The Movies and Me
As 1969 waned, I’d been working at Columbia for nearly a decade. I’d arrived as the classic wet-behind-the-ears kid who thought he knew a lot more than he did, but I’d worked incredibly hard and established myself as an experienced record producer whose work ranked—all modesty aside—with the best in the industry. By the end of that year, I would have the Grammys to prove it.
In many respects my decade at Columbia had been a dream for me. I’d met some of my lifelong heroes, built friendships that would last a lifetime and made some recordings in which I take enormous pride. I’d worked with some of the best people in the record business–Goddard Lieberson, Schuyler Chapin, Jim Foglesong, Clive Davis and any number of others—and I’d made a place for myself among them.
At the same time it had been a demanding 10 years, marked by countless nights toiling in recording studios and editing cubicles, on the heels of countless days dealing with corporate politics and, sometimes, needy, entitled artists. That decade had been the making of me—but, as the decade ended, I was tired and in need of a change. I said as much to Clive one day. I told him I loved my job and the people I worked with, but I wanted to try something new, something that would give me fresh energy and excitement.
I had an idea of what that might be, and Clive didn’t see a problem with it. The result was the establishment of what amounted to a mini-department alongside Masterworks, headed by me and known informally as “Broadway and Soundtracks.” I would step away from the bulk of my classical-music responsibilities; I would continue to be Columbia’s lead producer on Broadway cast albums—1970 would, in fact, be my busiest year—but I would add new responsibilities in an entirely different area: movie soundtracks.
That seemed a very appealing way to widen my horizons, because I’d been a movie fan my entire life. Back at Oberlin and Yale, one of the paths I’d imagined for myself led westward to Hollywood, where I’d write movie scores. That hadn’t come to pass, partly because at the time I was still involved with my college girlfriend, who lived on the East Coast. So I’d never developed any particular expertise in films or how they were made, but my fondness for movies had never left me. As things turned out, a sizeable portion of my working life from late 1969 to early 1971 was built around the movies.
Walk into a record store (if you can still find one) and head for one of the less-traveled corners, and you may well spot a section called “Shows and Soundtracks” or something of that nature. Film soundtracks and original-cast albums were born at pretty much the same time and, since they both involve actors, dramatic stories, and even some of the same stories and performers, it was perhaps natural that they’d be lumped together in people’s minds. Why shouldn’t the original-cast album of the stage musical 1776 and the soundtrack of its 1972 movie version, which featured most of the same songs sung by most of the same people, be sold side by side?
Nonetheless, take it from someone who’s done both: They’re two very different things, with little or nothing in common.
From the public’s point of view, the main difference is that, except in the case of a musical film, a soundtrack album is overwhelmingly made up of instrumental music newly composed for the film. Almost all movies feature songs that are sung in a scene, played during a scene (on a radio or a jukebox, for example) or simply heard on the soundtrack, but most of them aren’t the work of the film’s composer and therefore don’t make it onto the soundtrack album. The composer’s work rarely includes songs; most often it’s instrumental music meant not to call too much attention to itself, because it’s intended to enhance dialogue scenes without distracting the audience from what the actors are saying.
From the record producer’s point of view, the main difference between a soundtrack and a cast album is that a soundtrack doesn’t start with a recording session. By the time the record company gets involved, the recording session has already happened—and it’s been part of the production of a movie, not of a record album. The session is all about the needs of the director of the movie, not at all about the needs of the producer of the album.
When it’s time to put the record together, the studio sends you the raw tracks, very much as they were recorded—which is to say, as a series of piecemeal cues. You have absolutely no control over what was recorded or how it was recorded—and, if you see an obvious need for some additional material, you’re out of luck. You have to work with what you get. I worked on 10 soundtrack albums, and on only one of them did I have any input into the actual recording.
In short, it’s essentially an editing job—but one that can be a lot of fun, because it’s a real test of the producer’s creativity. I’ve always enjoyed solving the cryptograms that The New York Times runs along with its daily crossword puzzles. Solving a cryptogram, I’ve realized recently, is something like making a soundtrack album, because both require you to find all kinds of inventive ways to work things out, based on what you’re given.
It’s a challenge, though, because record albums are made to be listened to, and movie music is rarely if ever created with that in mind. Typically a movie’s first priority is the dialogue—music that drowns out or distracts from the dialogue, even if it’s brilliant music, won’t work. The second priority is the cinematography—photographing the story to its best advantage. The music is a supporting player at best; that’s why they call it “underscoring.”
