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1940 (13th Academy Awards)
MUSIC (Original Score)
Arizona -- Victor Young
The Dark Command -- Victor Young
The Fight for Life -- Louis Gruenberg
The Great Dictator -- Meredith Willson
The House of the Seven Gables -- Frank Skinner
The Howards of Virginia -- Richard Hageman
The Letter -- Max Steiner
The Long Voyage Home -- Richard Hageman
The Mark of Zorro -- Alfred Newman
My Favorite Wife -- Roy Webb
North West Mounted Police -- Victor Young
One Million B.C. -- Werner Heymann
Our Town -- Aaron Copland
*Pinocchio -- Leigh Harline, Paul J. Smith, Ned Washington
Rebecca -- Franz Waxman
The Thief of Bagdad -- Miklos Rozsa
Waterloo Bridge -- Herbert Stothart
MUSIC (Scoring)
Arise, My Love -- Victor Young
Hit Parade of 1941 -- Cy Feuer
Irene -- Anthony Collins
Our Town -- Aaron Copland
The Sea Hawk -- Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Second Chorus -- Artie Shaw
Spring Parade -- Charles Previn
Strike Up the Band -- Roger Edens, Georgie Stoll
*Tin Pan Alley -- Alfred Newman
It was a terrific year, obviously. Some interesting things about it (besides the multitude of nominees):
Meredith Willson, much better known as creator of "The Music Man," received his first of two Oscar nominations for scoring Chaplin's "The Great Dictator." (His second nom came the following year for "The Little Foxes.")
Artie Shaw, much better known as a jazz clarinetist and big-band leader, received two nominations (one for song, the other for "scoring") for a kinda-crummy, but sorta-fun, minor Fred Astaire musical "Second Chorus." In later years Astaire expressed some embarrassment at having made it and at how it turned out. It's fallen into the public domain and is now often seen (and sold) in poor-condition-print DVDs, along with countless other unfortunate p.d. titles, such as "Charade," "The Last Time I Saw Paris," "Till the Clouds Roll By" and Astaire's own "Royal Wedding."
Disney beat out some real heavyweight contenders that year with the score of "Pinocchio." It reminds me a little of how the Disney animated scores' winning streak in the early '90s caused a change in the music category rules. (Not that I don't also love the "Pinocchio" score, of course.)
I guess the thing that struck me the oddest was Copland's "Our Town" appearing in BOTH categories, and Korngold's "The Sea Hawk" & Young's "Arise, My Love" appearing only in "Scoring" . . . alongside Artie Shaw's "Second Chorus"!
Can anyone shed any light on what happened there?
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Thanks for the bump, johnbijl. Looks like Ludwig put the question much more clearly and succinctly, but what a can of worms! It is indeed amusing, though also frightening in a way, to think you'd need an accompanying diagram to figure out who the nominees should be, but I'm sure there are points of federal and state law that can be just as complicated.
The upside of having so many nominees per category, from the standpoint of posterity, is that it gives the movie music buff a good number of recommendations for good scores. Good luck to the poor Academy members tasked with picking the winners, though.
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Posted: |
Jul 13, 2015 - 4:55 AM
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By: |
manderley
(Member)
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I don't recall the detailed differences in each of the two categories as it pertains to the actual work of scoring, but it should be noted that in each of the two categories the major studios and/or major independents (like Selznick-International Studios, Walter Wanger Productions, Hal Roach Productions, Frank Lloyd Pictures, etc) can only appear once in the listing.
Therefore, each studio or independent production company (and probably the music department, specifically) selects and submits its own nominee, and thus each gets a fair whack at the final award, regardless of the composer/nominee.
It is for that reason that in category one, Victor Young can be submitted 3 times, once for his Republic Pictures work, THE DARK COMMAND, once for his Columbia Pictures work, ARIZONA, and once for his Paramount Pictures work, NORTH WEST MOUNTED POLICE.....and Richard Hageman can deliver two---one for Walter Wanger Productions' THE LONG VOYAGE HOME (released through United Artists), and one for the Frank Lloyd Pictures' production THE HOWARDS OF VIRGINIA (released through Columbia).
Hollywood's history always becomes clearer if you totally forget the creative aspects of picture-making and learn to concentrate on the social history (....who's sleeping with who, who dislikes who, who's trying to one-up who, who's been publicly bad, etc.....) and the business history (....who's contracted to who, who's getting the big bucks, who's career is on the skids, who's blackmailing who, who owes gambling debts to who, etc.).....
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I see what you mean . . . it's a MERITOCRACY.
