Miles Goodman discusses his film music philosphy of bringing a quality to the picture which isn't visible. He has no interest in listening to film scores independently because of this, and actively wants his musical world to be much wider. He discusses parts of his music which were cut from "What About Bob?" and "Muppet Christmas Carol".
Miles Goodman is best known to viewers as the King of Comedy, having brought his composing touch to wacky pictures like “What About Bob?”, “Housesitter”, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”, “Indian Summer”, and, mostly recently, “Getting Even with Dad”. Goodman, whose scoring career began on the acclaimed but short-lived 1977 NBC drama James at 15, orchestrated for his cousin Johnny Mandel on “Being There”, “Agatha”, “Deathtrap”, and “The Verdict” from the late ‘70s to the early ‘80s, when he eventually began scoring his own films. Although the composer has been involved with a number of diverse projects (particularly having worked on pop-oriented soundtracks like “La Bamba”, “Footloose”, and “Little Shop of Horrors”), it has been his long association with comedy that has given him an (almost) unshakeable image of scoring genre films, one that he accepts, however reluctantly. Goodman has also found recent success in producing non-soundtrack jazz albums, working extensively with Toots Thielemans as well as Terence Blanchard, Grover Washington, Jr., Peabo Bryson, and others. His work in jazz has given him virtually a second profession, one that he discusses – along with scoring comedies and other film music odds and ends – in our conversation, recording December 15, 1994.
Your bio says that you got your first big break doubling as a composer and music supervisor on the television program “James at 15”. Were you known for being able to act in both capacities at that time, or was that simply how it worked out for you?
I only chose songs and acted as a music supervisor actually on that one TV show. That was a happy accident and a result that at the same time, the film community was beginning to embrace popular music in a big way. There weren’t many people who were comfortable in both worlds. There are now, but there weren’t then. So it’s a function of timing.
Being in the right place at the right time…
I guess. It didn’t feel like that at the time. It felt like it was just another job.
What was that whole experience like?
“James at 15” was a 20th Century Fox show, so Lionel Newman was head of music, and, as I’m sure you know, he was a famous character, and hated young people. And he hated the music, and he hated the show I was doing. I was so eager and so looked forward to learning from this man who I respected, and I walk in the first day and he said, “so you’re Goodman, right? Well, Beethoven, we have high expectations for the music on this show.” [laughs] I’d walk into his office later and he’d just grimace, and although we ultimately ended up on friendly terms, for six months every day he’s just beat the shit out of me! [See my interview with Randy Newman, FSM #45, for more Lionel stories – LK]
The last time I worked with him was when I orchestrated “The Verdict”, since he conducted it, and me, the composer, Johnny Mandel and Lionel all went to New York, worked together and it was great. But in those first few weeks working for Lionel, and I was 27 years old at the time, he would just have so much fun with me. I’d go in and he’d say, “So what orchestra do you want?” And I’d tell him four guitars, because I was writing a harmonized guitar part, a drummer, a keyboard player, and a bass player, and he’d look at me like I was speaking Greek. And he’d say, “I can’t wait to hear this!” It’s fun in retrospect, but I was really scared at the time.
The project seemed to jump-start your career, at least, and I was wondering, in composing your own music, what your attitude is towards film scoring in general.
The job of the composer is to make the experience of watching a movie enriched and more involving. The object of the score is to bring something to the film that other filmmaking elements don’t bring to it. I guess the rule of thumb is that if a scene isn’t made better with music, then don’t have music in it.
The score can provide a kind of second skin to the movie. However, it’s an opportunity that’s often missed because, for whatever reasons, many filmmakers don’t really understand the potential for music. Often times, their expectations for what music can do are too low, often they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid of allowing music to do the kinds of things that can provide subtext, provide tone, provide all kinds of thing. And often times filmmakers are frightened of that, and I think that a lot of composer, ironically, are hampered by low expectations of what music can bring to a film, and are frustrated by that.
How do you go about convincing filmmakers that music can play a primary role in their films?
You have to show them. What I do is typically spread out my recording process over a long period of time, so that I’ll write seven minutes of music, then record it, and write and record, etc. Not all at once, if I can help it. [laughs] So it gives me a chance to try some stuff, and if it doesn’t work, I’ve always got next week to come back and fix it. Directors are always afraid that they’re not going to know what they’re getting until it’s too late, and it makes them nervous, and that makes the composer nervous. And a nervous composer is an inhibited composer, and what’s not good for the music is to be frightened that they’re not going to like it.
