Morning Becomes Goldsmith

Report by Jeff Bond

On February 7, composer Jerry Goldsmith appeared on the radio program Morning Becomes Eclectic and had a wide-ranging, hour-long conversation with host Chris Deritis. As a public service (and because Jerry's waiting for a certain infernal region to ice over before he grants us losers at FSM an interview), here are a few highlights:

Goldsmith started off by discussing the Oscar nominations, which were announced this year on his birthday, February 10. "It's a great day," he said. "You go to bed the night before and set the alarm for 7 o'clock, but you don't want it to go off, because hopefully the phone will ring at 5:30. So if you wake up to your alarm it's gonna be a bad day. But if somebody interrupts your sleep with a phone call it's gonna be a great day. Fortunately [this year] the phone rang."

Remarking on hearing his theme from The Man From UNCLE being performed, Goldsmith said "It's funny; that theme is kind of a jazzy piece, and when I was growing up I wasn't allowed to even listen to jazz. It was a strictly classical household. When I got into the commercial business the needs have been everything from strict classical to rock and roll. The present day rock-pop stuff is kind of elusive to me," Goldsmith laughed. "I have to rely on my sons to guide me in that direction."

Discussing his replacement score for Chinatown, Goldsmith remarked on how he'd been fortunate that, on the few films where his scores have been replaced, the result was that the films "went from nowhere to complete obscurity! If I told you the name of such-and-such a film I did the score to and it got dumped, you'd have no idea what I was talking about." (anyone remember Gladiator or The Public Eye?) He said that was generally the case with any movie which had a score rejected, except for, he quickly added, Chinatown and Air Force One (on which he did the final score).

Goldsmith confirmed that he would be scoring this fall's new Star Trek film as he discussed how he prefers to work on a variety of different film projects. "The reason I can do four or five pictures a year is that they're all different. It gives me a chance to try different things. Ultra-violent films I just don't want to do."

When Deritis asked if he got to watch the entire, completed film before writing his score, Goldsmith quickly replied "Not any more! Used to be; now I'm lucky if I have any film to write to at all! Schedules have been truncated a great deal. Years ago I'd have ten weeks to write a score; now I'm lucky if I have five weeks. Special effects I don't even see; they tell you what's going to be there and you write music to it and hope it fits." Goldsmith insisted, however, that he was not able to begin working on a score based on a script alone. "I can't tell you what the music's going to be like from the script because that's only half the realization," he explained. "It's not the complete vision." Asked about the technique of providing music to a film based on the script, Goldsmith recalled the time Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos was asked to score the film Green Mansions. Villa-Lobos was provided with the script, and later arrived in Hollywood to work on the picture with a completed score in hand. "Of course, it didn't fit!" Goldsmith recalled. "I remember the score was lying around at MGM for years and Andre Previn and I kept trying to think of a way that we could rip it off! I mean, he was a great composer, and it was a huge score."

Goldsmith related his oft-told "I hear voices" story about composing music for The Omen. After telling the producer he thought voices would work for the movie, Goldsmith had second thoughts. "What are you going to do with the voices? Are you going to have them oooh and aaahh for two hours? I got this idea of doing some kind of dark thing with a mass and I called a choral director in London that I'd worked with before and said that maybe some kind of Latin mass or text would work, and he gave me the text to some mass. It really worked great and it was fun, because you start writing music to Latin and it almost writes itself. It doesn't take a lot of brains; the words kind of dictate the music."

Goldsmith waxed at length about how much he enjoyed scoring First Knight, but tripped up on the name of the character Sean Connery played before Chris Deritis remembered it was King Arthur. "I had a senior moment, there!" Goldsmith laughed. Asked if there were any directors he'd like to work with, Goldsmith replied "I'd love to do a movie with Ken Russell. He's wild and wacky and he really understands music. I'd do anything to work with him; unfortunately he's not making very many pictures now. And I guess the other one is Franco Zefferelli, because he also has a wonderful love and knowledge of music.

After referring to the "ugly face of electronics" rearing its head when he had begun working on Planet of the Apes in 1968, Goldsmith quickly pointed out that he certainly wasn't against using electronics in his scores. "I was at the point where I went way overboard with them and now I've kind of pulled back and I use them in more moderation," Goldsmith explained. "I still use them because I think it's like a whole new section of the orchestra. I hear things in my head that I can have produced electronically that I would never be able to create acoustically, although if Stravinsky were alive today, maybe he could!"

Finally, Goldsmith talked about writing the new fanfare for this year's Academy Awards. "I was called last year by [Motion Picture Academy President] Arthur Hiller, who said I have a favor to ask of you and an honor," Goldsmith recalled. "I said, 'Give me the honor.' And he said they wanted a theme written for the Academy Awards; there's never been one before and it's about time. And I said I would love to. Then I said, "What's the favor?" He said "We can't pay you." I said fine! And I stopped to think about it: of all the composers in the world, they asked me. It didn't really dawn on me until last week we recorded it, and there was all the press and television, and it was like my 15 minutes. You can win all the nominations and all the awards but this one is the biggest award I think I can ever have."

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