Hollywood Composer
I
I STOPPED off at the coffee shop near the studio where I was finishing a script. It was late at night. I saw him there — a typical product of Hollywood Music Departments—a little composer with watery blue eyes. I knew him slightly and we got to talking.
‘Yes, sometimes of a three o’clock in the morning,’ he said, ‘I’ll knock off work at the studio and come over here to Coffee Joe’s for a coffee and a breather. This place may be only two blocks from the studio, but for me it’s as far away as Mexico City. Any kind of difference is welcome after fifteen straight hours in the Music Department.
‘The silent streets,’ he said, ‘always clear up my cars, during this short walk, of all Music Department remnants. Of all such reminders there remains but one, the sound of Bill Grey’s footsteps alongside of me. Bill is my assistant, my “scorer.” This is Bill Grey sitting here. He always accompanies me because it’s a habit with him. He also accompanies me musically when I am scoring a picture. Nowadays he accompanies me in person when I take a notion to wander — just in case. He thinks that composers of symphonic music are nuts. Bill is here to see that I get back to the studio at 3.45 A.M. sharp. We’ve a big orchestral score to get out against a preview date.’
‘So you’re on the merry-go-round again,’ I told him.
‘Yeh,’ he said, ‘we’re on it. The Music Department has been working day and night for the past three weeks. Copyists, symphony orchestras, recording stages, music director, sub-music directors, under-sub-music directors, and under-under-sub-sub-music directors have been frantic. Bill takes all this seriously.’
‘Look here,’ I said, ‘have you seen this article in the Hollywood Tribune?’ I gave it to him. It read: —
Every week in the year 60,000,000 persons in North America hear an excellent symphony orchestra playing a fairly good new orchestral score. This orchestral score, for the most part, is original. It has been written during the past year. Accompanying this orchestral score is a complete series of pictures which translate for even the meanest hearer every last particle of meaning in said orchestral score so that he cannot help increasing, bit by bit, his emotional vocabulary of music in general and of this music in particular. Week after week his spiritual and mental scope is being enlarged. . . .
No, it isn’t the radio.
It is the motion picture sound track of Hollywood. This sound track is the greatest musical influence in the whole world. Hollywood produces more symphonic musical sound track than all of the rest of the world combined. At least 300,000,000 persons listen to some part of it weekly. These people are scattered all over the world.
The single audience of Hollywood’s sound track, per week, easily equals, if not surpasses, the accumulated per week audience of all of the radio audiences of the world. However — and this is important — radio music originates in many different lands; Hollywood sound track originates in Hollywood alone. Moreover, even though symphony concerts were played at least once daily upon every radio network in the country, still Mr. Average Listener would probably rather turn his dial to Benny Goodman or Paul Whiteman unless a law be passed which compelled him to listen to a ‘good’ symphony program for at least one hour a week.
But he does not need a law to compel him to sit inside of his favorite movie theatre for three hours a week! He may not know that he is unconsciously being ‘emotionally conditioned’ for better music, but one thing he knows for certain — that when he comes home and stumbles accidentally upon a ‘good’ symphonic program on his radio, he likes it better after the movie theatre than before. This is true whether his home be a rude tent in Asia, or a palace on the French Riviera. Hollywood sound track has symphonically been teaching the world how to understand music with one head — and one heart. It has been doing this for years.
‘It’s a pretty good article,’ he said, handing the paper back, ‘and very true in many respects. It’s about time that the public should know something of our secrets. Nobody ever writes a word about movie music — which music certainly is the logical claimant for the greatest influence on the accumulated music worlds of today. On the other hand, radio music — movie music’s most deadly rival — has daily newspaper columns all over the country devoted to it. In every city in the world — literally billions of words hourly. And about movie music — none.’
‘Well, what about it?’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the music which you hear in the background of practically every motion picture you’ve ever seen is heard by an audience of no less than 300,000,000 persons every week. And although 300,000,000 persons hear this music every week, virtually no one is ever conscious of hearing it.
‘You have never noticed this “movie music” because it is not just movie music, but background music. And, because it is intended as background music, extreme care is always taken to keep it exactly within that rôle. Producers maintain that the public must come away from each and every picture with only two ideas — that the story was vastly entertaining and that the stars were breathlessly glamorous.
‘If,’ he continued, ‘they say of a picture, “The score was excellent,” Hollywood’s instant rejoinder is that the movie was a very poor picture. “Why,” they say, “the public noticed nothing but the score!” Anyway,— regardless of the way the musical elite of the great world capitals feel about movie music, — the way that Hollywood feels, so goes the world. And there’s money in it! We can’t all be great composers, but we all like to eat. Personally I’m crazy about it. Three times a day.’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘why are you sitting there talking to me about motionpicture music? Why draw attention to it at all?’