What I like to do is say, “Hey, let me show you,” and most directors are totally open to that. If you can show them that it helps, great. So, I write the way I want to, and I show them, and either they like it, or they don’t. And if they don’t, I alter my course to conform more with their expectations, and if they like it, everybody’s better off… the film, the director, and the composer.
And I would imagine one of the best associations in your career has been working with director Frank Oz. How did your relationship begin?
He was doing “Little Shop of Horrors”, and I was recommended to him by the music editor as someone very good at working with both song and score material. We met, hit it off personally very quickly, and it has just developed from there.
The ending was extensively refilmed, and I was curious as to what your situation was concerning the other version.
By the time I was scoring they had already done the original ending, so I never had to do the original. An interesting note is that there have been conversations over the last couple of years about restoring the original ending, and reissuing the movie with it, in which case I’d have to go back in and re-score it.
I’ve heard it’s a big special effects extravaganza…
Yeah. The plant, in the guise of classic horror and monster movie clichés, takes over the world. I’ve seen it, and it’s very funny…
A little too dark for general audiences?
Yes. What they found was that, although it worked that way in the stage production, with film being a medium that uses close-ups, the audience tended to be more affectionate and connected with the main characters, so viewers were upset when they died.
You scored one of my favorite comedies, “What About Bob”? How do you find an approach for silly, absurd pictures like that?
They’re very, very hard, and I think a lot of my colleagues would agree. Because you have the element of tone, which has to be just right, and if it isn’t just right in “What About Bob?”, then the Bob characters loses his charm and becomes psychotic. If you go too much in one direction harmonically you could make that guy a real nutcase, and if he is, he loses some of his innocence, which is an important part of the comedy in Bob.
On the other hand, in addition to tone, you have timing, which is important to comedy, especially that type of comedy, which is not made up of a lot of knee-slapping jokes, but a lot of smiles from the audience based on clever and twisty moments. You have to let those moments live, so the music has to be sensitive to the timing and rhythm of the comedy, because comedy is so much about rhythm. The music, which has a rhythm of its own, has to be compatible with the comedy. It has to either keep out of the way of the laughs, or enhance and support them. You can’t come in with music and step on laughs, because if an audience is finding something funny and is enjoying it, the music can’t come in and tell them, “all right, we’re onto the next thing. You have to stop enjoying this moment.” You have to allow the audience to enjoy the comedy, and with the tone, you have to be balancing those moments all the time.
You have done a lot of scores for that type of film. Have you become some sort of expert on scoring comedies, being able to fine tune their scores to an exact science?
You know, I’m dying to do a movie where someone gets killed or fucked. I’ll tell you! [laughs] I do enjoy it, it’s hard, but I enjoy it, and I think I do it well, but… I have an appetite for different kinds of moods, and an appetite for different kinds of films, musical pallets that you can work with. But I can’t knock it…
Going back to “Bob” for a minute, I remember the moment when Frank Oz gave me his instruction on what he wanted from the music. They were right on, but this should give you some sort of idea about scoring for comedies. He said, “I really don’t know what the music should be in the film. I just want it to be stupid.” Now how do you write stupid music? [laughs] So I wrote what I believed to be an eminently stupid theme, based on descending major chords going to a minor chord, and then over the course of the film, the whole tonality shifts from the innocent major feel deeply into a minor feel as Bob [Bill Murray] gets into the skin of Leo [Richard Dreyfuss] more and more.
The score, by the way, also had an element in it that was taken out. I had a boys’ choir singing along on many of the cues, because I felt these two guys were just acting like children. So, I had 12 year-old boys singing, “la la la,” interweaving throughout the score. I thought it worked wonderfully, but the executives at the studio had a very hard time with it.
The boys’ choir did pop up at the very end…
Yes, that’s right. I finally sold it a little bit for the very end, but for the most part, they felt it drew too much attention to the music.
The film was such a hit, it’s a shame that no record label ever got around to releasing it…
That’s my luck. I’ve had very bad luck with record labels.
Have you ever privately released any of your music?
No. In fact, I’ve never listened to any of my music since I’ve recorded it.
You’re sick of hearing it?
Typically, what I do after I’ve recorded a score is listen to it a bunch of times a few days after I’ve recorded it, then never again. It’s boredom. I’ll listen to it and learn, and say, “That worked better than I thought it would,” or “That’s not what I wanted to achieve,” because I don’t work on synthesizers, rather in the old dinosaur way of paper. So there’s always a certain element of surprise once it’s all done, which is what I like. I’ll try and learn where I succeeded and failed, always learning more from where I failed than where I succeeded.
