Which, in turn, prompted me to send this e-message to the show's producer/host:
Dear John,
We met last year at your annual Musso Oscar bash, and prior to that via e-mail, when you kindly identified for me some of your wonderful Off-Ramp bumper music.
Speaking of music...
Caught the show last night. Did you know it was Alex North's 106th birthday? The "2001" piece conveyed the broad outline of the Kubrick/North saga, but I question some of its accuracy. To begin with, Wikipedia to the contrary notwithstanding, Alex North had nothing to do with Laurie Johnson's score for "Dr. Strangelove." In my opinion, Mr. Curtis's essay betrays a lack of understanding of Kubrick's autocratic methods and lets the director off the hook for his boorish behavior to his composer. The famously willful control-freak Kubrick would never have made a decision to opt for his temp tracks instead of an original score, or any other major modification on his picture, because studio executives asked him to do it. The fact that Kubrick forever after continued to use pre-existing music in his films bespeaks his own preference, (though composer Leonard Rosenman, who won an Oscar for supervising the "Barry Lyndon" classical score selections, personally thought Kubrick was "nuts" to take that approach to his pictures).
Alex North didn't discover Kubrick's switch-over shortly before the film's opening, he had that particular shock sitting in the audience at the gala "2001" premiere. Kubrick had ample opportunity to communicate his intentions to North before that event, but he never revealed his intentions to North when he enigmatically told the composer that the score he had thus far written was sufficient and no more music would be required.
On a personal note, (no pun intended), I've always agreed with Mr. Rosenman's opinion of Kubrick's scoring proclivities. The master director I think was being disingenuous when he said that even the best film composer could never equal Beethoven et al, and I think Mr. Curtis's unquestioning acceptance of that statement is unfortunate, even for a classical music correspondent. For one thing, Kubrick chose his pre-existing music from contemporary composers, not just the old masters. More to the point, the musical requirement of any given movie is unique to itself, and the challenges involved are not the same challenges faced by a musician composing purely for the concert hall. There's no way a needle-drop Beethoven score could have done for "Spartacus" what North's score, a masterpiece of 20th Century music, accomplished. The fact that, on his later films, Mr. Kubrick chose not to work with a composer, alone among all the other artists and craftspeople in that most collaborative of mediums, was in my opinion a tragic flaw in his undeniable filmic genius.
This thread reminds me of a subtopic that was brought up years ago in another "2001" music thread, but which was left unresolved. It was about other noteworthy (insert snicker here) uses of Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" in movies, predating Kubrick's most famous one. I am only aware of the documentary "The Epic That Never Was" (1965) about Laughton's unfinished film of "I, Claudius."
However, someone here at the board mentioned an earlier use, perhaps as early as the '30s or '40s, in a British comedy which he couldn't quite remember.
Okay, further Googling has helped me to turn up the intriguing post that's been bothering me for years.
Posted: Oct 30, 2013 - 9:06 AM By: Ken Longworth (Member)
. . . And a few years after I first saw 2001, I viewed an English comedy from the end of the 1940s in which the Thus Sprach Zarathustra theme was used to make a tongue-in-cheek comment about some of the characters' behaviour. It was a better use of the music than Kubrick's, despite the fact that the music is now invariably associated with 2001.
So . . . PAGING MR. LONGWORTH!
I wonder if I'm the only one here who wishes you could remember any further details . . .
I've always loved Kubrick, but have long maintained he was pretty much a musical idiot. His only magnificently scored film is SPARTACUS and that's probably Kirk Douglas' doing (happy 100th!). His other film's scores, including 2001, despite its influence, are "meh" at best, and probably would have been better with original music, depending on the composer. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE worked because Beethoven was integral to the plot and the main character listened to classical music. BARRY LYNDON also fared better because the music generally fit the period and...well, Leonard Rosenman).
I've always been a staunch defender of Kubrick's musical ideology, as I am any director who usually prefers to use existing music in their films (Tarantino, Allen, Scorsese, Von Trier etc.) or no non-diegetic music at all. It's his or her vision that is the most important, not the composer's. That being said, I obviously do not support poor treatment of composers -- like not telling them about the musical changes.
But the story of WHEN North was told about the 2001 rejection varies greatly -- some say it was the gala premiere, others say it was an early pre-screening/test screening-type thing. Which is true?
I wish I had handy my copy of the Alex North biography book. Anybody...? The Henderson bio quotes North from another book (The Making of Kubrick's 2001, ed. Jerome Agel): "I went to a screening in New York, and there were most of the temporary tracks." Not a lot of detail there ...
I've always been a staunch defender of Kubrick's musical ideology, as I am any director who usually prefers to use existing music in their films (Tarantino, Allen, Scorsese, Von Trier etc.) or no non-diegetic music at all. It's his or her vision that is the most important, not the composer's. That being said, I obviously do not support poor treatment of composers -- like not telling them about the musical changes.
But the story of WHEN North was told about the 2001 rejection varies greatly -- some say it was the gala premiere, others say it was an early pre-screening/test screening-type thing. Which is true?
He went to the premiere in New York in April, 1968 xpecting to hear what music he had done in the movie. He knew Kubrick was still wedded to using the temp music he had when North composed and recorded his music in London, but he still expected to hear his stuff in the movie too. He was devastated when he discovered Kubrick had used none of it. We covered this in detail in another thread several months ago.
The true story is that Kubrick was so dang happy with his "Temp" Score of the Light Classics...He decided to keep it in. No matter what Alex North wrote. This is a long article about 2001 music and Alex North, and what Kubrick was doing...If it has been posted before...i don't remember...
This is Stanley Kubrick speaking about Film Music...and never mentioned Alex North...but he was...
When I had completed the editing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I had laid in temporary music tracks for almost all of the music which was eventually used in the film. Then, in the normal way, I engaged the services of a distinguished film composer to write the score. Although he and I went over the picture very carefully, and he listened to these temporary tracks (Strauss, Ligeti, Khatchaturian) and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musical objectives of each sequence he, nevertheless, wrote and recorded a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had listened to, and much more serious than that, a score which, in my opinion, was completely inadequate for the film. With the premiere looming up, I had no time left even to think about another score being written, and had I not been able to use the music I had already selected for the temporary tracks I don’t know what I would have done. The composer’s agent phoned Robert O’Brien, the then head of MGM, to warn him that if I didn’t use his client’s score the film would not make its premiere date. But in that instance, as in all others, O’Brien trusted my judgement
You're all just saying common knowledge here. Still no confirmation as to whether it was a private studio screening or the gala premiere. Seems like the location and circumstance varies depending on which source you use.
In fairness to Mr. Curtis, I must amend one of my counterpoints to his report. There are, I've learned since writing my Dec. 5 e-mail, differing versions of exactly when North learned about Kubrick jettisoning his score. On at least two separate occasions, years apart, North had told the story of his unpleasant surprise "at a screening" and "at the opening," but there is no definitive proof that the fateful event was the actual premiere or an earlier screening. Mr. Curtis' version on that one point, therefor, does fit the facts so far as they are known.