‘It should be dragged out for your inspection,’ he answered, ‘because this music has already accomplished a very important thing. Whether you like it or not, this music has made a music lover out of you. It will continue to make a better music lover out of you. Unbeknownst to you we have fixed things with such painlessness that you have been permeated with fine music which you didn’t even know was playing; and meanwhile the picture was teaching you the vocabulary of it all — the vocabulary of orchestral music!
‘Background music,’ he explained, ‘is a little-known music, despite all of its great, incalculable influence on the world’s music of today. People, if they ever thought of it at all, probably thought it was turned out on the side by “jazz” composers regularly attached to the studio. But it’s not. It is really’ — and one could see that he took pride in making this point — ‘a form of “serious” music composed by serious composers, and not by “swing” arrangers. Likewise, it is not compiled (as is universally believed) from the scores of the Great Masters. Finally, it is vitally necessary to every Hollywoodian motion picture. It is produced in ways that no other music is, or could be, produced.
‘And, as the fellow who wrote that newspaper article said before, its repercussions throughout the civilized world are tremendous. For this partly artistic product made in America is carrying with it, despite all that directors can do, a certain kind of American creative music all over the world, spreading American art — the only real kind of art a cinema film can hold — all over the civilized and uncivilized globe. As the guy in the article says, it has been doing this every week for years. And it is doing even more. It is making the world’s ear safe for better orchestral music and wielding incalculable artistic influence.
‘There will always be those,’ he continued, ‘who will claim into eternity that “forceful musical influence” is forceful only when it deals with quality, and not quantity. That is true — eventually. However, quantity still has a tremendous amount to do with any propaganda system. “Propaganda,” incidentally, usually deals with immediate necessities as well as future eventualities. Movie music is not a “future eventuality”; it is being written, being played, giving pleasure, selling tickets, now — today. It is not theory, but fact. It affects you.’
II
And so, as he spoke, I found out a great many things I’d never known before about the other side of motionpicture making. I found out that it is fabricating a kind of primitive international language which all men understand instantly, and with a complete emotional articulation. It is simple to understand that motion-picture scores usually attempt to describe in music the accompanying action on the screen. You ought to be able to close your eyes and, just by listening to the music, describe exactly whatever the screen might be portraying. I found out that some cinema music is quite crass, and, although the purely descriptive is still used, it belongs to the earliest methods of ‘background’ scoring. For instance, long ago in the movies, whenever a man plunged through a manhole, movie music would follow him right down into the bass clef. Or, should a girl run upstairs, a light little upward run — in the old purely descriptive music — would run up upon the flute with her. Hollywood composers have a special name for this kind of motion-picture music writing; they call it ‘underscoring.’ It can be compared to ballet music in both intention and style. It is‘pantomimic.’ It is not true ‘background’ music.
Again, the picture may in sundry spots need very heavy emotional music. Heavy emotional music — ‘ the old gutseroo’ — is vitally important. It requires not only a close study of the picture, but, like as not, a conference between composer, scorer, music director, and picture director. You see, they have to come to an agreement as to what, exactly, the ‘emotional significance’ really is!
For instance, the music department cannot get out a movie score unless it knows whether the hero really loves the girl or is, as a matter of fact, thinking of another love nest far away. Is this girl, who is laughing, really laughing? Perhaps her heart is really breaking. If it is breaking, should they ‘milk’ the scene with heartbreak music, or, oppositely, attempt to give it a grimly realistic treatment by writing against it a trivial chunk of radio music, which in the movie will seem to be drifting casually, tellingly, in from next door?
Trivial or ponderous, this background music is always dramatic. It can be compared to opera in technique — an opera without voice or words.
Sometimes the effectiveness of certain scenes depends on their locale. In this case the scene is bolstered up with ‘Paris’ music, ‘sea’ music, ‘mountain’ music, or ‘colorful old Mexico’ music, the music department frequently writing what will amount to a symphonic poem embracing the thematic material of these regions. Such music is always definitely ‘symphonic’ both in style and in treatment.
The above three techniques, I found out, constitute the only techniques the music department uses. But actually, and most of the time, they blend two of these together; frequently they blend all three.
For instance, a Parisian miss might be heartbroken in the mountains of old Mexico. In such case every single element will be considered separately. The ‘heartbreak’ theme may be Parisian in style, but it might also be accompanied with a Mexican rhythm, plus a horn-call or so in order to suggest mountainous spaces.
