Since 1971 and “The Conversation”, David Shire has been scoring major Hollywood productions. In 1976 he scored “All the President’s Men”, which by any criteria must be one of the biggest films of the year. This success did not happen overnight – he had been composing since the late ’50s for various stage productions. David was born in 1937 in Buffalo, New York. His father is a band leader and piano teacher, so he was immersed in music at an early age. He graduated from Yale University in 1959, having written two shows for the Yale Dramatic Association. During the ’60s Shire worked as a pianist, arranger, and conductor, and composed songs and stage works. He composed some dramatic scores for TV’s “CBS Playhouse” in 1967 and launched the current phase of his career scoring various TV episodes beginning in 1970. Songwriting and musical projects (for the stage or screen) are still of great interest to him, and be balance his film works with these other activities. His wife Talia is in the current film “Rocky”. David himself can be seen playing piano in “Harry and Walter Go to New York”. His father-in-law Carmine Coppola appears as a conductor in that same picture. His brother Sandy is an arranger-conductor working in Los Angeles. Brother-in-law Francis Ford Coppola rounds out the ‘family’. The Shires live in the Los Angeles area and have one young son, Matthew. Talking with David was a very enjoyable experience – it was just plain fun. His friendly manner quickly put me at ease. I purposely asked some of the same questions which were submitted to the composers at Oakland last year. During the interview David often displayed his sense of humor, but he is quite serious about his work. Tell me about your background. I was an English major at Yale and switched to music, writing two shows for the Yale Dramatic Association. I graduated in 1959, did a couple of months of graduate work in composition at Brandeis and went into the Army Reserve Program for 6 months. When I got out, I started working in New York as a rehearsal pianist, arranger, night club conductor – musical odd-jobs of all kinds – and writing on the side. I wrote an off-Broadway show which got on a year later. Progress from there was doing more and more composition that was income-producing and less and less of the other things. Eventually I was a full-time film and TV composer. Was writing for films something that you always wanted to do? It wasn’t the first thing I thought of when I wanted to do music. My father was a popular piano teacher and band leader in Buffalo – in fact he still is. So I grew up in the tradition of what, at the time, was popular music, principally show music and the old standards. I took piano, and the first thing I thought I wanted to be was a concert pianist – later on, to be a composer. I suppose I thought of film music as one of the kinds of music I wanted to write, except it was more just writing melodic music with movies as one area that I could write for. Like most kids who are attracted to these things, I was attracted to the ‘romantic’ – Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Ravel were some of the first composers that I fell in love with, and the film music tradition, certainly at that time, was largely based on the work of composers like these. When my career actually started, I was principally involved in the stage – music for musicals. I always thought film music would be something I’d do on the side – between musicals – but as it turned out, my film music career has become the principal one and I have to make time for stage projects and the like – what I call foreground music. You worked on some Barbra Streisand TV specials and she recorded some of your songs. How did that come about? When she first started to surface, I was writing songs with a lyricist whom I had worked with almost exclusively, and we, like most of the young songwriters in town, took some songs to her to try to get them recorded. She took two of them, but didn’t record them until a year later. They were ‘Autumn’ and ‘No More Songs for Me’ which were on the earlier albums. Also I knew her pianist at the time. He was playing Funny Girl and when he left the show after a year, he asked me if I wanted to replace him. So that became my steady job – I was in the pit of Funny Girl for over a year, both as pianist and assistant conductor, and during that period she did a TV show “Color Me Barbra” and asked me if I wanted to assist Peter Matz, her arranger, as assistant arranger and accompanist. So I did a couple of specials with her and over the next few years she recorded some more songs of mine. I noticed that you wrote the title song to “I’d Rather Be Rich” (1984). When I was living in New York my agent happened to be friends with the New York representative of MCA publishing and he said they had a picture “out there” called “I’d Rather Be Rich”, and they were looking for a title song and would my lyricist and I like to submit one. We submitted one and, lo and behold, they used it. But I think of that as completely divorced from my movie career. I had nothing to do with that film other than sending the lead sheet out to California. I saw that and assumed that you had been working in films in the ’60s. During that period I was playing Funny Girl, working off-Broadway, and playing rehearsal piano. I think it was after that I even did my first serious television work – the CBS Playhouses. They were the first extensive background scores I did. I had done a lot of incidental music for plays and things from Yale on, but the first actual big television thing was “The Final War of Ollie Winter”, which was the first CBS Playhouse. I gather that your first work in films was at Universal. I first came out here with a Broadway show which I wrote that folded out here on the road after six weeks of tryouts. I was getting tired of pursuing the theater thing unsuccessfully and knew Billy Goldenberg who was working at Universal, and he introduced me to Stanley Wilson, who was head of the music department at the time. I played him some of my CBS Playhouse tapes. And on the strength of those, he gave me some work – I started on “The