view. It’s also really difficult because I loved the guy dearly. And I wanted to serve him and his legacy as much as his humanity.”
That’s required writing about aspects of his life that will be hard for those who loved him to relive.
“The alcoholic side of Doug was so tragic and so devastating to watch,” Brian says.
“I mean, it pretty much scared me straight in some ways. But even at his worst, he had a remarkable capacity for generosity and love. I knew that firsthand, but talking with Sandra, the love of his life, was really something.”
Although the film begins with Hopkins being fired, Maggie, who grew up a Gin Blossoms fan, post-Hopkins-firing, says “Lost Horizons” isn’t meant to cast his former bandmates in a bad light.
The film isn’t trying to cast the band in a bad light
“There’s no need to ever have bad blood,” she says.
“That’s not the point of the story at all. It’s about how Doug’s personal struggles slowly overwhelmed him and the people around him trying to save him. And I think it’s pretty clear that if somebody is running up a large bill for recording and not able to record their part and has been fired as a result, why that happened.”
Once the labels and their lawyers got involved, she says, it stopped being about the interpersonal dynamic in the band itself.
“And that disconnect is how humanity fell through the cracks.”
The film does touch on Hopkins’ feelings of resentment, sadness and betrayal at what happened to him, Maggie says.
“But I think hopefully, it also shows the greater context of it all. It’s mostly his own demons that he’s fighting.”
Brian spent a lot of time with Hopkins in the aftermath of his dismissal, so he lived through much of that resentment firsthand.
“When Doug got fired, I was appalled,” he says.
“He was so bitter and angry, for understandable reasons. But it’s really difficult to be in a band with an out-of-control alcoholic. And in many ways, those guys were just kids caught between the machinations of a corporate major label and a really sad, tragic alcoholic.”
Hopkins didn’t have a place in this world
The sadness is still palpable in Brian’s voice as he discusses Hopkins’ passing decades later.
“There was no place in this world for him,” he says.
“And the world really suffered. Because the songs were amazing. He had that ability to cram these huge emotions into a three-minute (pop) song with that sadness floating just below the surface. That’s why ‘Found Out About You’ and ‘Hey Jealousy’ are still on the radio.”
That human element in Hopkins is what ultimately makes his story so compelling and worth sharing decades later.
“There’s so many people that were left with huge holes in their hearts when he died, that we just feel so responsible, wanting to present him in an accurate light that will hopefully somehow satisfy everybody who knew him and loved him well,” Maggie says.
“Almost everyone that knew and loved him, when we asked them questions a quarter century later, they were moved to tears.”