Sweet Sound of Success

And now?

Now . . . yecch! Two things brought an end to that movie-studio heaven I was talking about, besides of course the end of studio orchestras and musical staffs. The first was commerce, the discovery that a film score had commercial value outside of the film. That meant that suddenly a film composer had to face a whole new question: how that score will sell -- on three-minute 78-rpm records, on LP and now on CD. That has had a very bad effect on film music.

The second thing that happened was the rise of the auteur, the director who thinks he knows everything and integrates every aspect of the film into some kind of concept. The director who has to know what you’re doing, piece by piece by piece . . . that can be very inhibiting. Instead of concentrating on your own grand plan -- as composer, or designer, or whatever -- you have to be concerned with what the director is going to think two days from now about what you did today.

There are exceptions, of course. Scorsese does know everything, and so does Coppola. Here‘s what I did with Scorsese for Age of Innocence. We talked about the period of the piece: 1870, say. We talked about musical models: Brahms, say. Then I went to London, recorded a few themes with a small orchestra. Marty liked some of them, didn’t like some of them. But he took the themes he liked, and started to cut the film around the music. That‘s the ideal way to work, and that’s why Marty and I have done seven films together.

Every director is different, of course. Producers, too. With Alan Pakula on To Kill a Mockingbird, we did a lot of preliminary talking. We talked through every character at enormous length before I sat down to compose. But again, we weren‘t talking about seconds and minutes and feet of film; we were talking about the people who were going to live in that film.

Any favorite among those 200 film and television scores?

Oh, Mockingbird, I guess. It’s such fun to listen to, even if I did write it. I don‘t just listen to movie scores, of course. I saw the L.A. Opera’s Lohengrin, and thought it was just fine, really well staged and performed.

Did you also see La Traviata last month?

[Long pause.] It‘s a great opera, though, isn’t it?