On Saturday, 10 October 2020, at 12 PM PDT/8 PM BST, film music lovers and aspiring film composers alike will get a unique chance to attend an online masterclass with the Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated composer John Debney. Organized by The American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers (ASMAC), the event will be moderated by the ASMAC board member Sylvester Rivers.

Topics discussed during the event include:

•   Anatomy of a Comedy Score

•   Anatomy of a Rom Com

•   Anatomy of a Musical

•   How to get inside a director’s head

•   Surviving Post-Pandemic Hollywood

JOHN DEBNEY

John Debney is one of the most successful and versatile composers in Hollywood. During his prolific career that spans over three decades and more than 100 film scores, the composer has penned music in a variety of genres for films such as ‘The Passion of the Christ’, ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘The Jungle Book’, and ‘The Princess Diaries’, television projects such as ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ and ‘Sea Quest DSV’, as well as numerous cartoons such as ‘A Pup Named Scooby-Doo’, ‘Inspector Gadget’, and ‘The Ant Bully’, to name but a few.

Beloved by collaborators and fans alike, Debney’s musical talent is only matched by his famed charismatic and affable disposition, which makes for one extra reason to join this not-to-be-missed event.

SYLVESTER RIVERS

Sylvester Rivers is a composer, arranger, pianist and ASMAC board member. He has recorded with numerous hit artists including Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, The Jacksons, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dionne Warwick, Nancy Wilson, Kenny Rogers, New Edition, Smokey Robinson, The Temptations, Gladys Knight &The Pips, Martha Reeves, Lamont Dozier, Barry White, the Love Unlimited Orchestra, Shalamar, Cheryl Lynn, Gloria Gaynor, Candi Staton, The Sylvers, Marc Bolan & T. Rex, Ray Parker, Jr. & Raydio, Deniece Williams, Johnny Mathis, Billy Preston, Syreeta Wright, Michael Henderson, Earl Klugh, Stanley Turrentine, Najee, Maxine Nightingale, Aretha Franklin, The Fifth Dimension, and many others.

The American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the arts of Music Arranging, Composition and Orchestration within the entertainment industry community and the general public. To find out more about ASMAC or to become a member, visit www.asmac.org.

Tickets:

To register for the event, follow this link.

ASMAC Members – $5.00
SCL, Maestra, ASA, AWFC – $8.00
Non Members – $12.00

The ‘60s brought changes in culture and style that affected even the world of film music. The sound of the symphonic score established in the ‘30s by the likes of Max Steiner was going out of fashion, being instead replaced by experimental music, jazz- and rock-oriented rhythms, and pop tunes. Composers like John Barry, Ennio Morricone and Jerry Goldsmith were strongly influencing the cinematic sound of the decade and what the studios would request from their directors.

The following selection includes some of the most famous rejected scores of the ‘60s, underlining the strong creative differences between directors, composers and studios, which ultimately influenced the outcome of each production.

‘EL CID’ MOVIE POSTER

El Cid (1961)

Miklós Rózsa
Mario Nascimbene

Directed by Anthony Mann and produced by Samuel Bronston, El Cid is a 1961 epic historical drama film that is based on the life of the Castilian knight Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, called ‘El Cid’, who sets upon defending Christian Spain against the Moors.

Samuel Bronston had just finished his epic film King of Kings (1961), and decided to materialise his life-long dream of bringing the story of El Cid to the big screen. MGM had partially financed King of Kings, which meant they had a say in every major decision. Wanting more freedom and control over this new epic, Bronston produced El Cid with his own company, Samuel Bronston Productions, in association with the Italian company Dear Film Produzione. This meant that in order to receive financial assistance from the Italian government, certain compromises had to be made, such as Bronston having to employ a certain number of Italian artists and technicians to work on the project. As such, despite wanting to hire Miklós Rozsa, with whom he had worked on A King of Kings, Bronston went ahead and hired the Italian composer Mario Nascimbene. This collaboration, however, would be short-lived, as Bronston’s requirements would infuriate the composer. Nascimbene writes:

Bronston called me and asked me to score EL CID, which was being shot by Anthony Mann. I read the screenplay first, and they told me to write some dance themes only. The music had to accompany a kind of fighting dance for scenes taking place on the beach, so I wrote some cues for tympani, with a rather brutal, violent rhythm, without any real melody. Director Mann liked what I had written and shot his scenes, using the cues as background. Then, when shooting EL CID was about halfway, I was asked to come to Malaga to discuss the score itself. Samuel Bronston met me there when I arrived, showed me a pile of records of Massenet’s ‘El Cid’ and told me: “This is the music for the film”. Apparently I had to sort of “adapt” Massenet’s music for the film. Samuel Bronston behaved in an offensive way, and I told him that I am used to discussing the score with a director, and with him only. So I returned to Rome, where I tore up the contract already made.

This outcome worked wonderfully for Bronston, who managed to hire his first choice, Miklós Rózsa. It is speculated that the producer never intended for the score to be an adaptation of Jules Massenet’s opera to begin with, but it was merely a sure-fire plot to get Nascimbene to back out of the picture.

Be that as it may, Bronston did go to great lengths to get Rózsa to score his picture, even managing to get him out of a pre-existing contract with MGM to score Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Mutiny would end up being scored by another MGM in-house composer, Bronislau Kaper. As a concession to their co-producers, another Italian composer’s name (Carlo Savina) appeared on the credits as co-composer on the picture, but only on the Italian prints.

