Matching Moguls, Note for Note : Conflicts Between Hollywood and Composers Have Been Played on an Epic Scale

Eminent composers have written Hollywood film scores--the rich sister to theater composing--since the inception of talkies. But the moguls who hired them frequently did not know the first thing about music, giving rise to some wild misunderstandings.

Andre Previn, who once worked at MGM, has recounted the classic case of the producer who was unhappy about background music in a biblical movie, according to Hollywood historian Otto Friedrich. Told that the offending passage was merely a minor chord, the producer issued an edict that remained posted in the studio’s music department for years: “From this date forward, no MGM score will contain a minor chord.”

Friedrich said that when Igor Stravinsky screened Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” before its release--the feature-length cartoon used “Rite of Spring” for the sound track--the composer discovered that he could not follow the music from his original score. As Stravinsky ironically recalled years later, “the instrumentation had been improved.”

He also found Leopold Stokowski’s conducting “execrable” and “Fantasia” itself an “imbecility.”

Yet Disney claimed that Stravinsky was so pleased by the movie that the composer not only had been “visibly moved” at the screening but had made the remark that the animations were visually “what he really had in mind” when he composed the music about 2 decades earlier.

Who had what in mind was also a point of contention between composer Dimitri Tiomkin and producer David O. Selznick. Tiomkin was hired to write various themes for “Duel in the Sun,” including an “orgasm theme.” When Tiomkin played the result of his effort for Selznick--the sighing of cellos, the trumpeting of brass--the producer was not pleased. “That’s just not an orgasm,” Selznick told Tiomkin.

The cross-purposes of moguls and musicians was never more revealing than when Irving Thalberg tried to hire Arnold Schoenberg to write the score for Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth.”

According to Friedrich, the MGM production chief had heard a radio broadcast of Schoenberg’s “Verklarte Nacht.” On learning that the composer was teaching at UCLA, Thalberg summoned him to his office and remarked how much he had liked Schoenberg’s “lovely music.”

The composer promptly told Thalberg that he didn’t write “lovely music.” Moreover, he told the producer that if he took on the project, he would require control of the dialogue and actors as well as the score because everything had to be harmoniously in key.

Needless to say, Schoenberg never did the score for “The Good Earth.”