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Posted: |
Jan 20, 2008 - 10:52 AM
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By: |
manderley
(Member)
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Every few years we have a thread on "Page Cook".
Here are two posts from a thread in 2005 that I think are relevant, one by Ron Pulliam, who I think, covers the writing area of Cook/Boyer's endeavors very well, and also, immodestly, one by myself, which covers more of the personal area of his life:
Ron Pulliam:
.....For nearly 30 years, Page Cook was a name that carried considerable weight with a large number of film music afficionados throughout the United States. Through his "Soundtrack" column in Films in Review(FIR) the National Board of Review's magazine, Cook championed the masters,encouraged the newcomers and laid waste the pretenders/pretentious.
His delight with film scores could result in all-out raves. His displeasure often called into question a composer's abilities and intelligence, and he often incurred the wrath of his readership following some of his more severe pronouncements. "Puerile" and "execrable" were two of the words you could
count on seeing in a Cook review.
Cook lived in awe of Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann and Miklos Rozsa, none of whom could do any wrong. He was very partial to Friedhofer, North,Waxman, Steiner and Bernstein, and kind to Gold and Moross. Cook could not bear Tiomkin, Barry, Jarre, Nitsche, Conti, Schifrin, or Hefti. He was moderately tolerant of Mancini, who earned his first Cook rave with "Lifeforce." Jarre also earned a moment of Cook praise for his score to "Pope Joan, a film very few ever saw and a score which remains unfamiliar (and Jarre has never, to my knowledge, recorded any of that music for an album). Cook's description of the score left an impression on me that it was unbearably beautiful and one of the greatest ever written. Some of Cook's major raves of the 1980s were for David Shire's "Return to Oz" and Bruce Smeaton's "Iceman."
For some of us, Cook went too far in his dismissals of scores by contemporary composers, such as Bernstein, Goldsmith and Williams. Each, on occasion, was subjected to Cook's musings as to whether or not they might be 'written out.' John Williams delighted Cook in 1977 with "Close Encounters..." and "Star Wars" and later with "The Fury" and "Superman." When "The Empire Strikes Back" came along, Cook gave it a bad review. Ditto with "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It wasn't until "E.T." that Williams could find a kind word about his work. Jerry Goldsmith was riding high on Cook's list with "The Swarm," "Boys From Brazil," "The Chairman" and "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and then took a nose-dive, along with Williams, in Cook's point of view. I cannot remember the last rave over a Bernstein score (it was possibly "Marie Ward" in the mid-80s), but there was faint praise for the Bernstein-conducted Film Music Collection until the release of "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir," and Cook considered this album an unqualified success.
Despite the hardships he placed on conductors and their scores, he also championed the practice of reconstructing and re-recording film scores. "King's Row," "King Kong," "North by Northwest," and "The Best Years of Our Lives" received much advance publicity and high praise upon release.
He also kept us apprised of the Charles Gerhardt-RCA "Classic Film Scores..." series, letting us know what albums we could anticipate.
Page Cook was in an enviable position -- he was the only full-time film music critic employed by a national magazine that I knew of.
It was through him that I learned about films and scores I might never have seen or known to expect. He let most of us know about various things, such as the USC-Alfred Newman Memorial Library Fund, Elmer Bernstein's Film Music CClub, the formation of the Society for the Preservation of Film Music (now called the Film Music Society), and the trials and travails of the early specialty labels like Citadel, Varese Sarabande and Southern Cross (Label X). He related to us, in a series of articles over many months, details behind one of the great debacles in film music history -- the emasculation of Newman's score to "The Greatest Story Ever Told." We might have learned about this eventually by reading Ken Darby's book "Hollywood Holyland," a manuscript from which Cook extracted quotes in one of his columns.
Best of all, however, he gave us the information we needed to make inquiries and to order things that our local record stores would not have otherwise carried or been able to get through their distributors. He opened up the film music world for many of us, and it was in this capacity that he gained respect from us.
Cook's column started in 1963 with a rave review of Newman's "How the West Was Won," and continued into 1992 when he was no longer physically able to meet deadlines. For many years, he would devote a column to the "5 Best Scores" of the year (normally in a Spring issue the following year) and he would spend as much space denouncing the worst scores as he spent on the best. When FIR began offering a separate listing of Cook's "5 Best" lists, the listing started with 1958.
In the late '80s, he all but abandoned reviewing new scores and turned his attention to past scores newly revitalized by the burgeoning laserdisc market.