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Posted: |
Jul 13, 2015 - 9:14 PM
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By: |
PFK
(Member)
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1940 (13th Academy Awards)
MUSIC (Original Score)
Arizona -- Victor Young
The Dark Command -- Victor Young
The Fight for Life -- Louis Gruenberg
The Great Dictator -- Meredith Willson
The House of the Seven Gables -- Frank Skinner
The Howards of Virginia -- Richard Hageman
The Letter -- Max Steiner
The Long Voyage Home -- Richard Hageman
The Mark of Zorro -- Alfred Newman
My Favorite Wife -- Roy Webb
North West Mounted Police -- Victor Young
One Million B.C. -- Werner Heymann
Our Town -- Aaron Copland
*Pinocchio -- Leigh Harline, Paul J. Smith, Ned Washington
Rebecca -- Franz Waxman
The Thief of Bagdad -- Miklos Rozsa
Waterloo Bridge -- Herbert Stothart
MUSIC (Scoring)
Arise, My Love -- Victor Young
Hit Parade of 1941 -- Cy Feuer
Irene -- Anthony Collins
Our Town -- Aaron Copland
The Sea Hawk -- Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Second Chorus -- Artie Shaw
Spring Parade -- Charles Previn
Strike Up the Band -- Roger Edens, Georgie Stoll
*Tin Pan Alley -- Alfred Newman
It was a terrific year, obviously. Some interesting things about it (besides the multitude of nominees):
Meredith Willson, much better known as creator of "The Music Man," received his first of two Oscar nominations for scoring Chaplin's "The Great Dictator." (His second nom came the following year for "The Little Foxes.")
Artie Shaw, much better known as a jazz clarinetist and big-band leader, received two nominations (one for song, the other for "scoring") for a kinda-crummy, but sorta-fun, minor Fred Astaire musical "Second Chorus." In later years Astaire expressed some embarrassment at having made it and at how it turned out. It's fallen into the public domain and is now often seen (and sold) in poor-condition-print DVDs, along with countless other unfortunate p.d. titles, such as "Charade," "The Last Time I Saw Paris," "Till the Clouds Roll By" and Astaire's own "Royal Wedding."
Disney beat out some real heavyweight contenders that year with the score of "Pinocchio." It reminds me a little of how the Disney animated scores' winning streak in the early '90s caused a change in the music category rules. (Not that I don't also love the "Pinocchio" score, of course.)
I guess the thing that struck me the oddest was Copland's "Our Town" appearing in BOTH categories, and Korngold's "The Sea Hawk" & Young's "Arise, My Love" appearing only in "Scoring" . . . alongside Artie Shaw's "Second Chorus"!
Can anyone shed any light on what happened there?
Man, look at those names in 1940: Young, Steiner, Waxman, Korngold, Webb, Hageman, Skinner, Copland, Newman, Stothart, Harline etc. We'll never see a year like that again!
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I hope I'll never see a year like 2008 again! Back then, I missed this thread completely by getting hit by a bus.
SECOND CHORUS can now finally be seen in BluRay visual quality, though it's a shame they didn't include as supplemental material the cut number, "Me and the Ghost Upstairs," the only known instance of Astaire dancing on screen partnered by his choreographer and friend Hermes Pan. At present, it can only be seen, if that's the word, in a very poor dupe on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9APvN68fwz8
At a Cinematheque screening event in his honor years ago, Artie Shaw explained that Astaire was not the only one embarrassed by SECOND CHORUS, though Shaw seemed more abashed at an old Paramount short whose narrator declared that an obviously pre-composed and arranged piece represented an example of a "jam session.") Originally, the feature-length film was going to be purely a starring vehicle for Shaw, and its rather serious and arcane subject matter was to be the difficulty faced by a jazz musician who is even briefly absent from the scene trying to remain hip to this ever-evolving form of music. Came the day when, to Shaw's surprise, the foreign born producer Boris Morros informed him jubilantly that he had just signed "Fred Ashtaire" to his picture.
Shaw of course was always very serious about his music, and he managed to write and perform for SECOND CHORUS a sort of miniature clarinet concerto, which might partly account for his Oscar nomination. A modern re-recording of this piece exists on CD.
http://www.amazon.com/American-Classics-Copland/dp/B00005UW1Z/ref=sr_1_4?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1436855333&sr=1-4&keywords=concerto+for+clarinet+by+artie+shaw
Personally, I've always felt that SECOND CHORUS would have been a very good picture if only it hadn't been so stingy with Fred's footwork. (Absent "Ghost Upstairs," only 2 real Astaire numbers remain, though he also gets to throw in a brief parody of Russian folk dancing.) A lot of the humor, apparently abetted by lyricist/script contributor Johnny Mercer, is delightfully off beat, and expertly executed by Astaire and onscreen rival Burgess Meredith. Off screen, Meredith ended up marrying Paulette Goddard. (Oh, yes, that reminds me of one other thing that might have made SECOND CHORUS a better picture: a co-star who knew how to dance.)