Virginian”, three or four episodes in all, and then a series called “McCloud” – the first year it was on the air. My first actual feature film was at Universal, a western called “One Last Train to Rob” – real drive-in fodder. Do you think you could have gotten the job at Universal without your tapes? That’s hard to say. I think I would have had to have something to play, and those were the principal scores I had to play to show that I could do TV movies. One needs prior experience to get into that work. Almost always. Stanley Wilson is a particularly missed man – he died about four years ago – because he was one of the few who could assess someone’s ability for TV scores off the street, so to speak. He helped a lot of people like Quincy Jones, Benny Carter, Oliver Nelson, and other jazz composers who weren’t thought of as background scorers, but he saw that they would make good ones. Now it is much more difficult. It’s hard for someone to assess your ability to do TV movies unless you actually have that kind of work to show them. Stanley was terrific; he was an executive, but he was also a first-rate musician and composer and knew all the problems. He was a rare individual in a position like that. It looks as though you were doing series, movies-of-the-week, and features within a short period of time. Well, the movies-of-the-week came a little later – and I did not start getting really good ones right away. But gradually it has been more feature work and less TV work. Lately it’s been mostly features. The early films you did were not particularly memorable. “Summertree” wasn’t even released here, and no one has really heard of “One Last Train to Rob”. “Skin Game” was the first picture I did that was reasonably successful, and “The Conversation” was the most prestigious one. “All the President’s Men” is the only huge hit that I have been connected with. Do you think that your work on “All the President’s Men” is really noticed? I thought it would be very unnoticed, but I’ve been surprised at the comments I’ve been getting on it, people saying that they know there was not much music, but it must have been a terribly difficult job and what music there was was absolutely right. And people have said that to me who are not even musicians! I don’t think it is noticeable for an average audience, but people who listen to film music and to what it is doing seem to notice it more than I thought they would. It was one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, assignment I ever had. I had to come up with a concept that would work, because the film could have gone with no music at all. Pakula really kind of elicited the score from me. I kept saying, What do you need music for? He said, I’ll tell you why we need music… He told me what he wanted the score to do and that it would not involve a lot of music. But he said that what there was could be very important and when we were all done he was nice enough to say at several points that I shouldn’t look at it as the number of minutes, but that he thought the score was really a key contribution to what he wanted the picture to be. I think that it was. It was a very tense film and the music occurred mostly at breathing points. Yes, and it reminded you that there were people involved and emotions. I’m told they were going to put out a band arrangement of the theme, based on the single that I did. One company wanted to put out a medley of the theme and ‘Hail to the Chief’. I think it’s a little bizarre. As far as attracting attention goes, I would think that “The Hindenburg” or “Farewell, My Lovely” will do that, since they are recorded. Those were the first two soundtrack albums I had. Really, the most and strongest response I’ve ever gotten to any score was for “The Conversation”. Was that single ever commercially released here? I don’t know if it ever got officially released. It was sent to disc jockeys, but the week that it was supposed to be released, Paramount sold ABC-Paramount Records to Dunhill, and the record got lost in the shuffle. “President’s Men” was an excellent film. How do you react to bad pictures? I have done them, like most of us. Lately I’ve been able to turn certain things down, which is really the nicest thing about doing better films – you get offered better movies and have a little more freedom to pick and choose. It’s a drag to do a bad film even if you can write a terrific score for it, because there is that synergy between the music and the film; and a lot of time a terrific score in a bad movie doesn’t really seem that good. And the reverse is also true. I’ve heard scores that aren’t that great, but the film works so sensationally that it makes it look like the score is working terrifically. There is that relation between music and picture. People ask that standard question – can a good score save a bad movie? I don’t think it can save it. It can make a marginal film better. It can make a bad movie maybe a little better, but it is still going to be bad. I think Jerry Goldsmith said it once, but I also feel it is true that a good picture can save a bad score. And a bad score can hurt a good film. In a couple of movies I’ve seen in the last year or two the picture’s really setting up an original emotional tone, and then a cue comes in which is a cliché and pulls the film down to its own emotional level, which is less interesting and specific than that of the movie. It should be the other way around. I think the scor should be at least as evocative as the film. Will you mention some examples? The score for Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now” – I don’t remember the composer’s name. To me it was really a composer’s dream. It had multiple levels of meaning and mood and was really bizarre in its own original way. But the music was kind of sentimental and much less evocative than the picture. Yes, I thought it was overly romantic. Yes, kind of ‘muzaky’. And also the score for “The Garden of the Finzi Continis”. Again the film was very rich but the score was not as good as the movie – too sentimental. Another ‘standard’ question – Have you noticed any changes since you have been in Hollywood? I don’t guess you have