Fast-forward to the present, and Lipman has also scored a B horror film called Cyst, about a mad doctor who creates a revolting monster. “It’s an icky, silly film,” he says, describing his start on the project. “A couple of years ago, this young filmmaker, Tyler Russell, made a film. He was working in L.A. for about five, six years as a camera man and decided to try out being a director. So, he came [to Texas], and he found this guy, George Hardy—who’s a dentist, really, but who had also been the star of this old cult film called Troll 2. They made a film called Texas Cotton, and they needed a composer—a cheap one. And I was just starting out!” Russell and Hardy were looking for someone with orchestral experience, and Lipman fit the criteria. “A couple of years later, they wanted to make another bad B cult movie. So, they decided to do a horror film about a doctor and they literally wrote the script over the weekend.”

The resulting score covers the film almost wall-to-wall, and it gave the composer the opportunity to sink his teeth into some big moments. In the very beginning, over the opening titles, Lipman introduces the star of his score, the violin. “The violin is the central character, Patty. We agreed that violin would be her, and the organ would be the evil doctor. So, rather cliché. But that was the only straight-ahead, orchestral piece on the score,” he says. “As soon as you get into the film, you start to hear guitar and a jazz quartet with flute. When the orchestral music comes back at the end, it’s big and pounding as the monsters devour their victims.”

He comments that Cyst was largely temped with early Jerry Goldsmith, like his episodes of The Twilight Zone. “They really wanted that vibe. The first stuff I gave [Russell] was too big—they wanted it to be minimal and sinewy, so I really went to school on Jerry Goldsmith’s stock. And I was really impressed with the economy of how they used to make records and scores back in the ’60s, where they could only afford one recording day. You could hear errors on the score. You could hear little edits, little clicks and things like that.” In the spirit of this economy, Lipman recorded the instruments himself and used those recordings to sweeten his soft synths.

One instrument that he did borrow and learn to play was a theremin. Rather than rely on an admittedly good library of samples, Lipman wanted the authentic instrument, which has too many performance quirks to faithfully reproduce with a computer. “It was harder than I thought! I was like, ‘I’ll be a natural at this. It’s easy!’ No, it’s not. A huge part of the theremin’s problem is that each theremin behaves completely differently,” he explains. “But I feel pretty good. I think I got a good sound and I didn’t worry too much.”

Lipman continues to be busy through Covid, both working as a professor at University of Texas at Austin, and doing orchestrations for the Budapest Scoring Orchestra for The Last Planet, Terrence Malick’s upcoming feature on the story of Christ. He describes the process of coordinating a remote recording session as “weird,” but goes into further detail: “So, we book the session and we send the parts over. Then we go on this website called Source Connect where we can hear the orchestra, the control room and the conductor. They play through each cue, just like a real session, but you just don’t see them. It’s kind of good in a way, because it forces you to really listen. Then, you give your notes and they’ll do another take and you move on. It’s worked really well. They send all the sessions back in a Pro Tools file that you download and it’s done.”

Just like that.

—FSMO