I found that it might be a source of considerable amusement the next time I went to the movies to examine piecemeal a bit of musical sound track; I was told that although the musical technique of the music department changes from second to second (as the split-second changes of the pictures may demand) the music is nevertheless not difficult to follow. You who read this might try the experiment; you’ll see (hear) many interesting things: for instance, that Hollywood composers ‘theme’ all of their important film characters and almost never allow these characters to appear in emotional sequences without accompanying them with their identifying ‘theme.’ All in all, they employ a musical technique truly Wagnerian in concept if not in style. Their music, more often than not, weaves one of the most complicated and at the same time one of the most understandable musical patterns in the world. It not only ‘times’ the laughs, stresses important dramatic points, underlines important psychological emotions, or, for that matter, provides the very air and essence of India; but it also corrects a star’s faults, makes such faults seem graceful (when they are really awkward), makes feminine stars seem a little more feminine when they are too masculine, or vice versa, or does any one of a thousand other startling, incredible things.
III
Background music is — very evidently — a brand-new technique of music writing. It is not composed in haphazard fashion, but written to fit thousands of split-second timings, using and consolidating the joint techniques of ballet music, operatic music, and ultra-highhat symphonic music.
These things, I learned, are what background music is. There are a few things, however, which background music is not.
First of all, it has nothing to do with such music as that of the movie ‘musical.’ This is an erroneous notion which Hollywood composers, such as my present companion, seem still to encounter everywhere. He is very bitter about being confused with a mere writer of popular song hits. Background music, he maintains, does exist in a way in most of Hollywood’s popular musical pictures; but when it does so exist it is usually based upon a set of popular tunes written by Hollywood’s popular tunesmiths; these tunes are then arranged (not composed) by special arrangers to fit the musical picture, its dancers, singers, pantomimists, or whatever persons, routines, or ideas a Hollywood musical producer may decide to throw in. Hollywood musicals (that is, musical pictures with a popular-tune background only) are ‘arranged’ and not ‘composed’ — outside, of course, of the five fundamental tunes turned in by the tunesmiths. The studio songsmiths compose ‘key numbers’ — which are barely sixteen pages of manuscript music — and this original music then furnishes the basis of what is known as a Hollywood musical.
Twenty background composers — a few of them of international repute — furnish Hollywood’s background music. A few of them are good composers. The rest of them are, for the most part, musical hacks. But that doesn’t matter — they know more about the language of the symphony orchestra than the average man, and after all we need more teachers than geniuses. And, remember, these men are composing all the time, day after day, month after month. No, Hollywood motion-picture music is not any longer patched up out of the immortal scores of the Great Masters — these methods would today be considered barbarous, because the repeated cutting and recutting of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished Symphony,’ Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries,’ and Tschaikowsky’s ‘Sixth Symphony’ finally gave the public the jitters and began bearing down on the box office. The ad nauseam point has been reached in hacking up old scores. The public won’t stand for it. Movie moguls, of course, immediately broke down the front door in their mad rush to get out of classic music’s abattoir, and so today all music accompanying the pictures — or nearly all — is composed especially for each particular picture.
IV
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ my composer friend said, as he finished his third cup of coffee. ‘The music of the Old Masters still has a very important reservation in the annual footage of Hollywoodian sound track, but when it appears nowadays it appears not in servile rôle but as full-fledged music played by a director of Leopold Stokowski’s calibre. As such it is not, in any sense of the word, background music. It is direct, straight-from-the-shoulder music — meant to be noticed. You love it, but you might not have loved it unless many years of excellent background scores had made good music emotionally articulate and comprehensible to you — had unwittingly made a music lover out of you.
‘There is one extremely easy and convincing way by which everybody may prove to his own satisfaction just how important a Hollywood background score can be and is to its particular picture. Just go in to see any movie making the slightest pretense at being anything but a light comedy or a swing musical. Plug up your ears, especially during the emotional, romantic, or even bloodcurdling parts of the picture. This will make you miss the dialogue, of course, but you’ll also blot out the background score, which is the idea in this case.
‘If you now react,’ he said, ‘as most other persons react, you will suddenly realize that the picture up there on the screen before you is nothing more than a flickering pattern of black-and-white ghosts moving gigantically across an enormous silver screen. It’s eerie, that’s what it is. For it will now become a gawky picture, ill-timed, inelegant, unromantic, dull, undramatic, pointless, insignificant, mundane, and spiritless. Its landscapes will now seem labored and composed. That hillside up there is all too obviously of synthetic vintage and from the Special Effects Department. That beloved and glamorous star will also have undergone a marked change; she will now gap, flutter, smile inanely and without meaning; she is now — in a word — both ghostly and futile. She does not breathe as other women breathe. The entire picture has — quite simply — become “cold veal.”
