Elfman--Credit Him With ‘Batman’ Score

Danny Elfman is glad that some people are finally going to learn that he, not Prince, wrote the score for “Batman.”

Now that one of the year’s most-talked-about movies is in the theaters, Elfman is hoping that audiences will see his name in the credits and realize that about 75 minutes of his music underscores the action and the titles. Although Prince contributed only a few songs, and they play a relatively minor role in the Warner Bros. film, Prince, a Warner Bros. Records artist, still got most of the credit.

“It was annoying to open up Rolling Stone magazine and read that Prince did the sound track,” griped Elfman, who is also the lead singer and songwriter for the oddball rock band Oingo Boingo, which is performing Friday through Sunday at the Universal Amphitheatre.

Warner Bros. Records further confused the issue when it released the Prince album, titled “Batman--Motion Picture Soundtrack,” last week. The first single from the album is “Batdance,” which has already rocketed up the pop chart to No. 22. The surprise is that “Batdance” isn’t even in the movie. Prince’s album features songs he wrote for the movie and some that were inspired by the movie.

“None of this is Prince’s fault,” said Elfman, who never worked with Prince on this project. “People heard Prince was writing songs for the movie and assumed he was doing the score. But the score is all that music that underscores the action. I did that.”

Eating a quick bacon-and-eggs brunch recently in West Hollywood, Elfman--who’s affable, smart and very talkative--kept apologizing for emphasizing the Prince issue.

“I just spent three months, working night and day on this score,” he explained. “I’m proud of it. I want people to realize that I wrote it.”

The next step in clearing up the confusion is the Aug. 8 release of the album of Elfman’s score--also on Warner Bros.

“It’s unprecedented for a company to put out two albums of music from the same movie,” Elfman, 36, explained. (Actually, the 1981 animated film “Heavy Metal” had a double-LP song sound-track album and a single-LP Elmer Bernstein score.)

“When I started this project I never thought I’d get an album of my music,” continued Elfman. “I thought Prince’s songs would be recorded and that would be it. But during the scoring sessions, Jon (the film’s co-producer Jon Peters) said he wanted a second album of the score. I never thought Warners would go for it but they did.

“But if my sound-track album wasn’t coming out and Prince’s album was the only ‘Batman’ music out there, I’d be very unhappy.”

This is Elfman’s 10th score and his third assignment for director Tim Burton, who started Elfman’s film-scoring career by hiring him for “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” in 1985. That was Burton’s first feature. It was also Elfman’s first composing job.

“Tim contacted me,” Elfman recalled, regarding the Pee-wee Herman film. “He’d seen me work with Oingo Boingo and decided I’d be right to do the score. He liked the crazy music I was writing for the band. It didn’t matter to him that I had no experience at all doing film scores. And this was orchestral music, not pop or rock. I’d never written for orchestra. I wasn’t sure what I was doing all the time but I had a lot of help. I learned as I was going along.”

Burton was pleased enough with that work to hire Elfman for “Beetlejuice,” Burton’s second movie and his second box-office hit. Meanwhile, Elfman was becoming a big-time movie composer, with assignments like “Back to School,” “Wisdom,” “Midnight Run” and “Scrooged.”

Elfman wasn’t really surprised when he was asked to score Burton’s third movie, “Batman.”

“He said the movie was going to be dark and that he wanted some music that had an operatic quality,” Elfman said. “But he also said the movie had a fun, upbeat side, so he wanted some music that reflected that aspect. But the first thing he said was forget about the TV series. He said the movie would be nothing like that.”

In many ways, Elfman said, “Batman” was his toughest assignment.

“For most movies you write about 45 minutes of music. This one was almost like scoring two movies. Also, I usually work only with the director. For ‘Batman’ I was working with Tim and Jon and some other Warner Bros. (movie) executives. I had to do regular presentations of what I had written while I was composing. I never had to do that before. But this was such a big, expensive movie they had to be sure every aspect of it was just right.”

Elfman still considers film composing a secondary career, squeezed in between Oingo Boingo concerts and recording sessions.

Oingo Boingo, which has a large following among teen-agers, plays irreverent, hyperkinetic, brassy music that has many dark, macabre touches. With its wacky, theatrical material, this eight-man band is really more like a musical-comedy troupe than a rock band.

Primarily a cult band, it has large pockets of fans in the West Coast and the South. Its albums aren’t big sellers. “If we sell 250,000 copies that’s great for us,” Elfman said.

While growing up in Baldwin Hills, Elfman was more into movies than music. “When I was 12 or 13 it was my goal to someday work in films--maybe as a director or cameraman,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d wind up composing film music--though it was an aspect of film I paid more and more attention to as I got older.”

But when Elfman got involved in the ‘70s version of Oingo Boingo as musical director, he put his film aspirations on hold and focused on a pop music career.

Now he’s such a hot-shot film composer that he’s constantly turning down work. “My film career is flourishing but not as much as it would be if I dived into it 100%,” he said. “I could be working on films year round.”

Will that ever happen?

He replied: “Not as long as there’s still life in Oingo Boingo.”