been there that long… Actually I do have an answer for that, simply because of the specific period of time I’ve been there. It started with that ‘flowering’ of rocks cores, which made me and a lot of other composers very nervous, because we were not primarily rock musicians. I thought if that is the way film music is going, I’d better look out for something else to do. But in the last four or five years we’ve come away from that and there’s a renewed interest in old scores and the old way of scoring: the rediscovery of Korngold and Herrmann and the use of the large orchestra, for instance. Some of the younger and hipper directors now want a more traditional score. I think that film music has gotten better in general in the last four or five years, since the fascination with rock scores has worn off and we’re now back to scoring the picture rather than tacking a record album onto it. Also with electronic instruments and the new electronic devices we have to play around with, and their use in the hands of the composers like John Williams – his music for “Images”, for example – scores are more truly original and interesting. Also, as pictures reach for more interesting emotional moods, it makes the score do the same. Listen to the music which has been created for films since, say, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, which was one of the prototypical scores of a new kind of composing for films – by that I mean with a handful of instruments where you have a transparent texture rather than the big ‘Mittel European’ effulgence. I’m as big a fan of Korngold, Steiner, and Newman as anyone, but looking back at the European school, scores seem more like each other than now, when you get one score being totally different from another. Put John Williams’s music for “Images” against his compositions for “The Missouri Breaks”. It’s like two different men, and I don’t know if there’s such a radical difference in texture, tone, and style between, say, one score of Korngold and another. Certainly they were different, but as far as general style went, they were much more the same. That is one of the most exciting things to me about film scoring: to do a picture like “The Conversation” with solo piano and then “Farewell, My Lovely”, which is totally different style, period, mood, and orchestra, and then “The Hindenburg” which is completely different from the other two. As movies cover a wide range, the music has to also. Can you attribute the re-emergence of film music to a single cause? I think that the smarter producers and maybe the less smart ones after them saw that diminishing returns were setting in, that even if the soundtrack album sold a lot of records a rock score was not going to turn a mediocre picture into a big contemporary hit. “American Graffiti” wasn’t a hit because of the use of old records; it was because that use was absolutely right. Producers saw that you couldn’t just paste a rock score on any movie. Also, I think a lot of those scores didn’t sell many records either. It wasn’t necessarily a ticket to popularity. Then too, rock has expanded – it means so many other things now. The range of music from awful to terrific that the term covers is vast – from melodic to non-melodic, rhythmic to almost arrhythmic. There are scores now that are rock-influenced, but you really would not call them that pejoratively. While looking through some old issues of Variety, I noticed that the youth-oriented pictures – the ones that got most of the rock scores – lost money. Yes. The producers saw that they weren’t making any more money with rock scores than without them; so good-bye rock music. It’s that simple. I gather that you use music sparingly. I don’t know if that impression is due to pictures I’ve seen or… It might be. I guess “The Conversation” and especially “All the President’s Men” are spare. “Farewell, My Lovely” and “Hindenburg” are, for instance, forty- or fifty-minute scores. Just as a general rule, I believe that if there is no dramatic reason to have a cue, you shouldn’t have one just to put music in for the sake of having music. The most economical score is often the best one, just as, when I’m searching for a musical solution, the simplest one is often the most effective one. But it depends on the picture. I’ve written what I feel each movie has called for, and if I get one next week that calls for an hour-and-a-half of music, then I’ll do an hour-and-a-half. Generally the director has as much to do with the spotting, and therefore the amount of music, as I do. I think that in general movies tend to use less music today than was the practice a while back. Do you have some personal philosophy about the use of music in films? I gather that you approach them as individuals. Yes, it’s kind of a nice thing that each movie has its own problems and there aren’t any pat solutions. I try, as any good film composer does, to service the picture – service the drama of the film. If the score can be a nice concert suite away from the movie, all the better. But basically the rule has to be to service what’s there, and that can be like night and day from one picture to another. You mentioned electronics before. I’ve never written a totally electronic score, but I’ve used electronic instruments. In “Conversation”, for example, the latter cues are filtered very subtly through a synthesizer to modulate the texture of the piano to make it a little weirder and unsettling. As Harry’s mind slowly goes, the piano starts to take on a different color. So that’s a use of a synthesizer where it does not really sound like a synthesizer. In “Farewell, My Lovely” in the dope scene, you can hear the electric tuba gurgling away on the bottom. And the electronic keyboards that we all use now – a million different timbres that you can pick from. A totally electronic score usually bores me as I eventually get tired of the tone colors, whereas I use synthesizers as an instrument in conjunction with acoustic textures. It widens enormously the range of sounds you can have. I recently bought an Arp and am having a lot of fun with it. Very few scores are completely electronic. “Forbidden Planet” was one. Gil