Bronston flew Rózsa and his family to Madrid for the whole summer and offered him a lovely house for him to work from and the same weekly living expenses the producer himself was getting. Besides Spain itself being a huge inspiration for the score of El Cid, the composer set out to research the history of El Cid and the Spanish music in the Medieval Ages. He turned to ninety-two-year-old Dr Ramón Menéndez Pidal, a Spanish philologist, historian and expert in El Cid, who introduced him to the twelfth-century musical poems of ‘La Cantigas de Santa Maria’. Furthermore, Rózsa studied Felipe Pedrell’s collection of Spanish folksongs, which the musicologist had compiled throughout his life. The composer spent a month of intense study, analysing these two very different sources after which he began working on translating what he had learned into the new score.

Despite Rózsa’s seamless collaboration with Bronston, the composer was shocked to realize, during the premiere of El Cid, that the director and his sound editor had chopped and binned some of Rózsa’s cues in favour of the film’s sound design. As a result, Rózsa cancelled his publicity tour, stating that, ‘I could not talk about music which nobody was going to hear.’

The above issues notwithstanding, the film was a commercial success earning more than four times its production cost of $6.25 million and garnered three Academy Award nominations including Best Art Direction, Best Film Score and Best Song. El Cid would be Milós Rózsa’s last epic score.

‘HATARI!’ MOVIE POSTER

Hatari! (1962)

Henry Mancini
Hoagy Carmichael

Hatari! is a 1962 American adventure romantic comedy film directed by Howard Hawks. It portrays a group of professional game catchers in Africa who entrap wild animals and sell them to zoos before a female wildlife photographer disrupts their ways.

Hawks was planning on hiring his long-time collaborator, Dmitri Tiomkin, to write the score for the picture. The director’s only requirement was for Tiomkin to completely leave out the string and woodwind sections and instead use authentic African instruments. Thinking Hawks was joking, the conservative composer showed the director a score that included strings. This misunderstanding would lead to them parting ways and the pair would never work together again.

HOAGY CARMICHAEL’S SKECTH FOR ‘HATARI!’

The director then turned to prolific singer-songwriter Hoagy Carmichael who played Cricket in the director’s 1944 picture, To Have and Have Not, after Hawks had discovered the musician at a party. Hawks wanted to work with someone who had never scored a picture before and had no preconceived notions of what a score is supposed to sound like. And although the director was happy at first with Carmichael’s material, they ended up disagreeing on the direction of the music and Hawks had to turn to another composer yet again.

As it turned out, the third time was the charm as the director’s next choice, Henry Mancini, would go on to score Hatari!. Mancini did end up using violins in his music, however, he masterfully entwined them with tribal rhythms and an array of native instruments that Hawks had brought back with him from Africa. Mancini would use instruments such as the thumb piano, shell gourds and giant pea pods to score the animal scenes. Among the shot material was a scene that Hawks was contemplating on cutting out, but asked Mancini to have a look at it regardless. The scene featured Anna Maria D’Alessandro (Elsa Martinelli) taking three small elephants to a watering hole to bathe them. The composer loved the scene and immediately knew what to do with it. He superimposed an E-flat clarinet over an electric calliope (the only one in the world at that time), and the result would give birth to one of cinema’s most memorable themes, ‘Baby Elephant Walk’. The composer recalled:

[…] As the little elephants went down to the water, there was a shot of them from behind. Their little backsides were definitely in rhythm with something. […] it reminded me of something. I though, Yeah, they’re walking eight to the bar, and that brought something to mind, an old Will Bradley boogie-woogie number called “Down the Road a Piece”, a hit record in the old days, with Ray McKinley on drums and Freddie Slack on piano. Those little elephants were definitely walking boogie-woogie, eight to the bar. I wrote “Baby Elephant Walk” as a result.

Interestingly, the next track after ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ on the soundtrack recording is ‘Just for Tonight’, which was Hoagy Carmichael’s reworking of ‘A Perfect Paris Night’ and the only material retained from his work in the film. Luckily, all of Carmichael’s recorded music, as well as the written score were preserved and are archived at Indiana University.

‘TORN CURTAIN’ MOVIE POSTER

Torn Curtain (1966)

John Addison
Bernard Herrmann

Torn Curtain is a 1966 Cold War political thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. …of an American scientist (Paul Newman) who is secretly a double agent who publicly defects to East Germany to discover Soviet nuclear secrets.

By that time, the celebrated director had enthralled audiences worldwide with masterpieces such as Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960). However, following the box office failure of Marnie (1964), Hitchcock started to doubt himself as his cinema was beginning to show its age. Universal Studios saw Hitch’s hesitation as an opportunity to get their claws into the film’s post-production. Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal, instructed Hitchcock to bring in a new sound to the picture and go for a pop-oriented score more in tune with the times.

Having previously successfully collaborated with Bernard Herrmann on eight of his pictures which constituted one of the greatest director-composer partnerships in the history of cinema, Hitchcock turned to the composer once again, this time with precise instructions in tune with the studio’s demands:

I am particularly concerned with the need to break away from the old-fashioned cued-in type music that we have been using for so long. […] The audience is very different from the one to which we used to cater; it is young, vigorous and demanding. It is this fact that has been recognized by almost all of the European filmmakers where they have sought to introduce a beat and a rhythm that is more in tune with the requirements of the aforesaid audience.