He devoted two columns to the score of "The Diary of Anne Frank" which was reborn in the Fox restoration on laserdisc (a restoration that brought the film to its roadshow length and included all of Alfred Newman's legendary score, including the exit music).
He also made some about-faces on scores he initially panned. One such score is Kaper's "Mutiny on the Bounty" which fared poorly in Cook's 1962 appraisal. When released on laser in widescreen stereo, Cook analyzed Kaper's work and praised it as one of the best scores of its time, a view many of us had held all along. This reversal of opinion was not unique to re-visits of movies via laser.
In the 80s, Cook made two notorious about-faces that puzzled and amused many. In his first review of John Morris' "The Elephant Man," Cook could barely get past his displeasure over the use of Barber's "Adagio for Strings." "The Elephant Man" fared poorly in its also-ran status in the "5 Best Scores" column for its year. A month or two later, Cook revisited the score based on a colleague's contention that it was a work of great beauty. Cook then reassessed/revised his opinion of the music and praised the score highly, claiming it was one of the best of the decade. Still, it would never appear on any of his "Best" lists. A year or so later, the same thing happened with John Scott's "Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan of the Apes." He attributed his turnabout to British critic Dennis Mann-Riley who took him to task for claiming that all Scott did was raid the works of Sir Edward Elgar. It was at this point that Cook invalidated one of his primary principles: He had always contended that he reviewed a score by seeing the film, never by listening to a soundtrack. In his reassessment, Cook stated he listened to the soundtrack to gather his initial impressions. "Greystoke" was heralded as a contemporary masterwork. Thereafter, both Scott and Morris were treated by Cook as "masters" of film music.
One of the great Cook curiosities for me was that he never -- not at the time of release and not several years later when the Varese "Masters of Film Music" recording was issued -- mentioned Jerry Goldsmith's wonderful and compelling score to "The Final Conflict." The film came out at a time when Cook had already accused Goldsmith of scoring any film that came his way for money. Not reviewing the score in 1982 might be considered an oversight...if he didn't see it, he couldn't review it (and there was no soundtrack album). But it is beyond possibility that he never heard the Varese recording.
Despite the eccentricities of the man, Cook could be fascinating when he turned his attention to a score. For me, his columns were an introduction to a breakdown of a score's parts, and he helped me to see and hear a score in a different way. In some respects, Cook remains for me an arbiter of standards. His seemed to be very high, and I always learned from him.
There were other curiosities, too, and allegations made about hoaxes: Cook would often champion a young composer no one had heard of. He would devote a column to a score no one else had heard and another column to an "interview" with the composer. To this day, I have heard no more about these young composers (who can't be so young anymore).
Two I recall are Scott Lee Hart and Rennie Dawson. Cook also heralded a special recording he said came from the Netherlands called "The Classic Film Music of 20th Century-Fox." He listed the cues, reviewed at least one of them and claimed a second volume was forthcoming.
The album, of course, was available only as an import and would be tough to find. To my knowledge, Cook had the only one that ever existed. Sad to say, it existed only in his mind.
If all of these columns were hoaxes -- and I must say that I believe they were -- they were a violation of trust with his readers, as well as ethically abhorrent. They cast a pall over the legacy of a man who conversed/corresponded with film music giants. There is a great deal of history in the Page Cook legacy, all of which is archived at Brigham Young University.
Some day, the contents of that archive may shed an illumination on film music that will make his all-too-human failings fade away.
During his tenure at Films in Review, I read Cook every month, and I learned a lot from him. I'm grateful his voice was heard during a time when no others were available.....
And here is one of Manderley's:
.....Ron Pulliam.....you've written an absolutely wonderful (and dead-on) summation of Boyer. Thanks so much for putting all those thoughts down for us.
Although I had read Page Cook's column from the beginning, in the 1960s, it wasn't 'til the early '70s, when he wrote very nice reviews of the music in several films I had worked on, that I wrote to him to thank him, after which we became very good friends. It was not until then that I found out his real name was Charles Boyer.
Whenever I was in New York, I visited him, and I once invited him out to Los Angeles for a week which he seemed to enjoy.
I think, though, even to his closest friends, he was a bit of a cipher, and I'm sure Joe Caps would agree on this.
On the one hand he was a sweet, good-natured person with a well-developed sense of humor, and on the other, he was occasionally suicidal, with a well-developed death wish. (I've always thought that his terrible death, via AIDS, was a result of this emotional undercurrent to end it all, played out in the worst way possible.) Charles worshipped the idea of walking into heaven like Richard Burton and Jean Simmons in THE ROBE, backed by a blue-screen filled with clouds and a heavenly orchestra and choir, overseen by Alfred Newman and Ken Darby. Unfortunately, I think Charles' own End Title sequence may not have been quite so melodic or well story-boarded and art-directed.
