Now, I did one of these before.  But I can’t remember what I said then.  Or even when it was.

Was it Entertainment Weekly?

No.  Film Score Monthly.

Oh really?

It was a cover too.  I’m pretty sure.

Did you get a copy of the magazine?  [#26]

Yeah.  But I forgot to look around for it.  It was like right after “The Addams Family”.  I had just done three movies then… it might not have been a cover.  [I didn’t have covers then.  –LK]

Did you get the magazine?

I think they sent it to me because of that.  I don’t think I’ve ever paid a subscription.  [sarcastically:] I don’t even want it.  They just keep sending it and sending it… no, I devour every issue every time it arrives in the mail.

This [room] is, like, so uninspiring.

This room?  Well, there was music playing or some activity every…

No, this is fine.  This is perfect… so how’s it going with “Speechless”?

It’s going fine.  It’s just not very eventful.  Everything’s going along, so far, smoothly as it ought to.  It’s had a very accelerated post-production schedule, so there wasn’t even a lot of time for some of the normal hemming and hawing.  Even the director hardly had time to come over to the house to listen to what I was doing, because he was so busy editing.

You worked with Underwood before, right?

“City Slickers” and “Heart and Souls”.

Oh, that’s right.  He directed that… duh.

[Beavis laugh] Duh, huh, huh.

You like working with him?

I love working with him.  He’s such a nice guy, so sweet.  I’ve been to sets where he’s working and he gets these jobs done, but knowing him it’s hard to imagine him commandeering, you know, what you have to do to get a movie made, because he’s so considerate and sweet and nice.  I would go to the end of the earth for him.

How’d you get involved with “City Slickers”?  Billy Crystal?

Yeah, Billy Crystal.  See, this is stuff I don’t know if I’d be repeating, you know, how I got into that, but I met Billy Crystal at “Saturday Night Live”, where I wrote comedy material.

I want to talk about that, because I want to know how you got involved with “Saturday Night Live” in the first place.

Uh, just a group of friends and people that I met when I moved to New York were involved with comedy and music and… I just fell into that group.  I lived in New York for 12 years before I moved here.  I moved there when I was 16.

This was after you were with Bette Midler…

Well, when I moved to New York, my ultimate dream was to play and arrange and whatever for Bette Midler.  Through amazing being-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time circumstance, I happened to meet people and start staying with them and they lived across the hall from one of Bette Midler’s back-up singers.  That’s how I got the job becoming their musical director, when her back-up group created their own group.  They were called the Harletts when they worked with Bette, and they wanted to have their own life outside of touring with her.  So I became their musical director ’cause I idolized Bette Midler.  I knew every arrangement and started leaning all the arrangements that obviously inspired her.  So when I met the Harletts I was the right guy, but I also lived across the hall and was 16 years old and would do anything for no money.  So I was really the perfect guy.  Then Bette asked them to go back on the road with her, so my big ultimate fantasy came true before I even turned 18.  It was through working with Bette and all those people that I got involved with “Saturday Night Live”.  I mean just this whole kind of group of… people.  Funny or comedic, music people.  You can’t explain how, especially in New York.  You just meet this person, you get this, whatever.  Anyway, thank God there was a great musician named Tom Malone who plays every instrument you can play but doesn’t play piano at all, and he became the musical director of “Saturday Night Live”.  Although he plays trombone mainly and trumpet and sax, that was a blessing for me because he needed to call on somebody else to play piano.  They started calling me and I started going up there, every now and then.  And then the year that Billy Crystal and Martin Short came on, that one year, I started going up there a lot and just hit it off immediately with Billy and Martin and Christopher Guest that was just the best.

What that a great environment?

Yeah.  I mean all the shows from that year aren’t… I see them all on Comedy Central – like any other year, there are moments where you go, ‘Oh boy, that was, uhh-pew,’ but there were some great things and of course Billy took off.  He was already famous when he did that, from Soap and a lot of other things, but that’s when he really took off.  He said, ‘I want you to go on the road with me.’ And true to his word, months later he found me and said, ‘Would you come on the road with me?’ So I would score his monologues.  I would play under these comedy monologues which with Billy would always take a turn into, you know, not too serious but always take a, for lack of a better word, sentimental shift.  So in concert I would really in effect score these little monologues.  Through that, he had a faith in me as being able to write music and introduced me to Rob Reiner when he did “When Harry Met Sally”.  He asked Rob, ‘What’s the music gonna be?’ Rob said, ‘I’m thinking of using standards,’ and Billy said, ‘Do you have someone to help you choose the songs and arrange them right and do the whole bit?’ And so Billy was like Mama Rose with me and really lobbied for me to get that job.  Luckily for me Rob was so open and without being grotesquely egotistical.  I was the right guy for that job on “When Harry Met Sally.” So I met Rob one day and he just said, ‘Sure, let’s do it.’ So I got that gig.  It was a great way to start working on music for film, because it wasn’t my own music, it was my record collection, basically, which is a great way to get paid.  I got to see how music for movies is finessed without my own ego or abilities as a composer on the line.  It was a nice little softer entry…

There was no score on that, right?

It was all adaptation, so I had to take “It Had to Be You” or whatever song… and it wasn’t only records, it was often piano or small group.  Did we ever even do an orchestral cue in that?  No.  Well, maybe a few.  And that’s where Harry Connick, Jr. came into the picture.  A guy named Bobby Colomby, a friend of Rob’s who worked at Columbia Records – who I believe still works there – also said, ‘What are you doing for the music?’ Rob says, ‘Well, me and this guy are picking songs.’ So he says, ‘Well I have the perfect artist to play.’ So Harry came in as a pianist and a singer and at that point was completely unknown, to me and Rob also.  And it just all clicked.  It didn’t all click at first but the second day it clicked.