Melle’s “Andromeda Strain” was another. Well, it’s like any other instrument. You can use it because it’s right dramatically or because it’s modish. No matter what it is, in the former case it works and in the latter case it doesn’t. Can one do a score where the music reflects a particular period, and retain the period atmosphere throughout? For instance, in “Farewell, My Lovely”, there is a lot of contemporary sound. I don’t know how well-integrated it is because I’m too close to it. Certainly there are strict period cues. As danger creeps in, it goes to more contemporary harmonies, rhythms, and textures. I hope it was all of a piece in one way or another. I think it worked well there, but I noticed the difference, particularly on the record. Yes, it’s a trial-and-error thing; blendings of style are often what makes film music exciting. No pun intended, I just play it by ear as I go along. Sometimes it seems more natural to go into more dissonant textures, and it seems to emerge right from the period texture. Like the dope scene – there’s a lot of dissonance in it, but the fragments and melodies that weave through it are taken right from the theme, which is a period thing. Should an audience be aware of a score? Or should it not be heard? That can be both. There are places in a movie where you want the score to be heard – as in a montage, where the music can be as important as the photography, the effects, or the action. Usually you want the main title to be heard. Like in “Pelham”: it is a black-and-white credit title with no visuals under it at all. They said, make a main title which will make everyone think they are about to see the most exciting picture ever made. You certainly want the audience to be aware of that. Then there are cues that work almost subliminally and films like “All the President’s Men” where many people would say, “What music?”, if you said there was music in it. It was often working on a subconscious level. Almost every movie has a range of cues from one extreme to another. How do deadlines affect you? They make me nervous, nauseous, and upset --- like almost everyone else I know. Most of my work would probably be non-existent without deadlines to meet. I don’t wake up each morning bursting with musical ideas. It’s the deadline that produces the concentration and discipline that produce the work, and I know if I had eight weeks to do a picture, I’d spend eight weeks on it; and if I had four weeks, I’d have it in four weeks – I don’t know if the score would be any better for the eight weeks. There is a point of diminishing returns where if you have too little time, you have to cut corners; but too much time can reduce the concentration, the intensity of the search for a solution. What is the biggest problem facing you as a film composer? A major problem is the difficulty in getting a decent sound when you wind up in a theater – a sound that is up to contemporary high-fidelity standards. People listen to the most sophisticated sound systems at home and then they go to a movie and hear what, when compared to the state of the recording art, is a relatively unsophisticated sound – cut off at 10,000 Hertz. Unless it’s a stereo picture with magnetic sound, which is an exception, you are dealing with a compromise sound. You have the experience one very movie of having a score sound magnificent on the recording stage – or at least very good when you play it back – and then you go into the dubbing room where they monitor through the optical cut-off, and right away the sound is diminished. There are techniques which can improve optical sound, but the problem is getting theaters to change their equipment. No one is going to use a new system until the theaters can accommodate it, and that seems to be as difficult as converting to the metric system. Also, I think we have lost some techniques that we had. My wife is an actress, and we’ve often remarked how in the older movies – the Bette Davis pictures – the dubbing was such that you could have a big orchestra playing rather loudly and never miss a line of dialogue. You had the full effect of both. Not it seems that if you are going to hear dialogue, the music has to get shoved way down. I think those older mixers with their less-sophisticated equipment had a way of dubbing on acoustic planes. The actors were often better-miked because there wasn’t as much on-the-spot location recording all the time. There were ways of getting the full effect of both dialog and music. Now it seems that you have to pick one or the other. A lot of that is also just due to the change in style of acting. Jack Nicholson does not emote like Bette Davis, nor would you want him to. It’s just a less theatrical, more naturalistic style of performance which is harder to hear and harder to record. But I think that somewhere between those two there might be a better compromise. The recording engineer whom I respect most out here has said that they knew some dubbing and recording techniques in those days which were better than the ones we use now. It varies too with the style of orchestration. I don’t want this to sound too glib, but I think there are things to be investigated that we have had and might have lost. You said that you had no concert compositions. Why is that? My writing seems geared to dramatic vehicles of some kind. My earliest semi-professional work was incidental music for plays or songs for shows. I’m just that kind of musician. I know some others too – we don’t write abstract music, so to speak – it’s more like gebrauchsmusik: music for specific uses. It’s music to service drama, whether it be the drama of a single lyric, a musical, a television show, play, or movie. I seem to need that story or dramatic spine to get me going. Not to put myself in the same league, but my father-in-law, who worked with Toscanini for a while, is fond of this story: Toscanini wanted a concert piece from Puccini and commissioned one. For months, years, it never came, so he finally wrote and asked, “Where’s my piece?” And Puccini wrote back saying, “I’ve tried, but until the curtain goes up I can write nothing.” I’ve written a few things, like my ‘Sonata for Cocktail