What does a music contractor do? My clients are the composers. I have about fifty clients, and when they get a movie, I schedule, budget, and put everything together – hire musicians, get the place to record… I just sort of coordinate everything to do with the scoring of the movie. How do you balance multiple projects that happen simultaneously? Sometimes I’m working on ten or twelve movies in a six-week period. I have a great staff. I have two wonderful guys who work with me. It’s a lot of teamwork and I’ve been doing it for a very long time. I’m not saying it’s easy, because it isn’t. Sometimes it’s mind-boggling: I mean, we’ve had three movies going in the same week. That’s awful. Two are manageable. We very often have two going, and the ideal situation is to have one go at a time, but I don’t have much to say about that. How did you get into the business? I went to work for the old agency MCA when they were in Beverly Hills, and the man I worked for there was one of the top agents for composers. When they dissolved to buy Universal and start producing television, he took me with him to Universal, where he became the head of music. I worked for him for a number of years. Eventually, he did just the contracting there. And, when he died, I took over. What is it like being a woman in your position, or does gender even play a factor in your work? Oh, my God! It’s a lot better now! It’s been thirty-three years. But at the time… I have a daughter who is thirty-five years old. She’s a labor lawyer, and she thinks it’s really hard for women today. Boy, she hasn’t got a clue about how much better it is. It was horrible. I had death threats. My car was vandalized time after time after time. I got terrible hate mail that was so disturbing that it doesn’t really bear repeating. And, at that time, people thought there was only one way that a woman would get that position. It’s just the way it was. It was basically a boys’ club. There were very few women in the orchestras. It was awful. It was tough. Fortunately, I have a very loving, supportive family. My husband was just fantastic. He helped me get through it, and I’m a very strong person. So what made you want to stick with it? I loved music. I kind of grew up with it. When I was not quite twenty and in the music business, it was a huge opportunity for me – just huge – to become the contractor of what was then the top television-producing studio. We had eighteen one-hour shows at that point. It was so different from now, where everything is a half-hour sitcom with two minutes of music. And, in fact, of the eighteen shows, two were ninety-minute anthologies. So when I say it was a lot of work, I mean it. And I did it by myself. But it was very organized and unlike movies. Television has air-dates, so you don’t have dates that cancel all the time. You would almost never cancel a TV date. In many ways, and as horrendous as the volume was, it was a lot easier than what I do now. What are some of your challenges that you face on a daily basis? Work going out of town. There’s so much runaway production. A good deal of work, more than I probably would want to know, is going to London. A large amount is going to places like Salt Lake City, Seattle… It’s very disturbing, so I have been dedicated a good chunk of my time at this stage of my career to trying to keep work in L.A. It’s not like the old studio system, where everything was done here. Once in a while something went to London or New York, but not very often, and that’s all changed. I think I’ve had a few goals. One of them was that the women in the orchestra would have dignity and be treated equally, and that there be many more of them. I would say that my orchestras are anywhere from thirty to forty percent women now. I’m very pleased with that. And the women are treated with the utmost respect and dignity. In fact, all the musicians are. I’ve also tried to make sure that the musicians are protected and treated as artists, which they are. You listen to John Williams’s orchestra or James Newton Howard’s or James Horner’s – any of the marvelous orchestras – and you hear that these people are sensational. There are no greater musicians anywhere in the world – and no musicians anywhere in the world with their versatility. I mean, I just finished a movie with Marc Shaiman where we had a classical orchestra and within it, a big band. We’ve done that so many times. It’s just incredible. One minute they’re playing like the L.A. Philharmonic and the next minute they’re playing like they’re in a Broadway show pit. You know, they’re just unbelievable! How closely do you work with the composers? Pretty closely. Some of them have been my clients for a good many years. I also have many new, younger clients. I feel very nurturing toward them. I try to show them the ropes and be protective of them and make sure they’re getting the best orchestras. Then, I’m on the stage with them while they’re recording. So we see each other quite a bit and talk a lot. You touched on this a little bit earlier, but how has the industry changed since you started? There is very little leadership today. I think it’s a lot of inexperience. I think a lot of it is that there isn’t the leadership at the studios. Directors are given free reign. We used to have leadership. You had producers who knew what they were doing and things went smoothly. You didn’t have the constant previewing. I mean, every movie that I work on is previewed, almost without an exception, besides Spielberg, who is among the very few who do not preview. He makes the movie that’s his vision and, hopefully, everyone will see it as he does. With previews, somebody in the back row of a preview says, “Gosh, I didn’t like that ending,” and they’ll re-shoot the ending or they’ll re-shoot this or that. So there’s never a schedule you can keep to. Sometimes I hire orchestras out and cancel them two, three, sometimes four times, because they’re constantly previewing and if they don’t get good numbers, that’s it; they pull it back and they start with the editing again. With digital editing, it’s very simply or fast to go in and do it, but what this means is that the picture is always changing. We sometimes record without a locked picture. It’s just very difficult for the composer. I’ve been on some films where it’s been brutal, where changes were made and the composer doesn’t even know it. We’re on the recording stage and up comes the picture, and it’s not what they’ve got. So yeah, it’s changed. And all those things certainly have made the cost of making movies just tremendous. Where do you see the changes going in the future? I would like to be very optimistic, but at the moment I don’t have a reason to be. I know that the constant re-shoots and all of that are very bad because, when they get down to music, they have no money left. Obviously that doesn’t bode well for us. Is that why there is a battle about recording in L.A. versus London or elsewhere? Believe me when I tell you, a lot of the recording in London is a free trip and a great vacation because, by the time you pay first-class airfare, they’re not beating us at all. Airfare is tremendous for first-class, or even business-class, and most of them fly first-class. Then they stay at the best hotels, and there’s the per diem, et cetera, so recording in London costs a huge amount of money. With Seattle, it’s awful! They work for cash, no benefits, no payroll taxes. Even with our low-budget agreement – which we have for films twenty-nine-million and under – it’s hard to match Seattle. And, needless to say, I’ve heard some of the scores done in Seattle, and I feel terrible for the composers, because they come back and they’re miserable. They’ve written a good score, but it has been played so poorly.