In this nontraditional biopic, director Julie Taymor crafts a complex tapestry of one of the most inspirational and legendary figures of modern history, Gloria Steinem. Based on Steinem’s own memoir My Life on the Road, “The Glorias” (Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander, Lulu Wilson, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, each one playing Gloria at a certain age) traces Steinem’s influential journey to prominence – from her time in India as a young woman, to the founding of Ms. magazine in New York, to her role in the rise of the women’s rights movement in the 1960s, to the historic 1977 National Women’s Conference and beyond… “The emphasis in the film is not on the singular woman but on the multiple ‘Glorias’ represented in the film”, writes director Julie Taymor. “And ultimately for me, “The Glorias” are not just of the Steinem bloodline but, by the end of the film, are also in effect, ‘WE THE PEOPLE.’ What inspired me to do this story, this life, was how it introduced me to all these varied women and girls. Her life is the women in the story.”
Elliot Goldenthal received an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for his score for “Frida” and Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for his music for Neil Jordan’s “Interview with the Vampire” and “Michael Collins”. Also notable among his more than 30 film scores are Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” and “Heat”, Neil Jordan’s “The Butcher Boy” for which he received the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Music, Joel Schumacher’s “A Time to Kill” and “Batman Forever”, Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy” and Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest”, “Across the Universe”, “Titus” and “The Glorias” which premiered at Sundance in January 2020 and became available for digital download and streaming via Prime Video on September 30, 2020.
The film utilizes a very interesting and effective narrative style. How did the concept of having four actors play the roles of Gloria through the film’s timeline affect or influence how you would approach composing the film’s score?
All the problems I had to figure out was a challenge, because there is a timeline going from the 1930s to 2017! Within that there’s a magical Greyhound bus that carries these four Glorias of various ages, and they’re able to interact with each other, and that’s out of time, so to speak. So that gave me a reference point, and I realized that I don’t have to refer to any particular time period. I used the amplified guitar in a very soloistic, personal way, a very, almost introspective way of playing guitar, as well as other instruments like accordion, glass harmonica, cello harmonics, and things like that. The guitar created a contemporary feeling that we’re all familiar with, having grown up in that amplified guitar age since the 1950s on, but it also provided a timelessness, which I can play off of as constant. The first thing you hear in the movie is the amplified guitar, and the last thing you hear in the movie, over a big majestic orchestra, is also amplified guitar, so it had a binding factor in the movie.
Your score hits each time period of the score uniquely and yet the music, like the film, possesses an overarching unity that seems to flow across the storyline through Gloria’s internal perspective. How would you describe your major thematic ideas for the score, and how they intersect as the story is told?
On a musical/technical level, the first melody you hear with the little girl and the jukebox tied on the back of the car is played in an almost 1940s ‘Hot Club of France’-style of playing, on an acoustic guitar. That melody goes through a series of transformations, you hear it again when the little girl is leaving her house in Michigan, by the lake; you hear it in the scene when she’s with her mother when The Andrews Sisters didn’t show up and she’s kind of forlorn because it’s raining and she tells her father the bad news about the cancellation of the concert. Then you hear it when she’s dancing with her two former boyfriends in her 50th Birthday scene later in the movie. It’s the same chord changes – so it had a subconscious unifying affect also, with the motivic material there, and that takes us through various chronological stages of her life, and the music that represented that time.
The score has a variety of palettes which contribute musically to Julie’s visual storytelling style. How did you choose your use of bluesy electric guitar, moments of jazz, string quartet, instrumental R&B…?
