Committed to the Music of the Movies

At first blush, one would think that aficionados of film scores have got to be among the most special of special interest groups in the music world. The objects of their veneration are works designed to complement, often as inconspicuously as possible, a sequence of images on the screen. Then they’re divorced from those images and issued in a format that requires them to stand on their own as independent works of art.

“That’s right,” Denny Zeitlin told me this week. “The primary task of the music is to heighten the emotional stakes of the scene, and you don’t want it to pull people out of the experience, either.”

Zeitlin, a well-known Bay Area jazz pianist (and, as it happens, a prominent local psychiatrist), was speaking in anticipation of the CD release today of his one and only film score, which he wrote for the 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and which previously existed only in a 25-year-old LP version.

For reintroducing his score to the commercial market, Zeitlin can thank Robin Esterhammer, a 36-year-old independent film and video producer who has been collecting soundtrack recordings since he was a 12-year-old in Germany, and whose personal collection numbers 2,000 recordings.

“I always felt that there weren’t enough soundtracks available that I wanted,” Esterhammer says from his Burbank home, explaining what led him to form his own independent label, Perseverance Records, and bring out a tiny catalog of scores long sought by buffs.

These decidedly non-mainstream CDs include the soundtrack for “Dr. Phibes Rises Again,” a 1972 horror film from the rococo tail end of Vincent Price’s long career. This score by the British music consultant John Gale all but defines “eclectic,” with its echoes and quotations of everything from 1950s lounge music to Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata to “Rhapsody in Blue” -- and an end-credit track, evidently prized by connoisseurs, of Price singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” accompanied by full orchestra. (The Basil Kirchin score for its 1971 prequel, “The Abominable Dr. Phibes,” is due out this year.)

Perseverance operates on a very small scale. Esterhammer orders pressings of 1,000 to 2,000 copies, of which he has to sell 600 to 700 at a wholesale price of $11 to turn a profit. The expenses on the “Body Snatchers” CD are his highest yet, because they include a trip he made to San Francisco to prepare a 30-minute interview with Zeitlin for incorporation on the disc.

In the conversation, Zeitlin recounts his experiences as a musician hired to produce a jazz score and then asked, thanks to a producer’s change of heart, to compose a score for full acoustic orchestra. Although he was pleased with the result, he found the process so demanding that he chose never to take up a film commission again.

Esterhammer’s enterprise provides a hint of the nature of the film-score world, which comprises thousands of collectors all pursuing their personal wish lists, fed by a handful of independent record labels working with the major studios.

“For us it’s about continuing to get the music out there,” says Jonathan Watkins, vice president for music catalog development at MGM Music, which licensed the “Phibes” and “Body Snatchers” music to Esterhammer’s label. “We get e-mails from collectors all the time, but we’re not a record label, so scores are not something we can put out ourselves.”

Once a score is issued by an independent label, Watkins says, the music is available to be sampled, or incorporated, by contemporary musicians or dropped into TV shows or commercials, all of which might produce new revenue for the studio. “If it’s not out there, it won’t be used,” he says.

With a few high-profile exceptions -- such as the score for “Titanic,” a huge hit on CD in the late 1990s -- film scores interest a small, if committed, audience. The sales tracking service Soundscan doesn’t even break out the category as a separate genre but folds it into its “soundtrack” category, which includes song-driven movie tie-ins, some of which feature tunes not even heard in the original film.

“Sales range all over the map,” says Robert Townson, vice president and producer at Studio City-based Varese Sarabande, the world’s biggest independent soundtrack label. Varese Sarabande’s soundtrack catalog numbers more than 1,000 titles, Townson says, ranging from those that might sell a couple of thousand copies to those that hit a few tens of thousands. A 100,000-seller -- a dismal flop in the pop music world -- is a big deal in this genre.

A lot depends on the popularity of the original film, which helps explain the “Titanic” soundtrack’s success, but that’s not to say the genre doesn’t have its own popular brand names. There’s a roster of contemporary stars -- Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman, John Williams, etc. -- and a pantheon of the historical demigods who first brought European classical standards to Hollywood. The preeminent such figure probably is Bernard Herrmann, whose career spanned the period from “Citizen Kane” (1941) to “Taxi Driver” (1976) and whose roughly 100 scores include the music that gave many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films their unique atmospheric color.

This is the sort of business that tends to stay in the hands of knowledgeable devotees. Townson, who says he produces about 50 titles a year, clearly considers himself something of a guardian of “a very important and very historically vital aspect of film history.”

The interest of others such as Esterhammer is more personal. “It appeals to me that you can watch a movie,” he says, “and you can get a piece of that film to take home with you.”

It isn’t unusual to hear of master recordings unearthed in old warehouses or rescued in the nick of time from destruction; characteristically, the master recordings for “Phibes” were in John Gale’s possession because someone had retrieved them from a waste bin during the demolition of a London recording studio.

Supporting all this effort is a community of collectors who keep up a vigorous trading market in commercial recordings, bootlegs and quixotic quests. (One gets the impression that many fans spend their lives in search of mythic recordings, like opera fans hunting for a lost Callas “Traviata.”) The Web site Soundtrackcollector.com claims more than 10,000 registered members and lists more than 35,000 titles in its film-score database. There are several trade journals and a preservation organization, the Film Music Society -- founded in the 1970s after MGM cleared out its music department “and threw away everything they had,” says its president, film composer Christopher Young (“Entrapment,” “The Shipping News”).

The craft even has its own special lore. One anecdote tells how the prominent composer Alex North didn’t learn that Stanley Kubrick had rejected his commissioned score for “2001: A Space Odyssey” until the film premiered, complete with the idiosyncratic soundtrack Kubrick had personally compiled from the works of Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss and Gyorgy Ligeti. Only years later was Townson able to prevail upon the humiliated North to allow a recording of his score, which was conducted in London by the composer Jerry Goldsmith and still is part of the Varese Sarabande catalog.

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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. Michael Hiltzik can be reached at golden.state@latimes.com.