Herrmann was not crazy about the film but agreed to score it as by that time Hitchcock was his only regular source of feature film work. The independent-minded composer went ahead with music he thought was appropriate for the film. Granted, Hitchcock had asked Herrmann to sketch the music ‘in advance because we have an urgent problem of meeting a tax date’, so the composer had to come up with the cues blindly. When Hitchcock arrived at the Goldwyn Studios on 24 March 1966 for the first recording session, he was shocked to realize that Herrmann had gone against his wishes and wrote bold, unusual symphonic music using atypical orchestrations and an unorthodox line-up of instruments consisting of twelve flutes – doubling on piccolos, alto flutes and bass flutes – sixteen French horns, nine trombones, two tubas, double timpani, eight cellos and eight basses. He also composed music for the murder scene, even though Hitchcock had expressly requested be left without music.

The orchestra musicians were ecstatic about Herrmann’s score and gave him a standing ovation right after the recording. Hitchcock, however, was furious and dismissed the composer in front of everyone. The two never spoke again, ending a twelve-year-old collaboration.

A few days later, British composer John Addison was hired and flown to Los Angeles. Ironically, Addison’s replacement music wasn’t pop-oriented either and neither did it manage to salvage the picture which flopped.

Bernard Herrman’s score for Torn Curtain remains one of the best known ‘might have beens’ in the history of film music. And although it never ended up in the film, his music was released on CD no less than three times over the years.

‘2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’ MOVIE POSTER

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Classical compositions by various composers
Frank Cordell, Alex North

2001: A Space Odyssey is Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus and is based on Arthur C. Clarke’s short story The Sentinel. Kubrick worked together with Clarke on writing the script, which they completed in January 1966, which would eventually prompt Clarke to publish his science fiction novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As was his custom, Kubrick used temporary music throughout his film in order to find the film’s pulse and to help carry the narrative. And thus, over the next two years, as the project was taking shape, he acquired multiple records of classical music, listened to countless hours of orchestral pieces and put together a temp track (temporary music used in a picture during production). Among his favourites were Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard Strauss’ tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (which became the movie’s signature track), a waltz by Frédéric Chopin, Johann Strauss’ The Blue Danube, Aram Khachaturian’s Gayene, and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Kubrick actually approached Orff and tried to persuade him to compose the score, however, Orff politely declined saying that this task was too large for his advanced age (the composer was seventy-one at the time).

Kubrick became convinced that his film didn’t need an original score as his carefully-curated selection of classical oeuvres would do the film justice. The MGM bosses, however, disagreed. They were adamant that a movie of such magnitude required an equally-great composer. And so, at the end of 1967, the director approached two composers – English composer Frank Cordell and well-established Hollywood composer Alex North (with whom Kubrick had worked on Spartacus (1960).

The collaboration with Cordell was stillborn, as at that time, Kubrick wasn’t very clear about what he wanted and instructed the composer to adapt Mahler’s Third Symphony. Cordell’s score got rejected and Kubrick then turned to Alex North.

Alex North recalls:

I was living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York (where Arthur Clarke was living) and got a phone call from Kubrick from London asking me of my availability to come over and do a score for 2001. He told me that I was the film composer he most respected, and he looked forward to working together. I was ecstatic at the idea of working with Kubrick again (Spartacus was an extremely exciting experience for me), as I regard Kubrick as the most gifted of the younger-generation directors, and that goes for the older as well. And to do a film score where there were about twenty-five minutes of dialogue and no sound effects! What a dreamy assignment, after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, loaded with dialogue.

 I flew over to London for two days in early December to discuss music with Kubrick. He was direct and honest with me concerning his desire to retain some of the “temporary” music tracks which he had been using for the past years. I realized that he liked these tracks, but I couldn’t accept the idea of composing part of the score interpolated with other composers. I felt I could compose music that had the ingredients and essence of what Kubrick wanted and give it a consistency and homogeneity and contemporary feel. In any case, I returned to London December 24th [1967] to start work for recording on January 1, after having seen and discussed the first hour of film for scoring. Kubrick arranged a magnificent apartment for me on the Chelsea Embankment, and furnished me with all the things to make me happy: record player, tape machine, good records, etc. I worked day and night to meet the first recording date, but with the stress and strain, I came down with muscle spasms and back trouble. I had to go to the recording in an ambulance, and the man who helped me with the orchestration, Henry Brant, conducted while I was in the control room. Kubrick was present, in and out; he was pressured for time as well. He made very good suggestions, musically. I had written two sequences for the opening, and he was definitely favorable to one, which was my favorite as well. So I assumed all was going well, what with his participation and interest in the recording. But somehow I had the hunch that whatever I wrote to supplant Strauss’ Zarathustra would not satisfy Kubrick, even though I used the same structure but brought it up to date in idiom and dramatic punch. Also, how could I compete with Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from Midsummer Night’s Dream? Well, I thought I did pretty damned well in that respect.

In any case, after having composed and recorded over forty minutes of music in those two weeks, I waited around for the opportunity to look at the balance of the film, spot the music, etc. During that period I was rewriting some of the stuff that I was not completely satisfied with, and Kubrick even suggested over the phone certain changes that I could make in the subsequent recording. After eleven tense days of waiting to see more film in order to record in early February, I received word from Kubrick that no more score was necessary, that he was going to use breathing effects for the remainder of the film. It was all very strange, and I thought perhaps I would still be called upon to compose more music; I even suggested to Kubrick that I could do whatever necessary back in L.A. at the M-G-M studios. Nothing happened. I went to a screening in New York, and there were most of the “temporary” tracks.