Piano’, a 3-movement piece written for its own musical sake. There’s a lot of songs, but again, songs are attached to lyrics. I seem to be, for better or worse, a dramatic composer. Which, one would say, is more popular music than, shall we say, serious music. The reason that I asked is that I understand that Richard Rodney Bennett has been impressed by your work. We have a mutual admiration society. It seems to me that Bennett, among all the contemporary people who work in film, is perhaps better known as a composer. He seems to straddle both worlds beautifully, also from twelve-tone to jazz. I mean, his range is extraordinary. Johnny Williams is like that also. I know that between film scores he does concert pieces. He recently did a flute concerto. And there is Paul Glass, whom I studied with, and who is one of my dearest friends. He’s now in Europe writing concert music, but he has written some film music. He wrote the music for “Bunny Lake is Missing”. I guess you would say that Paul is primarily a serious composer, though he would probably laugh at the categorizing in the first place. He’s a composer. There are certainly others who go back and forth like that, and maybe, with the evolution of the media, there has evolved a new category of composer – the ‘media composer’. Well, I did not mean to differentiate in any derogatory sense. There is a musical establishment which tends, I think to look down on film music, and sometimes rightly so, because film music often is simply not good music. It is an ancillary craft or art. It’s servicing someone else’s vision 99 out 0f 100% of the time. Really, what I’d call my serious, non-film music work is for the stage. It is still not concert hall, but I’d be happy to have written “Porgy and Bess” and no symphonies at all. What has influenced you musically, and who are your musical idols? Just about everything has influenced me at one time or another. This relates to what we were talking about before – different styles for different pictures. Sometimes a movie calls for a style that I’ve never really been influenced by. I’ll get all the records and scores I can lay my hands on, and in a couple of weeks I’ll be influenced by that style because I’m trying to be. Twelve-tone music is not my natural style, but “Pelham”, in its own way, is a twelve-tone score, my own use of the system. As far as general influences: those early Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Ravel influences that just about every film composer admits to. I really started in pop music and I was studying classical piano, but I was going it so that I could play ‘Stardust’ better. In the summers when I was home in Buffalo between semesters at Yale, I studied music at University of Buffalo with a man named Bob Hughes who introduced me to the wonders of Stravinsky. And I’d say that Stravinsky was the single most important classical influence that I’ve had from college on. Certainly the earlier pieces – ‘The Firebird’, ‘Petrouchka’, ‘The Rite of Spring’ – influences, again, that almost every film composer will admit to, but more specifically the middle period, the neo-classical period, which in addition to style has influenced my writing in terms of philosophy: the use of another style, but filtered through one’s own musical personality to have the best of both. Just the approach that Stravinsky has used in many works has been inspiring in general, if not in detail – and I’ve also borrowed in detail too. Not because I wanted to, but because the influence of that music is so strong that you cannot avoid certain usages which you know are not original to yourself. I suppose that the most basic influence of all is just the melodic tradition of Kern, Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, etc. That was really my earliest and strongest influence because, as I was growing up, my father was teaching the songs of those people hour after hour to piano students who came and went. So that music, above all, was drummed into my head. I am basically a melodist. No matter how complicated or sophisticated I get compositionally, there’s usually a melody of some kind somewhere. Then you don’t mind being influenced – you listen to what other people do in films? Oh, yes, absolutely. I can’t avoid it. Like everyone, I’m influenced by what I like. Often I find myself not playing a record I love when I’m writing because I know that the more I hear it the more I’m going to want to write like it. Sometimes if it’s a different style than the one I’m trying to get into, it can be dangerous. I think film music, as opposed to straight concert music, is more influenced by other styles. It is a music that stands on the shoulders of other music. I was talking to a film class the other night at UCLA, and we got on the use of the word ‘parody’ in the literary sense. Film music is – in the bet sense – that kind of parody, using a style which is not indigenous to the composer who is writing it, but which is chosen because it is a specific aesthetic choice in relation to the subject matter of the picture. So it is one more step removed from – if you will – primary musical creativity. One sitting down to write a concert piece usually writes in his own style, where the aesthetic choice of ‘a style’ is not the burning question. He is writing music that is natural to his own development, the development of his own style – whereas in film music the very choice of style is an aesthetic decision that is of crucial consequence to the movie and the score. If I’m doing a picture set in the 1800s, I probably couldn’t write serial music. Maybe it would work, it depends; but in either case it is something that has to be considered. What about your own style? Friends who follow my music claim that they have turned on television shows where they’ve missed the credits and heard the score and said that’s one’s of mine – and found that they were right. They claim that I have a certain basic style that is recognizable even when I’m working in different styles, so to speak. When I’m trying to find a sound for a movie I can’t help thinking about what things are similar or what might work. In “The Hindenburg” it was