An Evening with Alan Silvestri

Report by Jeff Bond

On Wednesday evening, October 15, ASCAP presented another of its series of interactive lectures by prominent film composers, this time featuring Alan Silvestri. After an introduction by SCL President Jay Chattaway, Silvestri took the stage and proved himself an engaging, and one might even say inspirational speaker.

The centerpiece of the composer's presentation was two film clips, one from Forrest Gump, the other from this summer's film Contact. Each was presented first without music, then as scored by Silvestri. The Forrest Gump cue showed Forrest as a child, escaping from some childhood bullies (and his leg braces) by running away at super-Gump velocities. In this case Silvestri's commentary focused on spotting, i.e., where would the music begin in this scene? In characterizing his relationship with director Robert Zemeckis, Silvestri emphasized that Zemeckis rarely specifies exactly where he wants music to stop and start within a scene, but at some point during spotting sessions he will inevitably hear Zemeckis say "You're going to play here, aren't you?"

Silvestri stated that his thought process in the running sequence centered on exactly where would be the most effective moment for the music to begin. There were a number of obvious choices: the point at which the bullies begin to taunt Forrest; the point at which the first rock thrown by the bullies hits him in the head; the point when Jenny yells at Forrest to run away; the point at which Forrest actually starts running; the point when the footage changes to slow motion; and the point when Forrest's crutches break away (this was the point during the spotting when Zemeckis said "You're going to play here, right?"). Silvestri found that the most effective point for the music to begin was when Forrest actually began to feel the freedom of running, something completely irrespective of his flight from the bullies.

Regarding Forrest Gump, Silvestri was asked how important it was to come up with a central theme for the movie. The composer related how, after seeing the opening sequence of the film (in which a feather floats down to rest at the feet of Forrest as he's seated at a park bench), he rushed home and very quickly composed the film's opening piano theme, which became the theme of the picture. Robert Zemeckis immediately approved of the theme when Silvestri played a demo version of it, and the composition survived virtually intact from Silvestri's original sketch. "I thought I had it made!" Silvestri recalled. "I'd come up with the main theme for the movie in no time and the director liked it! This was going to be easy!" Unfortunately, the composer soon realized that he had a problem. "It didn't work in the running scene. Then it was like, 'Well, it doesn't work here...it doesn't work here...it doesn't work here... What I realized was, I had scored the feather; I had gotten the essence of that moment, which really summed up the film in a way, but wasn't appropriate for the other scenes in the movie." The piano theme that opened Forrest Gump consequently did not appear again until the feather takes off again at the very end of the film, bookending the story. Silvestri then had to compose a great deal of new material to flesh out the actual storyline of the film.

The sequence from Contact involved Jodie Foster meeting with the mysterious philanthropist played by John Hurt. In contrast to the Gump scene, which focused on the transcendent moment of Forrest discovering the feeling of running, the Contact sequence had to hit a number of dramatic "beats," according to Silvestri. In the scene, Foster meets with Hurt's character on an expensive, extremely high-tech private jet. Hurt's character is mysterious and peculiar, and he first shows Foster a presentation indicating that he has been following her career, and possibly even her personal life, for some time. Hurt then reveals that he knows about the message sent by the aliens from Vega and has found the secret to decoding the alien document. "The music had to get across the strangeness of the John Hurt character, the potential threat of him. There was a kind of James Bond aspect to his character. And when Jodie sees these images of herself that he's put together, there's a threatening aspect, like she's been stalked. At the same time, there's Jodie's excitement that this man has found the answer to the problem she's been trying to solve, which is the key to understanding the alien transmission."

To get across the dual agendas of the scene, Silvestri actually composed two different pieces of music. "There's a dramatic underscore that's acoustic and then I have this electronic music playing against it with a completely different rhythm. Sometimes when you have conflicting elements of a scene that have to be pointed out the answer is to write two completely different cues and combine them. They really don't have to relate to each other musically at all."

After discussion of the two film scenes, Silvestri took questions from the audience, which consisted mostly of composers. One of the key questions was how the composer handled making changes or having cues (or even scores) rejected. Silvestri responded that he had gotten much better at heading off these kinds of communication problems over the years. He recalled his first major job, writing music for the television series CHiPs: "It was the beginning of the second year, the show was very successful, and I felt great because I had a steady job. So when I did the first episode of the second year I just went all out and wrote something that I thought was just spectacular, really great." Silvestri recorded his first cue at the session and went into the booth to see his producer, certain that he was about to be showered with praise. The playback was greeted with a lengthy silence, after which the producer tactfully informed him that he needed to remember that CHiPs starred Erik Estrada and John Wilcox, not Alan Silvestri. "It's not the Alan Silvestri Show," the composer pointed out. "You have to remember that your job is to collaborate and make what's on the screen work better, not just to show off what you can do musically."

Silvestri's description of how he got started in scoring was one of the highlights of the evening. The job was the result of a case of mistaken identity. A man Silvestri was working for (Silvestri was just a guitar player at the time) was asked to write music for a low budget film, The Doberman Gang. "He did what anyone out here does in a situation like that: he said yes," Silvestri remembered. "Unfortunately, this guy knew absolutely nothing about writing music, so he called me up and asked me if I wanted to do it." Silvestri had no composition experience at the time. "I had to have a meeting with the movie producer the next day, so I went to a book store and asked for every book they had on writing music for a movie. Well, there was only one, by Earl Hagen. It was seventy five dollars, which was more than I could afford, but I had to have it so I bought it, and I spent all night reading it. And the next day I watched the film with the producer and sat down with him and kind of amazed myself because I actually had something to say and had ideas for what I wanted to do." The film was ultimately quite successful and Silvestri began to get other offers.

The composer's first orchestral score proved to be an equally serendipitous experience. "I had done Romancing the Stone for Bob Zemeckis, and he met these people who had done a student film called Fandango. They were looking for someone to score their movie and Bob was really high on me after Romancing the Stone and he recommended me. I screened the movie and they had tracked it with classical orchestral music, Shostakovich." It was made clear to Silvestri that the filmmakers wanted music that was equivalent to the classical pieces they had chosen. "I was so intimidated, I put off writing forever. I mean, I was down to the last second on this thing, and I was literally going to tell them that I couldn't do it. I was going to quit the business, and it was to the point where if I would have quit there was no way they'd have time to hire somebody else and have them do it, so I was really going to cause a disaster for everybody concerned." Silvestri explained that the electronic compositions he had created for CHiPs and Romancing the Stone had never challenged him to think in the "vertical" way that an orchestral composer does. "Finally, the last possible night, I just started writing out of sheer desperation. And the first thing I wrote seemed okay. So I wrote some more. And I kept writing all night." Silvestri eventually finished the complete score on time. "My wife was sitting there in the soundstage the day we recorded the first cues. The music was performed and there was a look of shock on her face--she had no idea I was capable of anything like that. She just took one look at me and said, 'We're rich!'"

Throughout the seminar, Silvestri was an energetic, highly personable speaker who communicated his enthusiasm about the film scoring process while displaying a refreshing sense of humor and humility.