And movies are made up of little snippets, scenes (a two-hour movie might have as many as 110 scenes) that may run as long as 10 minutes or as briefly as a few seconds, so the music is composed in ways that make sense only in that context. To take the movie’s soundtrack and eliminate the dialogue track would result in an album consisting of several dozen brief, self-contained snatches of music, averaging only a minute long. It’s hard to imagine many people wanting to listen to an album like that. The trick to a decent movie soundtrack is to make some musical sense out of the pieces they send you, assembling them into a different product that will fulfil a different purpose.
I’ve always described making a cast album as delivering a musical with no sets, costumes or lights. Well, the producer of the soundtrack album has to deliver a movie with no actors, no pictures and, usually, no dialogue. His job is to convey something of the essence of the film through music alone—not to tell the story narratively, as I often do with a musical, but to tell it emotionally.
I quickly learned the first rule of soundtrack production: The movie soundtrack that you buy in the record store is not the movie soundtrack that you hear in the theater. If you’re making the first, you don’t want the second. The in-theater soundtrack, which integrates the music tracks inseparably with the dialogue, sound effects and special effects, is useless. You want the music by itself.
You also want the original, un-edited music tracks as recorded in the studio by the orchestra (often, but not always, conducted by the composer). Except for opening titles and closing credits, these tracks are invariably longer than the versions you hear in the film, sometimes much longer—the music for a 15-second scene may be a tiny snippet from a five-minute piece of music—and they give you much more to work with. The music editor, who trimmed the recorded music to fit the visuals, is a crucial part of the movie-making process, but the producer of the soundtrack album wants nothing to do with his or her work. We need to do our own editing.
One other useful tip: Whenever possible, I got the dialogue tracks as well as the music tracks. As with a cast album, sometimes a snippet of dialogue can make a world of difference in setting the tone for a musical excerpt. In one of my soundtracks it was much more than a snippet, and it made the whole album possible.
I took on my new duties at a fortuitous time, because Columbia, which had always done the occasional movie soundtrack, was getting more serious about the movie business. In 1967 CBS had launched its first-ever venture into theatrical films, buying the former Republic Pictures studios and announcing plans to make 10 films a year under the aegis of Cinema Center Films. There would be mid-level productions costing about $3.5 million apiece.
Between 1968 and 1972, when CBS shut it down, Cinema Center released 31 films. Of those films, at least 20 lost money and only Little Big Man (1969) and perhaps two John Wayne vehicles, Rio Lobo (1970) and Big Jake (1971), were ever of any consequence.
For CBS, however, it was an exercise in what today’s corporate world calls “synergy”: Cinema Center films would be advertised on CBS stations, would eventually be broadcast on CBS television and, of course, would yield soundtracks for Columbia Records. This was where I came in. Of the 10 soundtracks I worked on, seven were Cinema Center films; Columbia picked up the other three independently, sometimes at my recommendation.
I didn’t spend long in the soundtrack business, and most of these records didn’t engage my creative faculties as much as the Broadway shows that I was doing at the same time. I haven’t listened to most of these records for many years. But here’s what I can recall of my brief stint as a small cog in the Hollywood dream factory.
The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969).
I don’t have any particular memories of this record, which probably was the first movie soundtrack I worked on. A bizarrely cast tale of the conquistador Pizarro (Robert Shaw) and the Incan emperor Atahualpa (Christopher Plummer), based on a Peter Schaffer play, it may well have been already in the works when I took the reins on Columbia’s soundtracks.
The Reivers (1969).
This was one of the most interesting projects I worked on. It was based on the William Faulkner story and had a score composed by a composer I’d never heard of—John Williams. We had an English classical guitarist of that name on the Columbia roster, but this wasn’t him. I soon realized that I did indeed know of The Reivers’ composer, at least by reputation: He was jazz pianist Johnny Williams, who had changed his professional name in 1969. Under that name he went on to write the music for Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), Schindler’s List (1993) and about a million other movies with classic scores, winning a slew of Oscars along the way.
When I got the tapes for The Reivers, it was beautiful music, and I was very impressed. It was mostly very short cues, though, some of them less than a minute, some of them a minute and a half, a few of them four or five minutes. It wasn’t going to work at all as a record album.
But I really liked the music, so I took it upon myself to see if I could find a way to build it into something that would work. Using whatever compositional skills I had, I turned these scattered scraps into larger segments, which sometimes meant putting things out of the movie sequence, sometimes repeating a section—because, I thought, it was so good, why not hear it twice? I took this approach with several of the soundtracks I produced, but probably my favorite of them was The Reivers.