I was kind of mad that they didn’t release the real songs from the movie and that they just released the Harry Connick, Jr. album.

But for me and Harry, that was a godsend because we couldn’t get the rights to a lot of them for the record.  Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald… for the movie when Rob says, ‘I want something,’ they say, okay we’ll pay, whatever.  But for this record, the record company wasn’t gonna pay this exorbitant amount of money that they wanted, or in Ella Fitzgerald’s case, it’s actually in her contract that they don’t allow it.  They thought that a song of hers on a soundtrack record would cut into her own record sale or something – at least they did then but I bet it’s changed because of the ever-exploding world of soundtracks, especially standards, which I have to save “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle” helped to create.  So we couldn’t get Ella Fitzgerald, we couldn’t get Louis Armstrong ‘cause all the Louis Armstrong in that movie was Louis and Ella.  They just said, ‘There’s no record unless, let’s just let Marc and Harry make a record.’ And we were like… ‘Uh, okay.’ And in a week we made that record.

And that thing sold like hot cakes.

It sold really well and of course for Harry was his career diving board.

Both you guys…

Oh, it was tremendous.  It was a blessing.

Do you enjoy that music supervisor role?

I love it, yeah.  I love arranging, orchestrating, adapting.  I love it as much as composing.  That movie, “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Sister Act”, especially, was one that I know my adaptation and arranging skills were integral to.

Did you do a score to that too?

Yeah, on “Sister Act 1”.  On “Sister Act 2” I only did some of the music supervising.  “Sister Act 1” doesn’t have a lot of score, probably around 20 minutes.  It’s mostly the adaptations.

There’s less on “Sleepless in Seattle”, right?

In the movie?  On the record, there’s none.  In the movie there’s hardly any at all.  I recorded more than what’s in the movie, but the director cut it.  Of course, you can’t argue with the success of the movie; it just felt like too much score took away from the songs.  I was heartbroken as a composer but hey, what the fuck?!  I can say that now.  At the time it was a terrible experience.  I mean, to go to the movie and go, “Oh my God, they took…”

Really?  You didn’t even know?

No, because they dubbed it in New York.  Unfortunately, without getting to the whole story, there was a “collaborative breakdown.” So by the time that they dubbed the movie, I wasn’t really in the loop, didn’t need to be in the loop.  You know the composer, once you’re done… Ron invites me, asks me to come down, but not every director wants the composer there.  For the very reason as on “Sleepless in Seattle”, I would’ve been going, “Well what do you mean?” So, they were happy to not have me whining and she made all her choices.  I didn’t know until I saw the movie what some of those choices were… I’ll always remember.  I’ve never actually seen that movie, again, from beginning to end.  Every now and then it’ll be on TV…

The only thing I remember, score-wise, is when she’s typing on the computer…

Yeah.  I mean for me that was a nutty version of a theme that was established earlier in the movie and without having heard it being established it was just like this silly theme.

It just seemed out of place.

That’s what makes it worse, not the loss of the cues but how the cues that remain in the movie seem out of… where’s that coming from?  You didn’t understand that that was her theme, this magic theme.  So anyway, it’s all spilt milk.

That’s why you didn’t work on “Mixed Nuts”?

Well, I mean it’s obviously, yeah.  For me, unfortunately, it was a complete breakdown.  And then ironically to get nominated for an Academy Award for the song that was in the movie…

The Harry Connick, Jr. song.

Yeah, he sang it.  I wrote that with a guy named Ramsey Macleane who writes lyrics for almost all of Harry’s records.

So what about Martin Short?  You mentioned Billy Crystal.

I did a comedy special called, “I, Martin Short, Goes Hollywood,” the bad grammar on purpose.  That was a funny special that went over the heads of just about everyone who saw it.

I want a copy of that so bad.

I have it.

Do you?

I could sell it to you!  I’ve got it.  There is some priceless stuff on that.  I just love…

Compare working with Crystal, say, with Short, both big comic personas.  I mean, who do you like better?

Oh, that’s like talking about your friends.

I know, I’m just kidding.

It’s different but not so different.  All I can tell you, what’s so obvious is that all we do is laugh… and laugh and laugh and laugh.  I have worked with other comic performers… maybe not enough to make this kind of judgment, but I have worked with some people up at “Saturday Night Live”.  I worked there full time for a year, as opposed to just going in when they already had the idea and they knew, “Oh, let’s bring in Marc,” where I was just there day after day trying to think of stuff, working with the hosts.

The Sweeney Sisters.

Yeah, that was my big thing.  Sometimes, there are people who, although they’re funny on screen, are not funny to be around and there’s no laughter in the room.  But that’s certainly not the case with Billy or Marty, as you can imagine.

They’re nutty.

Working with Billy on those Oscar medleys, we laugh and laugh and laugh.  We have to crack each other up to get things going.  And the dirty lyrics, the unusable lyrics that we come up with before we come up with the ones we can imagine saying on TV are so funny.  And of course working with Marty is just…

What’s he like?

