MOVIES : Cinema Pianodiso : Elmer Bernstein would be perfect for those ‘Do-you-know-me’ ads--he’s been the music man for 180 movies

As a soundtrack composer, Elmer Bernstein sees himself as an outsider who arrives at the end of the filmmaking process, one who is there to provide musical comments that may directly affect the way that movie plays. He may be the last to arrive, but the show can’t go on without him.

Consistently active since the early ‘50s, Bernstein has scored more than 180 films whose soundtracks cover a vast range. “I’ve had several careers” is how he puts it.

There are his scores for comedies, among them “Ghostbusters,” “Trading Places,” “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” “Three Amigos,” “Airplane!” and “Meatballs.” His dramatic films include “The Field,” “My Left Foot,” “The Chosen,” “The Birdman of Alcatraz,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Hud.” He’s concocted jazz-based soundtracks for such films as “The Man With the Golden Arm,” “Sweet Smell of Success,” “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Love With the Proper Stranger,” and among his many Westerns are “The Magnificent Seven,” “True Grit” and “The Shootist.” Of course, there are his spectacles: “The Ten Commandments” and “Hawaii” to name just two.

The Academy Award-winning composer (“Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 1968) ranks among Bernard Herrmann, David Raksin, Jerry Goldsmith, Henry Mancini and Max Steiner at the top of his craft.

With a resume like that, it’s hard to imagine Bernstein, who has just finished “A Rage in Harlem” for director Bill Duke and recently recorded his score to John Landis’ “Oscar,” coming across a movie that threw him a curve. But, for a while, “The Grifters”--Stephen Frears’ ‘90s film noir starring Anjelica Huston and John Cusack--did.

“I must confess that after I’d first seen it, I thought, ‘Here’s a movie the likes of which I’ve never seen before. This is going to take some real thought,’ ” Bernstein said in an interview at his Santa Monica duplex. The spry, 68-year-old composer and his wife, Eve, make their home in Santa Barbara, but also have residences in England and Ireland.

Bernstein found the story of three con artists, based on the novel by the late Jim Thompson, absorbing, yet “quirky. It’s kind of strange. So my general concept of the music was to go with a kind of off-centered type of score because that’s what the film is like. It’s playfully unsettling,” he said, a sly smile crossing his face.

As is usual with the scoring process, Bernstein conferred with Frears and discussed the concept of the music after filming had concluded. The two then “spotted” the film, deciding which scenes needed music and why. “Then, to give Stephen an idea of what I had in mind, I put down some of the cues (musical segments), as they appear in the film, on synthesizer,” Bernstein said.

The pair each found in the other a supportive collaborator.

“I admire a lot of his scores, and he had a particular American sound which I wanted,” said Frears, the British director whose other pictures include “Dangerous Liaisons,” “Prick Up Your Ears” and “My Beautiful Laundrette.”

“He is also a very sensitive man, a man who can really read a film,” Frears went on. “ ‘The Grifters’ is complicated--part melodrama, part irony, maybe European, maybe American--and Elmer’s score was a brilliant idea. I was thrilled.”

Bernstein’s soundtrack mirrors the film’s story; Thompson’s ‘50s underbelly-of-life novel is given a contemporary interpretation by Frears, who worked from Donald Westlake’s screenplay. Bernstein had about five months to write the score; film composers are generally given anywhere from three to 10 weeks.

Devising an appropriate opening theme was critical to the success of his score, Bernstein said. The theme is a sparse series of three angular musical fragments, played by various instruments and different-sized ensembles throughout the movie. (The fragments are followed by ominous-sounding low brass chords and then a syrupy, ironic-sounding saxophone that foreshadows the at-odds personal entanglements of protagonists Huston, Cusack and Annette Bening, who plays Cusack’s love interest.)

“It turned out to be the first thing I thought of, but since it came so fast, I thought it was too easy, so I fooled around for another week before deciding I had the small, apropos theme I was looking for,” he said.

