Scotty Dugan

Scotty Dugan says he became addicted to moving pictures after beginning his career in still pictures at the age of 14. He was barely a teenager when he sold his first photograph -- a high school game-winning, fingertip touchdown reception -- at his hometown newspaper, The Reading Chronicle. The editor paid him $5 and discouraged him from submitting more material, as "The paper has its own photography staff," Dugan was told. But the thrill of capturing filmed images that told a story had set in. Dugan kept taking "story-type" pictures and the Chronicle kept publishing them. Soon, so did the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe. His photographs then landed in Encyclopedia Britannica and on the AP Wire. Even one-time presidential candidate Gov. Michael S. Dukakis hired him to shoot stills. And when the Reading Chronicle began publishing his sample captions verbatim, Dugan was off to journalism school at Boston University, where in addition to studying newswriting, he honed more camera skills as the school's official sports photographer. After college he went on to work as a copy editor in the sports department at the Boston Herald during the Larry Bird era. But his love for photography and storytelling drove him to relocate in the late 1980s to Los Angeles, where he kept one foot in publishing and the other in the movie business by working as an editor at The Hollywood Reporter. Dugan then spring-boarded from entertainment journalism to entertainment publicity in the mid-'9Os, forming his own PR company, Dugan & Story Public Relations. During this time he wrote press materials for clients ranging from Charlton Heston to Barbara Streisand, billionaire philanthropist Sir John Templeton, and fitness guru Tony Little. While he was writing during the day about other people's entertainment industry careers, Dugan was furthering his own at night. He worked a second full-time job as a graveyard script processor at Warner Bros., where he transformed drafts of script for movies ("The Fugitive," "Dave") and TV programs ("Murphy Brown," "Designing Women") into final shooting format. He took film directing classes at UCLA and began hosting directors' workshops out of his home, studied screenwriting under some of the industry's leading story professionals, and finished four stories, among them the romantic comedy "Click," about a love bug that visits a New England beach community, which is the first film produced by his company Dugan & Story Productions.