In an interesting twist, North found out that his score had been rejected only during the film’s premiere in New York, an experience that, according to author Michael Benson, left him ‘shocked and humiliated’.

Thankfully, Alex North’s original score was brought to life in 1993 via a full recording conducted by Jerry Goldsmith.

In the second part of this series, we continue to explore the history behind some of the film scores that were replaced during Hollywood’s Golden Age. This particular selection features the work created by some of the brightest musical minds of the era that would nonetheless get rejected due to creative differences and clashes of egos.

‘COMMANDOS STRIKE AT DAWN’ FILM POSTER

Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942)

Louis Gruenberg
Igor Stravinsky

Commandos Strike at Dawn is a 1942 Second World War propaganda film directed by John Farrow and adapted by Irwin Shaw from a short story entitled The Commandos by C.S. Forester that appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in June 1942. The film tells the story of a Norwegian fisherman who is outraged by the atrocities committed by the Nazis against his peaceful, bucolic village and escapes to Britain to form a resistance force.

Toward the end of 1941, Morris Stoloff, musical director at Columbia Pictures Corporation, met with Russian composer Igor Stravinsky to discuss the possibility of his composing the score for Commandos Strike at Dawn. Stravinsky had been living in the United States since 1939, following the deaths of his wife and daughter from tuberculosis. Just before emigrating, Stravinsky himself had spent five months in hospital, during which time his mother died.

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Alexandre Tansman was appointed as Stravinsky’s assistant and Hollywood advisor on the score due to the latter’s lack of experience with the Hollywood scoring system, and they both sought out Miklós Rózsa’s advice on the technicalities of scoring a film.

In the end, the negotiations didn’t pan out. Similar to Arnold Schoenberg’s attempt to score The Good Earth, Stravinsky began working on the score long before signing a contract. His approach was to create a pastoral atmosphere with his score by basing the music on Norwegian folk songs. This was an unusual perspective, considering that war films at the time had a very specific sound and featured heroic marches and fanfares.

Stravinsky ended up salvaging the material he had written and turned it into a four-movement concert suite entitled Four Norwegian Moods, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 13 January, 1944. Stravinsky had based his compositions on pieces found in The Norway Music Album, three of which were arrangements by Edvard Grieg. Stravinsky vehemently denied to have drawn inspiration from Edvard Grieg’s music, stating, ‘All the themes in my Norwegian Moods were taken from a collection of Norwegian folk music my wife found in a secondhand bookstore in Los Angeles – and not from Grieg, as some writers on my music have stated!’

‘FOUR NORWEGIAN MOODS’ ALBUM COVER

The replacement composer for the project was another composer of Russian descent, Louis Gruenberg, who not only delivered the score quickly but was exactly what Columbia was looking for. His work earned him an Oscar nomination in the Best Original Score category in 1944.

As for Stravinsky, during the 28 years he lived in the United States, he tried his hand at scoring two more times, but to no avail, on both occasions due to clashes with producer Darryl F. Zanuck. In 1943, he was informally approached to compose the music for Song of Bernadette (1943). He managed to compose music for the ‘Apparition of the Virgin’ scene, however, the project ended up going to Alfred Newman, who won an Oscar. Stravinsky recycled his music which made its way into the second movement of his Symphony in Three Movements. Similarly, in February 1943, upon the personal request of Orson Welles, Stravinsky began composing music for 20th Century Fox’s Jane Eyre (1943). After Bernard Herrmann replaced him, Stravinsky ended up turning the music he had composed for a hunting scene into ‘Eclogue’ to his Ode for orchestra, which premiered in 1943.

Despite never making it as a film composer in Hollywood, Stravinsky remained in Los Angeles until 1969 and his stay in Southern California triggered fresh approaches to his compositional techniques.

‘SINCE YOU WENT AWAY’ FILM POSTER

Since You Went Away (1944)

Max Steiner
Alexandre Tansman

Since You Went Away is a 1944 American drama film directed by John Cromwell for Selznick International Pictures. The movie was adapted and produced by the legendary producer David O. Selznick from the 1943 novel Since You Went Away: Letters to a Soldier from His Wife by Margaret Buell Wilder. The film tells the story of a housewife who is left home alone to take care of her two daughters and a pair of lodgers while her husband is away to fight in World War II.

Selznick wanted his Oscar bait to demonstrate his patriotic support for the war effort but did not want to make another traditional war movie. As was typical with his productions, he personally wanted to oversee all aspects of the production, including the music. However, finding the right composer for the picture turned out to be quite the challenge.

DAVID O. SELZNICK

Selznick’s initial choice was MGM’s in-house composer Herbert Stothart, with whom he had collaborated a few times before. However, Stothart was already attached to four other films. The producer then reached out to Bernard Herrmann, but Herrmann declined, as the project was of no interest to him.

Selznick then asked for a list of all the available composers in Hollywood and their credits and thus ended up hiring freelance composer Alexandre Tansman to score the picture. A prolific concert composer, Tansman was an émigré from Poland who moved to Paris in his twenties and had only worked on one Hollywood film, Flesh and Fantasy (1943). He was unattached to any of the big studios, a position Selznick found to his liking. Hiring Tansman, an established composer of symphonies, operas, and ballets, would carry ‘a certain little extra distinction’ and would help with publicity. Selznick then hired Charles Previn, a music director at Universal, to oversee Tansman’s work and Louis Forbes as Associate Music Director.