more specific because I wanted a specific musical reference, whereas with “The Conversation” I wanted the score to sound like ’50s jazz, but through a glass darkly. I listened to some old jazz records, but the score sounds nothing like them. What do you think about borrowing from classical music? Like “Barry Lyndon”? That, or “2001”. I think that the score for “2001” works very well. I never heard the score that Alex North wrote which was not used – it was supposed to be terrific. I don’t know if it would have worked better or not; I’m certainly not unhappy with the way the picture was scored. Kubrick wanted some of the specific associations with those specific pieces that you could not get with original ones. You could write a waltz in the style of Strauss, but it is not the same as playing ‘The Blue Danube’. It did give a special flavor. I think what’s so evocative about it is that you can’t really say how it works. I’ve heard different people explain why that music works and give totally different reasons, and they both are right. It has that richness of connotation you get any time you quote from anything in art. And if it’s right for the picture, it’s right. I believe “Barry Lyndon” could have had an original score in the style of those composers and it might have been better or certainly as good, because many of the works they played weren’t that well-known anyway. That is what I thought. Since the music was not so familiar, it could function as a score. In “2001” the entire audience recognizes ‘The Blue Danube’, but not the opening fanfare. Although everyone recognizes it now. Yes, in dog food commercials, salad dressings, and deodorants… An interesting example is in “the Big Bus”, a comedy, a satire of disaster pictures. When in the fourth reel the Big Bus finally emerges from its hangar, that had laid in ‘Zarathustra’. And it broke everyone up at the early screening when it was the only piece of music in the movie. I objected to it at first – it’s been used in commercials – it’s a cliché now. But in the context of the whole score and the whole film, which is kind of a motley collection of sight gags and movie gags, it works as a musical gag… When this silly, huge bus comes out of the hangar and you hear those opening bars of ‘Zarathustra’, it’s funny. They were going to let me write an original cue and then decide whether my cue or ‘Zarathustra’ worked best. And halfway through writing the score, I thought – I can’t really write anything that will work better there. So there is parody twice removed. It is a parody of a parody, now a film joke. What is the rest of the score like? It is kind of a collection of ‘movie music’. There’s a Steiner-esque love theme, some rock, some Johnny Williams menace music, a purposely overscored main title, etc. The main title is supposed to be the ultimate movie melody – it rises and rises and builds and builds for about three minutes, but nothing is going on visually. So on the level of people who are hip to those things it might have that joke of being the ultimate piece of over-inflated movie music, and to those who aren’t, it just sounds like a nice, exciting piece of music to start a picture with. You can take it on either level. I don’t know how the picture will do, but I’m pleased with the score. How about your musicals and stage work? What are your ambitions there? Well, it was the initial area that I loved. I got three or four musicals on, but none of them were hits. I love working in that medium with the human voice as a dramatic vehicle. I love song writing. I’ve done much more composing than I ever thought I would by this point, because of the demands of the films. When I was a kid, movie music, to me, was just big melodies played by soupy string sections – that was my image of it. I think the stage is an exciting place for a composer. I believe there are film musicals and television musicals to be written which will break new ground and show new possibilities. A film musical does not necessarily have to be Busby Berkeley or a version of a Broadway hit. The movies of Lelouch could easily be musicalized: in fact they almost are half musicals. Are you familiar with “The Queen of the Stardust Ballroom”? Yes, the writers are all friends of mine. I don’t think the show was a fully successful solution to the problems of doing a television musical. The visual style of the film tended to be very naturalistic. It started off with that tragic hospital scene, the people crying, the close-ups, kind of ‘cinéma vérité’-style. And then the first song came in, and you were kind of jolted. It never seemed to totally mesh for me. The songs that took place in the ballroom itself where the people were dancing worked. There’s always that problem to confront in a TV musical. I think that a really effective TV musical might be something like Three Penny Opera, which is small but totally stylized. But, who knows? The most successful solutions will probably be totally unpredictable. It was an interesting approach. It did work for a lot of people. And at least it broke new ground. It was the first of its kind and hopefully paved the way for other works which will maybe solve the problems better. There is one thing I am still puzzled on – I have always viewed the stage and film as different areas – I have never been very interested in stage. I think of films as much more dramatic than stage. Not really. It depends on what you are comparing to what. There are bad movies – undramatic pictures and undramatic stage pieces. I saw “A Chorus Line” recently, and that was certainly as ‘dramatic’ as most films. The theater is a different kind of excitement, really; I don’t know if you can compare the two – like apples and oranges. Ideally I’d like to work in both areas. You mentioned that the films of Lelouch were sort of like musicals. That brings up Francis Lai or Michel Legrand, whom I really think of as songwriters rather than dramatic composers. I don’t think they have a dramatic bone in their musical bodies. Really? I think that they do. I think Michel Legrand is a first-rate dramatic composer, except he accepts too many assignments. He tries to write too much too