Then, I’m sick of it. It’s not that interesting. I mean, you work with Film Score Monthly, but I have to tell you, I’m not a person to listen to film scores willingly. They’re often created in a specific response to a specific narrative, and often times don’t have much meaning outside of it, as far as I’m concerned.
We’ve always had a debate about people who criticize soundtrack albums as being “boring” music, but they often forget that the score’s primary purpose is to serve the narrative.
You know, what I’ve found is that some weak music is superb with films, and some superb music doesn’t work for films. It’s a different craft, and very interesting in that respect.
A film you scored that’s become a perennial favorite now, “The Muppet Christmas Carol”, has a number of differences between the soundtrack album and the film itself. It sounds as if the score was re-recorded several times…
Yes. The deadline for the album was far before the deadline for the score. So what they had was piano/vocal pre-records for all the songs, so I went in and sweetened, arranged the orchestra for the songs. In addition, I had to write some cues that I thought were going to be appropriate for the movie, and I don’t know that any of what I wrote for the album was actually used in the film, but the motifs were. I wrote three or four different pieces, including an overture, to fill out the album because there were only seven songs in the film.
A couple of those songs weren’t even used in the film. Were they all shot?
Yes. One of them, the ballad [‘When Love Is Gone’], was not in the film, but is in the video version. It was cut because the studio thought that it dragged the movie down at that time, but the director didn’t really feel that way, so he put it into the video. But the studio felt that the ballad pulled the movie down at that point.
It’s just about the most dramatic portion in the entire film…
They felt it was a little out of character. I don’t know. I always enjoyed it… it’s a nice song. As for the others, I believe that the Sam the Eagle song [‘Chairman of the Board’] was filmed but cut, and I can’t remember about the other one [‘Room in Your Heart’]. I remember arranging it, but I don’t believe it was shot, although I might be wrong. I enjoyed that movie a lot, though.
Let’s talk about that new Frank Oz film that you’re working on.
I’m really excited about it. I’m working on a film right now called “Stranger Things” [now titled “For Better or for Worse”], which is a comedy, and I’ll finish that in mid-January. For that, I’m having a lot of fun using an off-the-wall a capella vocal group called The Bobs for the score. And the Frank Oz film, “Indian in the Cupboard”, is a big-budgeted family movie, written by the woman who wrote “E.T.” [Melissa Mathison], based on a classic children’s book. They’re shooting it right now, and it will be out in the summer [mid-July]. It’ll be a big symphonic score with motifs from Native American music.
What kinds of preparation have you gone through so far?
I’m buying a little Indian wood flute and I might write the main theme on it… I’m excited about it. This one will be an album, I’m sure.
Your bio says that you felt a period of burn-out, during which you became tired of film scoring. How did that all come about?
It’s the whole dynamic of fear, working with someone you love like music, and having to earn a living doing it in an environment where fear plays a major element for everybody. Fear of failure, fear of success… it’s puts a little strain on things. You find yourself constantly second-guessing yourself, not the greatest thing for the creative process, and it simply wore me down.
I was also working an awful lot at a certain point, and I had a couple of bad experiences that everybody has, mainly confronting this issue of low expectations. It’s very frustrating when you know you can do something, yet the people who are employing you don’t want you to do what you know you can do, and you know it’s going to be better for the movie. So, I found myself getting into a whole life-orientation in terms of the business that I wasn’t really comfortable with, but I didn’t seem to be able to resist.
Looking back on it, I realized that my whole musical life revolved around film music. I took a couple of years to relax a little bit, and it allowed my interest in music to resurface. Luckily, I also found a kind of second career that has really helped me tremendously in terms of balancing the needs I have as a creative person, of having some kind of control. I have this with the records I produce, which also brings forth some kind of vision that I can execute, without any problems. This makes it easier to do the films now, and I don’t have that kind of resentment, and when I’m between jobs, I’m not waiting for the phone to ring, and I’m not nervous.
Now, when I’m not doing a film – and I’m trying to keep myself to three films a year if I’m fortunate – I always have something to go to that I enjoy dong. I now enjoy the films, and when they’re done, I’m working on something I enjoy also. It makes it easier. I recommend it to all film composers.
