The Hollywood Film Music Reader (review)

Knowing that I am an obsessive collector of jazz recordings, a friend once told me that he loved the oddball jazz performed by space aliens in the cantina scene in Star Wars (1977), and he asked if I had more music like it. I immediately thought of the 1940s recordings of Raymond Scott's Quintette as well as Benny Goodman's small-group sessions from the 1930s. To my surprise, an article in Mervyn Cooke's Hollywood Film Music Reader confirms that Benny Goodman was actually on John Williams's mind when he put together that memorable soundtrack moment in the Star Wars canon. Explaining how he arrived at music that sounds like nothing else in the film, Williams says he proposed a scenario to director George Lucas in which aliens from a distant planet somehow discover sheet music played by Goodman's big band in the 1930s. "And they looked at this music, and they kind of deciphered it, but they didn't quite know how it should go, but they tried" (242). Williams, who began his career as jazz pianist, then went to work writing "old-time swing band licks" for Trinidad steel drums, kazoos, and small reed instruments. That's what we hear just before Luke and Obi Wan meet Han Solo. I guess my recommendation of Goodman was appropriate (but I still think that Williams was channeling the music of Raymond Scott that Carl Stallings put to such brilliant use in all those Warner Bros. cartoons).

The genesis of Star Wars jazz is just one of many striking anecdotes in Cooke's anthology. Reciting some of the better ones is irresistible, and I can't imagine any of this book's reviewers passing up the opportunity. George Antheil's story of bringing Salvador Dali to Paramount studios to meet Cecil B. de Mille is especially irresistible. Anthiel was trying to advance his career by impressing de Mille, who had just hired him to write the score for his latest epic, The Plainsman (1936). Upon being presented to de Mille, Dali immediately kissed the mogul's hand and declared him to be "the greatest surrealist on earth." De Mille was flattered but puzzled. He asked Anthiel what surrealism was. When Anthiel muttered something about "superrealism," de Mille said, "Oh, a kind of supercolossal realism?" That was a compliment that de Mille could accept. He was even tempted to hire Dali as a set designer, but the painter was much more interested in writing screenplays, a job for which de Mille found Dali more than a little unsuited. Fortunately for Anthiel, his music was sufficiently pleasing to de Mille, and the director overlooked the strange encounter with Dali that Anthiel had arranged.

If I had to criticize this informative and elegantly conceived anthology, I would cite two problems. First, the title is a little misleading. The Hollywood Film Music Reader does not reveal that the book consists entirely of primary texts. Part 1, "From Silents to Sound," consists of first-hand accounts from laborers in the field of early cinema music. Part 2 explains itself as "Film Composers in Their Own Words," and Part 3 collects statements from filmmakers who worked with musicians and from a few composers, such as Igor Stravinsky, who did not write for films but who was eager to give his opinion of those who did. When I first picked up Cooke's anthology, I expected to find contemporary, theoretically informed accounts of movie music. At the very least, I expected to encounter the word "diegetic." But this was not what Cooke had in mind, and I cannot fault him for it.

My only other criticism involves the repetition of familiar knowledge. The segments are basically arranged in chronological order, so the early sections repeatedly give us composers explaining how the "click track" works. Later on, in accounts of working with film directors, numerous composers tell us about "spotting." Fortunately, each commentator has his (all are...