Philharmonic Concert to Salute Great Film Music of ’39

Twenty years ago, music scores to hundreds of MGM films were dumped in a landfill in Sepulveda Pass as part of an “administrative housecleaning.” Monday night, reconstructions of some of those classic scores will be heard in Cahuenga Pass as part of “A Night of Great Movie Music.”

Composer David Newman, scion of a prodigious musical family and an admitted missionary for film music, will conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in a program concentrating on films from 1939, considered by many to be the greatest year in American movie history.

The 50-year-old scores to be heard include “Wuthering Heights,” written by his father, nine-time Oscar-winner Alfred Newman; Max Steiner’s “Gone With the Wind,” and a newly reconstructed 20-minute suite from “The Wizard of Oz,” scored by Herbert Stothart.

“Film music has been tossed aside and thrown away,” said Newman, the 35-year-old music director of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in Utah. “We want to make people aware of the fact that this music exists, and more importantly that it shouldn’t be destroyed. It should be available for future generations. . . .

“In 50 years, when it’s considered old enough to look at as more than just a piece of nothing that was written for a film . . . it should be available at the least for a student of film and at most for an orchestra that wants to perform it.”

The centerpiece of the concert will be orchestrator Steve Bernstein’s “Wizard of Oz” reconstruction, which will include clips from the movie projected on the Bowl’s 27x45-foot screen. Other film clips to be screened while the Philharmonic plays include “Marnie” and “Day for Night.”

Composers Maurice Jarre and David Raksin will preside over suites from their “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Laura,” respectively. And lending the program a more contemporary tone, Alan Silvestri will conduct his “Back to the Future.”

Monday’s performance will be the fifth in a series of concerts to benefit the Sundance Institute, where for two weeks each summer Newman teaches a master class to young composers. Newman is also on the advisory board of the Los Angeles-based Society for the Preservation of Film Music (whose members include the Library of Congress, the American Film Institute, UCLA, USC and Brigham Young University).

“We’re 100% behind the concert,” said William Rosar, executive director of the preservation society, who lauded Newman’s efforts “to ensure the survival of the very repertoire he’s wanting to perform.”

Newman calls his work for Sundance “proselytizing in nature.”

“The MGM dumping is only one thing,” he says. “What bugs me is that our society tends to label things,” and considers classical music to be “more artful” than film music.

Newman admits that “there’s a lot of bad film music, but there’s a lot of bad classical music. There’s a lot of bad everything.”

Last year Sundance spent $250,000 to have such scores as Dimitri Tiomkin’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Max Steiner’s “The Searchers,” “Wuthering Heights” and the “Wizard of Oz” suite reconstructed. Newman hopes its next project will be a record of “The Magnificent Ambersons,” the troubled 1942 film directed and narrated by Orson Welles, which starred Joseph Cotten. “Bernard Herrmann wrote a voluminous score, most of which has never been heard.”

Newman has heard a lot of film music, not only by his father, but by uncles Emil and Lionel Newman and cousin Randy Newman. Of all that he’s heard, his favorite remains his father’s score for “All About Eve” (1950), in which Bette Davis plays a famous Broadway actress and Anne Baxter her scheming protege.

“What the music did for the movie,” says Newman, as it underscored the characters’ emotions, had an incredible impact on him.

With this in mind, he’ll sit down this year to score Danny DeVito’s “War of the Roses,” starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas; Touchstone Pictures’ “Gross Anatomy,” and Orion’s “Madhouse.” His score for “Little Monsters,” starring Howie Mandel, can be heard beginning Friday.