For most of the time I knew him, he lived with his mother. He once told me his father had passed away in the 1940s, but who knows for sure? The relationship with his mother, Ruth, was a very symbiotic one, and they seemed to support each other's neuroses. (I called to chat one evening, Charles hadn't yet arrived home from work, it was raining, he had forgotten his umbrella, and she was really frantic. .....and Charles was a grown man!) .....Kind of a Norman Bates without the horror.
And although Charles did odd-secretarial and office jobs throughout his time, he was virtually a pauper. Ken Darby was a very close friend and often sent him money to pay for things. On the other hand, I once visited him and he had purchased (because he loved the score so), 10 VHS copies of CLEOPATRA, at a time when double-tape sets like this were about $70-80 each. Other than the copy he had viewed, all of the others were still sealed and wrapped, and when I asked him why he spent so much on so many, he indicated he was afraid a copy would get ruined and he wouldn't have another!
As for the fake columns on non-existent composers, I thought they were amusing and harmless (though I guess I'm in the minority). If you had read his columns in the magazine long enough, you were certainly in on the joke, and looked forward to it. I think his doing this was his response to the critiquing which was then starting in film reviewing by the Cahiers du Cinema and the like, praising the "nouvelle vague" in films and filmmusic. (It should be pointed out that, under other names, Charles also wrote letters to the editor---essentially attacking himself and his musical positions, and including praising Tiomkin---which were posted from various parts of the country.)
Just after his death, I spoke to one of his closest friends and asked how Charles' occasional boyfriend was taking this. The friend said, "What boyfriend?", and I went on to describe the boyfriend and the times and events they shared, as conveyed to me in detailed letter descriptions from Charles. The friend said, "There was no boyfriend, only Charles' vivid imagination!"
In all the years I knew him, I was never quite sure how old Charles was. I knew his birthday was December 7th, but I always thought he was born somewhere between 1949 and 1951 from his references. Recently I have discovered that he was born on December 7, 1944 (which means he started his very influential column when he was 19).
He passed away on January 15, 1994 and I miss talking with him and enjoying the 22-page single-spaced letters from him (.....although I've carefully saved the many I received).
Whatever his faults, and there were many.....whatever his musical prejudices and acclaims, and there were many.....Page Cook remains one of the most important and unique voices in the history of early film music writing.....
What is interesting to me today, almost 15 years after his death, is how many of the Golden Age scores and composers that Cook championed then are now available to us, often in wonderful original soundtrack versions or near-definitive re-recordings. It is so sad to me to realize how much he would have enjoyed that.
I can't reiterate too much how Charles was a two-sided personage, particularly as reflected in the letters he wrote to the editors of FIR under assumed names. From conversations with him I got the impression that the FIR people didn't know the letters were from him (they were sent from various parts of the country apparently by some of his scattered friends and thus were postmarked from everywhere). Generally they attacked his negative positions on scores and composers, sometimes violently, and I've always thought it was his way of balancing out his sometimes extreme critical viewpoints.
Certainly he was much respected by the long-standing composers of the day like Friedhofer, Darby, Newman, etc. who often corresponded with him.
As for the mythical 20th Century-Fox soundtrack compilation album review that had everyone befuddled, I often laughed at that because anyone who was truly collecting soundtracks on a very serious basis and therefore understood the AFM regulations, the studio deals with certain labels, and the release procedures pretty much knew this was a farce. (The label name and number he had concocted was a clever pastiche of a then-bootleg label, I believe, as well as a European-style catalog number unused in the US.) I was always surprised so many people were apparently taken in; Wish fulfillment on Charles' and his audience's part, I'd say. (I've always wished Nick Redman would go back and actually assemble that compilation album for Fox Music so that it actually would finally exist!)
Some years after that we were once talking about how nice it would be to have a "swashbuckler" compilation on LP, with some of our favorites included. Since, in his one-or-two "hoax" columns on non-existent composers he had included photographs of the "composer" in question (....apparently snapshots of a friend), in jest, I suggested that this time he should show a mock-up copy of the non-existent "swashbuckler" album on a nice background, with a disc protruding from the cover with just a bit of the label showing to convince everyone. He took to the idea a bit too much, I thought, and I dropped it immediately. It is ironic that years later we've had a number of compilation CDs devoted to swashbucklers.
