Tribute: Mary Rodgers

Posted on June 28, 2014 at 6:16 pm

Mary Rodgers, writer and composer, died on Thursday at age 83. She was co-creator of the wonderful musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” based on the Princess and the Pea fairy tale. It was a breakthrough role for Carol Burnett on Broadway. Here she is singing, “I’m Shy.”

It was remade with Tracy Ullman.

Burnett played the role of the evil Queen.

Rodgers also wrote books for kids that have become classics, especially Freaky Friday, filmed three times, most recently with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UShtvCen6So

She wrote a two-generation advice column with her mother for McCall’s Magazine and she worked with Leonard Bernstein on his famous series of Young People’s Concerts.

Rodgers was the daughter of one award-winning Broadway composer Richard Rodgers (“South Pacific,” “Pal Joey,” “The Sound of Music”) and the mother of another, Adam Guettel (“Floyd Collins” and “The Light in the Piazza”). The New York Times wrote:

“The Light in the Piazza,” Adam Guettel’s 2005 musical, for which he won a Tony for best score, was based on a 1950s novel by Elizabeth Spencer about an American woman traveling in Italy with her mentally disabled daughter, who falls in love with an Italian man. Years ago, Ms. Rodgers had suggested the story to her father as ripe for musicalizing, but he decided against it. Decades later she passed the idea on to her son.

Why, she was asked in 2003, did she not adapt the work herself?

“I had a pleasant talent but not an incredible talent,” she said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine. “I was not my father or my son. And you have to abandon all kinds of things.”

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Interview: John Ottman, Editor and Composer of “X-Men: Days of Future Past”

Posted on May 27, 2014 at 8:00 am

I last talked to editor/composer John Ottman about “Jack the Giant Slayer” and loved hearing about his unique combination of roles, often working with his former classmate, director Bryan Singer. They collaborated again on X-Men: Days of Future Past and it was a pleasure to catch up with him to discuss the challenges as both editor and composer of working with so many characters and two different time periods.

You have so many characters in this film and some of them change their appearance a lot, either due to use of their superpowers or being played by different actors in different time periods. How do you as an editor help the audience keep everybody straight?

The hardest thing when you have many characters in a room in one scene is to basically keep their presence alive in the scene. If you spend too much time with one character talking, your mind inevitably wants to know what the other characters are thinking or how they are reacting. And if you spend too much time away from showing their reaction to the other character talking, the more I think you feel uncomfortable in the scene. So the challenge is sort of the keep everybody alive even if they’re not speaking.

What are some of the ways that you do that?

I just put myself in the mind of the audience. I’m watching someone speak and I as soon as I start to wonder what the other character or character being spoken of might be a reacting, I want to see them. I use my own reaction to cut to another character.

And there are different time periods in this film also.

Yeah, there’s a dreary future and then there is 1973. Logan’s consciousness was fed back into his younger self so that he can change an event that happens in the past so that the future might be fixed or not be so dreary.

How do you keep the audience constantly aware of where they are in time?

It’s pretty obvious where you are. Nevertheless, we did have internal debates sometimes where people were like, “Are you sure people know that we are in 1973?” “I think so.” But that wasn’t a huge problem. It was just basically the timing and keeping the storyline as clear as possible. It’s extremely convoluted and a very complex story.

You’ve got the young and old version of some of the characters, right?

Correct, yes. And the other biggest challenge of the film was the time travel aspect. It’s like the “whack a mole” game where you whack one mole and then you create another problem. It’s sort of like you have to keep whacking a mole until you can live with the smallest problem. But there will always be imperfections in time travel stories so that was a big challenge; sort of building consensus with everyone to try to accept what we were going to accept.

Did you once again do the editing first and then composing second?

Of course, yes. It’s overwhelming to actually deal with all of the management of the film to get it together. The editing is not just putting pieces together. At least for me it’s also storyboarding scenes, it’s designing the pre-visualization of the scenes with the pre-vis artists, it’s generating the shot list with the second editing director, visual effects issues, looping the actors and all that endless stuff. I have no hope of even starting to write the score until I have some sort of editor’s cut.

So do you work with a temporary music track as you are editing?

Yes, but people would be surprised to know that I don’t really use music to cut my scenes together. I wait until I get my full editor’s cut together before I put any temporary music in. And working without music, I know where the film is strong and it’s not reliant on the score. Once I get to that point, I spend about two weeks putting temporary music in so we can have screenings and show the studio.