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Incidentally, the liner notes by Mr. Brock for his wonderful new CD of MODERN TIMES claims that Chaplin composed the score for all his subsequent feature films, but the onscreen credits for THE GREAT DICTATOR seem to indicate that this score was an exception, composed by Meredith Willson, and the Oscar nomination -- if it can be relied on, something which this thread obviously calls into question -- would seem to bear this out. Was this a case of Willson merely assisting Chaplin, a la Raksin on MODERN TIMES? According to the credit listing at TCM, Willson was the composer, and HIS assistant was Max Terr...
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Posted: |
Jul 14, 2015 - 4:21 AM
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By: |
manderley
(Member)
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Incidentally, the liner notes by Mr. Brock for his wonderful new CD of MODERN TIMES claims that Chaplin composed the score for all his subsequent feature films, but the onscreen credits for THE GREAT DICTATOR seem to indicate that this score was an exception, composed by Meredith Willson, and the Oscar nomination -- if it can be relied on, something which this thread obviously calls into question -- would seem to bear this out. Was this a case of Willson merely assisting Chaplin, a la Raksin on MODERN TIMES? According to the credit listing at TCM, Willson was the composer, and HIS assistant was Max Terr...
I've always assumed, and I suspect I am joined by others, that Chaplin was barely more than a "hummer"---or else someone who could pick out key notes of a melody on a piano---after which a skilled composer wrote them up, arranged them into a score for each scene, and orchestrated them for a full orchestra.
Has anyone EVER seen any first draft original music composition manuscripts for ANY Chaplin film in which at least 50% of the score is in at least 3-4 staves and in Chaplin's own hand???
While Chaplin's melodic skills are not really in question, I personally think his compositional skills have always been a fiction very generously adhered to by his musician friends. I've always wished a skilled musicologist would research this in detail and write a strong paper about his findings and detail the depth and extent of Chaplin as a composer.
In several scattered conversations I had with David Raksin over the years, it always seemed to me that he was very reticent about detailing his day-to-day involvement with Chaplin on MODERN TIMES even 50 years after the fact. Did privacy clause agreements come with employment contracts even back in 1936???
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Incidentally, the liner notes by Mr. Brock for his wonderful new CD of MODERN TIMES claims that Chaplin composed the score for all his subsequent feature films, but the onscreen credits for THE GREAT DICTATOR seem to indicate that this score was an exception, composed by Meredith Willson, and the Oscar nomination -- if it can be relied on, something which this thread obviously calls into question -- would seem to bear this out. Was this a case of Willson merely assisting Chaplin, a la Raksin on MODERN TIMES? According to the credit listing at TCM, Willson was the composer, and HIS assistant was Max Terr...
Willson was a well-known composer for the concert hall and Broadway, he would not have accepted work without a credit. But the most important sequence is from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde Liebestod anyway. There's not a whole lot of original score involved.
I saw an interview with Raksin many years ago in which he said that he was sitting at the piano during the scoring of MODERN TIMES and Chaplin whistled the themes to him, which he would then repeat on the piano to make sure he got exactly what Chaplin wanted. That means he and Edward Powell actually wrote the incidental music based on those themes.
Chaplin however was certainly more invested in the scores for his films that almost *any* other director, including Hitchcock.
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Incidentally, the liner notes by Mr. Brock for his wonderful new CD of MODERN TIMES claims that Chaplin composed the score for all his subsequent feature films, but the onscreen credits for THE GREAT DICTATOR seem to indicate that this score was an exception, composed by Meredith Willson, and the Oscar nomination -- if it can be relied on, something which this thread obviously calls into question -- would seem to bear this out. Was this a case of Willson merely assisting Chaplin, a la Raksin on MODERN TIMES? According to the credit listing at TCM, Willson was the composer, and HIS assistant was Max Terr...
Willson was a well-known composer for the concert hall and Broadway, he would not have accepted work without a credit. But the most important sequence is from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde Liebestod anyway. There's not a whole lot of original score involved.
I saw an interview with Raksin many years ago in which he said that he was sitting at the piano during the scoring of MODERN TIMES and Chaplin whistled the themes to him, which he would then repeat on the piano to make sure he got exactly what Chaplin wanted. That means he and Edward Powell actually wrote the incidental music based on those themes.
Chaplin however was certainly more invested in the scores for his films that almost *any* other director, including Hitchcock.
I'm not a Chaplin expert in any way, but I don't recall any quotations of the Liebestod from Tristan anywhere in The Great Dictator (it's also been a while since I've seen the whole film). However, the famous scene of Hynkel's ballet with the globe does quote the Act I prelude from Wagner's Lohengrin.
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I remembered wrongly. I meant the Lohengrin quote in the globus balloon ballet.
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That's okay, we all knew what you meant.
Manderley, do you plan on getting this splendid MODERN TIMES CD? If so, I'd be very interested in your thoughts about Brock's liner notes which go into more detail than I, for one, have ever seen before about Chaplin's processes with his collaborators. It may jibe with your/our understanding up until now, or it may offer a new perspective, or both...
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