Knowing the Score

Did you know that Danny Elfman came up with the main theme for “Batman” on a 747 and went into the plane’s bathroom to sing the melody into a tape recorder? Or that the late Henry Mancini composed the Oscar-winning theme song for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with Audrey Hepburn’s limited vocal range in mind?

These are just two of the fascinating anecdotes from the history of film music presented in the one-hour documentary “The Hollywood Soundtrack Story,” premiering Tuesday on American Movie Classics. Hosted by Oscar-nominated composer Randy Newman (“Ragtime”), the special chronicles the 100-year history of American movie music from the silent era to today’s popular compilation scores.

Eighteen composers and producers talk about the craft of film music in the special. Three of them--composers David Raksin, Marc Shaiman and American musical specialist Gillian Anderson--as well as “Soundtrack” co-producer Tony Thomas, discuss their place in the world of film music:

Marc Shaiman, who has penned the scores to “‘Misery,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” both “City Slicker” movies and the current “Forget Paris,” relishes his working relationship with filmmakers Rob Reiner and Billy Crystal.

“We have a great time,” Shaiman says. “We laugh and laugh and laugh. Actually, that’s part of the reason they enjoy working with me is that I can kind of keep up with them on the comedy side of things. Even if the projects we’re working on are not always funny, we still laugh and laugh and laugh, and eat and eat and eat.”

Composing scores, though, is no laughing matter. These days, Shaiman says, because of dwindling post-production schedules, he only has four to six weeks to complete a score.

“It’s horrific,” he says with a sigh. “The only bad thing about the job is the time-pressure deadline situation. You simply lose the rest of your life. If you don’t get a certain amount of minutes written every day, you can’t make up for it.”

Shaiman also can lose precious time if the director doesn’t like what he’s written, “which is why I really enjoy when directors come over as much as they can. I thrive on input. I bet a lot of directors would laugh to hear me say this, but I do enjoy it when there’s a strong opinion.”

Another hitch occurs when directors and producers disagree on the score. “Not only is there me with my opinion, there’s the director, which really should be the final word, and then there’s also the producer,” Shaiman says. “When you have three people not necessarily agreeing, it can be really tough with your head.”

Shaiman also has been the music supervisor on the box-office hits “When Harry Met Sally . . . “ and “Sleepless in Seattle.” The soundtracks, both of which featured standards, went platinum.

“I was really honored with the fact I worked on ‘When Harry Met Sally

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Tony Thomas, co-producer of “The Hollywood Soundtrack Story,” is a film authority, film and record producer and author.

His love affair with film music began at 11 when he saw Errol Flynn in “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” The 1938 classic features the robust Oscar-winning score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

“My father was a military band master, so I had some musical proclivity. I was very much aware of good music, particularly in the big swashbucklers--the Errol Flynn pictures. So many of his pictures were either scored by Korngold and [Max] Steiner--big, obvious music, symphonic and romantic. You couldn’t miss it.”

Thomas acknowledges the majority of moviegoers today don’t know much about film music. “There’s some kind of perception that a good film score is one you don’t hear, which is not true, of course. Music really makes all the difference.”

Especially in the case of the 1945 Oscar-winning Billy Wilder film “The Lost Weekend,” which originally had no music. Preview audiences responded to the heavy drama with laughter. “They had actually withdrawn it and it was shelved,” he points out. Then composer Miklos Rozsa was brought in and his vibrant score, Thomas says, “just made it fly.”

Movie music, Thomas points out, alters the audience’s perception, making scenes seem more romantic, more dramatic and more exciting. “It’s the combination of sight and sound. We just don’t see a picture with our eyes. We also see it with our ears. Just like life itself. It’s a direct appeal to the emotions. It’s like color. You just accept color when you see it. When you hear music as part of an experience of watching something, it makes a difference.”

These days, Thomas laments, he doesn’t “hear very much in the way of scoring, where the music is part of the texture of the picture, the punctuation. I hear a lot of background music. That’s apparently what the producers want. They are going for a young audience who grew up on rock ‘n’ roll. They are attuned to that. There’s so much violence and vulgarity [in movies] now, I don’t know what type of music you can put with it other than current pop.”

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Gillian Anderson is a detective, musician and magician. The American music specialist, currently on leave from the Library of Congress, is a veritable Sherlock Holmes.

Not only does she restore original silent film scores, Anderson also conducts them with full orchestras at screenings across the country. Last month, she conducted the restored score of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 vampire classic “Nosferatu” at the Metropolitan Opera.

“It’s a completely different animal when you put a full orchestra and the original accompaniment to the picture,” she says. “It basically transports you back into that era.”

The habit of creating a score, “not necessarily original music, but specifically to a film” caught on after D.W. Griffith utilized one for his 1915 feature “The Birth of a Nation.”