I’d like to go back to that same challenge of two time periods and so many characters. How do you use the music to help the audience keep it all straight? You don’t have different themes for the characters, right?

In fact this has fewer characters themes than X-Men 2. It’s not so typically superhero-like when a character walks and you hear a motif for them.

This film is different so it does not really lend itself to have numerous character themes. There is the overall theme of the film; the X-Men world, which is my theme from X-II but then there are really three other themes in the film. The main one is Charles Xavier’s theme because it’s really his story about how his character has lost all the hope when we see him in the 70’s.

And it’s Logan really trying to get him to rekindle that hope. That’s the centerpiece of the score; at least subliminally, his music. And also he’s trying to fight for Raven’s soul so she has a little bit of a motif in the movie and then Magneto himself has a very simple very accessible motif. There’s not much time in modern movies to establish a beginning, middle and end theme for each character so you barely have time to do signature sound that you can recognize, so his is very simple but very sort of malevolent.

For lack of a better description, there’s a metallic sort of sound. And Mystique has her transformation swishy kind of sound. So I obviously left room for those things. I am very involved in the sound design so I think I surprise people when I am directing the dub as the editor, how I often bury the music or intertwine it with the sounds I use.

What about the time period differences? Are there different instruments or different time indicators?

The 70s gave me an excuse to use some analog synthesizers; we use some old keyboard synthesizers and electric piano and guitar, sometimes very subtly but it was fun to do that. And especially for the sentinels of the past, I was able to do some sort of electronics that were of the period. The score for me is unlike Jack in that Jack was a very pure orchestral swashbuckling score where you had basically everything emulated from the orchestra. This score was very synthesizer heavy with orchestral supplementation. So that was just our decision because every movie is different and that’s what felt right for this film.

If you could take one of the X-Men, which powers would you pick?

I guess I would have Mystique’s power so I can sort of… I can be really out of shape and morph into someone has a great body.

Yeah, I think we’d all like that one!

Interview: James Levine, Composer of “American Horror Story,” “Royal Pains,” and “Glee”

Posted on May 12, 2014 at 8:00 am

Composer James S. Levine worked on two of my favorite television series, so I was especially delighted to get a chance to speak to him. I love “Glee’s” fabulously curated choral selections. And I love the soundtrack to “Royal Pains,” which so perfectly matches the sun-drenched Hamptons setting and the slight humorous, outsider-y edge of the Lawsons. Levine has also worked on other hit series, including “American Horror Story,” “The Closer,” and “The Blacklist.”

What was the first instrument you ever played?

Piano. I had to ask for piano lessons. I was the youngest of three. I started asking for piano lessons when I was about seven and started when I was about nine. I had this great little local teacher, classical at first. Then I started bringing in pop songs that I wanted to play. My sister was a singer in high school and used to be in musical theater. I wanted to accompany her so I’d learn the song she was singing, show tunes, some pop songs as well.

When I was 13 I switched to a different teacher. I wanted to learn jazz and improvisation and so I switched teachers. He became a mentor to me and I studied with him through college.

What did you study in college?

I decided to get a Bachelors degree in American Studies. I really got into how music functions in society, so I studied music from that perspective. the function of music and culture and then the actual nuts and bolts of musical training I did with this fantastic teacher who I studied with until I was 23.

And when you thinking about music in society, where you very aware of music in movies and television?

Of course, yeah. Totally always very aware of that, sort of loved doing that or thinking about doing that while playing in bands or playing in shows and playing songs, writing songs, that sort of stuff. Sort of anything I could do I would do, that sort of thing.

Why is it that we no longer have the distinctive TV theme songs as we used to in the 60’s and 70’s?

I think that there is this sort of push to get to the show right away so you don’t lose the viewer. And there is a fear of making a definitive statement out of the gate. I think people are afraid that if you establish a tone that’s too specific immediately you might turn off a bunch of people.

One thing I love about Glee is the way it crosses so many categories with the music on the show — pop, rock, hip-hop, show tunes, songbook.

You can’t be afraid of that. I have worked with people, Ryan Murphy being probably one of the most well-known that is not afraid of making a statement and sort of making people uncomfortable and sort of redefining himself with each show. With American Horror Story, each season, we totally reinvent ourselves. So he trusts that you make something that’s compelling.