You said it takes the sting away from the bad experiences you’ve had. Have you had many bad experiences scoring films?
Not recently. I think I learned my lesson. I’ve had several bad experiences, but in the last few years, I haven’t really had any bad experiences. On several occasions, I’ve done a score that’s a little out-of-the-ordinary, and I’ve had to re-do the entire score. So in three of four cases in the last five years, I’ve had to write two completely different scores for the same film. That’s very taxing, which I had to do on “He Said, She Said”, “Housesitter”, “The Super”, and “Vital Signs”. For all those movies I did one score, and was asked to totally re-do it.
Is this caused by miscommunication between you and the filmmakers?
It’s caused by taking a few chances, and then having the studios – especially with comedy – being so nervous and preconditioned to certain musical sensibilities. In all those cases, the directors were fully behind what I was doing, but when it got to the studios, they’d have nose-bleeds.
I did the score to “Housesitter” with Mose Allison, a great Mississippi blues-jazz artist, singing an opening song, giving a wonderful kind of spin and tone to this farce. Then I did the whole score in a kind of late ‘50s bebop style with a sextet, and it gave a moodiness to the movie without interfering with the comedy that was really wonderful. It made you feel for these middle-aged people who were so lost and incapable of having any kind of relationship, and it added a wonderful element to the film.
But the studio went nuts. The head of the studio literally said to the director, “When I hear the music, I have two feelings at the same time. I want to laugh… and I’m sad.” And this is, of course, exactly the objective. But for them, it was unacceptable. So I had to go back and entirely re-think the role of the music in that film.
Keeping along the same lines, what are your feelings towards temp-tracks?
It’s a fact of life. Sometimes they’re very good to me. Sometimes the music editors will come up with ideas that I’d never come up with, that open things up for me, but sometimes it’s a terrible burden, which I’m sure other composers have echoed. So I’ve had different experiences, but it’s a fact of life.
Now, many composers are getting more involved with directing the temp, and I kind of like that too, so at least on some level it can work for you. You can control it, at least a little bit. For example, on this movie I’m doing now, there were a number of approaches to take; it’s the kind of comedy that calls for a specific stylistic statement musically. There were a number of options, and the temping process became like thinking out loud. Eventually, we arrived at something quite good through the temping process, so in this case it has worked quite well for me.
Many of your best scores were for films successful critically and financially, yet were never released for one reason or another. Has this frustrated you over the years?
It doesn’t frustrate me anymore. I have largely made a career out of doing comedy, and comedy soundtracks, for various reasons, don’t appear to be marketable.
I have been disappointed that certain things haven’t been put on CD, and at one point I suggested to one or two labels when I was doing “Housesitter”, that they do an album with 20 minutes each of “What About Bob?”, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”, and “Housesitter”. But, I do a lot of orchestral work, and the orchestras are fairly large… and I guess you’d have to ask the record companies about it. I don’t know.
Just the way it works, unfortunately…
Yeah. Sometimes I wonder, though. I’ll walk into the store and see the score to “Memoirs of an Invisible Man” being on CD, and with “What About Bob?” not on CD, I’ll think, “Who have I insulted?” [laughs] “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” was a real good example of an excellent film, with the score an important part, but, hey, what do I know?
Oddly enough for me, my record career, which is now going certainly as well as my film career, started in response to trying to get a score released by a record label. In composing Funny About Love, which we didn’t know was going to be a bomb before it came out, because we all thought it was quite nice, I did the score featuring Toots Thielemans, who is a great jazz harmonica player, and then took it to a record label, asking them if they wanted the score. The guy said, “I don’t want the score, but if you can think of any record to do with Toots Thielemans, I’ve always wanted to do a record with him.” So, I’ve had a lifetime love affair with Brazilian music, and I came up with the idea of a two-album set called “The Brasil Project”, which has done very, very well in jazz markets, and was the beginning of my career as a record producer. So I guess that, in many ways, I’ve benefited from film scores and records in kind of an oblique way.
What are you looking for in the future?
I want to do different kinds of projects. It’s very important to me to do films that call for a different musical vocabulary from one that I’ve been using. I have a very short attention span, and I want to do different things, risk things, and be challenged. And if I have an image at all in the business of doing comedy and sophisticated things, I’d like to do things which have a darker quality to them, and continue to work with filmmakers who are challenging and interesting. Also, I’d like to continue in a major way with developing my career as a record producer, and – hopefully – one day down the road bring the two aspects of my career together.