He’s just insane, he’s just who he is.  He loves to perform and he loves to sing.  He has a great voice.  It’s a shame what happened with his TV show.  That’s what happens when a performer like that and a network… they wanted to turn him into “dad.” I mean he is a dad and if it was like his real life it would’ve been better.  I mean when he talks to his kids, he’s insane.  It’s not like what it was on the TV show.  It should’ve just been a sketch show, and from what I understand they are actually doing six more and it’s just gonna be a sketch show.

Trying to do too much.

Oh, that show was all over the place and it was kind of obvious.  I was on the first show; he sang a song which they ended up cutting and putting half of in the end credits, but I was so excited, they said, “Oh yeah, we’ll work it out that Marc’s like the struggling composer who lives in the guest house.” So then I could always be kinda coming in.  ‘Cause I’m a ham, I was, “Sure.  Work that out.  Yeah, I’m available.”

But you weren’t in the other shows?

No.  They filmed I think five and only showed three.  What they are, which is not always the case, is just great people.  Great, funny, unaffected, un-star-trippy, who you can really hang out with… you know, friends.

What about Rob Reiner?

Very much the same thing.  I know I sound kinda polyannish here, and I have worked with people who aren’t wonderful to be with 24 hours a day, but I have been lucky to work with Rob and Billy.  I just fit in.  We’re the last of the old-fashioned show biz… the references that we throw out would go over the heads of anyone younger than myself.  I mean I’m young to them.  We just have a shared affinity for old-time show biz plus what we’re doing now, and I think that’s obvious in all their work.  For Rob it’s the same thing.  We just laugh and Rob is very nurturing about thinking that I’m capable of doing whatever he has put on my plate.  I’m trying to wean him off standing behind me and singing what he thinks it should sound like.  I think by the next movie I can actually say, “Rob, stop singing, just stop it.” In his lovable way, he loves to shout out what he thinks it oughta be.  Whether that’s how an actor’s saying a line or a French horn part, he’s out there, letting you know.  Which can also be a nice relief almost because there are so many choices, it’s nice to have a director say, “This is what I want.” Then you’re not up all night thinking.  But on the other hand it might cut into what you have to offer the movie.  That might be your one idea that you can’t even get out because you’re already being told ‘do this, do this.’

Are you pretty fair about that?

Yeah, and the more I work with him the more confidence I had to say, ‘You know, I don’t think so, why don’t we try this or whatever?’

What about North?  I just wondered if he knew how it was gonna turn out [i.e. bomb].

Well, when we first saw it, I was with Rob and he sensed that… there was something missing from how it had been conceived and what had ended up on film.  But then once you’re working on a movie you address what’s there and you still work as hard.  It can be just as enjoyable or unenjoyable, those moments that you know what to do or don’t want to do.  So why I was working on it, I was just into it.  I remembered that something had happened between conception and… I mean when Rob came to my house, at the end of “A Few Good Men” and I was doing something for him for the premiere – he said, ‘Oh man, you gotta do my next movie,’ and he told me all about it.  He stood in my studio there and for half an hour told the story.  If they just filmed him telling the story right then, everyone would’ve bought a ticket, I mean he was mesmerizing.  It was like, wow, I’m gonna work on “The Wizard of Oz” of my generation.  That’s how I felt.  Who’s to say what happened?

I remember hearing about the idea…

You don’t know – people send me scripts, I read the scripts, I don’t know.  I’m only now able to look at the movie when they first show it to me and not want to go home in tears.  I have watched some really successful movies and have gone home from those first assemblages which can be three hours long and I go, “Oh…” But that’s my own lack of professionalism.  You learn how to watch ‘em.  First of all to watch a movie without music, you just want to kill yourself.  It’s almost unwatchable.

Some movies work.  Like “Butch Cassidy”, you ever see that?

Not without music.

There’s a little music.

I guess there are but to watch a movie with no music… not to mention no foley, no sound effects work, no nothing.  When people are standing in the lobby of a hotel talking, there’s just dead air.  You think, “Oh, this is just sitting here.” Then a month later they send it to you on a video and it’s got the sound of people working behind a desk, going into an elevator, things you weren’t even seeing.  Then you think, “What was I thinking, why did I think this was so dead?” I’m still flirting with amateurism.  I really need to have it all there, in my eyesight, in my ears.  I’m starting to get better at it.  I also get very inspired, maybe too much, by certain sounds that are in the movie and I work the score around them.  I really like to have the sound, it’s really helpful to me.  Also, you find out suddenly you’ve scored a scene and then two weeks later, you realize there’s a hum of a truck.  In the next cue in this movie [“Speechless”] that I don’t think we’ll get to today, I wrote it to the first tape they sent me.  And then the second tape came in and they redid my calculations on the computer.  I was like, what?...  mmmmmm, they’re on the bus for half of the cue, and I guess that hum’s gonna be there, that’s part of the reality of the scene.  But whoa, I’m hoping we can cheat realism a little there.  But every composer goes through that.  It’s the same story.

Since you did “When Harry Met Sally”, “Sleepless in Seattle”, and now “Speechless”, how does working on a romantic comedy differ from something more dramatic like Misery?