fast, and sometimes does not get deep enough into it. He has written some fine scores. I agree, but his music has never grabbed me. Well, it’s impressed me. Sometimes I realize his film music does call too much attention to itself, but as music it’s terrific. He’s a brilliant song-writer, and I think if he spent more time on some of his movie projects he would often be more subtle. Before you judge, you should see the movie “The Picasso Summer” (never released, but shown on TV). I believe that score, which is on the “Summer of ’42” LP, is his finest work. It gives you an idea of the broadness of his vocabulary and how dramatic he can be. Let’s get back to your music. Is your score for “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” strict twelve-tone music? There are certain criteria which must be met. It’s not strict twelve-tone in the Schoenberigan sense; there is a twelve-tone row, but I used it in a freer way that Schoenberg would allow by his strict rules, yet the main title is a pretty strict twelve-tone piece in one sense except that I put the row and its permutations over an ostinato, which gives it a kind of tonality. It was a way of finding and organizing a sound for me, but I was not trying to be atonal. The row is used in the score in all its permutations – retrograde, retrograde inversion, inversion, and all the different keys, and against itself. But it’s not strict Schoenbergian usage. This use of a tone row I got from Paul Glass. He taught me how to construct and to use the row to make the music sound like I wanted it to sound like, rather than like bad Schoenberg. It is a strict row in the Schoenberg sense, and covers all the semi-tones without repeating. Yes, it is stated right away in the main title. And in the end title, when the music goes into a tonal, kind of Mancini-ish jazz version, that’s still the row as the melody, only in a different rhythm division and different octave displacements. The end title was going to be 3 minutes long and I repeated the main title for two minutes. The recording date was the next day and I was complaining at dinner to my wife that I didn’t know what to do for the last minute because I had already said everything I had to say. She asked, Can you ever make a row sound pretty? I said, Sure, and sat at the piano and improvised some consonant jazz chords against the row. She said, That’s really beautiful, like New York was before things like “Pelham” depicts. Why not use that at the end to remind people what New York was like before the hijackers and muggers? So I did it, and it worked. The row was constructed to give me a kind of dissonant jazz sound that would be fresh – not the standard movie and TV jazz thing. To have dissonance, but to hold it together with some kind of harmonic sense. The row had only two kinds of intervals in it: minor-thirds and major-sevenths and their inversions – two key jazz intervals , so that no matter what I did with the row it came out sounding like ‘semi-dissonant’ jazz. It did not sound like twelve-tone to me when I first heard it. Well, it shouldn’t. It was an organizing principle that worked for me to get what I was after. What happened to the soprano part in the “Hindenburg” titles? When I first played my title music for Robert Wise, he was practically in tears – he liked it so much. He thought the idea of using the soprano was terrific. I even made a demo with piano and voice that they laid in on the film as a temp track and it seemed to work fine. I don’t know how much flack came from the audience and how much from the boys in the tower, but after a few previews Bob came back and told me with great reluctance that the main title was not working because of the voice… On the preview cards one woman complained she couldn’t hear the lyrics, and it was a wordless soprano! It’s my own feeling that he might have gotten flack from somebody in the tower, saying it just sounded pretentious. They asked if I could put the melody on some other instrument, so I went back in. I had the foresight to put the soprano on a separate track, so we removed her and overdubbed a trumpet. I had to make a few changes in the melody. Originally it was a duet for soprano and trumpet. So by putting the soprano melody on trumpet, I had to incorporate some of the things that were originally on trumpet into the orchestra. I really wasn’t happy with the final result. Somehow it made the sound even worse; I think they got a terrible sound on the trumpet when they overdubbed it: it sounds like an English horn in the beginning. There just was not the time and money to go back in with 58 musicians and a re-orchestration. If there had been, I would have reorchestrated it as a trumpet solo. I was doing it as a specific metaphor. The main title was patterned after the last songs of Strauss – the first of the last four songs. I wanted it to be a cultural metaphor, something to sum up that period in Germany – Strauss died in 1948 – that kind of overblown, romantic orchestration; something that is gorgeous, but too big: soaring and heavy at the same time, kind of a musical equivalent to the dirigible. The main title was this big, beautiful airship floating by with a swastika on it. The sound of the soprano voice singing that kind of theme is very German to me, very beautiful, but something with almost a warning of disaster in it. Also, there are the associations with Wagner – Wagner is associated with Hitler through the works of Nietzsche. So it was kind of a culture symbol. That’s why the love theme for Scott and the Countess is in the style of Brahms: they were the two who were anti-Nazi, and Brahms was anti-Wagner with a passion. There has to be a reason for the choices. Even if they aren’t explicit, I believe they help. Record reviews have mentioned other influences – Herrmann and Vaughn Williams. Herrmann, a little bit. I scored several scenes using a certain kind of rhythm motive which I associate with him. This is really a dumb question, but since Francis Ford Coppola is your brother-in-law, why didn’t you score “The Godfather”? He preferred to have Nino Rota and Carmine, which I think were good choices. If it’s nepotism, he picks the