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chapter 6 Career Crescendos O ne major outcome of Mancini’s success with Blake Edwards, his bestselling albums, and the growing shelf of his awards was that now other directors, even famous classic veteran directors, the past kings of the cinema, were starting to take notice of his music, trying to get him on the phone to talk about the musical possibilities of their next pictures. Again, he was writing traditionally satisfying music that they could understand, yet it had a modern slant toward the younger audiences they wanted to court. The great Howard Hawks was one of those directors. Just now he was hoping to find a workable composer for his own new, overlong, under-structured John Wayne adventure film set in Africa about a group of wild game hunters who collect specimens for zoos and circuses around the world, to be called Hatari!—the Swahili word for “danger.” Hawks, who had started in silent films as early as 1926 and went on to make a handful of the greatest classics of American cinema, such as To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Sergeant York (1941), Dawn Patrol (1939), and Red River (1948), was a pal of John Wayne, and this whole project had been loosely built around the Wayne image, trumping even the need for a cogent script. The idea of Duke Wayne as a modern big game hunter chasing down rhinos from an armor-plated jeep seemed enough: just him and a series of animal chases separated by casual conversation scenes among the chase crew (Red Buttons, Hardy Krüger, Elsa Martinelli) back at base camp. After location shooting in Tanganyika, the filmmakers returned with a lot i-xii_1-286_Caps.indd 85 2/10/12 2:46 PM 86 chapter 6 of footage and no sequential story, save for one subplot about wanting to find the meanest rhino, which had gored one of the team members early on. Hawks talked with his most frequent composer compatriot, Dimitri Tiomkin, about what music might do for such a picture, and he floated the idea that the soundtrack might keep away from the usual symphonic action scoring for which Tiomkin was famous, that it might concentrate on more authentic African rhythms and sounds. Hawks had brought back two large boxes of African percussive and tonal instruments for that very purpose. Initially Tiomkin nodded, but he never really took the suggestion seriously. He was a two-fisted, large-scale orchestral composer, famous for compelling themes like those for High Noon and The High and the Mighty and for blunt adventure scores like 55 Days at Peking and Duel in the Sun. That was his kind of music, and no matter how the director re-explained his needs, Tiomkin remained intractable. Hawks began to think he had a soundtrack crisis on his hands. His second choice for the music to Hatari! was most peculiar. But as tinkering went on during the film’s editing process, trying to make it fall together into some kind of a story, Hawks was hoping that some new approach to the music might spark the whole project in the right direction. He had a few conversations with another old friend from the 1930s, songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, to see if there was some other way to go with the music. Trying to connect the kind of nostalgic, romantic, southern-flavored blues tunes for which Carmichael was known with this film’s African savannah setting seems a misguided idea at best. It is hard to know what Hawks was expecting there. In Richard Sudhalter’s biography of Carmichael and in Todd McCarthy ’s life of Howard Hawks it is mentioned that Hawks wanted a score that would be by turns dramatic and tuneful. Because Carmichael’s career had been mostly a 1930s-to-1950s event, he had been particularly pleased with this unexpected attention now in the early 1960s. Carmichael’s son has told how Hoagy would get up in the middle of the night to jot down musical ideas for Hatari! “You’d hear it and you’d know you were in Tanganyika.” As gloriously American as Carmichael’s songs were, it is baffling to think about what scoring he was devising that might evoke John Wayne on the African veldt. According to Sudhalter, the Carmichael archives contain music and manuscript material for Hatari! “indicating work on a main theme, a song, and bits of connective tissue.”1 Hawks soon asked to see some of...

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