You know, sometimes I read your magazine and I realize that perhaps some of the people reading it or listening to film scores might get further into the examination of these things than the actual composer.  Of course I only speak for myself.  But for me, any movie is a new movie, regardless of the genre.  I’m not aware of the differences.  Every day you’re going to have to write a certain amount of music to meet the deadline and every day you’re wondering, “How can this scene work?” and then suddenly you find a rhythm.  They all start the same.  There’s that first like ten days of what should be the themes be like and it’s just horrible, you’re trying to figure out what should it be.  But once you’ve settled on it and the director has given you the go-ahead, then it’s kind of fun.  There are still moments of, “What do I do here, what do I do here, how do I make this work?” Or, “Am I shoving a theme here where it doesn’t really belong, or finding the right tempo?” When you choose a tempo and then you wake up the next day you go, “Oh my God, I must have been tired, I must have just eaten, this tempo’s so slow,” and you have to start over, ‘cause you can’t just speed up.  Everywhere that something hit when you chose that tempo changes so drastically.  But all that’s the same on every movie.  I would love to do another movie like Misery.  I would love to do Misery again, that was just the first movie I ever wrote so I would love to just… start from scratch.  I was just, what’s the word?  I don’t want to say “lost,” ’cause I actually think I did an okay job, but uh… I would love to have another crack at it.

Clueless?

Yeah, I was basically clueless.  Right from… everything.  The logistics, the mathematics, the craft of film scoring.  I might have a knack for writing a certain kind of music or matching a dramatic sense in my way, on my own bell curve or whatever it is.  But I’m not trying to build myself up.  I didn’t know anything about click tracks or the things that you just have to know to make the orchestra sessions go smoothly.

So you just learned on hand.

Yeah, I’ve had like a scholarship, I learned all this in a movie studio scholarship.  But I got lucky.  Out of the first seven movies I worked on, I think five made over 100 million dollars.  I’ve worked on like seven 100 million dollar movies in the space of four years.  It was like a fairy tale.  If I never had another hit, I would still have as many blockbusters on my resume as some composers will have in their whole career.  You learn really quickly when that stops and movies you work on you think are just as good as the ones that were hits just… disappear.  Ge bad reviews, and no one comes to see them…

And then all that work…

Yeah.  All the work and millions of dollars.  Just now sitting at the dub, the minute work that goes into when someone just opens a drawer and the choices of how that sounds… you think of all that.  Oh my God.

You go crazy.

As grotesque as it is, when a movie really bombs and you can actually figure out the percentage of what your salary was, and how that was a double figure percent the entire movie made – oh boy, someone’s in trouble.  Luckily the composer sort of gets the glory when involved with a hit and gets not as affected by a movie not being a hit.  I’ve had this conversation with my agent, Richard Kraft.  Or Richard “Film Score Monthly” Kraft as I guess I should refer to him… Uh, what was the question?

Talk about, uh…

Who are you?  Why are you doing this?

Me?

How are you involved with Film Score Monthly?

You’re turning the… I just do it for fun.  I’m just a student.

A student at, oh, USC.  How did you get involved with Lukas Kendall and Film Score Monthly?

How do you know all the names…?

Because I get sent this, of course.  I’m sure every composer gets sent this.  It’s very interesting.  I mean it is interesting.

Oh, you like it.  I hate it.  I just do it to meet people “like you.”

Oh, geez.  Are you on America Online or Internet?  All these people that write all these letters to Film Score Monthly are writing their opinions.

“There was a track I didn’t like.”

Oh my God.  That’s what I was talking about.  They’re analyzing things far more than those who wrote them intended.

That’s true of everything.

Of course in print this will sound like I’m a complete hack.  And I’m sure that a lot of people reading this have already made that deduction about me.  You know, you’re on a movie, you write the best music you can.  You’re not thinking about some of the things that they seem to think where…

You’re doing the “Home Alone” face.

Yeah.  [laughs]

Why don’t we talk about working on the “City Slickers” moves and the western motif.  How did you go about that?

Well.  Put your fingers on the piano.  Hit the play button.

No.  It’s very musical-influenced.

I’m very sponge-like.  Which any composer I guess is… but once I hear music, it’s like it’s in there.  As a kid, I was always playing stuff by ear.  The Beatles records, all that western music from TV shows or movies was in my head.  I listened a little when I got “City Slickers”.  I watched “Red River”, of course, I listened to “The Magnificent Seven”.  You don’t want to listen to much… did you have like a bologna sandwich or something?

I have a terrible problem today.

I could only do the western music that I was capable of.  Then of course there was the temp score.  You know the famous temp score that becomes the subject of every interview.  So they had temp scored “Big Country”.

In the first one?

And a lot of Aaron Copland.  So listening to the temp score was a lot of indication of, “Oh, yeah, that kind of thing.” Then there was always that moment for me – not for a lot of other composers, but I don’t bill myself as capable of things that I’m not capable of.  I might have already told this story, if not in this magazine then in others, of how, after trying to write some Copland suite for the cattle stampede like what was in the temp score, I was like, “I’m not gonna ever… I can’t write this.  It’s just gonna sound like warmed over Aaron Copland anyway.  Even if I did it great, it’s just copying Aaron Copland.” I had been listening to this Aretha Franklin record that afternoon in the car, and so I was just sitting there, saying to myself, “Well I actually play gospel piano really well, despite my Caucasian Jewishness.” I love that kind of music, so I just started playing this gospel groove even though it had nothing to do with anything.  I don’t remember the actual moments of how that happened, but I was sort of playing that groove from this Aretha Franklin “Amazing Grace” record, this great record she made in church.  It was literally, I think, like out of a movie.  I had stopped and put pause on the videotape, but after five minutes it starts playing again, if you don’t do anything.  So I was just sort of daydreaming, like really depressed, “I have no talent,” but I can play gospel music.  That’s one thing I can play.  And maybe I’ll just move out to the woods and I’ll play gospel music in this little church, and be like the only white guy in this church and have a really great life, just knowing that that’s what I do.