‘And then take your fingers out of your ears. The entire thing changes right there before your eyes — and you’ll see what I mean when I say that an orchestral background score (which you’ve never noticed) is one of the most important things about a motion picture. The formerly hideous Special-EffectsDepartment hillside again becomes a real hillside and its trees are real trees. Birds in the bushes again sing the song of eternal love. Beauty, ambition, hope, charity, and humanity are in the air again. Stars become people instead of well-dressed $2000-a-week Beverly Hills tennis players. The very flowers have come to life. Everything’s fine. But not without our music. Our music makes it fine. And that’s why background music is the very breath of the cinema.
‘ Since its very beginnings the motionpicture industry has known that no motion picture is more than a ghostly flicker imitating life. Its black-andwhite shadows are lifeless without music. This fact is just as true today as when nickelodeons first opened their portals. Sound and its accompanying dialogue may have momentarily dimmed this ancient cinema necessity, but when the sound film, surfeited with talking, suddenly became obnoxiously barren, so much so that motion-picture box-office receipts fell off alarmingly, it again became apparent that, no matter what new inventions or improvements might come or go in the motion-picture industry, music was one of its prime necessities and was there to stay forever. Music was reinstated, and box-office receipts climbed back. Now you couldn’t take music away from Hollywood with a regiment of tanks.
‘With all this on our shoulders you’d think they’d let Bill and me and fellows like myself alone, wouldn’t you?’ he complained. ‘You’d think, in the middle of the night, just before dawn, they’d give us more than forty-five minutes for a couple of cups of coffee. I’m so tired I can hardly see. But they won’t. They want speed! The most typical thing we Hollywood composers can tell you about ourselves is that we are the fastest composers in the world. We can, all of us, write symphonic music almost as quickly as a symphony orchestra can play it!
‘Only thirty composers in the world can write music so quickly,’ he said proudly, ‘and twenty of them are in Hollywood.’
‘Why do they have to write so fast?’ I asked.
‘Well, they must write music with this tremendous speed because, frankly, Hollywood cannot wait. Ordinary garden variety of composers (or those not in Hollywood) need from two to three months to write a three or four hundred page orchestral score, and even then these non-Hollywoodians consider this to be some tremendous feat or other. Hollywood, however, cannot permit $200,000 to $2,000,000 to remain tied up for three long interest-bearing months while a composer mulls over and brings forth a properly fitting background score. The percentage on $2,000,000 a day can develop into quite an interesting sum — in any case too much, even for Hollywood.
‘Accordingly the writing of orchestral background scores has become a tremendously organized and highly technical business; studios have equipped their music departments with the last word in such comforts and devices as are calculated to heighten to nth degree motionpicture background score production. Studios and offices — all of them equipped with grand pianos, recording devices, pretty secretaries, and what not — are placed at the disposal of the composer in order to squeeze the last possible bit of inspiration out of him. They even do something that until recently was practically unknown in the history of struggling musical composers — they pay us fat salary checks, too.
‘Each studio’s music department is a big musical factory. Each factory revolves, more or less, around its two, three, or even four background composers — plus, of course, the all-important music director, who is final authority about what shall or shall not go into the sound track when all the other boys begin to squabble. (He’s supposed to know!) Most large studios are geared to high production — our studio, for instance, produces about one and a half background scores a week. One and a half background scores a week! One and a half opera-length scores a week! And every week in the year!’
V
‘The first day I came here,’ he continued, ‘I met another composer, an old pal from back East, who proceeded immediately to take me on tour. We bummed around Hollywood Boulevard, saw Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and other not so bewildering sights. At last — as does every studio person in Hollywood — we took a busman’s holiday. We went into a movie.
‘Sounds of boisterous laughter greeted our entry into the theatre. I thought that we had entered into a comedy. But there, upon the screen, was one of my favorite stars. The drama was a most serious one. I looked at my fellow composer in amazement. I didn’t, quite frankly, get it.