It was a real project, but I liked the music a lot and I was pleased with the way it came out. I wasn’t the only one, either: After the record came out, I got a letter from John Williams thanking me for the creative work I did on this album.
As it turned out, it was well worth the effort. A couple of decades later, John Williams became the conductor of the Boston Pops and, when the Pops changed labels and signed with Sony (the successor to Columbia), he asked me to be the producer of their recordings. I produced at least a half-dozen recordings of John conducting the Boston Pops.
One of those records, in 1994, was a fresh recording of music from The Reivers. Burgess Meredith had been one of the stars of the original movie, and we got him to do the narration. It was a good recording, and very satisfying. I’ve done a lot of work with John, and it’s always enjoyable.
M.A.S.H. (1970).
Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H. was not a Cinema Center film—it was from 20th Century Fox. When Columbia was considering picking up the soundtrack, somebody from the business-affairs office, I think it was Walter Dean, asked if I would be willing to see the film and let them know if I thought it would be a good idea. So one day in late 1969 or early 1970, the studio did a special screening for me. I was the only one present, and I couldn’t stop laughing. I went home afterward and said to Irene, “This is the funniest damn film I’ve ever seen.” I just fell in love with it.
I was also struck by its use of music. There was incidental music by Johnny Mandel, but the film’s most notable musical elements were the theme song, “Suicide Is Painless,” written by Mandel and Mike Altman, and a series of ersatz Japanese renditions of such old-time American songs as “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” “My Blue Heaven” and “Happy Days Are Here Again,” which are heard over the Army base’s public-address system throughout the movie. There’s no other movie that sounds like M.A.S.H. I thought it was wonderful, and couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.
Based on my enthusiastic report, Columbia made the deal for the soundtrack, and in due course we received all the music and all the dialogue, the latter of which already had the sound effects incorporated into it. That left me with only one minor detail to figure out: how to turn a movie that sounded like no other into a conventional soundtrack album.
The answer, of course, was not to try. I ended up doing it not unlike the way I record a musical. M.A.S.H. was like a play with music, and the music was wonderful and wonderfully suited to the anarchic humor of the screenplay. So I started with the script instead of the music, going through it to decide which dialogue I wanted to keep—which turned out to be a lot more than I’ve ever heard on any other soundtrack album that I recall. I wound up with a kind of skeletal version of the screenplay, and then put the music into place to fit that outline, fading the dialogue in and out as necessary to trace some of the film’s plot lines, running gags and signature bits.
This was a pretty bold choice to make, especially since I’d only seen the film the one time. But I figured nobody was going to second-guess me, and nobody ever did.
Listening to it today, I say to myself, “My God, that’s good!” It’s really a very entertaining soundtrack, and it definitely captures the unique spirit of M.A.S.H. Is there any other soundtrack like it? Well, it’s a big, wide, wonderful world, and other people may well have done similar or better things, but not that I’ve ever heard. It was really great fun to make and, a half-century later, it’s still great fun to listen to.
We released “Suicide Is Painless” as a single, and it spent three weeks on the charts in 1970, peaking at No. 58—nothing special. But it got picked up as the theme for the long-running television show based on the film. The song became a classic, even hitting No. 1 on the British charts in 1980.
According to director Bob Altman, he hadn’t intended it to be the movie’s dominant musical element—it was supposed to be a goofy song sung by one character in one scene, and he wanted it to be “the stupidest song ever written.” He’d planned to write the lyrics himself, but couldn’t come up with words that were stupid enough. Unable to work it out, he turned to his 14-year-old son, Mike, who wrote the lyrics in five minutes. It came out so well that, recorded by a spacey vocal quartet, it wound up being played over the opening titles and became the movie’s musical signature.
Altman later told Johnny Carson, during an appearance on The Tonight Show, that he’d been paid only $70,000 to direct the movie, but that his son’s half of the song turned out to be worth more than $1,000,000, thanks to its use in every episode of the hit television show.
The real irony? Because CBS was uncomfortable with having a song that seemed to glorify suicide as the theme for a prime-time comedy, the network decided to use an instrumental version of the song. So Mike Altman’s lyrics were heard only in the movie—not on the television show that earned him all that money.
A Man Called Horse (1970).
I don’t have any particular memories of working on this soundtrack. It was a Richard Harris western, and westerns are usually easier soundtracks because there’s a tradition of long, atmospheric scenes of riding horsemen, sweeping scenery and so forth, usually accompanied by some sweeping music as well, because there isn’t any dialogue, so the composer can really go to town.