When you are working on a series like “The Blacklist,” where do you begin?

I think you definitely start with characters and the story and from there I think about themes for characters, I think about the overall tone of the show and sort of what components make up the show. On a lot of these shows like “Major Crimes” or “The Closer,” which I worked on for a long time, there is always the case and then you also have the specific character beats and character pieces and those can help define the character. You sort of ride the line between propelling the case forward in those shows and also getting and giving character information.

Going into a new season of a show, there is always an overall goal of the writers and the creator and producers like this season is going to be about fulfillments and so and so’s drives to find his long lost mother. Okay now within that we are going to have 18 or 22 or 13 episodes of different procedural cases but the overall arc is something that helps you think in a more global sense and sort of maybe grow the music forward a little bit and stretch it.

So just as the writers and the creators might want and usually need to like feel as though they are stretching their muscles and expanding the sort of mythology of the story, that composer can see like we have that opportunity too. You know you have to take chances to do that. So sometimes you might take the chance and be like, “This is not our show! This is unlike anything we do.” And sometimes too like, “Oh, that’s a really cool idea and it totally works!” And it feels like it’s evolving so it’s sort of a case-by-case basis.

One of the things I love about “Royal Pains” is that it has this very specific setting that is not like anything else on television. How do you think about adding the overall distinctive quality to the music?

We keep it breezy and fun and then. The goal at the beginning was to make it light. There’s obviously the medical drama case stuff, which sort of exists in its own way and that’s sort of a procedural element that show so the music sort of functions in that way. But the rest of it is like placing characters. And I always wanted to feel like there is sort of a central core group of four or five characters, a small little breezy sunshiny Jack Johnson, James Taylor, rock band. It’s like sort of an acoustic rock sort of score but it’s evolved and we sort of drift in and out of more serious moments and pull it in either direction. We keep it like a beach party a little bit. To keep the sunshine and all of that. The story gets serious but sometimes you don’t have to play serious on top of serious to get the point across and often times it’s not necessary; because it’s a well-written show and they are good actors.

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Interview: Stephen Endelman, Composer for “Rob the Mob”

Posted on April 3, 2014 at 8:00 am

“Rob the Mob” is a fact-based story about a couple named Tommy and Rosie who thought they had a foolproof way to make some money. Since Mafia members were not allowed to bring weapons into their social clubs, why not rob them there?

Yeah. It does not sound like a good idea to me, either. But what is a good idea is making a movie to tell their story, starring two exceptionally gifted and charismatic young actors, Michael Pitt and Tony-winner Nina Arianda. I spoke to the man who composed the film’s score, Stephen Endelman.

How did you get involved with this project?

I worked with Raymond first on “Two Family House.” That was a very pleasurable experience and then there was another one in between that I couldn’t do which was “City Island,” which is actually a really good movie. This is the best of all, this is I think, well not just me, a lot of people are talking about what a great movie it is and it is. I got involved with Raymond, he showed me the script, I read the script and I said, “Raymond, I have to do this movie.” He said, “I want you to do it, it’s not a question, you don’t have to tell me that”. And I said, “Great.” Then he came to my studio and he said “Stephen, I have got an idea. I said, “Fire away.” He said, “How about I come here with David Leonard and I’ll set up in your other room, and you be in your room, I’ll be in this room and you write music and I’ll cut. I’ll do this for six weeks and then I’ll go back to New York for the last three weeks.” And I said, “You make that happen, I’ll be thrilled. What a creative way to work.”

And so that’s what happened. And so he came here. I had seen a lot of footage as they were shooting. And I was writing, there was never any temp score at all. Five weeks after Raymond got here, the producer got here, we showed him a cut and it was like seeing the movie, all my music, all we needed to do was to refine it at that point, cut the movie down and refine it.

That’s very unusual, isn’t it?

That’s deeply unusual and it shouldn’t be. It should be the only way to work.

Tell me what the benefits are of doing it that way.