ALEXANDRE TANSMAN WITH HIS FIRST WIFE ANNA ELEONORA BROCINER

Tansman was an unknown to the producer, and Selznick was anxious about entrusting a production of such proportions to a composer relatively new to Hollywood. So he requested that Tansman record only a couple of reels of music – or as he put it, ‘the minimum required from a cost standpoint’ – so that the producer could decide early on, before losing too much time and money, if the music worked.

Tansman was then asked to arrange a few versions of ‘Together’, a 1928 song that was the centrepiece of the film’s music, and was only given the length and the overall mood of the scene – he was not informed as to the application of his music to the scenes. This temporary recording was to be produced using a chamber ensemble, so Tansman had to reorchestrate his score for his reduced resources. Naturally, the music did not sound as good as it would have employing the power of a full orchestra, and needless to say, Selznick was less than impressed.

In other words, Tansman had fallen into a trap by agreeing to compose to script, without final footage. This was Selznick’s typical requirement, as he wanted composition to take place before the picture was edited in order to allow composers more time and avoid time crunches during post-production. Max Steiner and Alfred Newman had refused to work like this, being aware of how much a picture could change between script and locked picture. Tansman, however, did not, so when Selznick viewed the synchronised footage and musical mockup, the composer’s fate was sealed.

‘SINCE YOU WENT AWAY’ SOUNDTRACK ALBUM COVER

With little time left and a very long film in need of music, Selznick’s reached out to Warner Bros. music director Leo Forbestein and asked to borrow Max Steiner. Forbestein agreed but warned Selznick that hiring Steiner on such short notice would not be cheap. Desperate, Selznick agreed to pay Warner Bros. an astounding $3,300 a week for Steiner’s services. Steiner took the assignment with a bit of anxiety, as he was well aware of Selznick’s habit to micro-manage the scoring process. Ironically, Selznick had considered replacing Steiner during the postproduction of Gone with the Wind, when the composer stated he was unable to deliver the score before the set deadline.

Selznick was very grateful to the composer, considering the time constraints and the fact that at the time, Steiner was going through a rough time in his personal life, as his father was dying and had been hospitalized, his marriage to Louise Klos was falling apart and Steiner himself was suffering from a back tumour that required surgery. ‘Thank heavens for Maxie.’, the producer is said to have affirmed.

Steiner’s score features an astonishing number of themes, several popular songs of the era and traditional works, as well an infusion of several of Steiner’s themes from earlier Selznick pictures. A recording of ‘Together’ from Tansman’s score was retained. 

Since You Went Away would mark David O. Selznick and Max Steiner’s final collaboration and was both a commercial and critical success, earning nine Academy Award nominations, winning one for Best Score. This was the first time Selznick’s company would receive the award for best music.

‘CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA’ FILM POSTER

Caesar and Cleopatra (1945)

Georges Auric
Arthur Bliss

Caesar and Cleopatra is a 1945 British Technicolor film directed by Gabriel Pascal and is based on the play by George Bernard Shaw and was the most expensive film ever produced in Britain at the time. Gabriel Pascal was the only director Shaw trusted to film his plays after successfully delivering Pygmalion (1938) and Major Barbara (1941). Shaw praised Pascal by saying, ‘Pascal is doing for films what Diaghilev did for ballet.’

The story focuses around a middle-aged Julius Caesar, who, at the height of the Roman Civil War, takes possession of the Egyptian capital city of Alexandria, where he meets a young Cleopatra and teaches her how to rule Egypt.

Shaw himself recommended Sir Arthur Bliss to score the picture, and so, on 6 June 1944, the British composer signed the contract. However, the deal was with the author rather than the director. Bliss, who in 1953 would become Master of the Queen’s Music, was a well-established composer of classical concert music and had only a few movies to his name, including the most expensive film of its time, H.G. Well’s Things to Come. Bliss’ score for Things to Come would have been a pillar in British film scoring had it not been ruined by the perpetual re-editing of the picture and the poor quality of contemporary dubbing technology.

‘THE FILM MUSIC OF SIR ARTHUR BLISS’ ALBUM COVER

Shaw, who was a former music critic, was in charge of all the communication regarding the music of Caesar and Cleopatra and provided Bliss with some helpful suggestions, including to write music in his own style and not to compose a clichéd imitation of Egyptian music. ‘In Heaven’s name, no Egyptian music!’, the author pleaded. Shaw also sent Bliss a letter offering him serious advice before the contract was signed:

“Be careful not to let yourself be placed in the position of an employee of Pascal or of the film company, as anything you compose for them in that capacity will belong to them and not to you. If I were a composer writing for a film I should make a skeleton piano score of an orchestral suite consisting of overture, nocturne, barcarole, intermezzo and finale. I should copyright this in my own name in England and America. Then, being in an impregnable position as sole owner of the music, I should license the film people to use the material as an accompaniment to their film for a stated period on stated terms, giving them no rights whatever. . . Remember that an orchestral suite by you will long survive Pascal’s film and become a standard concert piece quite independently of my play, like Grieg’s Peer Gynt. Let no parasite fasten on it.”

‘THE FILM MUSIC OF GEORGES AURIC’ ALBUM COVER

Following Shaw’s advice, Bliss started work on a score, writing 100 pages of music in his signature style, sketching out cues such as ‘Memphis at Night’, ‘Ftatateeta’, ‘Soldiers’ Chorus’ and ‘Barcarolle’. His instrumentation did call for a buccina, an ancient Roman wind instrument, which was the only exotic instrument Bliss used in the entire score.