I seldom got to meet with a film’s composer personally, though, but on this one I did. I was on the West Coast, I think for some other purpose, but I knew we were doing the soundtrack for the film, so I went to see the composer, a very gifted man named Leonard Rosenman.
The composers of movie scores range from studio hacks to failed pop stars to real artists of the medium and, occasionally, to concert-hall composers such as Leonard Bernstein or Aaron Copland. Rosenman was one of the real artists of the medium, an impressive guy and a really serious composer who had scored some classic movies, among them East of Eden (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955).
He was probably in his mid-40s in 1970, and he had definite ideas as to what he wanted in the soundtrack album. Which was unusual, because most composers are focused on the movie and, by the time the soundtrack is in the works, they’re on to the next one. I was grateful to have had the opinions and the guidance of the composer. Most of the time, that didn’t happen.
Tell Me that You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970).
This bizarre mix of comedy and drama featured Liza Minnelli as a girl whose face has been disfigured in an accident, Robert Moore as a gay paraplegic and Ken Howard as an epileptic. All three wind up sharing a house together and helping each other with their problems. It was a huge flop that didn’t make any money and its soundtrack album didn’t sell at all, as far as I can remember … but I’m still very glad we made the soundtrack anyway.
The film was produced and directed by the famous Otto Preminger, who also worked as an actor. He played a smugly evil Nazi commandant in Billy Wilder’s hit Stalag 17 (1953), and he brought some of that same approach to directing. “Imperious” was a word often associated with him, as were “temperamental,” “demanding,” “impatient” and “controlling.”
He wanted a say in nearly every aspect of his films, including the orchestral recording session, which is unusual for a director. When Columbia picked up the picture, which was a Paramount film, Otto insisted that we should send one of our people out to Hollywood to musically supervise the recording session. That person, of course, was me. This already was unusual, but Otto ensured that it would get even more unusual.
To compose the score, for whatever reason, Otto had hired a man named Philip Springer. Now, Springer was a very erudite man—he was, I think, Dr. Phil Springer—but the score he wrote for Tell Me that You Love Me, Junie Moon was atonal and very, very difficult, not only to listen to, but also to play.
At the first recording session, Springer was taking some time in explaining things to the orchestra musicians, who were seeing the music for the first time. They needed to read it, understand it and then perform it under trying conditions, getting it right while synchronizing the music to the film. So, beyond Phil’s music, there were technological challenges as well, and it was taking time to sort them out.
I had never met Preminger before, and frankly, I thought he was a bully. He had no patience and no manners. Every five minutes, it seemed, he’d bellow, “Mr. Springer! Mr. Springer! Ve haff to get on with zis!” And I could see that Phil was really up against the wall. He had written a very abstruse, difficult score, he was trying his best to get the musicians to play it, and the director was making that impossible.
I had just met them both, and I had no desire to antagonize Otto, but I’d been at a lot of recording sessions by then, and I could see that we wouldn’t get anywhere unless Otto calmed down and let Phil do what he had to do.
So I said to him, “You know, Mr. Preminger, I think we ought to have a little more patience with this guy. I mean, he really needs the time to get it going.”
He turned on me and said, “Mr. Shepard!”
I said, “Yes?”
“If you keep on defending incompetence,” he said, “you vill die a poor man.”
I replied, “Well, I am a poor man, Mr. Preminger.”
“Ah, perhaps so,” Otto said, “but I didn’t know you were so ready to die.”
And then, while I was trying to figure out what to say to that, he added, “You’re a musician, right?”
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “OK, you’re going to write my next movie.”
I didn’t take him seriously at the moment—but, oddly enough, that turned out to be exactly what happened.
The Owl and the Pussycat (1970).
This was a Cinema Center film, a romantic comedy starring Barbra Streisand and George Segal. I don’t recall anything particularly significant about the soundtrack.
Scrooge (1970).
Christmas came early for me in 1970—months ahead of time, in fact. Cinema Center was the American distributor of a British musical which had started out being called A Christmas Carol; by the time it was released, though, it had become Scrooge, presumably to avoid confusion with the many other Christmas Carols around during any holiday season.
Columbia Records naturally had rights to the soundtrack album, and I was asked to go to London and oversee the editing and mixing. I wasn’t exactly the producer, since the people working on the music for the movie knew what they were doing, but was simply there to make sure that what we got from them met our production standards. Because this film was a musical, its soundtrack album was going to consist primarily of the songs from the movie, and thus would be treated more like a cast album than like a conventional soundtrack. For that reason we might need a segue, here and there, to get around some unnecessary dialogue, and in general songs for records need cleaner intros and endings than movie soundtracks do.