The main characters in “The Grifters” aren’t really going anywhere, and neither does Bernstein’s theme. “It kind of turns in on itself all the time,” he said. “There’s a kind of nervous quality to it that comes from the way it repeats itself, rather than opening up linearly. It’s confining. So that’s the unsettling part of my theme.”

Martin Scorsese--one of the producers of “The Grifters” who has signed Bernstein to score his film, “Cape Fear,” currently shooting in Florida and starring Robert De Niro--was knocked out by “The Grifters” theme. “It was different than I expected and I loved it,” Scorsese said by phone during a break in filming “Cape Fear,” a remake of the 1962 picture directed by J. Lee Thompson. “It has an almost-Kurt Weill sound that (Bernstein) has devised to introduce the characters and which becomes the (musical) theme of the picture.”

Getting inside the characters, feeling the drama of a film, telling the audience something about a scene--these are the film composer’s main tasks, Bernstein said. “Simplistically, the composer should service the film. In ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ you get a geographical feeling from the Mexican-American border music, but, more importantly,” he said, pausing and looking off to one side in thought, “the music pushes on, gives the film energy, because the plot is slowly developing.

“Whereas in ‘My Left Foot,’ the music was there to extend something that was implicit in the film, that there is something inside of this man Christy Brown, who has cerebral palsy, a passion inside that he couldn’t get out. Here, like ‘The Grifters,’ a lot of the figures turn in on themselves, mirroring the idea of something that can’t quite get out.

“Music generally gives a film emotional exhilaration, but not in a way that you have to necessarily be aware of,” Bernstein said. “All you have to do is see any film without any music and you know what music does.”

The son of European immigrants, Bernstein revealed an early talent for music, and at 12, was given a scholarship to study piano with Juilliard’s Henriette Michelson, with whom he studied until 1949. As a boy, he was introduced to Aaron Copland and the late composer recommended he undertake composition studies with his former student, Israel Citkowitz. Later, Bernstein studied composition with another renowned former Copland pupil--Roger Sessions--and Stefan Wolpe.

After an early career as a concert pianist--”I really didn’t like it. The pressure is tremendous and as a young person, it wrecks your life”--Bernstein, who graduated from NYU in 1942 with a degree in music education, gravitated toward dramatic composition. During a stint in the Army Air Force in 1942-46, he wrote for the Air Force Radio network, which led to other radio work and finally to film. He debuted in 1950 with the score for “Boots Malone.”

His banner year was 1955. Before then, he experienced what he called McCarthy-era-inspired “graylisting.” “For my left-wing sentiments, I was never blacklisted, I just wasn’t getting any major work,” he said. After a couple of years, during which he completed scores for such far-from-memorable films as “Robot Monster” and “Cat Women on the Moon,” Bernstein got the break of a lifetime: scoring Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments.”

He was doing dance arrangements and serving as rehearsal pianist for DeMille’s niece, Agnes de Mille, for the film version of “Oklahoma” in 1954 when Bernstein met Roy Fjastad, then head of music for Paramount. “Roy asked me to do a favor for him, help Sylvia Fine, Danny Kaye’s wife, with some of the music she was writing for Kaye’s ‘The Court Jester,’ ” Bernstein recalled. “If I did him this favor, he promised me he would get me some composing work. And about six weeks after I finished ‘Jester,’ DeMille needed someone to write a dance for ‘The Ten Commandments,’ and Fjastad, God bless him, thought of me.”

Bernstein was invited to meet DeMille on the Paramount lot, and after brief introductions, the director asked him: “Do you think you could do for ancient Egyptian music what Puccini did for Japanese music in ‘Madame Butterfly?’ ” “I simply said, ‘I don’t know, but I’d certainly like to try,’ ” Bernstein said.

“It was the right answer. If I’d have said plain ‘Yes,’ I’d have been off the lot in five seconds,” he said, smiling.

DeMille liked what Bernstein conceived, and he was given additional small jobs to do. Six months later, when Victor Young, who was signed to write the “Commandments” score, became terminally ill (he died the next year), Bernstein got the assignment.