As for his birthdate, once again I always felt, from his descriptions that he was born somewhere between 1949 and 1951. I always recall his conversations wherein he recounted how his mother took him to see THE ROBE at the Roxy when he was very young, but that it had made a great impression on him. I assumed he was probably 4-5-6. It was only a few years ago that I was perusing the Social Security indexes of deceased persons searching for a distant family member that I had the idea of typing in Charles' name and probable residence at death. Up came 1944 for his birth year, together with the proper name and birth month and date I had already known.
I discovered Films in Review magazine in the late '50s and immediately subscribed, but eventually it was only because of the Page Cook columns and the extremely interesting and informative and extensive Letters to the Editor section in the back that I kept it coming until Cook's death. (I'm now 68, and to this day I still don't know who the National Board of Review---which published the magazines and gives out the awards each year---really are. A very curious organization.....)
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Not about Page, but I recently got some early 50s bound volumes of FIR and was reading through some reviews of films to see what certain now thought of classics were thought of then. And there was a young feller reviewing films (in his very early twenties) - his name? Steve Sondheim.
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Posted: |
Jan 20, 2008 - 1:10 PM
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By: |
manderley
(Member)
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.....Thank you Manderley! I’m always fascinated by your reminiscences of Page Cook/Charles Boyer. Keep those recollections coming!
In case anyone’s curious, here are Cook’s top five scores up to 1974. If someone could post a more up-to-date list, I’m sure it’d be much appreciated.
THE FIVE BEST FILM SCORES OF THE YEARS 1959 THROUGH 1974 by PAGE COOK as published and copyrighted (1975) by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, Inc.
1959
1) THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK (Newman)
2) BEN-HUR (Rozsa)
3) THE NUN'S STORY (Waxman)
4) THE MIRACLE (Bernstein)
5) ON THE BEACH (Gold)
1960
1) SPARTACUS (North)
2) THE STORY OF RUTH (Waxman)
3) PSYCHO (Herrmann)
4) ELMER GANTRY (Previn)
5) HOME FROM THE HILL (Kaper)
1961
1) EL CID (Rozsa)
2) KING OF KINGS (Rozsa)
3) SUMMER AND SMOKE (Bernstein)
4) ONE EYED JACKS (Friedhofer)
5) BACK STREET (Skinner)
1962
1) THE COUNTERFEIT TRAITOR (Newman)
2) TARAS BULBA (Waxman) and
HEMINGWAY'S ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG MAN (Waxman)
3) THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE (Previn)
4) TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (Bernstein)
5) THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (Fried)
1963
1) HOW THE WEST WAS WON (Newman and Darby)
2) SODOM AND GOMORRAH (Rozsa)
3) CLEOPATRA (North)
4) IRMA LA DOUCE (Previn)
5) THE V.I.P.S (Rozsa)
1964
1) MARNIE (Herrmann)
2) CHEYENNE AUTUMN (North)
3) YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE (Steiner)
4) ONE POTATO, TWO POTATO (Fried)
5) RIO CONCHOS (Goldsmith) and
DEAD RINGER (Previn)
1965
1) THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD (Newman)
2) JOY IN THE MORNING (Herrmann)
3) THE WAR LORD (Moross)
4) SHENANDOAH (Skinner)
5) THE HALLELUJAH TRAIL (Bernstein)
1966
1) FAHRENHEIT 451 (Herrmann)
2) NEVADA SMITH (Newman)
3) THE BLUE MAX (Goldsmith)
4) HAWAII (Bernstein)
5) LOST COMMAND (Waxman)
1967
1) CAMELOT (Newman and Darby)
2) THE TAMING OF THE SHREW (Rota)
3) ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (Nascimbene)
4) THE WAY WEST (Kaper)
5) THE WHISPERERS (Barry)
1968
1) WILL PENNY (Raksin)
2) THE POWER (Rozsa)
3) FIRECREEK (Newman)
4) THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (Herrmann)
5) ROMEO AND JULIET (Rota)
1969
1) A WALK WITH LOVE AND DEATH (Delerue)
2) WHERE'S JACK? (Bernstein)
3) TWISTED NERVE (Herrmann)
4) WHATEVER HAPPPENED TO AUNT ALICE? (Fried)
5) JUSTINE (Goldsmith) and
THE CHAIRMAN (Goldsmith)
1970
1) AIRPORT (Newman)
2) THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (Rozsa)
3) A WALK IN THE SPRING RAIN (Bernstein)
4) PATTON (Goldsmith)
5) THE LIGHTHOUSE (Scott Lee Hart)
1971
1) THE NIGHT DIGGER (Herrmann)
2) WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? (Raksin)
3) JANE EYRE (Williams)
4) VON RICHTHOFEN AND BROWN (Friedhofer)
5) BIG JAKE (Bernstein)
1972
1) DEATH BE NOT PROUD (Scott Lee Hart)
2) POPE JOAN (Jarre)
3) THE OTHER (Goldsmith)
4) THE NIGHTCOMERS (Fielding)
5) THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (Williams)
1973
1) SISTERS (Herrmann)
2) PRIVATE PARTS (Friedhofer)
3) CRYPT OF THE LIVING DEAD (Lambro)
4) LADY CAROLINE LAMB (Bennett)
5) PAPILLON (Goldsmith)
1974
1) THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD (Rozsa)
2) THE ABDICATION (Rota)
3) SHANKS (North)
4) THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK (Bernstein)
5) CAPTAIN KRONOS, VAMPIRE HUNTER (Laurie
Johnson).....
