Hollywood’s perspective on high finance

How do you prepare a film’s audience for what they are about to see? A bomb on the underside of a car, a dramatic revelation after an icy slap or a tender love scene between two strangers in a bar?

The filmmakers say it in music.

Before the introduction of sound films, theaters accompanied the mute with music. In theaters in small towns, this may be a single pianist. In large cities, theater owners often purchased Wurlitzer organs (built in Cincinnati) that included sound effects. And some of the biggest theaters in New York, Chicago and other metropolitan areas used small orchestras for their first showings of large-scale productions.

So what role does music play in the success of a film? Perhaps the greatest role of all…

Take one

A lesson in history: the first “talking” images had a lot of dialogue with a few moments of music usually for cut-outs or transitions. But something was missing.

It took one man, an immigrant composer from Austria, to create a musical project that has evolved and expanded over the past 95 years. This man was Max Steiner. Born in 1888, he came to America penniless during World War I and eventually found work on Broadway as a music arranger and composer. His music was “discovered” by David O. Selznick, who offered him a contract with RKO Studios.

Steiner’s radical idea of ​​having music playing in the background during dialogue scenes and engaging the audience in anticipation of thrilling action sequences was revolutionary. He worked for RKO Studio for eight years (1929-37), followed by 16 years with Warner Brothers and another decade as a freelancer.

Steiner has composed film scores for more than 300 notable films in his 35-year career. No other film composer has been so prolific. It’s a new film score every six weeks. His scores were nominated for 24 Oscars and he won Oscars for ‘The Informer’ (1935), ‘Now Voyager’ (1942) and ‘Since You Went Away’ (1944). His score for “King Kong” (1933) is considered a defining moment in the history of cinema. The first half of the film is without music, but when the adventurers arrive at Skull Island, the music creates tension and dread. Later in the film, Steiner’s score connects fantasy and reality to stimulate compassion for the unfortunate beast.

Steiner’s grandest (and most recognizable) score was for Margaret Mitchell’s historical epic “Gone with the Wind” (1939). He also composed the score for “Casablanca” (1942), “The Searchers” (1956) and had huge popular success with his theme from “A Summer Place” (1959).

There is a documentary about Steiner’s career titled “Max Steiner: Maestro of Movie Music” (2021) available on TCM and Amazon.

take two

The composer gives, but the publisher can take back.

There are many reasons for a filmmaker to choose film music, but there are also a good number of filmmakers who choose not to include it. How can it be that – having no music is annoying.

The answer is that Max Steiner’s work was so perfect for engaging audiences that he standardized it for all future audiences. These days we expect there to be a soundtrack because there’s always a soundtrack – well, maybe not always.

One of the most overlooked films of the 1980s is Sidney Lumet’s powerful 1982 drama “The Verdict.” The film has a musical score – remarkable at that – but there are also vast swaths of dramatic scenes from the film that unfold silently, or with repetitive sound effects that mimic the effects of a film score.

In one particularly moving sequence, Paul Newman’s character sits with one of his clients, a woman in a coma, and the sound of his respirator accompanies a close-up of Newman’s face, allowing the jarring sound effects to convey well. more than any musical score.

In 2007, the Best Picture Oscar went to “No Country for Old Men” by Joel and Ethan Coen. Adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel about a tough-guy lawman in the contemporary West (another standout performance by Tommy Lee Jones) who is on the hunt for a shockingly violent killer (Oscar winner Javier Bardem), the film uses silence to create narrative tension and compound the absurdity of the killer’s crimes. There’s a very subtle score that cuts through the more sinister sequences, but it sounds more like a low hum than anything melodic or evocative. The final credits of the film unfold to the sound of a slowly ticking clock.

Oscar-winning Russian filmmaker Andrei Zvyagintsev (a longtime critic of Putin, who was exiled to Germany) has always been frugal with his cinematic effects, but his 2017 film “Loveless” takes that code one step further. There’s a very sparse and evocative piano composition that only plays twice in over two hours of screen time. Between the two are vast stretches of silence that reflect the cold climate of government bureaucracy in contemporary Russia. When the piano appears, it conveys humanity and grief – the only tender moments in a dark world.

(This column is co-authored by baby boomer Denny Parish and millennial Carson Parish, who also happen to be father and son.)