[Title unverified]
[Author details lost]
Penthouse, 1999.11
I'm on a quest. You might even say that I'm obsessed. I've flown
from New York on a dubious discount airline, and I'm sleeping in an unheated
pool house somewhere in the nether reaches of the Hollywood Hills—in the
very heart of the kingdom of fantasy and weirdness—all just to meet the
elusive Danny Elfman. You may not recognize his name, yet here in Hollywood
he is truly a lord of the realm. He's written scores for some 40 major motion
pictures. Not only prolific, he can write inventive, quirky music for any kind
of movie, from the gothic Batman to the celestial Edward Scissorhands,
from the gamelan-infested menace of Dead Presidents to the lush, hypnotic
Black Beauty, from the blues-combo lurch of Midnight Run to the
string orchestra of Dolores Claiborne to the out-of-tune pianos and bent
banjos of A Simple Plan. The antic theme music for TV's The Simpsons?
Elfman again.
Still, a celebrity he's not, and probably never will be. For
better or worse, celebrity is reserved for movie stars and a handful of directors.
To the movie-going masses, screenwriters, film composers, editors, and cinematographers
are all arcane stuff—end-credit cuneiform, along with truly mysterious
entities like gaffers and best boys. But here in Hollywood it's a little different.
Here, Elfman is revered. Producers pander to him, studios throw mountains of
money at him (a million dollars a picture), directors beg him on bended knee
to score their movies: Please, Danny, just sprinkle a bit of Elfspritz on my
lumbering project. Make me look good, baby! They all want a touch of his brooding
soul because that old Elfman magic can make or break a film. A brilliant soundtrack
threads its way through a movie so subtly you hardly know it's there, but its
very "invisibility" is the source of its power. From moment to moment the music
is subliminally cueing your emotions, persuading you to believe manifest absurdities.
"Soundtracks are shockingly powerful," says Jon Turteltaub, director
of the Anthony Hopkins, Cuba Gooding, Jr., thriller Instinct, which Elfman
scored. "By the time the director gets to the composer, he's been on the movie
more than a year. He's pulling his hair out to make the movie as good as it
can be—it's a miracle he got it this far—and now somebody is going
to come in and possibly undo all this work with a lousy score. You're praying
the composer is going to bring this thing to life as only music can. Watch a
movie without music or with the wrong music—it's another movie."
And Elfman, at the age of 46, is not just any music spritzer;
he's the reigning king of the movie composers. Hell, he's well-nigh historical.
As his brother Rick Elfman, who directs independent movies, says: "There are
many great sweeping scores, like Maurice Jarre's score for Lawrence of Arabia,
but who are the artists? Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Taxi Driver),
Nino Rota (81/2, The Godfather)—and Danny. They wrote the
book. With the anomaly of the zither player who did the score for The Third
Man, the book is closed." Of course, there's also the guy who wrote the
Pink Panther theme (Henry Mancini), the guy who did that ocarina thing
for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Ennio Morricone), and the guy who
came up with the bass riff for Jaws (John Williams). But if you had to
choose just four film composers for the ages, Danny Elfman would have to be
one of them, and he's living here now among us.
I finally track Elfman to the Sony Studios lot in Culver City,
where he's working on Instinct. The Sony executive building is a high-and-wide
totalitarian-looking pyramid of glass and green stone that looms over the lot
like the Mayan temple of a thousand-year reich—the Reich of Illusion! There's
a ten-foot neon G clef in pink and blue above the entrance to the sound-recording
stage. Beyond a two-foot-thick refrigeration-type door is the sound booth, a
huge, high-ceilinged war room of cutting-edge electronic gadgets humming and
clicking, talking amongst themselves. MIDI samplers, Auricle electronic metronomes,
sequencers integrating the different synthesizer tracks, and a couple of 48-track
mixing consoles are minded by rows of engineers and techies who twiddle and
toggle their twenty-first-century gadgets with lugubrious concentration.