I’m playing that and then the movie came back on, not by me even hitting the button, and I’m playing the gospel music and suddenly there’s all the characters, going “ahhh,” their arms all raised like they’re in some gospel revival meeting.  In my mind, it was like “light bulb.” I realized, I could write this.  It had nothing to do with anything but when Billy and Ron came over, I said, “This is really odd but what do you think of this?” And they really liked it.  It made us all smile, and it kept the stampede light enough that you weren’t thinking, not that you ever would, that they were in any real danger.  I wasn’t really happy with the way they dubbed it, which is another story, I know I’m repeating myself.  I’m quoted in Fred Karlin’s book, that’s truly amazing.  I think the quote is, “The cue was actually quite spectacular until they added a thousand cow hoofs.” The guy who’s here today, Rick Klein, I remember the day when they first put up a new reel at the dub.  They let the dialogue guy just listen to what he has to work with.  Then they let the sound effect guy just listen, and then the music guy listen.  So you get this one moment of unnatural, just watching the music, hearing it how it was recorded at its fullest with no dialogue and no sound effects.  I’ll always remember after the gospel cue, everyone practically putting me on their shoulders saying, “Boy was that…” They really had it loud, it felt so good.  And then it ended up being the biggest disappointment of the movie.  That was with Ron.  We joke about it now and when he asked me for a copy of the score, I sent him the first page of the stampede with cow goofs stamped on it.

That’s funny.

He’s got that framed somewhere.  Then they used it on the Olympics, quite well, twice I think.  Someone sent me one.  They cut it brilliantly, the guys who do that, because they cut it to the music and it was even better than in the movie because, (a) you could hear it, and (b) the cuts with the skiing, it was really exciting.

I think your albums are so good to listen to.  With the sequel it seemed like you went even more, like, nuts.  I loved that album.

I was really proud of the sequel album.  I had a fight unfortunately with the woman who headed the record company, the poor girl, because they hadn’t told me that I had a time limit on how much music could be in that album.  I was only thinking about all those people who write the letters to Film Score Monthly and are going on-line, saying “Why are these records only 30 minutes, blah, bad, dah.” I just cut together the record I wanted to put out.  And then suddenly there was like, “Can you please cut ten minutes out of this?  Can you please cut fifteen, ten…” because every five minutes cost a lot more money for them in re-use.  But everyone kinda that the movie was going to be another big hit, it was going over extremely well at previews, it couldn’t have been going better.  Everyone had the attitude of like, the movie will be a hit and although these soundtracks don’t sell a gazillion records… I just thought, can’t I put one out…?  On the first one I was disappointed.  I remember whining to Richard [Kraft, his agent] like, “Can’t I just put out the record I want, I’ll give ‘em that extra money.  I will.” I meant that when I say that.  I say that a lot and I always mean it.  Everyone always thinks I’m trying to call their bluff and so they don’t make me pay but then they hold it against me.  And I really mean it.  I would’ve given them, whatever it was, to be able to put out the record because the record’s forever.

I think “North” was pretty long too.

Yeah, “North” they let me also on that one… “North” and “City Slickers 2” were my longest records.  I don’t know, “City Slickers 2” may have a lot of repetitious stuff on the record or in the movie, but I really enjoyed working on it again.  I thought it was a more mature version of what I had done on the first one.

I liked the theme.  What was that?

Sort of sounds like a lot of things.  [Starts humming with a hillbilly guitar sound – I giggle, like a little girl].  At first it sounds kind of hillbilly-ish and then it starts growing in stature.  I liked it and I liked the movie.  The preview audiences liked it too and then the reviews came out, and were so nasty.  I think that was to me an example of learning how people do read reviews.  And with a sequel I think people… I don’t know what you thought about the movie…

I thought it was very funny, but I didn’t think it was as successful of a movie as the first.

Yeah, but I thought on its own it was a sequel with integrity.

I thought it was very loud, energetic [I motion with my body in some stupid way].

It couldn’t be like the first movie.  I remember seeing the first movie right when we were dubbing the second one, it was on TV, and I remember even walking with Billy to the car.  I said, “Oh, I saw the first movie last night.” It was the first time I had seen it in, like, three years.  We both kinda looked at each other like we knew… you can’t do that.

You can’t top the first.

But people wanted for them to make a sequel.  Billy did a great job.  The movie made 45 million dollars or whatever, it’s not something to be sneezed at.  [I fake sneeze, he follows] You could be a Monday morning quarterback – I realize the big mistake they made.  They probably should’ve gone to Europe.  [I laugh] They probably should’ve done an underwater adventure.  Or gone to Transylvania.  It shouldn’t have been another western.  That was, I think, the big mistake.  It should’ve been a group of friends having an adventure, not in the West again.

Was Crystal really disappointed?

It was disappointing, sure.  When you’re proud of the movie, you’re more disappointed on the one hand but at least you’re not like ashamed.  “Mr.  Saturday Night” being the biggest case that we who worked on it adored.  No matter if you hated it or loved it, we loved it with all our hearts.  That was so close to us who worked on it.  Maybe too close.  Maybe that was what some people didn’t like about it.  It was too assuming everyone in the world likes and knows about the style of that time of show business or whatever.  Or they couldn’t get past the old age makeup, which I can’t be objective about because once you see it for a few days, you get used to it.  I lost the objectivity for what it’s like for an audience to sit and watch people they know in old age makeup.  All I know is when I first saw “Mr.  Saturday Night” in the completed first assemblage, the last scene… having read the script I knew that when the brother finally comes backstage and gives him the painting, I knew it was a painting of the two brothers, because you kinda think it’s going to be of the mother or something.  I was sobbing the great heaving sobs.  [fake sobs]

And you even knew that was gonna happen.