family member most suitable for the project. He picked me for “The Conversation”; Carmine worked on “The Godfather”, which I believe was appropriate. Could you enlighten me as to the furor over Rota’s music and the Academy Award? Somebody pointed out that Rota had used one of the principal themes for “Godfather” in another picture (“Fortunella”) and the rules clearly state that works submitted must be original for the particular picture. There was no aesthetic judgement involved – he got the Award two years later for “Part 2”. O.K., that’s my next question. How could he write a score for “Godfather Part 2”, re-using much of his score for “Part 1”, and win an Oscar for it this time? That came up for discussion [Shire was on the committee] – whether it should be submitted as an adaption or as an original score. Cue sheets were submitted and the movie was viewed several times by the screening committee. There was more new music than adapted music. The rule is that if the main thrust of the score is new music, then it is an original score. There was something like 40 minutes of new scoring and 20 or 30 minutes based on themes for the original. In “Part 1” much of the music was derived from that “Fortunella” theme, so it could not qualify as an original score. And since the previous film was not a “Godfather” film it could not qualify as an adaption. Is there much time between your scoring of a movie and its release? Usually the scoring date is set by giving the composer as much time as possible preceding dubbing, when dubbing is already schedule. So generally they are dubbing within a week after I finish scoring. Dubbing may last different periods of time. To give extreme examples, “President’s Men” was dubbed for over a month. We dubbed, I think, for two or three weeks and then there were previews; then there was re-dubbing for a week, another set of previews, and then re-dubbing for another five or six days. “The Big Bus” was dubbed in about two weeks, plus one quick day after previews. Then off it went. So it depends on how much money is invested in a picture and how much care is being taken. I’ve scored TV films which have been on the air within two weeks after we dubbed, and others where it takes six months to get on the air. Would you call yourself an avid filmgoer? Yes; maybe not like Pauline Kael, but I try to keep up with it. We go to movies at least once a week plus stuff on TV and we’re on the Z channel. Do you listen to music a lot? I gather you have a large record collection. Do you buy soundtracks? Yes. A lot of the current ones I get sent. As member of the Academy, producers try to win your vote at the end of the year – publishers, record companies, and studios send out soundtracks. If something comes out that I want right away, I’ll go and get it. Like the Raksin album of the Korngold LPs. How do you get assignments? You’ve worked with Robert Wise and Paul Bogart twice… Your work gets you work. Paul Bogart directed “The Final War of Ollie Winter” and really started me on my movie and TV career. But he met me when I was playing piano for a Steven Sondheim musical on television which he directed. So there it was doing something that led to something else. When he directed other pictures he called on me – we like working with each other. On “Two People” I knew Robert Wise was doing the picture. And I went after it – I arranged my interview with him, talked with him, and got the job. Sometimes my agent will do the footwork. I’ll tell him there’s a certain film I’ve heard about that I want to do and he will approach the producer or director and submit me. Now more people will ask for me because I have enough work out that they know. But if there is a specific picture that I want, I’ll be sure they know I want it. I’d like to know how a composer is paid. First you are paid a sum for composition… About $25,000 plus orchestration. After the movie goes into theaters, don’t you get a residual for each performance? You do from Europe through BMI, I think. When a feature film is shown on TV? You don’t get any more direct payments, but you get credit points from BMI. The same for TV programs. What is likely to bring a composer more income: a big film like “All the President’s Men” or a popular TV series like “Star Trek”, which is re-run constantly? You would probably end up making more from “Star Trek”; after all, the BMI credits add up. It’s hard to say since it depends on how many times they are re-run. Then if there is a recording, you get record royalties. In the case of Mancini or Legrand, they often get more from that than the composition fee. I’m sure Johnny Williams made more from the album and single of “Jaws” than he did from scoring the picture. On the subject of recordings, musicians are paid when they record for a film. If somebody wants to release a soundtrack album, the musicians have to be paid again? Right. If you use existing tracks, the musicians are paid as if they recorded it again. Often you make a new recording to get better sound since you have to pay them anyway. Do you have problems being type-cast? To some extent. I’ve done a wide variety of things, but I am known more for some things than others. I’m sorry that “Harry and Walter” was kind of a bomb and that “The Big Bus” did not get a very good run because they were two comedies and I wanted people to see that I could score comedy well. I try to do a variety of things so I don’t get type-cast. I think you have to be careful. I took “Pelham” right after “The Conversation” – in fact I went after it – because “Conversation” was delicate, wistful music for solo piano, while “Pelham” was hard-edged and biting with a big orchestra and totally different in mood and texture. You don’t do a lot of pictures. You’ve done about three a year, less than half of Jerry Goldsmith’s rate. Well, Jerry is an example to the extreme. He does an amazing amount of work, more than almost anybody else. But people think I work a lot. I don’t know. So you are as busy as you want to be. When you add the movies-of-the-week, television pilots and series, song-writing, and my own projects… I’m presently working on both a stage and a film musical.