As if at home in his rec room, Maestro Elfman, at once absentminded
and ferociously focused, pads around the booth in gray stocking feet. At the
slightest tremor of a wrong note his antennae twitch like some earthquake-predicting
mantis. "Wow!" he says when someone hits a sour B flat, "that really woke us
up in here. It was better than a cup of coffee." Pacing up and down like a child
actor playing Captain Ahab, Elfman carries on a stream-of-consciousness conversation
with himself. In a sort of verbal counterpoint, he makes abstruse jokes ("There
are too many Injuns in this hospital") and delivers mock Shakespearean asides
("Scoff all you wish, churls"), while issuing arcane instructions to the orchestra
("Really hit the D on 82") and reciting dialogue from a private scenario ("See
how he beats me and he beats me until there's nothing left!"). His manner is
witty, irrepressible, playful. Almost dizzy with childlike excitement at this
huge toy he gets to play with. He reminds you of a punky Mozart—at least
Mozart as played by Tom Hulce in Amadeus. "Have the horn player hold
it there," he instructs the conductor. "For about a year and a half—two
whole notes, until he turns blue." High in one corner of the booth, the finished
cut of the movie is being screened on a large TV monitor synched to the dialogue,
sound effects, and soundtrack. In the scene we are watching, the pathologically
simian-obsessed anthropologist played by Anthony Hopkins overturns a table in
a fit of rage. The jarring dissonance of the soundtrack is a startling burst
of abrasive, chaos-baiting modernism straight out of Bartok or Penderecki, composers
the average moviegoer is hardly likely to embrace. I mention to Elfman how odd
this is.
"Film scoring," he says, "is the only medium in which people
who'd never normally listen to anything dissonant are listening to it because
of its strictly dramatic underpinning. If you put a song in a scene you have
an immediate reaction. One person will think it's cool, the other thinks it's
fucked up. With a film score you don't get that reaction because people just
accept it as part of the language of the film. People don't ask, Is this my
taste, is this what I listen to? They don't listen to Penderecki; they're not
aware of it, so it doesn't bother them." The technicians in the booth are like
the crew of an intergalactic spaceship. On the other side of a huge picture
window sit the musicians of the orchestra in concentric circles. With their
wooden and brass instruments, their quaint little sticks and strings, they seem
like creatures from another century. The musicians are mute except when instructed
to play. Somnambulists sawing away at their ancient instruments -- time zombies!—all
under the supernatural control of a whimsical red-haired man in his stocking
feet. Maestro Danny Elfman—I go in for a close-up. White, pale Hapsburg
skin. The complexion of someone who never goes out in the sun, like the hemophiliac
courtiers you see in paintings by Velazquez. Hair of such startling redness
it resembles the underpainting on a dented car or a Renaissance portrait in
which the color has oxidized. Mustache and beard of the same jarring redness,
but so wispy they look like they've been stuck on with spirit gum. Thin, mad-scientist
glasses. He dresses with an eccentric's disregard for fashion. Paramedic-green
T-shirt, black jeans rolled up at the bottom, and socks. Socks! Socks without
shoes is the latest affectation among the Hollywood elite. Just that morning
I'd read about Sean Penn taking his children to school. He walks them from the
car to the school entrance in his stocking feet. The last time I was out here
it was shoes—very expensive shoes—without socks. It's all very casual
here in the booth. But with the clock ticking at thousands of dollars a minute,
you know everybody is making a concerted effort to keep it light. There are
about 20 technicians in the booth, some of them making $300 an hour, plus the
97-piece orchestra.
A couple of techies are catching 40 winks on the plush leather
couches, and who can blame them? With the endless repetition of tiny sequences,
the kab-balistic shoptalk and retakes, it's obvious these scoring sessions are
ultimately brain numbing. It could drive anyone to heights of whimsy, and it
doesn't take much to elicit whimsy from Elfman. Occasionally he'll bring in
a bullwhip to crack when things get slow, not that odd an idiosyncrasy for Hollywood.
But how many composers bring a shrunken head under glass into a scoring session
with them? Uncle Billy sits on the mixing board, lips sewn up, black wiry hair
still growing out of the parched skin of the skull, terrified beady eyes still
screaming. I get my first whiff of the dark side of Danny Elfman.