This was a fun trip for a variety of reasons. I didn’t have moment-by-moment responsibility for the recording, so there was less pressure, and the recording wasn’t made in a single day of frantic activity. And, of course, I was in London, one of my favorite cities in the world ever since the 1960s, when I visited fairly frequently for recording sessions with Pierre Boulez. I was there on business, of course, but Irene was with me, and we did have time to get at least a glimpse of the city. We also became quite friendly with one of the producers, Robert Solo, who was producing his first film; he became a good friend of ours for many years.
Leslie Bricusse (it’s pronounced “BRICK-us”) is known mostly as a lyricist, but he wrote both the score and the screenplay for Scrooge, and did an awfully good job on both. I hadn’t worked with Bricusse before, since most of his work was in London or Hollywood, but he was a lot of fun to be around. The film was still unfinished, but it was interesting to see it in progress. Albert Finney was very handsome as the young Scrooge, and Alec Guinness played Marley’s Ghost; I never met any of the cast, though, because I was basically there for the editing and mixing of the already-recorded tracks.
So there I was in Shepperton Studios, standing behind the glass along with the engineer—and I didn’t have a lot to do. I had one or two things to say, just to justify my being there, but I didn’t know much about making movies and they knew what they were doing. It was a very useful experience for me, though, because in the next year I would be getting directly involved in the making of a movie, and having been there to see this one in production served me well later on.
Little Big Man (1970).
Arthur Penn’s revisionist western, which starred Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway, was easily the most successful film Cinema Center produced, earned a then-princely $31 million. It had a score by John Hammond, but otherwise I don’t recall much about the soundtrack. As I mentioned, westerns generally make for easier soundtrack albums, and perhaps that’s why nothing sticks in my mind.
Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things about Me? (1971).
This comedy cast Dustin Hoffman as a troubled pop songwriter. The music was by Shel Silverstein—yes, the children’s-book author (Where the Sidewalk Ends), Playboy cartoonist, screenwriter (Things Change) and country songwriter (“A Boy Named Sue”). Silverstein was the lead songwriter for the rock band Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, and the score was written—fittingly for the subject matter—in a pop style, with the band contributing a couple of songs to the soundtrack.
Although I was a veteran producer, I was a bit out of my depth with pop, because the work of a pop producer is quite different from that of a classical or Broadway producer, and I was a bit out of my depth. I was fortunate, therefore, to have on hand somebody who understood that genre much better: Bobby Colomby, a musician and record producer probably best known today as the original drummer for the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears. I deferred most of the key decisions to Bobby, and it worked out well.
Le Mans (1971).
This auto-racing movie starred Steve McQueen, and I was told that he wanted to have some input into the recording. I have no idea what musical qualifications he may have had, but after dealing with composers, directors and producers, the last thing I needed was for a movie star to be added to the mix.
I imagine he that McQueen was concerned that the various music that accompanied the race scenes be somehow true to the experience—perhaps drowning out the music with roaring engines and screeching tires?—but, so far as I know, he didn’t end up having anything to say about the recording and, if he wasn’t pleased with it, I never heard about it.
By this point, however, I had moved back onto more familiar turf. John McClure had been in charge of Masterworks for some years and, when he left Columbia in 1971, Thomas Frost and I were asked to run the department as co-directors. Under most circumstances I wouldn’t have considered being a co-director of anything—it’s a recipe for conflict and stress—but Tom and I were longtime colleagues and also good friends, and I felt sure that we’d be able to make it work. As indeed we did: If we had any disagreements at all over the next few years, they weren’t of any consequence, and Masterworks thrived under our leadership.
So by mid-1971 my brief hiatus from classical music was over. I returned to a mix of Broadway and classical work, both somewhat reduced due to my new administrative responsibilities, and I turned away from movies for good … almost.
Such Good Friends (1971).
When, on the set of Tell Me that You Love Me, Junie Moon, the first day we’d ever met, Otto Preminger told me that I’d write the score for his next movie, I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me or my work, and the whole thing seemed like a sardonic aside to his ongoing quarrel with Phil Springer. I was to learn, however, that Otto was a man of impulse, a filmmaker who trusted his instincts, made decisions in a hurry and generally stuck with them.