I drove home and had such a headache from sobbing.  I mean I was just sobbing.  I just love that movie.  The other night it was on.  I watched a good 40 minutes of it.  Hysterical.  Some of that movie is really funny.  If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.  But oh my God.

I was wondering how you work with comedy as far as not taking over in a funny scene.

It’s hard.  I’ve done it.  I’m guilty of that.  I’m only still learning how to…

But she said you made scenes funny, she was talking about your timing in music.  What’s her name again?

Sandy DeCrescent.  She’s the queen of the orchestral contractors.  Don’t fuck with her.  She’s just… it.  She basically contracts I think for every composer.  She just puts together the best orchestras.  Which is a whole other subject of the brilliant orchestras.  They can play anything and make everything work.

Your main titles for “City Slickers” and “Addams Family” are grandiose and very musical…

They’re like Broadway overtures.

Yeah.  And I was wondering how you work the segues so well…

I come from theatre.  As a kid, I wasn’t listening to soundtracks as much as I was doing community theatre.  I love theatre, that’s what I should be doing and I think it’s obvious that all my scores sound like a Broadway musical composer who fell into film scoring.  I have lyrics to every single theme in every movie.

Really?

Especially “The Addams Family”.  Betty Comden of the very famous, although you may have never heard of them, Comden and Green, wrote the lyrics to the “Mamushka,” which was cut… Comden and Green wrote “Singin’ in the Rain.”

That was on the album, though, wasn’t it?

Yeah, it was on the album but it wasn’t in the movie.  Which is a whole ‘nother sad story.  But we wrote lyrics to Morticia’s theme [begins singing]: “Looking like something that ’rose from the grave, how can I help but to kiss ya.  Morticia.  Even the sun won’t spoil our fun, we’ll kiss in the cobwebs till daylight is done.  Then as the… sun chokes the life”… oh I can’t remember any of it, how sad.  We had verses upon verses… I’ll join the vampires’ militia, Morticia.  It’s ready to go on Broadway.  We could write lyrics to all those themes.  Especially “The Addams Family”.  Even “City Slickers” or any of them.  “Heart and Souls”, I had lyrics.  Every single theme in “Heart and Souls” had a lyric to it.

Are you serious?

I’m a songwriter.  That’s really what I am.  I should be writing songs and Broadway musicals.  The worst thing that I can say about myself as a film composer is when I allow myself for a cue to take song form too much.

Beginning, middle, end.

Yeah, like, I’ll start a theme and have this neurotic need to have to play the melody as it is in the song, instead of just matching the scene.  That’s what I was talking about earlier.  Then maybe my skills as an arranger come into play and hopefully I’ll successfully make it work.  But I arrange the melody to fit the scene instead of just writing something from scratch that fits it.

That makes it more unique though.  It also makes it listenable as an album.

That’s nice to say.  I want to talk to all though people out there buying soundtrack records.  God bless you.  [I laugh] I just know from our work that music editors buy these soundtracks to do temp scores.  It’s amazing that people out there… on America On-Line, when I first got on-line, my assistant Nick… we were talking about whether I wanted to use my name as my screen name.  I was saying, “Well I don’t think there are any other Shaimans.  I have never known any other Shaimans outside of our family.” He said, “Well don’t you think that somewhere in the world…” So we put up a search for “Shaiman.” And this person’s profile came up because I was in their profile under hobbies.  This guy under hobbies wrote “Soundtracks, listening to the music of John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Danny Elfman and Marc Shaiman.” So I wrote him a little E-mail thing that said, “Wow, I’ve never been someone’s hobby before.  How nice of you, although I think I will have my agent call for a little better billing.” [I laugh] So he wrote back and we actually had a correspondence where he was asking me all these questions about film scoring and I was happy to answer them.  And he moved my name up first in his profile.

But they’re all freaks, though, right?  [joking, of course]

No, no, no.  I just hope they’re filling their lives with more than arguing about intense things like Danny Elfman or Jerry Goldsmith.  I don’t know where it comes from.  [I laugh] And I’m victim of it.  Luckily, not victim as much as Danny Elfman… these long, long things about how… I don’t know why, I think he’s brilliant.  He writes every note that you hear and this whole other fallacy about orchestrators writing composers’ work… there are much lesser composers who 100% orchestrate their work.  The thinking that orchestrators must be composing because of their very existence just shows their lack of knowledge about the process of film scoring.

Because they basically embellish.

Well, there’s just this time element.  You write it out and you might write “woodwinds.” And then your trusted orchestrator will understand when a flute should be playing it… or you write it more specifically.  But there’s a collaboration.  In the same way, without at all wanting to seem condescending, if a boss writes a letter and hands it to a secretary and says, “Here, type this.” Believe me that is a grotesque way of describing what the orchestrator does, but it’s equally grotesque to think that because of the presence of an orchestrator the composer isn’t painstakingly, even if the end result may not sound that way, wondering about, “Is this the right note, is this the right chord, is this the right everything?”

So, talk about working with Hummie Mann.  Did he work on “Speechless”?