“DeMille asked me to write themes, one for each major character in the film, on spec,” Bernstein said. “I played them for him at the piano, he liked what he heard and turned to me and said, ‘Do you think you could stand me for another six months?’

“I owe him a great deal, everything in fact,” Bernstein said of the famed moviemaker. “He took an untested young person with no major film credits and let me write the score for his then $14 million--now it would be like $150 million--picture because he thought it was the right thing to do. He had that kind of confidence. This is not characteristic of people in his position, then or now.”

Between the time shooting wrapped on “The Ten Commandments” and Bernstein began scoring it, he wrote his jazz-infused soundtrack for “The Man With the Golden Arm,” a score that holds up solidly today. “It was the first time jazz was used in that capacity, driving through the entire film,” Bernstein said. He acknowledged the writing contributions of Shorty Rogers, who composed and arranged some of the jazz band segments in the film. “And the orchestra itself was basically a jazz orchestra in the midst of a symphony orchestra, so you came out of the picture feeling you’ve heard a jazz score, because it was absolutely relentless.”

“Man With the Golden Arm” led to other jazz-influenced works, including “Sweet Smell of Success” and “Walk on the Wild Side.” Then in the ‘60s and ‘70s came a series of dramatic films and Westerns. A new area of expertise opened up in the late ‘70s when John Landis requested Bernstein for his studio directorial debut, Universal’s “National Lampoon’s Animal House.”

“I had an idea for the music for the film which was radical at the time,” Landis said, “which was to have a straight dramatic score for a comedy. I didn’t want the music to say, ‘Isn’t this funny?’ And by not doing that, I thought it would be even funnier.

“The people at Universal asked me who I wanted to score the film and when I said ‘Elmer Bernstein,’ no one could believe it, or believe that he would do it, but he was gracious enough to say ‘Yes,’ ” Landis said.

At first, Bernstein expressed consternation at why Landis wanted him. “I was amazed when he called,” he laughed, remembering the incident. “‘Why me,?’ ” I asked him. Then John explained the film and asked me to come see it. I thought it was very funny, but, more importantly, I liked his non-comedic approach and that’s how we’ve done each of his pictures since.”

The Bernstein-Landis collaboration has included “Trading Places,” “Spies Like Us,” “Three Amigos”--”Which is a wonderful satire of his ‘Magnificent Seven’ score,” Landis said--and the upcoming “Oscar,” a ‘30s period piece about a mobster, played by Sylvester Stallone, who wants to go straight.

Landis said that the reasons he keeps working with Bernstein--whom he’s known since he was a teen-ager at Oakwood School (formerly in Agoura, now in North Hollywood)--are many.

“He’s tremendously enthusiastic, he attempts to understand what you want and his contributions make what you want even better,” Landis said. “ And , in 1965, he and his wife took me and Peter (Landis and Bernstein’s son, Peter, were classmates at the Oakwood School) to the Hollywood Bowl to see the Beatles.”

In return, Bernstein likes Landis because, he said, “There’s a sense of ‘off the wall’ freedom and letting go about John that allows for a creative atmosphere. John’s not afraid to look silly, so in that sense, he’s very adventurous. And he has a terrific sense for good musical ideas.”

Before doing “My Left Foot” in 1988, Bernstein, ironically, had become typecast as a comedy film writer, and he really wanted to do a different, smaller film to change his image. Starting with that film and continuing with “The Grifters” and “The Field,” the composer has not only been associated with more personal films, he’s also returned to orchestrating his writing. He finds the job of picking what instruments play what melodies a way “to refresh myself, and to stay fresh.”

Bernstein’s modest goal is to keep doing interesting films, but he’d also like to occasionally conduct classical programs with major orchestras. “If the L.A. Philharmonic or the Royal Philharmonic in London want me, it’s fine for me to do a film program, but I’d be considered a minor risk to do a serious program. People forget that I conducted the (Woodland Hills-based) Valley Symphony for a while, performing an all-classical repertoire. That’s where I run into (another kind of) typecasting. Ah, well,” he said, spreading his hands and shrugging his shoulders, “that’s just a minor sadness. I’ve had a wonderful life.”