However, the project came to a halt after Bliss had met Gabriel Pascal. Pascal was known to be tough and uncompromising in all departments of production, especially in music. Bliss later recalled, ‘I have had unforgettable experiences with one director who, where music was concerned, was a certified lunatic, and I had to discontinue collaboration.’ In his autobiography, Bliss explains, ‘One look at him made it self-evident that he would never be a sympathetic collaborator, and I withdrew from the assignment.’

The director wanted a ‘French-sounding’ score, so Bliss was replaced by Georges Auric, who was a member of the celebrated rebellious group of Parisian composers known as Les Six. The prolific composer took a different approach and composed the music using very colourful orchestrations and employing instruments such as strings, piano, celeste, xylophone, bells, harp, saxophone, tuba, and woodwinds. His music ended up being one of the highlights of an otherwise messy production.

A nine-minute suite containing ‘Main Titles’, ‘At the Sphinx’, and ‘The Battle’ was later recorded and published on a compilation album by Chandos Records. Similarly, Bliss’ rejected score was also turned into a suite consisting of eight short movements lasting 17 minutes, which was edited by Giles Easterbrook and Malcolm Binney. It was published several decades later also by Chandos Records.

‘THE NAKED CITY’ FILM POSTER

The Naked City (1948)

Miklós Rózsa, Frank Skinner
George Bassman

The Naked City is a 1948 American film noir directed by Jules Dassin and produced by Mark Hellinger. With a story written by Malvin Wald, the film marks the birth of the modern police procedural. The movie portrays the police investigation that follows the murder of a young girl and places the criminal underbelly of New York City under the microscope.

Hallinger was known for granting his directors a lot of artistic freedom, however, he only had one request for Dessin, that he use Miklós Rózsa to write the film’s score. Hallinger had worked with Rózsa before, the composer having scored two of the producer’s previous movies, The Killers (1946) and Brute Force (1947). Dessin, however, insisted that they hire George Bassman to score the picture. Bassman was a famed MGM arranger and composer who had scored three earlier Dessin films: Young Ideas (1943), A Letter for Evie (1946), and Two Smart People (1946). Both Dessin and Bossman had worked at MGM but were asked to leave; Dessin on account of his political views, and Bossman ‘for a different reason’.

The pressures of the film’s production took their toll on Hellinger, who suffered a heart attack while working in New York. Disregarding his doctor’s pleads for him to rest, Hellinger continued with the production. He even attended the recording sessions of the musical score, conducted by Bassman. Hellinger, however, felt that Bassman’s music was too similar to an Aaron Copland composition. Knowing Bassman’s background as an arranger, he feared that the composer might simply have reworked pre-existing music, a situation that could have serious legal repercussions. Outraged, Bassman insisted that his music was completely original and told Hellinger what he thought of him and his musical tastes. As a result, Hellinger immediately called Miklós Rózsa and asked him to replace Bassman as soon as possible. According to Rózsa, upon hearing Bassman’s score, Hellinger ‘nearly had another heart attack.’ As it happens, Hellinger did in fact die of another heart attack that very night.

The producer’s death did not slow down production and Rózsa immediately began spotting The Naked City, as he was given only two weeks to do the work on his own. The picture’s Music Supervisor and the head of Universal’s music department, Milton Schwarzwald, offered to bring in Universal in-house composer Frank Skinner to help shoulder the burden. Finding that time frame untenable, Rózsa agreed to score the chase sequence at the end and leave the first part of the film to Skinner, which featured less music-dependent dialogue scenes. Rózsa’s score went on to become a classic.

Interestingly, both Jules Dassin and George Bassman would soon be blacklisted for their Communist associations.

A Hollywood maxim states that one can’t truly call themselves a film composer until they’ve had at least one entire score thrown out. Accurate or not, what is certain is that even the biggest names in the industry have had their work tossed aside in favour of another colleague’s work for one reason or another. The dreaded R-word spares – almost – no one.

In the first two parts of this series, we explore a select number of film scores that have been replaced during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Granted, replacements didn’t happen back then as often as they do in our times, however, historically, film scores have been substituted fairly regularly be it due to studio politics, personality clashes between the creators, desperate last-minute attempts to salvage an otherwise poor picture or simply because the composers brought in were concert composers who weren’t part of the studio system and didn’t really ‘get it’.

With the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, the first feature-length motion picture to use a synchronized recorded score, the importance of the film soundtrack became apparent and thus studios started to commission original music. The next few years were spent experimenting and researching the best way to go about scoring a film. Legendary composer Max Steiner has stated that ‘background’ music was, for the most part, disapproved of before 1932 due to the fact that people were uncomfortable not being able to see where the sound was coming from.

‘THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME’ FILM POSTER

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

Max Steiner
W. Franke Harling

The Most Dangerous Game is a thriller adapted from a 1924 short story by Richard Connell, in which a deranged Russian Cossack hunter makes sure ships are wrecked on his island so that he can hunt the survivors for sport.

Producer Merian C. Cooper took charge at RKO Pictures during the Great Depression and was entrusted to go over all the projects that had accumulated with a fine-tooth comb and to greenlight the suitable ones. During that time, Cooper had two jungle adventures on his plate: King Kong (1933) – which required a large budget – and The Most Dangerous Game.