Yeah, eh did some work on this.  I didn’t know him on “Misery”.  He was the first guy I met in this quick meeting of people to say, “Keep writing how you’re writing.  If you want to, write like a piano player and play not in a strict tempo.  We’ll figure out a way to make the click track work.” Instead, other people were saying, “Marc, you’ve got to write to a click track [banging his fist rhythmically], you must pick your tempo and stick what that tempo and then [starts snapping] the sessions will go really easy.” But I didn’t feel that way.

They wanted to make it easier for them.

And that’s the way a lot of guys write…

You didn’t want to crinch your creative process.

For me.  Because I’m just an accompanist, I’m a piano player at heart.  So, Hummie was the first guy to say, “Just write how you write and we’ll figure it out.” So then on “City Slickers”, I just wrote how I wrote and although it went onto the computer, which is basically just like a big old pencil and paper or tape recorder, Hummie would take what I had played out of tempo and from us discussing it, it was obvious where the bar lines were.  To look at it on the computer… I don’t even know how to explain this… he would create a click track and write it out for the orchestra so that although it sounded like me playing it in a free fashion, they were playing to a click track.  It was a very insane way to do it.  But Hummie was trying to allow me to continue writing the way I want to write.  Since then I’ve learned how to tell the computer where my bar lines were.  This was the greatest moment of my life.  I may be talking too much about technical things.  [It used to be,] I could turn the computer on like it was a tape recorder, play and play and play until I played it just right and that might take a whole day of little-by-little playing a couple measures at a time.  That I could play this whole thing in there disregarding the tempo, playing at the tempo I felt like, and then after the fact tell the computer, that’s the downbeat of measure one, that’s the third beat of bar one… that changed my life.  It’s already written out, it was in the computer.  I don’t know if you can make any sense out of what I just said.

I zoned out about five minutes ago.  Only kidding.  Once you were supposed to come to a class of mine but Hummie showed up.

Oh, oh… [innocently] gee, I wonder what he said?  [I laugh] The whole point was, on “City Slickers 2” there was a scene in a doctor’s office where down the street you hear a little Mexican band playing.  And so I said, “Hummie, you want to write this?” Even then I had learned that it’s a nice thing to maybe have an orchestrator write a source cue here and there, because they get a little money from it, from ASCAP, from the royalties.  It’s just a nice thing to do.  At that point I was also trying to be a nice guy and I gave him credit.  I had seen this credit before in movies in the end titles.  So I let it say, “Additional Music by Hummie Mann.” I thought that was fair and I’m very into giving credit.  I hate, don’t even get me started on the idea when they don’t want to give credit.  That’s just like my biggest, intense…

Should I leave the room?

No.  Yes, please, actually, not having anything to do with this but, uh… So, I did the right thing.  I thought for a minute of music I let it say “Additional Music by Hummie Mann,” and thus began, I’m sure, rumors throughout the film scoring community that this young whippersnapper has no right to be getting these big movies and has no training, must not really be writing this and is just humming melodies into a tape recorder and Hummie Mann, this experienced orchestrator, is writing it all.  I think since then I have combated that belief by working on a lot of movies that Hummie didn’t work on, and just the lack of logic to the idea that I could be writing all these movies and just not really be writing.  I mean, it makes no sense.

So Hummie is a composer on his own now.

Yeah, and for Hummie I’d rather he can’t work for me because it means he’s composing his own stuff.

So do you have a contract with Castle Rock or something?

People always say that and I did like three movies with them.

People say that a lot.

Yeah, as a matter of fact, every question you asked… I’m still waiting for that really original question that’ll separate you from a lot of other guys.

What pants size do you wear?  [we laugh]

I take the fifth.

I hear you do stand-up comedy.

No… I live my life as if I did.  I’ve never done stand-up comedy.  I enjoy making people laugh.  I enjoy any circumstance… oh, you may be speaking of various functions here in the film scoring “community.” I have gotten up and, I wouldn’t say made a fool of myself, but I enjoy telling stories and singing songs and I would very much like to do that even for a paying audience.  That is I think my true distinction except for maybe Randy Newman who has a career as a performer.  I know I could easily entertain an audience through a show that is mostly of course music I have written.  A lot of it was written for off-Broadway stuff in New York that never became famous, but a lot of great stuff I wrote when I was in my 20s or even earlier when I was a teenager.  I wrote a lot of stuff, and a lot of it was really good.  No one show that I wrote became a big hit but there was a lot of great little stuff there.  That’s how I got my, quote, reputation.  That’s why they started calling me at “Saturday Night Live” or other jobs I got, from these things that I was writing.  None of it became famous or successful, but people kept saying, “Oh, that Marc Shaiman, he’s writing good music, but that show sure did stink.” [I laugh] And everyone always thought that was fine for me to hear.  They’d go, “Well I didn’t really like the show but your stuff was really great.” They don’t realize… you want the show to be great.  It’s no good for you if the whole thing isn’t working and it’s a team, you don’t want to hear that.

You were listed as a writer of “Saturday Night Live”.

Yeah.  I mean it was music but you’re writing, that is what you’re doing.  Sometimes you are arranging but you’re writing.  A great week at “Saturday Night Live” was, I was getting paid as a writer, then if I wrote something that called on me having to do an arrangement, I got paid as an arranger through the musicians union.  If I played on that arrangement, I got paid as a musician.  And if I played on screen, I got paid through AFTRA.  Boy, I’m sounding like… I’m not like this.  But those were always the big weeks, like the grand slam: the writer, arranger, musician, on-screen.  A week was a bonanza.  [I laugh] Oh, those were the day.

