Composer Comes Home to Conduct His ‘Lonesome Dove’ Score

The Garden Grove High School class of 1963 was studded with future entertainers. Destined for the biggest fame was Steve Martin, but there was also John McEuen, a founding member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Melody Westmoreland, who went on to sing with Elvis Presley, and Basil Poledouris.

Basil Poledouris?

Not a household name, granted. But his work has been heard by millions--anyone, for instance, who has seen the blockbuster film “The Hunt for Red October,” for which Poledouris wrote the music. The composer also can count the scores for “Robocop,” “Red Dawn” and “Conan the Barbarian” among his credits.

Poledouris comes back to his old hometown tonight to conduct the Garden Grove Symphony in his Emmy-winning score for the TV miniseries “Lonesome Dove,” as part of a Hollywood pops program.

Now an Encino resident, Poledouris left Orange County soon after graduating from high school. He recalls Garden Grove as a sleepy town of 3,500 with a market, a barber, a bank and a dime store. “I’m sure it’s quite different now, but then there was a lot of space,” he recalled in a phone interview.

“You could drive from Garden Grove to the Huntington Beach Pier in 10 minutes,” he said. There were no stop signs, but one had to dodge “an occasional tractor pulling hay across the road.”

A piano student from age 7, Poledouris went on to experiment with a number of band instruments in what he called a “wonderful” high school music program. “Just having that opportunity, I think it’s a thing that kids don’t have today,” he said. “It was kind of interesting that so many people from that class ended up in entertainment. I think it’s because we had room to do stuff.”

He started music studies at Cal State Long Beach but switched to USC in his sophomore year and developed an interest in cinema. Poledouris made several student films and graduated with a degree in film and music before going onto graduate studies in music at Cal State Los Angeles.

When it came time to get a job, he discovered that it was easier to find work as a film editor than as a film composer. He started editing educational films, with the understanding that he also would be able to do the music. “I scored about 120 documentary, industrial and educational films to stay alive, and to learn,” he said.

It was 1976 before he got the chance to work on a feature film; it was also his first chance to compose for a full orchestra. An old USC classmate, John Milius, called Poledouris with an offer to score a movie he was directing, “Big Wednesday,” a romanticized look back at Southern California’s surf culture. The movie maintains a following to this day.

“A lot of young surfers really respect this movie,” said Poledouris, who surfed as a youth in Huntington Beach and still finds time to hit the waves at Malibu.

His next assignment came from another old USC classmate, Randall Kleiser. That was “Blue Lagoon,” the high-profile Brooke Shields vehicle about a pair of stranded youths growing up together on an idyllic South Pacific isle.

After those two movies, “other directors started calling me up,” Poledouris said. Along with those projects already mentioned, he has scored the Goldie Hawn comedy “Protocol” and the TV miniseries “Amerika.”

He is now at work on two projects: “Quigley Down Under,” starring Tom Selleck and directed by Simon Windsor, the director of “Lonesome Dove,” and the newest Milius project, “Flight of the Intruder.”

The variety of his work--from the Copelandesque “Lonesome Dove” score to his futuristic “Robocop”--is one of the things that keeps Poledouris challenged. “I like to keep it moving around,” he said. “The interesting thing about working in film is that you can slip into any genre you want to be in.”

Though the director of “The Hunt for Red October” downplayed the book’s technical aspects in favor of characterizations, Poledouris says he still found himself with plenty of “beeps and blips and sonar sounds” to work around. “That presents some interesting challenges musically.”

The score for “Red October” includes some synthesizers, and Poledouris has done entirely electronic scores in the past. But, he said, he enjoys working with a live orchestra. “I don’t think I’d like to do all electronic scores. I’ve accepted them as part of the orchestral color. In the palette of orchestral colors, they have a place.” But, he said, he would not use them to mimic real instruments.

Poledouris feels he has since found the ideal niche for himself by scoring movies. He works at home where he can be close to his family and work independently. Beyond that, “once a film is turned over to me, I get this kind of possessive feeling that it’s mine. I like that.”

Basil Poledouris leads the Garden Grove Symphony in his score from “Lonesome Dove,” and Edward Peterson conducts scores from “Batman,” “Casablanca,” “The Cowboys” and “The Empire Strikes Back” tonight at 8 in the Don Wash Auditorium, Stanford Avenue and Euclid Street, Garden Grove. Tickets: $7 to $25. Information: (714) 534-1103.