Last fall, famed film score composer Jerry Goldsmith took time out during a gruelling rehearsal for his Carnegie Hall concert to talk with novelist Edwin Black. An edited transcript follows:
Edwin Black: I've studied your music for two decades. Would it be incorrect to say that Planet of the Apes was the project in which you made the greatest leap forward and the greatest contribution to the repertoire?
Jerry Goldsmith: I don't know. I don't think there was anything groundbreaking there. The ground was really broken in the 1950s by Alex North in Streetcar Named Desire, then later with Lennie Rosenman, in The Cobweb. Lennie really wrote an avant garde piece for that film.
EB: Planet of the Apes offers several non-serial...
JG: ...No, actually Planet of the Apes is serial.
EB: Interesting. Yet I heard a little bit of "Survivor From Auschwitz" by Schoenburg.
JG: You'd probably hear more of Berg than Schoenburg. He's of greater influence. I had written in this style before when I did Freud. But that too was serial.
EB: I've never heard the Freud soundtrack. The platters are hard to get. Not everything has been re-released on CD.
JG: It will be re-released eventually. They're all coming out. If you record in Europe, it doesn't cost much. Somebody will pick it up.
EB: You've scored how many movies now.
JG: 175.
EB: I know how wrong it is to ask, but which ones of those stand out in your mind?
JG: This is the first time I've conducted Planet of the Apes in thirty years. And I find it amazing. Phenomenal. It's really quite good. And I was sort of surprised. Every film I did with Frank Schaffner helped me grow as an artist. Creatively, I think Planet of the Apes was certainly a growth experience for me. Patton was certainly "growing up" and being inventive. Papillon, I certainly grew in a lyrical sense. Islands In the Stream, I expressed myself in a romantic way that I never had before. And Boys from Brazil, I had a great time copying Wagner and Stauss. Like I said, every experience with Frank Schaffner has been an evolutionary experience.
EB: I heard Debussy in Papillon.
JG: Oh, you probably did. The story was after all French.
EB: And a little Ravel in there.
JG: I don't think you're ever going to hear any Hollywood scores without a little bit of Ravel, or Debussy - they are great influences. You know, when you're writing as much music as we write - this is my fifth film this year, including the new Star Trek Insurrection... And by the time I finish that one, I've written over six hours of music. Now, that's a lot of music in less than a year. So you're going to be a little willing to have some influences slip in.
EB: Are there new arrangements in the concert version the Planet of the Apes?
JG: No, it's all the original. Some of this stuff in the Carnegie Hall concert has been rearranged. But Planet of the Apes and First Knight - they're both all original from the movie.
EB: So what is the difference, in terms of personal satisfaction, between the concert experience and the studio experience?
JG: I think the biggest difference is the fact that when you're doing a piece of music in the studio you have to stay within a certain timeframe. The picture isn't going to change. So if all of sudden you feel you want to express a little more in this passage, make it a little broader or slower, the movie isn't going to expand for that. It's still going to be the same length. So you have to stay within that. But when you do it in concert, well every day you feel differently. Concerts are something I've been doing for years, and every time I do it, I do it a different way. I do different tempo, different dynamics. Everything you feel is different. Every conductor - take Bernstein - how many times did he approach Mahler differently? Ten years later, he would do it totally different. And that's what makes the live audience so liberating. Each time you find new things in your work.
EB: You didn't score all of the Star Treks because of timing and availability, or was there some other reason?
JG: I think on the second and third, it was the money, and they had a different approach, and then on the fourth, they didn't ask me. The fifth they asked me. The sixth, I wasn't interested in doing. And the seventh, I guess they didn't ask me - the main reason was probably budget.
EB: And why have they asked you now?
JG: Because they like what I do, I guess.
EB: In your opinion, what is the state of the film score industry today? Is it as free and creative as it should be, or is it really suffering from too many external influences - temp tracking and far too much music not doing enough?
JG: I think first, that there's too much music in films today. The films I have the most notoriety on are Patton and Chinatown. Both were very, very sparse scores. Patton had 32 minutes of music. Chinatown had about the same.
EB: But scores these days are requiring 60-70 minutes...
JG: Nowadays, if I only have 60 minutes in a film, I think it's an easy job. I was happy to see that Star Trek: Insurrection had only 63 minutes.
EB: What is the effect of the temp tracking?
JG: Oh, I think it's become an industry in and of itself. I've actually seen motion picture credits for the people who did the temp tracking. I just find that absurd.
EB: And have you ever had the temp track interfere with your work?
JG: Oh, all the time. On Mulan, I did a whole score, they loved it -except for a one-minute sequence that they had animated to a temp track. No matter what I did with it, they couldn't get comfortable. They had been living with this temped piece of music for five years, so they'd gotten used to it. I finally pulled off something they could live with but it took five tries.
EB: All that over one minute?
JG: It was an important minute.
EB: Now one score you've had rejected was Legend. And I loved the score.
JG: So did I. And then the album was released because they actually loved my music, and there was a big demand for it. It's a very popular album.
EB: Who in your mind are the great contributors to the soundtrack field?
JG: I've always liked John Williams and what he does, John Barry, the two Newman brothers, David and Tom.
EB: What about the music to the big boat (Titanic)?
JG: He (James Horner) won the Academy Award. What can I say?
EB: How about originality?
JG: Well I think he's a bit eclectic. But the again, at times we've all helped ourselves to the work of others.
Edwin Black writes on movie music for Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader, Film Score Monthly, Spectrum Magazine, Hollywood Online in the US, Music for the Movies, Movie Wave, and Movie Music UK in England, TraxZone in France, and he moderates movie.music on Fox's Bix. He is the author of the forthcoming apocalyptic Y2k technothriller, Format C: (Brookline Book, May 1999).
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