I hear you’re also an aspiring actor.

Where do… where would you hear any of this?  [I laugh] Same answer.  It’s just the same stuff.  If they ever made… I keep hearing Martin Scorsese wants to make a movie of George Gershwin’s life story, and if I don’t play Oscar Levant… I’ll kill someone.  And if they don’t do it soon, I’ll ironically become too old to play Oscar Levant, and really drop dead.  ‘Cause I watch Oscar Levant in movies, do you know who he is?  [I shake my head, and let it hang in shame] Right over your head.  It’s really sad.

I want to know.

Well, you should.  Oscar Levant was a brilliant, brilliant pianist and he became like a protégé do George Gershwin and became even more famous for his acerbic wit.  He was extremely funny and sharp-tongued and had something to say about everyone and everything.  Really witty, welly funny.

Like the sidekick to Gershwin…

And he was in a lot of movies, in a movie called Humoresque where John Garfield plays a concert as a concert violinist and Joan Crawford walks into the ocean at the end.  He always would basically play himself.  And he was in “An American in Paris ”where he played Gene Kelly’s best friend, he was in “The Bandwagon” where he played Fred Astaire’s best friend.  He was really funny, played by the piano brilliantly and I look just like him.  I want to play him in a movie, I just want to play him in a movie.  [bangs his fist]

And there’s a great biography that came out.  It’s a very sad story because he was extremely fucked up.  I’ll just out-and-out say.  Addicted to every possible pill, a manic depressive, and certifiably insane at times, but he was always able to get himself out of it and even write about it and joke about it.  But it’s an incredible story.  [Bangs his fist] And you kids oughta be learning about the past.  It’s shocking for me to find myself in the position of going… I was always the kid, the extremely young person, and everyone was a lot older, and now when I think of people who don’t even know who… well Oscar Levant is obscure maybe but other names I could throw out to you and you’d be equally expressionless.

Duh.  You’ve been in a couple of movies that you’ve scored, haven’t you?

Yeah, as a matter of fact it’s terrible that in the last two years I haven’t been in one.  Something’s gotta be done about this.

You were in “Mr.  Saturday Night”.

I was in “Mr.  Saturday Night”, yes, I have a line.  [Does a voice] “What’s the matter, Buddy, having a bad day?” [I laugh] Rent it and watch for me.  It’s quite a moment.

Do you have headphones on?

Yes, I’m like the bandleader, a little Skitch Henderson.  Skitch Henderson, now there’s a name that’ll go right over your head.

Skitch Henderon, yeah….  Damn.  [I laugh, admitting my ignorance] Um.

See, when I was your age…

I’m not a musical freak.  I’m a freak, but…

I know but I know about people.  It’s just you learn things in schools or watching TV or going to movies… then again Skitch Henderson is extremely obscure.  There must be someone who’s reading this article right now…

Right now somebody’s reading this article… man that’s fast!  [I laugh at my own stupid comment]

… who will know who Skitch Henderon is.

What else were you in?

Beaches.  My greatest performance is still the first, in “Broadcast News”, which I didn’t score.  I was just someone who got the acting role with my friend Glen… have you seen that?

Yes… James L.  Brooks.

You were actually alive I think when that… well, it’s a great movie.  The only time that movie ever, for a second stops being about the three main performers – that movie is so good that there’s not an ounce of fat on it, there’s not even a shot of a plane landing, sort of time passing, not a shot of a front of a building, it’s just always about the three leads except for this strange little moment where me and my friend Glen come in and audition a news theme.  We’re these composers and we come in and audition a news theme in the middle of the movie.  We literally walk in with a portable keyboard and play this theme in the middle of the newsroom.  It makes no sense.  [I laugh] It was shocking that we were in the final cut of the movie but it’s really funny.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen that, but I know it starred Albert Brooks, William Hurt, and Holly Hunter.  Am I good?

Very good.  [At this point there were a few minutes of nonsense that got deleted on Will’s mini-disc.  – LK] Will Shivers is a great name, it needs to be out there.  [Makes hand gesture]

I was thinking of changing it if I ever became a sex therapist.  My middle name is Davis.  Does Will Davis sound better?  [announcer voice] “Will Davis performing tonight.”

No, Will Shivers is great.  It’s very… memorable.

ie.  The only time that movie ever, for a second stops being about the three main performers – that movie is so good that there’s not an ounce of fat on it, there’s not even a shot of a plane landing, sort of time passing, not a shot of a front of a building, it’s just always about the three leads except for this strange little moment where me and my friend Glen come in and audition a news theme.  We’re these composers and we come in and audition a news theme in the middle of the movie.  We literally walk in with a portable keyboard and play this theme in the middle of the newsroom.  It makes no sense.  [I laugh] It was shocking that we were in the final cut of the movie but it’s really funny.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen that, but I know it starred Albert Brooks, William Hurt, and Holly Hunter.  Am I good?

Very good.  [At this point there were a few minutes of nonsense that got deleted on Will’s mini-disc.  – LK] Will Shivers is a great name, it needs to be out there.  [Makes hand gesture]

I was thinking of changing it if I ever became a sex therapist.  My middle name is Davis.  Does Will Davis sound better?  [announcer voice] “Will Davis performing tonight.”

No, Will Shivers is great.  It’s very… memorable.