“The bigger and more expensive the film,” Anderson says, “the more apt it was to have a fully realized score that went along with it.”

To date, Anderson has restored 19 scores. “In the case of D.W. Griffith’s scores for ‘Intolerance,’ ‘Way Down East’ and ‘Orphans of the Storm,’ the piano score and the orchestral parts exist, but they are in a form which is not palatable to modern musicians. They have to be made more legible.”

With “Intolerance,” Anderson adds, “we had the film score and orchestral parts, but the film had been completely redone by Griffith. What we did was to use the music to reconstruct the film order. The order of the four different stories was encapsulated in the score. The piano part of the orchestral score is cued so when you are supposed to be on a particular note, there’s a cue in the music that says, like, ‘She kisses him.’ ”

In the case of the Douglas Fairbanks 1924 fantasy “The Thief of Bagdad,” Anderson had the original score, but two versions of the film--”neither of which exactly fits the score. Youhave to do some monkeying there. In the case of ‘Wings,’ all that’s left is the piano score--2 1/2 hours of music with 68 pre-existing compositions making up 50% of the score and 50% original music. The pre-existing pieces I was able to locate around the country and the world with all their sets of parts. The original music had to be reorchestrated.”

Anderson believes this early music has received short shrift from film historians. “You’ve a mountain of books which have been written about the history of film from the early era--almost exclusively about the image. But 50% of the impact of the work lies in the musical accompaniment. It’d be like studying opera based solely on the libretto. If our country has contributed anything to world culture, it’s in the area of film and TV. And the specialists ignore 50% of what makes that particular era’s films have the impact that it did. Music is simply short-circuited all together.”

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David Raksin’s haunting, romantic music for the 1944 classic “Laura” is one of the best-loved and most widely recognized movie scores of all time.

Originally, producer-director, Otto Preminger wanted to use the Gershwins’ “Summertime” and Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” for the romantic mystery starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney.

“Ira Gershwin,” Raksin says, “wouldn’t let him have ‘Summertime.’ So then he tried ‘Sophisticated Lady.’ I talked him out of it. He said, ‘What’s the matter? You don’t like it?’ I said, ‘I love it, but it’s the wrong piece.’ ”

Raksin was inspired to write the memorable theme after he received a “Dear John” letter from his then-wife. “It was a real ‘Dear David’ letter. When I talk about it I am usually terribly embarrassed. But that’s really how it happened.”

Renowned composer Alfred Newman (“How Green Was My Valley”), whom Raksin considered a “father,” hired Raksin for “Laura.”

“I was a guy generally assigned to detective stories, murder stories and things like that,” says Raksin, who composed the scores to such films as “Force of Evil” and “The Bad and the Beautiful.”

“I was considered a very far-out composer. Preminger was a very smart guy. He wanted Newman, who was the studio’s [20th Century Fox] top composer. Newman heard the picture had been in trouble, so he declined. Because it was thought of as a detective story, [Preminger] wanted to give it to Bernard Herrmann (“Psycho”), but he said, ‘If it isn’t good enough for Newman, it isn’t good enough for me.’ Newman gave it to me because I was considered a detective story composer. But I saw it as a love story.”

Raksin is the only composer who collaborated more than once with the difficult Preminger. Besides “Laura,” he penned the scores to Preminger’s “Fallen Angel,” “Forever Amber,” for which he received an Oscar nomination, “Daisy Kenyon” and “Whirlpool.”

“Preminger drove [other composers] nuts,” Raksin says. “He didn’t do that with me because I started out with a big fight with him. After that we were friends.”

Audiences were so enamored with the “Laura” theme, it was turned into a hit song. “There were so many letters,” Raksin recalls. “In those days if we got six letters, we considered ourselves to be famous persons. I stopped counting when I had 1,700. Otto Preminger, Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, all got hundreds of letters saying, ‘What’s that tune?’ ”

Raksin says he tried to interest publishers into turning the theme into a song, but they weren’t interested until the letters poured in. “Without asking me, [a publisher] sent me a lyric by a very, very famous and very good lyric writer. It was just terrible. So the publisher, who didn’t know me, called me up from New York and said, ‘What do you think of the lyric?’ I said, ‘I’m sorry to say I don’t think much of it.’ He said, ‘Who are you to say you don’t like it? ‘ I said, ‘The composer. ‘ He then asked me who I’d like to write the lyrics. I said, ‘There’s this wonderful guy--I don’t know him--Johnny Mercer. I’d love it if he could do it.’ Johnny called me up and he wrote the lyrics. It’s how those things happen.”

“The Hollywood Soundtrack Story” airs Tuesday at 5:05 and 11 p.m. on AMC.