How do you feel about your first film, “Cocaine Cowboys”?
“Cocaine Cowboys” was lamentable. It was incredibly awful, funny, and almost embarrassing to work on. I don’t even think there even was a script for the movie, which was an ill-conceived idea. However, it did start to teach me very valuable lessons about producing the score, getting it in on time, hiring an orchestra, conducting the orchestra, and doing all of those type of things; also the constraints of a budget. So it did teach me lessons along those lines.
After you scored “Cocaine Cowboys” and “Blank Generation”, I noticed you scored your next film ten years later. What happened?
I continued writing chamber and orchestra music, but I was terribly interested in theatre as I still am today. I wrote a musical called Liberty’s Taken. Norman Lear produced this with Julie and we did it at the Castle Hill Festival in Massachusetts and it will tour the country this year. Also there was The Love of Three Oranges. This director, Andre Serban, wanted me to re-score the entire Prokofiev score because he wanted a new Prokofiev score. It’s very funny, but I was doing two theatre pieces simultaneously – The King Stag and that.
After that, I worked on A Servant of Two Masters at the Berkeley Repertoire Theater in San Francisco. Then I started work on my opera Grendel and did a workshop at the Milwaukee Repertoire Theatre around 1985. Grendel is still in transit; it will happen. In 1986 I did a major musical at Lincoln Center and at the American Theater Festival called The Transposed Heads, which was based on a Thomas Mann novella. This had very unusual orchestration because I used western-style instruments plus Indian-type instrumentation bonsary, Indian percussion. It had approximately a six-week run at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater. The Transposed Heads was a very important piece for me. This is one of my best scores, but the lyrics are questionable. It was very beautiful and I’m very proud of it.
After The Transposed Heads I was commissioned by Music Theater Group to do Juan Darien. This was something that was in my mind for many years to do: to create a Requiem Mass that was based on a carnival, to have this collision between a carnival and the Requiem Mass. Do the entire thing in Latin and Spanish. That became the most successful theater piece and collaboration thus far with Julie and I. This premiered in 1987 and toured the world going to France, Edinburgh. It won the prize for music at the Edinburgh Music Festival, it won me an Obie Award for best music of that year, and an award from the American Arts and Letters. Then it went to Jerusalem, San Francisco, back to New York, and, most recently, it was at Lincoln Center at the Mitzi Newhouse. So it’s an extremely successful piece and will continue to be performed.
At the same time as composing music for a lot of Shakespearean pieces, The Tempest, Midsummer’s Night Dream, and two orchestral pieces, one called ‘Shadow Play Scherzo’, which ASCAP asked me to write in honor of Leonard Bernstein’s 70th birthday and was based on a theme from Juan Darien because Leonard really liked it. He loved The Transposed Heads and liked the theater stuff I was into, so I wanted to take a tidbit of my theater and dedicate it to him. That was in 1988, in the same year I wrote my other orchestral piece ‘Pastime Variations’ that was based on the 30th anniversary of Ebbets Field leaving New York, when it was being destroyed. We went down to that area and there was an apartment complex with a sign saying “No Ball Playing on the Grass”. It killed me to know that that’s the place where racial history was made, where Babe Ruth hit home runs, when he was briefly a Dodger and a Yankee playing the Dodgers. I couldn’t believe it. I wrote this lament performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the Haydn/Mozart Orchestra. It had twenty-six variations of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’, but backwards. Not the music backwards, though. Usually in a theme with variations you state the theme and then by the end it’s all convoluted and you kind of lose it. In this particular sense everything was convoluted in the beginning and then at the very end, this very doleful, almost Coltranesque saxophone solo played with the music of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’. And people were really touched by it, like feeling the sadness of a city losing a baseball team.
At that point I sent a tape to an agent named Sam Schwartz, who was recommended to me by John Corigliano. John said to Sam, “You ought to hear this guy. He is a wonderful theater composer and he’s also a wonderful orchestra composer. By the way, he was my student, I know him very well; why don’t you listen to this tape?” I sent him The Transposed Heads, Juan Darien, ‘Shadow Play Scherzo’, and ‘Pastime Variations’. It happened simultaneously that directors Gus Van Sant and Mary Lambert heard the tapes and both called me up simultaneously within a week. They thought the music sounded very un-Hollywood and were interested in working with me for that reason. That started me off ten years later.
So “Drugstore Cowboy” and “Pet Sematary” simultaneously happened at the same time?
Both of these directors wanted me for different reasons, but both of them said the same thing. They didn’t want to go into the Hollywood well at that point. Just remember, I didn’t send my tapes to any directors; I wasn’t actively seeking a film career, but at that point I’d always loved film and said, “What the hell, I’ll send my tape to this agent.” The agent sent many of his clients’ tapes out along with the score to Juan Darien, Transposed Heads, and those two orchestral pieces. They picked that up and that’s what happened. So when someone comes to me and says, ‘Give me advice; how do I get into this business?’, the only thing I can suggest to them is that theater – not to use it as a stepping stone – is one of the great dramatic forms in which a composer can learn a craft. When you have to do it, you’ve got to do it live. It changes every night and you’ve got to adjust. All the early composers, the Max Steiners, the Waxmans, especially the ones that came over from Europe and Vienna, they’re all theater composers. Nino Rota was an opera composer; Bernard Herrman worked in opera. Theater, theater, theater. That’s the way to do it. That’s my only suggestion.