It might sound like various styles to us right now – we’re looking at that through a microscope, in the sense that we all grew up through that. We lived it; it’s very much part of our lives. There’s a kind of folky instrumental sound when you see Bella Abzug campaigning, which is very representative of the feeling – the kind of infectious brashness that you felt in that period of the late ’60s, with Bella and just the streets in general. The sound of the ’60s also included kind of a free jazz saxophone type of thing, heard when Gloria went from a rural environment to a cosmopolitan environment – so I’m just saying, in the course of our lives… for me, I was a little boy but I attended Woodstock, and I was also in subway distance to go to the Village Gate and hear Miles Davis a number of times in a very intimate setting, and hearing the classics, hearing orchestral string quartets, all these things I grew up with. So that’s very much a part of what I breathed in, in my life. If you look back – way back – on Mozart for example, you hear Italian styles, German styles, Turkish marches and this and that; it’s not as unusual for composers to just reflect what they hear in their lives. But, especially in this movie, it took on years and years of life in very separate environments, from a long highway on a Greyhound bus, reflecting Middle America or the Great Plains or the Big Skies of the Northwest to the cosmopolitan environments and also the big, majestic ideas of freedom and personal human rights that’s beyond personal – that’s represented as more of a yearning.
Especially at the end, where you’ve got this striking symphonic passage that augments moments of the film’s emotional landscape and then gives the ending such a powerful, emotive flavor…
It’s very interesting that you ask that, because I held off on giving Gloria – during her speech at the Women’s March on Washington [2017], it was the day after the inauguration of the President. That moment, she was speaking to a vast crowd, I think there were four hundred and seventy thousand people in Washington, but it was a worldwide event, so I held off on making Gloria like a big, iconic figure. Instead, the big orchestral themes come in on the crowd reaction, when she said “The Constitution doesn’t begin with, ‘I, the president,’ it begins with, ‘We, the People” and that gave a kind of majesty to the ideas that audience, the people at the March and worldwide, were yearning for.
There’s a couple of really unique surreal moments in the film I wanted to ask about – the exotic ‘red tornado’ dream sequence prompted by a TV interviewer’s distasteful comment. Like much in your score, this sequence musically gets creatively pretty wild and fits Julie’s unique cinematic storytelling style beautifully. What do you recall about composing the music for this sequence?
I originally composed something for that sequence, during that tornado, where the TV announcer was playfully tortured – but nothing cruel, I should say. I played that scene from the perspective of the announcer’s trepidation, and I made it really, really scary. But Julie said “No, don’t do that. I want you to compose something that has a fun flavor to it, a kind of a playful menace. That’s the way she put it. The orchestral writing is very sardonic and kind of based on a tarantella but gone wild – gone mad a little bit. And it has some flavors of circus music, klezmer, and then goes into a rapid-fire rhythmic change in the middle that has a certain abandon to it. Of course I’m nodding to “The Wizard of Oz”, but in a fun sense of that. When we were kids, that sequence was a little scary to us, you know? We were kids! But now it makes us smile, and it has a sweetness to it.
Another is the animated Hindu goddess dance sequence during the Ms. Magazine sequence. It’s short but it’s just a wonderful bit.
That’s played by a wonderful percussionist named Jamey Haddad. That little sequence was meant to have the slightest, slightest feeling of the origins in India but also to make you smile a little bit. It’s not the all-encompassing, scary Kali, it was more of an uplifting mother Kali at your back, a being able to represent a woman’s feminist causes.
What particular instruments did Jamey use on that?
He plays musical clay pots, hajime – also various hand percussion, frame drums, and little Agogo bells.
That’s a delightful sequence. You’ve got the situation of this political movement that is so meaningful to so many people, and yet you can take an aside for something that’s very fun and energetic before going back into the drama. The Kali dance, I think, is a great example of that.
The other sequence is the conveyor belt sequence…
Yes, the ‘Treadmill Agitato’ scene.
That one was deadly serious. It’s the pent-up frustration one can have on the road and trying to push forward ideas of human rights and have the same racist crap being thrown at you. She’s lashing out at anyone but all you see are the miles and miles of road that she clocked in while trying to get things right. Julie’s model for the visuals there was Escher, the painter. That was played with a string quartet and, again, amplified guitar.