Recently, in conversation with the famed film composer, a few comments surfaced about the business of scoring for today’s television markets and the practice of breaking up full scores for the purpose of disc-release recordings. Mancini’s first real success came about twenty years ago through the American television series “Peter Gunn”. Now he has returned to score a TV movie, “The Moneychangers”. I asked him if the experience of scoring for TV had changed in the interim. Well, the time allotted is still the same. For instance, on “The Moneychangers”, I had one recording session on Monday and one on Tuesday; then we went again on the following Friday, then once on the first of December, and once on the fifth. The programs aired the first week in December, and ran for four weeks. That’s a pile of work. Well, you see, there are two-and-a-half hours of music in “The Moneychangers”. It’s thirty-eight reels long. Thirty-eight thousand-foot reels – you figure it out! What kind of orchestration? Oh, it’s more or less legitimate, you know. The small orchestra is about thirty pieces and the big one is about forty for the main title music. It’s modern in the musical sense of the word, but no rock overtones. As far as the experience of the whole thing goes, I think the studios have tended their store and have improved tremendously. After all, they were the ones who forced me to go outside in order to put my old scores on record. You mean outside of America? No, I mean outside the film recording studios. I had to go over to the record studios (RCA mainly) just in order to get a sound quality that would be any good at all on records. Then while I was there, I also arranged the various musical cues down into more-or-less song formats. But the reason I went was because of sonics, you know? But now, and for the last three or four scores I’ve done, we’ve been able to take them right off the soundtrack tapes and put them on record – the sound was that good. Things like “Waldo Pepper” and “The Pink Panther Strikes Again”. “The Molly Maguires”. That’s right. That was all right from the track because the recording was sensible and we were able to get in there later and mix it with the idea of a record in mind. But actually you wanted the opportunity to rearrange some of the music, didn’t you? To bring it into song format? Yeah, that threw me into what became a formula I guess – taking fragments and making full pieces out of them, acknowledging the listeners. Do you think with the resurge of film music interest that the audiences have changed and are willing to listen to the original, fragmented form? Yes, exactly. Like in the new “Pink Panther Strikes Again”, surprisingly it’s a big full score and the only time we used the Panther theme was at the beginning and end. So there are a lot of big dramatic themes, kind of comedic things that are still good musically. I just put all those sequences in the record because they made sense. Is it possible now to record less-commercial film music than it was before? Like “Night Visitor” or “White Dawn”? I just listened to a suite Tony Thomas put together from the original tapes of “Night Visitor” and it’s very interesting. You know, that was a very unusual orchestra with just woodwinds and percussion and keyboards. I was surprised; it was like listening to someone else’s music. I hadn’t heard it for so long. That happens, you know; you forget. But at any rate I agree that there are people out there listening and I’m very careful in the numbers that I do select for my albums. Certainly, just ego-wise, I want to get some of the things I think are good in there. And “White Dawn”? You see, that’s a case where unless it was a very big picture that has a lot of promotion behind it, the record people ask “How much money has it made so far”? You go to these record companies with the idea for an album and they really don’t care who wrote it, unless it’s Paul McCartney or Elton John – then they would take it sight unseen. But they know your name as well as McCartney’s. Well, I’m talking about the record companies now, not the studios. They ask you, How is the film doing at the box office? And unless you tell them, “Great!” or “Tremendous!” or those new words they’ve got for the super films, that’s the end of it. No one would touch “White Dawn” because it was a small picture, a sensitive film, and it didn’t have an all-star cast. Some of the companies are beginning to take chances though. This new LP of Dave Raksin’s on RCA was through the auspices of Ken Glancey who is the head of RCA, and he’s a very sensitive record executive, very much interested in things like that. He does them, I think, because he feels a duty to do them. He feels he can bring things to people that are not in great masses. Perhaps producers will get the message too and not ask composers for hit songs all the time. Well, if a song fits in a movie, there’s nothing in the world that’s going to keep it out! In most cases, why put the composer down for that, because they’re usually the ones who are told, “We want a song here,” and if you don’t do it… They’ll get somebody else. They sure will. So, back to the TV movie. Why are people like you (“The Moneychangers”) or Alex North (“Rich Man Poor Man”) or Jerry Goldsmith (“QB VII”) or Michel Legrand (“Brian’s Song”) getting into these quicky films for TV? You know the old argument about scoring for theatrical films was always, there was too little time and the producers were too careless about the music. Yet here you all are, putting yourself into double jeopardy. Well, I think it’s like the old firehorse, you know? The bell rings and you just go. It just happens I got into a bind on this one, but I’ll make it all right. I’m not really compromising because of the time element. I just think that many of us, once we get out head down and ready to go, you kind of get into a wave and it kind of carries you and the more you write, it seems, the more everything opens up, and it becomes easier. For me, anyhow. Once the die is cast, then it’s a pleasure for me. I just sit down to see what’s coming next. You can keep your integrity then, once the wave is going. That’s right. And I tell you, more people are getting into it all the time. A lot of new guys have come into it in the last five years. I think it has a great deal to do with television. The opportunity is much more accessible in television. It’s a budding field.