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Doug Segal ’75 by Jan Dragin Quill interviewed Pike alumnus, film producer, and writer Doug Segal from his home in Los Angeles. His credits as an associate producer, co-producer, and producer include: Angus (1995), starring Charlie Talbert as Angus, Kathy Bates and George C. Scott; City of Angels (1998), with Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan; Three Kings (1999), with George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Ice Cube; and Bulletproof Monk (2003), with Yun-Fat Chow and Seann William Scott.
Doug Segal ’75. Background image: artwork from City of Angels promotional poster.
Q. Who or what was your first muse? D.S.: Four of us kids grew up in North Andover. My dad had a huge influence on me creatively. He was a great host of parties and very funny. I remember watching him as a kid, how he captivated a room, how all eyes went to him. Q.: When were you first aware of your own creativity? D.S.: At Pike, I remember doing a school play, No, No, A Million Times No, probably about Sixth Grade. I was playing across from Wendy Bixby, I think. She was taller than I and generally more developed, if you know
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what I mean. I was playing this villain and she was my henchwoman. I’m telling her my villainous plot, and I remember while I was telling her this, the audience began to laugh. I couldn’t figure it out until I realized my eyes were right at her breasts. I got it at that moment, then played it more, like a gag. They laughed more. “This feels good,” I thought. Q.: And you never looked back? D.S.: After Pike, at Phillips Andover, I did more theater. I went to the University of Colorado for a year, mostly for the skiing. As a liberal arts major, I did a couple of theater pieces. I decided I’d pursue acting and transferred back East. My father wasn’t happy about my choice. He said, “Why pick acting? You could do anything you want in life. Why struggle?” I kept at it and, when he became very ill, I told him, “I want to tell you why I want to pursue acting. It’s because of you, seeing you entertain and make people laugh.” I don’t know that he was ever happy about it, but I do think it was a secret wish of his, too.
be in development. She was a tough cookie but said, “I like you. We’ll see if we can find something.” In 1991 she gave me the exiting development director’s position on Cool Runnings, about the Jamaican bobsled team in the 1987-88 Olympics. After that, I was associate producer and directed the additional audio with George C. Scott and Kathy Bates for Angus. Q: How did you come to work on City of Angels? D.S.: Dawn had remake rights to the movie Wings of Desire, which she was developing as a romantic comedy. At this time my brother was dying of AIDS, and based on his illness and my father’s death, I was a big advocate of the notion that life is short and we should live it to its fullest. I went to Dawn and said, “This movie should be a romantic tragedy, not a comedy. All the angel wants to do is experience life– taste, touch, love. But with that, he also has to experience pain because that’s part of the beauty of life.”
Dawn resonated with this because she’d studied Buddhism. In Buddhist philosophy I went on to New York University as a drama the human soul only grows through pain student and studied at the Lee Strasberg or love. Dana Stevens wrote the screenplay Theatre Institute. I never felt good as an with two endings. In one Meg Ryan’s actor, so I started writing and directing. In character lives, in the other she dies. To say my senior year, I wrote a musical that I also what we really wanted to say in the movie, produced and directed. After I graduated we knew, as unpopular as it might be, that NYU, Anna Strasberg asked me to teach she had to die. We pitched it to Dawn acting in their youth program, a great and that became City of Angels. The irony opportunity. I liked the alternative musicals of it all is that, while we were making the and started writing these shows for the kids. movie, Dawn was diagnosed with a brain tumor and she died without ever seeing the Q. How did you make the jump to Los Angeles, to finished film. films? Q.: And now your work is taking another D.S.: By the late 80s my wife, Susan, an turn—back to the future? actress, and I had lived in New York about 11 years. We decided, “Let’s never wonder I’ve gone back to doing more writing. ‘what if ’” and moved to LA. Our neighbor Two years ago I cowrote and produced a in LA ran a temp agency and sent us out on television pilot for Fox. Now I’m pitching a jobs. I got sent to Disney and other studios new show of my own and writing a prequel working as an assistant. to The Lion King for Disney. I see myself shifting away from producing and returning Q: And that’s how you met Dawn Steel? to the thing that was always the greater interest to me, the creative. It’s a tough D.S.: Right. Dawn was the first woman business, and having a sense of what people to run a major Hollywood film studio. I are looking for can be an asset. But in the began working with Dawn as a full time end, I have to write what I really want to assistant, although I’d told her I wanted to write and hope it finds its audience.