Reels of Sound

David O. Selznick was worried. A scene in Duel in the Sun called for some off-camera sex between Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones. Selznick needed "screwing music," but Composer Dimitri Tiomkin's score had a windy, rasping sound. "Dimitri, the music doesn't have enough shtup," Selznick said. "It doesn't sound like the way I make love." Tiomkin defended his score. "You love your way and I'll love mine," he said. "To me, that's lovemaking music."

Tiomkin, 76, is perhaps the best-known practitioner of an exacting, lucrative profession: writing music for movies and television. There are no rules for capturing a visual image, an emotion or a color in sound. "I once taught a U.C.L.A. course on composing for TV," remembers Lalo Schifrin, 40, composer of the Mission: Impossible theme. "I asked my students to write the sound of the color orange. Every response was different, and each was equally correct."

Fear in D Minor. Many movie composers--Schifrin, Joe Raposo, Billy Goldenberg and Jerry Goldsmith, for example--have classical music backgrounds. Goldsmith majored in music at U.S.C.; Goldenberg studied piano with his father. Schifrin's father was concertmaster of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra. Raposo studied in Paris with the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger. "You have five more years of counterpoint," warned Mme. Boulanger when he announced his impending departure. She worried about her pupil's attraction to popular music: "What will happen to you is the same thing that happened to Gershwin." Replied Raposo: "I certainly hope so."

Commercial composers knock out as many as six full-length scores a year, along with other assignments. For a 110-minute feature film they allow between six and eight weeks. A 90-minute TV movie can be polished off in two weeks. Jerry Goldsmith, 46, a veteran of some 65 films, churned out the music for Chinatown in ten days.

Frequently the film is in the can before the composer sets to work. While he watches the movie, he jots down musical ideas, which he then talks over with the producer and director. After that head session, cue sheets are made that include dialogue, action and music suggestions. A typical entry might go like this: "Actor crosses room, opens door, looks about fearfully (D-minor chord)--12 1/2 seconds." Now all that remains to be done is to write the score.

Sometimes there are interruptions. At work on Up the Sandbox, Goldenberg received daily phone calls from Leading Lady Barbra Streisand. Since shooting sessions lasted far into the night, the actress rang punctually at 2:30 a.m. "Hum me the music for tomorrow," she would request. During one predawn chat, Streisand asked Goldenberg if the movie's final measures could be extended into a song. "Sure," he replied. "Have it by 4," purred La Barbra. "I wrote like mad," Goldenberg recalls. "When she called, I hummed her the tune. She liked it, and the next day we got the word writers, Marilyn and Alan Bergman, to fit it out with a lyric." They booked an orchestra, and within a few weeks If I Close My Eyes, the movie's single, was ready for release.

Most musicians prefer scoring movies to writing for television. Not so Joe Raposo, 36, whose credits include ballads for Frank Sinatra, The Carpenters and Jose Feliciano, as well as the theme for Sesame Street. At ten, Raposo already showed the facility and ingenuity that are essential for a commercial composer. A piano student, he invented a two-handed speed method for orchestration. Each finger represents a symphonic choir. Notes played by the pinky and fourth fingers of the right hand are assigned to violins and flutes, the third and second fingers represent the clarinets and oboes, the thumbs are both French horns. In the left hand, the second and third fingers stand for the cellos and bassoons, while the remaining two fingers provide the bass line.

For a top composer like Raposo, fees are fairly standard. A film brings from $20,000 to $25,000; a two-hour TV movie is worth $5,000, while a 90-minute TV feature earns the composer $3,500.

No Stravinsky. A six-figure income eases the frustrations of deadline pressure and constant rewriting, as well as condescension from within the industry. Twentieth Century-Fox Music Director Lionel Newman's job profile for a composer is not flattering: "You don't want a Stravinsky because some primitive might be better. We're looking for a man who'll write to script." That sort of remark annoys Jerry Goldsmith. Says he: "There are damn few composers alive or deceased who have had the opportunity we have had to experiment with atonality and counterpoint." Next month Goldsmith will perform his themes from The Wind and the Lion, The Blue Max and The Waltons in London's Royal Albert Hall.

The movies are in fact following Goldsmith's lead into orchestration. Hit movies of the '60s were often scored by individual artists and rock groups: The Graduate by Simon and Garfunkel, Easy Rider by The Band, Steppenwolf, etc. Today, directors want a more symphonic approach. The Jaws theme is played by a 75-piece orchestra. Disaster films have enhanced the value of lush orchestral work. "Imagine," says Newman, "The Towering Inferno, for instance, raging to the obbligato of a Fender bass and a wah-wah guitar."

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