Hollywood’s Hottest Music Man : Marc Shaiman’s Soundtracks Give Emotional Shape to Films

At a recent night scoring session on the orchestra sound stage at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, Marc Shaiman wears his Angst as if it were a pair of pants two sizes too small.

“I hate this part!” Shaiman yells to no one in particular as he sits at a console in the recording booth, running his hands through his light brown hair and grimacing.

The task at hand is the recording of the main title theme that Shaiman has written for “Heart and Souls,” and things, while not going terribly, are not going all that smoothly either.

First, the 70-piece orchestra doesn’t quite get the feel Shaiman wants for the lilting yet hinting-of-other-worlds piece that rolls under the opening credits.

“I want it to be more like an Italian opera,” says Shaiman, 33, through a speaker system to J.A.C. Redford, in the studio conducting the score by orchestrator Jeff Atmajian, which Atmajian fleshed out from a detailed sketch by Shaiman.

The feel of the theme is resolved, but the fine-tuning is giving Shaiman high anxiety. The phrasing of the violins needs adjusting, Shaiman wants alto saxophonist Dan Higgins to play louder and with more schmaltz under actor Tom Sizemore’s credit. Some oboe notes are deleted, some trombone and tuba notes are lengthened.

This is the way Shaiman always works, says Joel Moss, who has engineered Shaiman’s scores to “Sleepless in Seattle,” “City Slickers” and two others.

Hollywood’s latest soundtrack Wunderkind , Shaiman either composed, adapted songs for or supervised the selection of pre-recorded numbers for the soundtracks for Emile Ardolino’s “Sister Act,” Rob Reiner’s “A Few Good Men,” “Misery” and “When Harry Met Sally . . . ,” and Barry Sonnefeld’s “The Addams Family,” as well as the two above-mentioned films.

A rock enthusiast with a keen ear for other aural realms, Shaiman works without a music school education or an extensive background in classical music. Still, he tries to capture some of the essential qualities of great music, be it Bartok, Debussy or his soundtrack heroes. He understands what a scene needs, and crafts music that can be hilarious, biting, warm or reflective. And his knowledge of popular songs allows him, as a music supervisor, to pick recorded performances that deftly underpin dramatic or comedic film situations.

Since “Sister Act,” “City Slickers” and “The Addams Family” became blockbusters, grossing well over $100 million, and since the soundtrack album for “Sleepless in Seattle” is currently No. 1 on the Billboard magazine Top 100, you might think that Shaiman would be smug and self-confident.

Moss says, “Un-uh.”

“Most guys come in all prepared with a stern approach to doing something, but with him, the journey starts when we get into the studio,” says Moss between takes.

At the session, another hour passes, and with a close-to-flawless take just completed, Shaiman leans back in his chair, breathes a deep sigh of relief and smiles.

“All right!” he exclaims. “Moving on.”

A few days later, the 5-foot-8, slightly pudgy native of Scotch Plains, N.J., is back in his large loft studio--located behind the home in Laurel Canyon that he shares with his partner and companion, director Scott Wittman, who oversaw Patti LuPone’s recent one-woman show at the Westwood Playhouse.

The composer says that the evening at Paramount was, thankfully, an anomaly.

“If the sound doesn’t come out exactly like you thought it was going to, it’s a horrible feeling,” says Shaiman, wearing jeans, a white, rumpled sport shirt, generic black oxfords and displaying a neatly trimmed two-day growth of beard. “But all’s well that ends well, and, through our work that night and a little fixing in the mixing, I’m very happy.”

So was “Heart and Souls” director Ron Underwood. “Marc’s main title is great,” he says. “Main titles are incredibly important in terms of setting the mood, letting the audience in on what kind of movie this was going to be, that it was about death and heaven, but that there was also a fun element.”

Shaiman is not only one of the most in-demand soundtrack artists in Hollywood, he’s one of the most versatile.