With a great reputation for delivering quality while being mindful of budgets, Cooper decided to test the feasibility of a jungle movie and went ahead with the production of The Most Dangerous Game. One of his ingenious ideas was to build film sets that were reserved for King Kong during the day and could be used for The Most Dangerous Game during the night.

MAX STEINER

Composer Max Steiner, who was Director of Music at RKO at that time, persuaded RKO’s bosses, who initially wanted to use ‘library music’ (old tracks), to go with original scores for these two movies. Steiner agreed to score King Kong at a reduced fee and Cooper said he would pay for the orchestra. Steiner already had a large workload on his shoulders, so W. Franke Harling was assigned to score The Most Dangerous Game.

Harling was well-known for having composed the music for A Light from St. Agnes, a popular jazz-oriented opera. Cooper, however, wasn’t pleased with his approach, complaining that his score was too ‘Broadway-light’ and unsuited for an adventure thriller.

Max Steiner was then begged to write a replacement score in only two weeks. Due to the very tight deadline on The Most Dangerous Game, Steiner had to work on this score almost in parallel with King Kong. And although it is often said that King Kong is the first great original film score of the ‘sound era’, some argue that this honour actually goes to The Most Dangerous Game, as it premiered sooner.

‘THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME’ AND ‘THE SON OF KONG’ SOUNDTRACK COVER

The music Max Steiner wrote for The Most Dangerous Game might sound all-too-familiar to most of us today, for it has been imitated countless times ever since. Steiner incorporated the leitmotif (Count Zaroff’s theme) he used throughout the film into ‘Russian Waltz’, a tune played by Count Zaroff at his piano in the film. This piece of diegetic music (AKA source music) was written by the composer himself. This ground-breaking technique of marrying the underscore with the source music would be used from then on in numerous films as a storytelling method. Furthermore, his music for the final chase scene is a masterclass in action and suspense scoring, employing techniques that are still used in sci-fi, thrillers, and horror movies today.

One of the problems faced by Steiner during this time was the small size of the orchestra that he had to work with. And while the players were some of the best in the business, the reduced number of the performers meant that the orchestra simply wasn’t able to convey the music penned by the composer in all its complexity so concessions had to be made. The recordings that exist today, performed by Moscow Symphony Orchestra and conducted by William Stromberg, are accurate reconstructions made by John W. Morgan for a full symphonic orchestra and are based on Steiner’s original handwritten sketches, thus reflecting the composer’s true musical intentions.

‘DON QUIXOTE’ FILM POSTER

Don Quixote (1933)

Jacques Ibert
Maurice Ravel

In 1932, Austrian film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst embarked on the task of adapting Miguel de Cervantes’ celebrated novel, Don Quixote, a tale about an elderly man who goes mad from reading too many books on chivalry. He filmed three separate versions of the film, in English, French, and German. The legendary Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin would go on to play the title role in all three languages. Chaliapin was already familiar with the character, having portrayed him in Jules Massenet’s opera Don Quichotte in 1910.

The producers had reached out to five composers to write songs for this film, including Maurice Ravel, Marcel Delannoy, Manuel de Falla, Jacques Ibert, and Darius Milhaud. Little did the composers know that this was, in fact, a contest. Each of them was certain that their music would be featured in the film.

The contract signed in June 1932 specified a heroic song, a serenade, and a comic tune, with the deadline set for August and a warning that Chaliapin preferred not to have too many high Cs, Ds or E flats.

The winner was the great composer and master orchestrator, Maurice Ravel, who was asked to compose four pieces. The producers were happy with the choice, for Ravel was one of Europe’s most prominent composers and they were hoping that with his name attached to the project, together with French author’s Paul Morand – who provided the lyrics – the project would attract investors. Furthermore, Ravel had a proven affinity for Spanish music which is what the project required.

Ravel, however, had suffered health problems since 1919 and at this time his health was in decline, specifically after having suffered a head injury in a car accident which prevented him from putting the music that he heard in his head on paper. This, in turn, slowed his progress in delivering the music and Ravel was eventually fired as a composer, having completed only three songs. These would become the three-part song cycle Don Quichotte à Dulcinée and would cover other facets of the story than Ibert’s work. Chanson romanesque portrays the noble lunatic as a lover, Chanson épique as a holy warrior, and Chanson à boire depicts the protagonist as a drinker. Although his songs didn’t end up in the film, they have become some of the most performed songs in the Baritone repertoire. The songs were later published and were premiered on 1 December 1934 in Paris with baritone Martial Singher performing and Paul Perey leading the orchestra. These are Ravel’s final compositions before his death in 1937.

Pabst then turned to French composer Jacques Ibert, who, as it happens, was a friend of Ravel’s. Learning about the contest, both composers became outraged, Ravel even considering a lawsuit against the producers, an idea he later dropped.

Ibert provided four songs for Don Quixote, Chanson du depart, Chanson à Dulcinée, Chanson du Duc, and Chanson du mort. He also wrote a song for Sancho Panza, titled Chanson de Sancho. The song texts were written by Pierre de Ronsard and Alexandre Arnoux, with Ibert himself conducting the recording used in the picture. Ibert’s music ended up in all three productions and he went on to arrange the songs for voice and piano, which were later published under the title Chansons de Don Quichotte, for Voice and Piano.

‘THE GOOD EARTH’ FILM POSTER

The Good Earth (1937)

Herbert Stothart
Arnold Schoenberg

The Good Earth is an American drama based on Pearl S. Buck’s eponymous novel which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. It depicts the life of a Chinese family of farmers as they navigate through life’s up and downs.

