Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music (23 page)

When I was a child, I dreamed of being a movie director.

Every Saturday, my sister and I would go to the movies. I sat for hours, studying those wonderful M-G-M and Warner Brothers musicals of the 1940s and ’50s. All I could think about was playing, singing, and acting in them—and maybe even directing them.

Although that dream hasn’t yet been fulfilled, I’ve never lost my love for film. I’m just as enamored of the art and science behind filmmaking as I am recording, and was privileged to have played a small role in the creation of numerous films and music videos (not from behind the camera—from behind the mixing desk).

My first involvement in a feature film project came courtesy of Quincy Jones, who asked me to record the score he’d written for
The Pawnbroker
in 1964.

Quincy and I had made many records together, and I was excited by the prospect of breaking into the film world. But it would
be a big step, given my relative inexperience with the art of film recording.

“I would love to record it, but I know nothing about movie scoring,” I explained to Quincy. “Neither do I,” he replied. “But I’ve spoken to Henry Mancini in London, and Armando Travioli in Rome. They’ve helped me understand how synchronization works. They also taught me a few tricks about how to arrange and record so that the film mixer can bring out the best in the music.”

I’m a problem solver, and this puzzle was one that I wanted to piece together. The score for
The Pawnbroker,
a Sidney Lumet film, took Quincy two months to write, and two days for us to record.

Quincy hired the best jazz musicians on the east coast, including Freddie Hubbard, Elvin Jones, Anthony Ortega, Dizzy Gillespie, Oliver Nelson, and Bobby Scott, and asked Billy Byers to help write the orchestrations. The sessions were frantic: At one point, Quincy and Billy kept a full orchestra waiting while they arranged the last cue that Quincy had written.

The Pawnbroker
was a revolutionary film.

The film challenged the Motion Picture Code, and brought the issue of frontal nudity and censorship to the fore. As a result,
The Pawnbroker
helped establish a precedent, and an acknowledgement that in certain situations, nudity had an undeniable moral purpose in films. But behind the scenes,
The Pawnbroker
also confronted another looming issue: the acceptance of black composers in Hollywood.

Until 1954, very few blacks were welcomed into the ranks of Hollywood’s film studio orchestras. It took influential actors such as Marlon Brando—a real jazz fan—and the efforts of black musicians such as Buddy Colette and Nat Cole to integrate the inimitable talents of African American musicians into the studios.

The musicians may have staked their claim to a small piece of the Hollywood studio scene, but black film composers were practically unheard of.

So solid was the white line—and Hollywood’s misperception of black composers—that Henry Mancini received a call from a
Pawnbroker
producer before Quincy was hired. “We know he’s gifted,” the producer told Mancini. “But he’s also black. Will he be reliable?”

They needn’t have worried. Quincy’s jazz-inflected score—dynamic, yet appropriately brooding and dark—underscored the picture’s dramatic theme, and garnered both Quincy and the producers of
The Pawnbroker
considerable praise.

After
The Pawnbroker,
my recording for film was limited to the commercials that A&R was cutting for the top Madison Avenue advertising agencies.

Then, in 1967, Burt Bacharach asked me to supervise the recording of the soundtrack for
Casino Royale,
which was recorded in London.

The plum to emerge from
Casino Royale
was Dusty Springfield’s rendition of “The Look of Love,” a performance that brought sensuality in film music to a hitherto rarefied level. Burt had written all of the music in the States, but when he and Hal arrived in London for the sessions, they were told that the script had changed. Consequently some of the melodies that Burt had written didn’t fit the new story.

Fortunately Burt was in the throes of fleshing out a melody that he’d devised for another spot in the picture; a pretty, Brazilian-influenced melody that he believed could be expanded into a song. Using Ursula Andress’s beauty for inspiration, Burt completed the melody, and Hal wrote the lyrics on the spot. Bacharach may have been thinking of Ursula Andress, but “The Look of Love” fit Dusty Springfield’s voice (and persona) beautifully.

Years later I was back in London to produce another James Bond film soundtrack: John Barry’s
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

I owe a great deal to composer John Barry, for teaching me about how film music is written and recorded.

John Barry’s scores were always rhythmic, and he often went against the grain. For example, a John Barry cue written to accompany a high-speed car chase was unlike anything you’d expect. Instead of a pulsating theme to underscore the scene, John would go in the opposite direction. Brilliant!

London had become a popular place to record film scores, and I enjoyed my work there. While British union rules prevented me from touching the board, the English technicians—Jack Clegg on
Casino Royale,
Gordon McCallum, John Mitchell, and John Richards on
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
were sheer professionals, and eager to fulfill my wishes as the soundtracks’ producer.

I had gotten a taste of the film world from my small part in bringing the music for
The Pawnbroker
and
Casino Royale
to life. Why can’t New York become a hub for film soundtrack recording, too? I wondered.

We could easily fit sixty or seventy men on the scoring stage in Studio A1 at 799 Seventh Avenue, and I set out to make our studio one of the premier film-recording facilities in the East. I started by purchasing the best 35mm magnetic film recording system I could afford.

Traditionally film music and dialogue are recorded on 35mm magnetic film, the advantage of which is quietness and fidelity. The space between the heads on a magnetic film recorder is wider than on an eight- or sixteen-track magnetic tape machine, and the hiss level is much lower. The amount of headroom is double or triple that of a conventional tape recorder, offering increased dynamic range and lower distortion.

Before digital recording, the fidelity of 35mm film was so highly regarded that engineers in standard recording studios began using it to record certain sessions, and many labels used it as a marketing tool. On the East Coast, Bob Fine was the master of magnetic film recording; I had taken note of what he was doing even before I became an engineer.