‘“I wanted to show you this picture in particular,” he said to me, “because it will be a most excellent object lesson for you. For one thing, it will give you a new pride in your recently adopted profession.” (I had never written music for the movies until I came to Hollywood.) “You will now notice,” he continued, “that the public are rolling in the aisles with hilarity. But, my friend, the picture up there isn’t funny. It is supposed to be serious, very serious. And that,” he wound up, “is what we composers of Hollywood can do to a director who thinks he knows too much about music. A director, for instance, barges into our music department with twelve cans of celluloid all nicely cut and fresh from the cutter, and this director shrieks for music — his music. Suppose now he annoys us, pesters us, tells us how to write music, how to do every note, makes our lives miserable. Well, it all winds up by our abandoning him. We take his directions and follow them literally — and look,” he said, pointing up at the screen, “just see what happens! Look at that long thin man up there. Do you notice that every time he takes a step that step is followed by a bassoon note? And bassoons — as every last member of a music department will tell you — make long thin men seem both longer and thinner. Synchronized steps in a piece of starkly realistic drama automatically turn it into the funniest comedy you’ve ever seen. Why? We don’t know why. It’s the funny bone of the public that will tell you why. And, old chap, notice, if you please, the heroine. Poor thing, she’s acting perfectly all right, but her background music isn’t. Do you notice, for instance, that it accents the fluttery and more jittery side of her movements? In private life, incidentally, she is fluttery and jittery. She knows of this fault, of course, and attempts, like the good actress that she is, to correct it. But the composer would not let her get away with it. He always caught that jitter when she least expected it, and he accented it. And now, no matter what she or the long thin gentleman will do, it will be funny.” To listen to that public howling, it certainly seemed so.’
If composers could do this, then indeed they certainly occupied positions of power! ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘didn’t the director rip out that silly sound track, especially after he had heard the first dubbing?’
‘Directors,’ answered my friend, ‘don’t know. They have scant ideas about what kind of music most appropriately fits what action; certainly they have no idea about the public’s reaction to motionpicture background music. But we — who are the specialists — know the public reaction to every note. Good directors, of course, know how to tell us exactly what they want and give us enough scope to correct their miscalculations. On the other hand, bad directors (bad for the music side of their picture) come in and want to compose our scores personally, although they are not composers — in which case, if they are insistent enough, we let them. I mean we compose their scores their way. That, apparently, was exactly what happened on yon screen.
‘So studios have become cagey about such things. They prefer to allow a composer who knows his trade to score a picture wherein a little fat man plays a serious or semi-serious rôle. They do not know why it is, but the composer seems to know that a fat man is ever so much fatter the moment you allow a squeaky oboe to wander morosely up and around in the sound track. A composer of background music knows that a dangerously beautiful young male star dare not be accompanied by muted strings lest in the audience scoffing youths let loose a singular and raucous whooping noise. He also seems to know that no trombone should sound its strident mannish note whenever a certain too-boyish young actress strides her masculine young self across the screen. Should he sound such a trombone even for a teeny-weeny “boop” the audience would tail-spin into hysterics.
‘When mistakes occur it is our silent duty unostentatiously to correct them. A little neutral music over the offending spot (instead of a brutally grim music) will often do the trick, and if that doesn’t we might even attempt some music that says, “Although it may appear so, all is not yet lost.” And we’ll do the same thing for an actress; we’ll cover her defects with a musical “beauty treatment” that would astound as well as confound not only you but her. In the music department, actresses with too precise movements have these movements musically rounded out — as if they were so intended. We do not write music as though to underline and stress their too-angular movements; instead we write music which closely follows their action but completes every movement in the rhythm with which such movements should have been completed. We “round out” their defective timings. And, as with the oboe and the fat man, there are ways of making a thin actress put on a few pounds, and, obviously, vice versa. Ugly ducklings can become swans, gawky schoolgirls can become graceful, and the accidental movements of a child become the soul of premeditated and planned choreography.
‘And then, remember, some of the world’s finest symphony orchestras are right in the studios of Hollywood. This is not to be wondered at when one considers that symphony-orchestra musicians are more highly paid in those studios than anywhere else in the world. We get the best — the very best.
‘Finally and always, remember this, as the newspaper fellow wrote: our music dins upon almost one billion — one whole billion — of human eardrums every week. If, in the future, our musical taste is good, we shall be the world’s greatest influence for good music. . .'
The little watery-eyed composer stopped for a moment to drink his fourth cup of coffee. ‘You’ll never get to sleep tonight,’ I protested. ‘Yes, I will,’ he said. ‘I haven’t slept in four nights. I’ll sleep tonight, all right.’
Bill, who had been reading a newspaper, got restive. ‘It’s over forty-five minutes right now, and we’ve still got a long sequence to write before dawn,’ he said, looking at his watch.