For “Mr. Saturday Night,” he wrote ‘50s pop-style big-band arrangements and a sentimental theme that underpinned the sadness surrounding Billy Crystal’s bitter character, comedian Buddy Young Jr. On “City Slickers,” Shaiman used everything from gospel and rock to Elmer Bernstein-esque Western numbers.

“Sister Act” found Shaiman, whose background is in musical theater and live show business, adapting such ‘60s Motown classics as “My Guy” and “I Will Follow Him” for a choir of nuns headed up by Whoopi Goldberg.

And on “Sleepless in Seattle,” Shaiman, along with Wittman, Ephron and Nicholas Meyer, dug up unusual versions of such evergreens as “As Time Goes By”--Wittman actually discovered the version by Jimmy Durante--to accent the seemingly impossible long-distance love affair between Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

He’s currently arranging classic pop songs for “That’s Entertainment III,” then comes Reiner’s “North,” starring Bruce Willis and in production now at the Culver Studios; “City Slickers II,” which began filming two weeks ago; and “Addams Family Values,” the sequel to “The Addams Family.”

Before he arrived in Hollywood in 1988, Shaiman worked in New York as a pianist, vocal arranger and musical director. At 17, he began accompanying Bette Midler, ultimately arranging “Wind Beneath My Wings,” her 1989 Grammy-winning record of the year, and an impromptu version of “Here’s That Rainy Day” and “One for My Baby” that Midler sang on Johnny Carson’s penultimate night as host of “The Tonight Show.”

Shaiman suggested Midler sing “Wind Beneath My Wings” on the soundtrack of the film “Beaches.” But Midler was skeptical.

“I was not sure about it, it did not speak to me right away,” says Midler. “But it’s turned out to be a real stalwart.”

“Luckily I persevered with ‘Wind Beneath My Wings,’ so I’ve been able to hold that over her, and I will continue to until she’s red in the face because that became the biggest hit in her career,” says Shaiman, with a gleeful smile.

The relationship between Billy Crystal and Shaiman goes back to the early ‘80s, when the latter was an in-house pianist and writer on “Saturday Night Live.”

Crystal was instrumental in getting Shaiman his first film music job: adapting songs for the soundtrack of “When Harry Met Sally . . . .”

“Later, I took him on the road with me, and when he’d accompany me, he’d always improvise,” Crystal says. “On some of the more serious monologues, he’d write brilliant underscores, always very touching.”

Some of Shaiman’s associates, among them Midler, feel he works compulsively.

“Maybe he’ll get so exhausted so that he won’t want to, but that hasn’t happened yet,” says Midler.

Shaiman has a couple of answers to the charge. One is that he’s been blessed to be on projects with people like Underwood, whom he called “genuine, friendly and supportive. You don’t want to let go of a relationship like that,” Shaiman says, now perched cross-legged in his chair. “You have to be completely greedy.”

Shaiman’s second reason strikes a harsher chord. On the wall above the desk in his studio is a list of names--handwritten in pencil. The names include Keith Haring, Bill Elliot, John Sex and 109 others, all close friends or just-say-hello-to comrades of Shaiman’s and Wittman’s who have died of AIDS.

“People always ask, ‘Why am I so happy to do so much?’ ” he says with a serious tone in his voice. “I am very lucky to have a clean bill of health. I have seen too many friends die before their time, seen too many people disappear who never got recognized for what they’ve done. So I become almost impatient with anyone telling me to slow down or bide my my time. I just don’t think we live in a day and age where that has much to do with anything anymore.”

Shaiman crafted two tunes that were used in “Heart and Souls,’ a film about four deceased souls (played by Charles Grodin, Alfre Woodard, Kyra Sedgwick and Tom Sizemore) who seek the aid of a young executive (Robert Downey Jr.) to fulfill one last desire before ascending to heaven.

Then last April, when the film was completed, Shaiman began the serious work, writing his string-dominated score at the piano, playing along as he watched the film on a video monitor.

“That’s what I love to do and it’s what I’m very good at, being an accompanist to a singer,” he says. “To me the movie is like one big singer, one big song, or an act with many songs and I’m just accompanying it.”