The problem with a lot of films today in my opinion and Raymond’s actually is that they are so used to doing things with a temp dub that by the time they hire a composer they are married to the temp score. So 80 percent of the time if not more composers are really just copying the scores with a few modifications. I have made a career of not doing that from day one. “Household Saints” — I saw the movie I wrote the score then the next movie, The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain, there was no score. Chris Mundell didn’t want to temp the movie at all and so when I got that job I just got a blank canvas. Raymond’s was the same. David Russell’s Flirting With Disaster was the same. What actually was not the similar way from working with Raymond was that he was downstairs in the film station editing and I was writing. But it’s the only way to work. And actually when I think about it, you know what at A Bronx Tale they brought me into the Brill Building six weeks so we’d build it together.

When you’re doing a crime story, how do you begin to think about what tone you want to achieve and how you want to set the stage?

When you think of crime movie, there are going to be robberies. From day one Raymond and I said, “No, we’re not going to do it like that because this is not a conventional mob crime movie.” This is about two young people who are madly, hopelessly in love, right? They are hopelessly in love and they have decided to rob the social clubs when they learned from Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, there were no guns in clubs.

Wise guys and guns in clubs don’t go together. So Tommy thinks it will be easy to rob them. Tommy takes their money, he humiliates them. Because his father was basically tortured to death, there’s a kind of vengeance level there. And the crime involved was just palpable so I said look we have to write a very memorable love scene. So that basically takes care of them. Element number one, their love scene. We hear snippets of it throughout the movie and at the end you get the big impression of it, that’s one level.

Then the other level, what do we do about the scary wise guy? So the biggest and the scariest of the wise guys is Andy Garcia who plays Big Al. Big Al isn’t scary anymore. Big Al is coming to term with the fact that his son is dead, what he’s got is his grandson. All he wants to do is make food in the kitchen, look after his little boy. That doesn’t need action. That needs a delicate touch because really you want to feel for Big Al, you wanna feel his relationship with his grandson, and then his dead son and you do feel that. Then you have those robberies, and in order to get the robberies where we want then Raymond had a song and we decided to, he wanted an Italian style, an Italian pop song from the 60’s. He thought the guys would be listening to that and it would be an Italian. And Raymond said “Why don’t we just write it?” So I said, “Fine.” e came up with the lyrics and I wrote the music. We have three songs in the movie. When they go to do the robberies, then you have the level of the robberies themselves and that’s the only tense music in the movie but even that is not really that tense. That’s kind of percussive with a lot of other stuff going on. It’s very rhythmic, it’s not angry, there’s no anger. It didn’t need that and the score didn’t need that. The score needed to be beautiful, and it needs to let you inside the inner voices of all the characters. The wise guys are sad, they are sad and they are old, and Rosie is crazy in love and silly and that’s kind of the tapestry there I think.

So it’s really a love story?

It is a love story; I think it is a love story.

What’s the best advice you ever got about writing for films?

The best advice I ever got about writing for film didn’t come from a film composer. Morton Feldman was one of great American classical composers, somebody who taught me for a little while. He said, “Stephen, there’s no such thing as funny music.” I thought about that because you know, of course there’s cartoon music and can you imagine that’s funny but of course he’s right, there’s no such thing as funny music.

So what did I do? I translated that as you’re building a score of funny theme or if you’re gonna try then you have to think about timing completely and less about what’s funny in the music. Because there’s no such thing as funny music, that’s nonsense and so that idea was really important because I never really studied song composing, I never really went to school, I studied with composers to be a composer. I saw myself doing film because I always loved films.

I became really interested in film music when I saw the uncut version of “Once Upon a Time in America.” Just watching that I realized, “Wow, that could just as easily been written for an opera.” The whole structure of that score is very operatic. That’s when I really started to think about the relationship between music and drama in the cinema. It should be of a whole. If you look at this movie “Rob the Mob,” I could actually almost piece it together as if I was composing a symphony. Each theme is very well constructed, the score is well constructed, things return, change come back but in quite an organized fashion. I happen to believe that’s important.

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Interview: Christopher Lennertz, Comedy Movie Composer

Posted on February 20, 2014 at 7:53 am

Christopher Lennertz is one of Hollywood’s busiest composers. Lately, he has specialized in writing scores for comedies like Kevin Hart’s Ride Along, with two more big comedic projects later this year: Think Like A Man Too (with Ride Along director Tim Story) and Horrible Bosses 2. In addition, he also does the music for the CW series Supernatural and the NBC drama Revolution. Past credits include last year’s Identity Thief, Think Like A Man, Horrible Bosses, and Alvin & The Chipmunks. He was generous in taking time from his very busy schedule to talk to me.