.....and thank you, John Smith!
When I read that list and listen to the brickbats often lobbed in Cook's direction, I have to say that the lists above seem pretty respectable to me.
We don't often remember what's left out years later (just as with Oscar's nominations), but I'd find it hard to argue with most of Cook's choices, many of which are still certified classics nearly 40 years later.
The "placer" on several lists, one "Scott Lee Hart" is, of course, fictitious. Perhaps it's Joe Gershenson's brother! 
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Continuing the list of Page Cook's top five scores:
1980
1) The Elephant Man (Morris)
2) Carny (North)
3) Pilate's Easter (Edward David Zeliff)
4) Tess (Philippe Sarde)
5) The Awakening (Claude Bolling); The Final Countdown (John Scott)
1981
1) Eye of the Needle (Rozsa)
2) Ghost Story (Sarde)
3) Dragonslayer (North)
4) History of the World, Part 1 (Morris)
5) Masada (Goldsmith)
Interesting and Possibly Unimportant Factiod: Cook revised these 2 years since the publication of the articles themselves, and what you have above is the revised version.
I'll have to look at home to find the original list.
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Completeing the list of Page Cook's top five film scores:
1985
Thank you for listing the years after 1985. I never kept up with his writing after that point and was curious to see what they were.
Interesting how the listings changed (different composers, no list of 5, etc.)
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Not to mention Rennie Dawson and Edward David Zeliff!
I think what started this thread was the revelation that Zeliff was a real person.
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The "placer" on several lists, one "Scott Lee Hart" is, of course, fictitious. Perhaps it's Joe Gershenson's brother!
Not to mention Rennie Dawson
Interesting. I seem to remember a photo of Dawson appearing in an issue.
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Posted: |
Jan 20, 2008 - 4:48 PM
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By: |
John Smith
(Member)
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As everyone’s aware, Page Cook loathed Maurice Jarre’s music and was only too happy to display that loathing in an array of vitriolic one-liners. His cruel put-down of Shogun (or was it Tai-Pan?) stands as a prime exemplar: “There’s not a scrap of musicality in the entire score – nor, I daresay, music.” So it was with considerable surprise that I read Jarre’s name on the 1972 best-of-the-year list – second only to Scott Lee Hart and his score for Death Be Not Proud. When I later discovered that both Hart and DBNP were products of Cook’s fecund imagination, I began to wonder why Cook had placed them in prime position where they’d pique maximum curiosity and thus more likely expose Cook’s deceit. I had to wait until 2003 – and a Scott Bettencourt FSD article – for a possible answer:
“In his wrap-up of 1972's scores, Cook wrote how Stephen Cosgrove was originally hired to score the feature Death Be Not Proud (directed by Paul Emery, adapted by Bertrand Gasciogne from a short story by Elliot Lytton) but was replaced by Scott Lee Hart, whose score for the film Cook considered to be the finest of the year.
Cook devoted thirteen paragraphs of his column to Death Be Not Proud, its scores and its composers (as well the advice Cook gave to its makers on a replacement composer), which makes it even more distressing that the film, Emery, Gasciogne, Lytton, Hart and Cosgrove are all apparently completely imaginary. In this case, the only possible explanation I can conceive of is that, since Maurice Jarre's Pope Joan was the number 2 score on the list and Cook was usually a Jarre hater, he was so appalled at the thought of naming a Jarre composition the best of the year that he felt the need to fantasize a better score just to take the sting off.”
So now we know…
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Royal S Brown is no lover of Jarre either, from memory.
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A very odd duck, any way you look at him. His glowing liner notes for the Gerhardt Alfred Newman release and his subsequent scathing pan of the album in FIR certainly fit the pattern.
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