In 1971 he was 66, and close to the end of a career that dated back to 1931. The man who had made Laura (1944), River of No Return (1954), Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Advise and Consent (1962) hadn’t had a hit for almost a decade, but he still did things his own way, showing no signs of waning confidence. He usually got what he wanted, and one of the things he wanted was me to compose the score for Such Good Friends.
He was very difficult during Such Good Friends. Very demanding, very opinionated. But it was a wonderful experience, and I’m proud of my work on the film.
Not many people today have seen Such Good Friends, which got only a limited release and was a box-office flop, but it was and is an interesting movie, with an excellent cast and strong direction. Characteristically for Otto in his later years, it was a quirky mix of comedy and drama, with a scathing attitude toward human character. It was written by Elaine May, adapting the novel by Lois Gould.
The story: Julie (Dyan Cannon), an affluent New York housewife, has her life suddenly upended when her husband (Laurence Luckenbill) unexpectedly goes into a coma after complications during what was supposed to be minor surgery. As he lies insensible, she stumbles across his “little black book,” and realizes that he’s been cheating with various friends of hers. Thrown for a loop, she initially reacts by having affairs with several of his male friends, but by the end of the movie (after her husband’s death) she emerges as a stronger, emotionally healthy woman ready for a life on her own.
As I’ve mentioned, Otto was more interested in the music for his movies than most directors are, and he insisted that the score’s composer should be present, as much as possible, for all the filming—which, in this case, was done in New York. He felt, I suppose, that it would help me get a feel for the emotional undercurrents of the characters and story.
Well, what could be more delightful? I was there for at least 2/3 of the filming, and it was a pleasure getting to know Dyan, who is a charming woman. Our friend Virginia Vestoff, who had played Abigail Adams in 1776, was also in the cast. They were all fascinating people, Ken Howard, Burgess Meredith, Jimmy Coco, Nina Foch … It was a great experience for me. As I said, back in college I had dreamed of going to Hollywood and writing film scores. Otto wasn’t an easy man to deal with, but I’ll always be grateful to him for the chance to live out that dream, even briefly.
This project is one of the reasons I’m so glad that I spent a year or so working on movie soundtracks, not only because it brought me into contact with Otto and made Such Good Friends possible, but also because the year I’d spent thinking in detail about movie music—how it works as music and how it fits with the visual and verbal components of a movie—was ideal preparation for the job I found myself doing. If I’d come to it cold, I doubt I’d have been nearly as pleased with the results.
I had a lot of fun writing Such Good Friends, because the contemporary setting and the mixture of drama and comedy meant that I could write in a variety of styles. There are dramatic moments, there’s a giddy waltz, there are moments of musical humor.
There’s even a bit with a kazoo solo. And I brought in Anita Darian, the wonderful singer whom I’d worked with on several studio-cast albums in the early 1960s, to play the kazoo. I remembered that, back in 1960, she’d played the kazoo on one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, in a “Kazoo Concerto” by Mark Bucci, and she was very good. It sounds silly, because anyone can play the kazoo, but this was a lengthy and bizarre solo, so I needed someone who was really good at it, and Anita was.
I wanted very much to have a song to run over the end credits of Such Good Friends, which turned out to be “Suddenly It’s All Tomorrow,” a song expressing Julie’s joy at finally finding herself free and clear of her cheating husband and their hypocritical friends. I wrote the music for the song and gave it to Charlie Burr, the lyricist with whom I’d written quite a few songs by this time. Charlie couldn’t do anything with it, though. He said, “It sounds like a march. I can’t … ” So I gave it to Robert Brittan, a lyricist whom I knew from Lehman Engel’s musical-theater workshop and who later wrote the words for Raisin, a show I recorded. Well, it just suited him perfectly. I liked what he wrote very much.
Now, I hadn’t cleared this with Otto. When we had the song finished, I played it for him with some trepidation. Otto wasn’t diplomatic with his opinions, and he could be very hurtful. But, much to my relief and delight, Preminger liked the number. It was sung in the film by O.C. Smith and actually published later as sheet music. In 1974 Lena Horne sang it in Tony and Lena Sing, the Broadway show she did with Tony Bennett at the Minskoff Theatre, which was something I’ll never forget.
Ironically, there was never a soundtrack album for Such Good Friends. But I put one together for my own amusement, following the same approach that I had for The Reivers, and it came out very well—as you’d expect, because I had written the music and had access to literally all the masters. The recording I put together has easily twice as much material on it as Otto used in the film. I had 100 copies made, and shared them with various family members and friends.
I would have loved the chance to score some more films, but so far no other opportunity has come my way. It was in every way a memorable experience.