In the early 1950s, Bob and his wife, producer Wilma Cozart Fine, made some startling symphonic recordings for Mercury’s classical Living Presence series. The earliest of those classical sessions were monophonic; Bob suspended a single U47 microphone over the conductor’s head and recorded direct to 35mm film. When stereo came into vogue, Bob designed a three-track magnetic film recording head, devised a multiple microphone system, and made some of the finest stereo orchestral recordings of all time.

Bob was also among the first engineers to design and use a mobile sound truck, and in the mid-1950s he opened his own studio, Fine Sound, where he recorded dozens of high-fidelity jazz albums for Mercury and Verve Records, including Count Basie’s sonic and musical tour de force,
April in Paris
.

Many of Bob Fine’s orchestral recordings were made in the ballroom of the Great Northern Hotel, and when the hotel closed down, some of his engineers came to work at A&R. They were valuable assets; because of their expertise with 35mm magnetic film recording, A&R became one of the best film-recording facilities in New York.

One of the most important film-music recordings made in our studio was
Midnight Cowboy
in 1969, and participating in the production was a milestone for me.

Midnight Cowboy
was a controversial film.

Expletives, the suggestion of homosexuality, or anything resembling prostitution practically guaranteed an X rating in 1969, and an X rating branded a film taboo.
Midnight Cowboy
touched on those themes, and the X rating it received caused quite a stir.

I clearly recall going to a screening of the film at Movie Lab with an invited audience of seventy or eighty people. John Schlessinger became upset because the audience hadn’t laughed in the spots where he thought they should have. To Schlessinger, that meant the film was doomed.

“How can you judge what’s going to happen?” I asked.

I was with both Johns—Schlessinger and Barry—when I saw the film for the first time in a theater with a regular audience, and they screamed, hollered, and did all of the things an audience does when they like something.

The comparison taught me a lot about what and what not to expect from a film. It also made me aware of how narrowly the person responsible for each portion of a film’s production views the final product. During both screenings I was hypersensitive; I wanted to be sure that the music mixes came across the way I’d intended them to.

Following what is still film-studio tradition, we scored
Midnight Cowboy
“to picture,” meaning the musicians sat in the studio and played each cue as the film was projected on a screen.

As we spent time together, I discovered that John Barry preferred to record long sections of scoring in one piece. For this reason, we decided that in addition to the short cues that were cut to the picture, we’d also record extended versions of the Theme, Main Title, and several other important cues, which could later be used on the soundtrack album or released as singles.

In those days, we didn’t waste much time recording a film.

The bulk of the music for
Midnight Cowboy
was probably finished in three or four days, in large part because John Barry’s scoring and orchestrations were so precise.

Midnight Cowboy
is a good example of how scoring and mixing a film in New York differs from scoring and mixing it in Hollywood, where they have individual mixers to record dialogue, music, and effects. The recording setup was fairly simple: We recorded the sessions on eight-tracks of magnetic tape (which were later transferred to 35mm film), and I premixed the score and songs to three separate stems (tracks). Later, film sound mixer Dick Vorisek added dialogue and effects on his board for the final mix. He was happy just to move the music up and down, with a pencil taped to three faders!

The most memorable song to emerge from
Midnight Cowboy
was Harry Nilsson’s new interpretation of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’.”

Harry had originally recorded “Everybody’s Talkin’” in 1968, for his second RCA album,
Aerial Ballet
. For
Midnight Cowboy,
we rearranged the song, and had Harry rerecord two versions: one for the opening credits, and a reprise for the end. The most noticeable difference between Harry’s RCA recording and the
Midnight Cowboy
versions is that the film renditions include harmonica, played by Toots Thielemans.

The inclusion of “Everybody’s Talkin’”—already familiar to many because of Harry’s first recording—helped make the United Artists soundtrack album for
Midnight Cowboy
a best-seller. “Everybody’s Talkin’” was not, however, a song that the producers had planned to include in the film.

When a film nears the end of production, the director assembles a rough cut: a draft version of the film that approximates their vision for the final cut.

Rough cuts are truly rough. Scenes that have not yet been filmed are missing, edits are choppy, and the film’s color hasn’t been corrected. Since music cues often are incomplete, the rough cut’s soundtrack often contains only bits of the actual score, and temporary music in between.

At first, John Schlessinger put “Everybody’s Talkin’” into the rough cut of
Midnight Cowboy
as a placeholder, since Harry Nilsson and John Barry were still working on an original song, “The Lord Must Be in New York City.” But as often happens when everyone lives with the temp track in a rough cut, John and producers came to love “Everybody’s Talkin’,” and the way it blended with the visuals. Nilsson had the voice of an angel, and his folksy rendition of “Everybody’s Talkin’” was exactly the kind of theme song the picture needed.

The scoring for many motion pictures (in whole or in part) took
place at A&R, including
The French Connection
(1971)
, Cops and Robbers
(1973), and
Fame
(1980).

I went to Hollywood to work on films, too.

Earlier I described how I came to supervise the recording of
A Star is Born
in 1975. It was one of the proudest moments in my life.

It’s rare for someone like me to join a film production team as the script is being completed, and rarer still to be accepted as one of the crew. I was relieved when everyone who was working on
A Star Is Born
welcomed my participation. When I took the assignment, I promised Barbra (and myself ) that I’d do whatever was necessary to make the soundtrack reflect what she had in mind.

Regardless of the sensationalized stories you may have heard, Barbra is a kind, sensitive person who demands from her colleagues only what she expects of herself, and
A Star Is Born
is a film of consequence. With it, Barbra opened the door for things that people in the film industry had long wished for. From true live action to technological freedom, working on
A Star Is Born
expanded all of our horizons.

Were there tensions on the set? Of course there were. With all of the aggregate talent working on the picture, there were bound to be squabbles.