How did you get involved in writing music for movies?

I started loving music at a very young age, I started playing the trumpet when I was nine and then I think I wrote my first song in fifth grade. Then I realized that the guitar is much cooler and the girls seem to like guitar players much better so I started playing the guitar when I was 13 and I just got more and more into music. I played in a rock band and as I really started to get into it, I studied classical and jazz and then coming out of California, I originally studied guitar and then I found myself in my sophomore year of college recording a session with Henry Mancini.

Wow!

Yeah, that sort of changed everything and I sure went back the next day, changed my major and decided I wanted to be a composer. I think it was just watching that session that gave me the impetus to sort of change my focus and focus on writing rather than on performing and that is a big difference. For me, that was a really big move.

What it is about writing that makes writing a score a comedy especially challenging? Especially something like Ride Along which is really 60% action movie, 40% comedy; how do you cover both types of themes in composing?

You’re right. There are sort of three different styles of music in Ride Along. One is most definitely the comedy and that is usually focusing on what Kevin Hart is doing. But one of the things that Ioved about that movie and that I liked about those types of comedies is that it allows you to sort of us set up the comedy with reality and sort of hyper reality so what that ended up doing was playing Ice Cube really, really straight, very, very tough no-nonsense, so that when Kevin did get funny, everything sort of became a big contrast. Same thing with the action; I really treated the action as real.

At what stage in a movie like that do you get involved? Is it early on or after the story has been shot?

This one I came onto about halfway through shooting and I had worked with the director, Tim Story, on Think Like a Man, so we had a relationship. At that point it was relatively quick that I sort of jumped in and started to come up with ideas and Tim and I started working on our approach and figuring out what he really wanted out of the music and that is sort of what put it to the next level.

I know you can’t talk too much about Think Like a Man Too, but you are working on that now aren’t you?

I started on it last week. All I can tell you is that it is just as funny, if not possibly funnier than the last one but it is also very similar in the fact that the ending is even more romantic and it is really kind of sweet. Again it is a great movie because it is funny for guys and super romantic at the end. It is just all around a great movie and I think it is just going to be bigger than the first one.

Do you just create the themes or do you also work on the adapting them to individual scenes?

By the end of the day every single scene has gone through trial and error. I try to make it fit every bit of the action just the way Tim wants it to and that’s really how we do it. It is a very intricate process going through the movie from start to finish we will probably, on Think like A Man 2 be about a six week to two month process. Usually what happens is I’ll write for a brief period of time, I’ll write for five days, seven days, have him come in, check out how the process is going, give me some directions, continue writing, that kind of thing and then slowly but surely we get through the whole thing and that is definitely what I assume is going to happen with this one too.

What’s on your iPod? What are you listening to when you are in the car?

Oh wow! You know, that is one of the reasons I love doing what I do. If you looked at my playlist in the car you would find Metallica, you’ll find U2, you’ll find the Beatles. You will also find Danny Elfman, John Williams and you also find John Coltrane and Miles Davis and a bunch of stuff like that so I really like the idea of being very eclectic with music because it really keeps things interesting. I think every style of music has a valid thing to contribute to people’s lives and I think that I love the fact that I can float around in various multiple genres.

Can you give me an example of a movie where you think that the music works really, really effectively to create the mood and tell the story?

There’s so many. I think John Williams is sheer perfection. Indiana Jones was sheer perfection and Star Wars and at the same time I think of Braveheart. The Godfather was perfect. That was really one of my favorites.

If you could pick any movie from the past that you could magically transport yourself back in time and create a score for, what movie would you pick?

It is really hard to do that because the movies that I love the most already have what I would consider to be phenomenal scores and so when I go back and think about that I think one that always comes to mind that I would love to get a crack at is Terminator. Because I feel like, and let me explain this and be clear, I think that the music for Terminator was absolutely perfect the year that it came out but because it was so synthesized it becomes very traditional. It becomes very dated 80’s music, an example of that where the music was so current as far as what the instruments were, that later on you watch it and you can’t get it out of your head how dated it sounds so I think that given an opportunity, I would love to take a shot at it. I would love to do a big sword and sorcery kind of thing. I would love to do a Lord of the Rings or Braveheart or something like that but then again, who wouldn’t?