The composer who was first approached with scoring this picture was none other than the great Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone technique, a revolutionary and highly-influential 20th-century compositional method. Schoenberg was living in California at the time in exile, having fled Europe to escape the Nazi regime. He was contacted by Irving Thalberg, the celebrated young producer at the Hollywood film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Thalberg, who was a rather cultured movie mogul, met with Schoenberg at MGM’s studios in November 1935 and expressed his appreciation for the composer’s music. Thalberg explained that the music he imagined for this picture would be similar to Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, op.4, which he had heard on the radio earlier that year.

SCHOENBERG’S SKETCH FOR ‘WANG’S UNCLE’ ©ARNOLD SCHOENBERG CENTER

Unfortunately, Schoenberg got a little too involved in the project, long before signing any contract with the studio. He proceeded to carefully read the short novel that was sent to him by the MGM library and made numerous markings on its pages. Two of Schoenberg’s notebooks contain over thirty sketches of roughly worked out tonal, chromatic and pentatonic motifs and themes for The Good Earth. Among them are ‘a motif of an eventful growing crowd of people’, a motif to ‘the uncle of Ching’, a ‘lotus’ theme, a ‘fishpond’ motif, themes for ‘Wang’s Uncle’, ‘funeral/death’ motifs, motifs of a ‘turbulent folk scene in connection with the revolution’, motifs about the ‘fear of the Wang family because of the soldiers’, as well as a ‘pearl/wealth’ motif. It has to be noted that Schoenberg did all of this even before a second meeting took place.

Unaccustomed with Hollywood’s film-scoring process, Schoenberg requested full control of the soundtrack – including dialogue – and demanded a staggering fee of $50,000 for his services. He is also said to have requested to work directly with the actors and have the director shoot the film to match his music – not the other way around. The main stumbling blocks with contracting concert composers to score a picture were money and time, as they were used to their highly-priced concert music commissions and they liked to take their time to write the music. These were two issues that were not compatible with the film studios’ way of doing things since the production of a film was under a tight deadline – and so it remains to this day – and the studios had their own experienced composers that could do the work at a fraction of the price and in a short period of time.

The collaboration never came to fruition and three weeks after their initial meeting, Schoenberg addressed a letter to Thalberg expressing his disappointment with the former’s silent treatment.

Herbert Stothart and Edward Ward were eventually engaged to provide the music for The Good Earth.

‘THE THIEF OF BAGDAD’ FILM POSTER

The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

Miklós Rózsa
Oscar Strauss

The Thief of Bagdad is a 1940 film marketed at the time as an ‘An Arabian Fantasy in Technicolor’. The film was produced by the renowned director and producer Alexander Korda of London Films, who had long dreamt of remaking the 1924 silent film of the same name. The story takes inspiration from the classic Arabian tale One Thousand and One Nights, as well as the novel The Tower and the Elephant by Robert E. Howard, and features a classic hero, a villain, a love story, magic, and adventure.

Korda began working on the project early in 1939 and chose German filmmaker Ludwig Berger to direct the picture. Interestingly, the production team at London Films comprised almost entirely of Hungarian émigrés, including Alexander Korda and his brothers, director Zoltán Korda and art director Vincent Korda, screenwriter Lajos Biró, and composer Miklós Rózsa, who had already scored Knight Without Armour (1937) and The Four Feathers (1939) for the firm.

Alexander Korda was planning on hiring Rózsa once more for this film, promising him a significant increase in his salary – which, according to Rózsa, had been quite low up to that point – and that his contract would begin immediately. However, Berger insisted that they should instead bring Austrian composer Oscar Straus on board, as the pair had collaborated before on Ein Waltztraum (1925) and Les Trois Valses (1938). It was agreed then that Strauss would write all the pre-production music and Rózsa would provide ‘all the dramatic and colouristic music’. Rózsa had no choice at that point than to agree to this arrangement.

Strauss was taking a cure in the French town of Vichy at that time so he sent all his music to London by mail. A composer of waltzes and operettas, Strauss’ musical input proved to be unsuitable for the film, or as Rózsa himself put it, ‘It was impossible – typical turn-of-the-century Viennese candy-floss.’

The musical director, Muir Mathieson, was furious with the outcome and didn’t hold back in expressing his frustration during a tense meeting with Alexander Korda and Miklós Rózsa. While publicly siding with Berger on the issue of the music, Korda was unhappy with Strauss’ sketches as well and secretly instructed Rózsa to re-write the music and call him when he’s ready. A week later, Rózsa had the music ready and Korda had the brilliant idea of giving him an office next to Berger’s, where he had a piano installed. He then asked the composer to keep playing his music until Berger came out of his office. Rózsa started to work and play fortissimo in that office, and after three days, Berger finally came into his office and enquired about the music. After listening to a few of the pieces Rózsa had composed, Berger realized that this music was much better suited for the film.

MIKLÓS RÓZSA

A telegram was subsequently sent to Oscar Straus notifying him of his dismissal from the production. Strauss threatened to sue, stating that this incident was ruining his reputation, but soon had a change of heart after Korda paid him his fee in full.

Rózsa went on to compose the score and songs for The Thief of Bagdad, which would become instant classics. Due to the outbreak of WW2, the production was forced to move to California where the film was completed, a move which prompted Rózsa’s prolific Hollywood career.

The critically acclaimed film became a commercial success and earned four Academy Award nominations including Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Special Effects and Best Film Score, winning all but the award for Best Film Score.