Jerry Goldsmith

Jerry Goldsmith (b. February 10th, 1929)

Evening the Score
During a monumental career, spanning more than five decades, composer Jerry Goldsmith, has written over 175 original film scores. He's been nominated for 17 Academy Awards, won the Oscar for The Omen in 1976, has received nine Golden Globe nominations and won five Emmy awards. Many of his finest scores have become a part of our cultural memory, including: Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, Chinatown, Mulan, and The Mummy. Goldsmith spoke with Barnes & Noble.com's Andy Velez from the studio-office in Goldsmith's Beverly Hills home, where his straight-from-the-hip comments -- including some sharp barbs fired off at cinematic icons Bernard Herrmann and Otto Preminger -- were often punctuated with wry laughter.

Barnes & Noble.com: Was yours a musical family?

Jerry Goldsmith: No. My family appreciated good music, basically classical music. I started studying piano when I was six, theory and harmony and counterpoint when I was 14. I began college and got bored with it, because I had been taking all these subjects privately, but I continued.

B&N.com: How did your composing career begin?

JG: It was about 1950. CBS had a workshop, and once a week the employees, whatever their talents, whether they were ushers or typists, would produce a radio show. But you had to be an employee. They needed someone to do music, and I knew someone there who said I'd be great for this. I'd just gotten married and needed a job, so they faked a typing test for me. Then I could do these shows. About six months later, the music department heard what I did, liked it, and gave me a job.

B&N.com: What was it like in television then?

JG: The west coast had just started competing with New York in doing live dramas. They started with Climax and then Playhouse 90. When you stop and think, we had Days of Wine and Roses, Judgment at Nuremberg and The Miracle Worker. This was the golden age. I did them live every week, in a studio with a little orchestra and prayed that no one forgot their lines. But they did! It was one of the great training grounds of all time.

I met John Frankenheimer on Climax. We're going to do Reindeer Games now. Ben Affleck and Gary Sinise are in it. John is very definite and he knows what he wants. Ours is probably the longest relationship I've had with a director in the business. Recently I said to him, "My God, we've been working together for over 45 years!" He just looked at me and said, "I know. I can count." [big laugh]

B&N.com: How did you prepare for The Mummy?

JG: I have to de-mystify and de-romanticize this whole process! When one does a movie, and I'm doing four or five a year, the schedules we're on are very short. In the case of The Mummy, I read the script, liked it and the director was someone I worked with before, (Deep Rising), so I accepted it and forgot about it. I started writing it in January and finished recording the last week in March. It was a longer schedule than you get these days.

B&N.com: Has there been a particular score that you had problems with?

JG: Basic Instinct was probably the most difficult I've ever done. It's a very convoluted story with very unorthodox characters. It's a murder mystery, but it isn't really a murder mystery. The director, Paul Verhoeven, had a very clear idea of how the woman should be, and I had a hard time getting it. Because of Paul pushing me, I think it's one of the best scores I've ever written. It was a true collaboration.

Funny, the picture I just finished, The Haunting, the director is Jan de Bont, who was the cinematographer for Basic Instinct. I found him equally intelligent and very, very good to work with.

B&N.com: What is the scoring process actually like?

JG: After I have seen it a couple of times, we sit and go through it scene by scene. And we mutually agree or don't, until we come to an agreement about where the music should be. It's called "spotting." I try to speak in terms of drama and emotion, not music, because you can't really verbalize it. Then I go home and start writing. Because we have all these electronics now, I can play it into a computer and run it in sync with a video. The director can come to the house and we discuss what works and doesn't work.

B&N.com: I'm going to mention a few of your films and ask you to comment. The Omen.

JG: It won an Academy Award. [laughs] I was up against Bernard Herrmann, who had two nominations. He was a pain-in-the-ass. We had a love-hate war going on. Then he'd just died, so I thought it would be slam dunk for Benny. So much for sentimentality. He was a wonderful dramatist, but not really a very good composer. His use of the orchestra is phenomenal, and I can always learn from that. You can learn from everything.

B&N.com: You were close with some of the greatest film composers.

JG: Alfred Newman was a big mentor of mine. Unbeknownst to me, he was lobbying for me to get my first major picture, Lonely Are the Brave (1961). I was really the new kid on the block. He was a consummate musician, a terrific composer and conductor. He loved music and respected talent. I think he loathed some of the people who worked for him, but they were talented and therefore they worked.

B&N.com: And Alex North?

JG: I loved Alex. He was just a wonderful person. When he did A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), the whole style of music changed in motion pictures. Up to that point, it had all been steeped in 19th century European tradition. Streetcar was purely American and contemporary. It opened the floodgates and we were allowed to do anything. I always marvel at Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. His score is so brilliant dramatically and musically it was so good. That to me is the definition of great film music. Nobody else could have scored that but Alex.

B&N.com: Otto Preminger's In Harm's Way -- for which Saul Bass did the title graphics.

JG: No one had a good experience with Otto Preminger.

Horrible human being. I can name all these great old time directors I had one job with, because most of them died or stopped working after I did a picture with them. Howard Hawks and Rio Lobo, Carol Reed and Agony and the Ecstasy. Unfortunately, Preminger did make some more movies. [laughs] Saul's designs were brilliant stuff. In a main title, he could tell the whole story, and that's what film is all about when you get down to it. Storytelling. That's what for me, is lacking in so much film making today.

B&N.com: Star Trek.

JG: It was one of the few times I ever worked with a star who was also a director -- with Jonathan Frakes. It's sort of a strange thing. You're sitting with the person you're working with and you're seeing him on the screen at the same time. The last Rambo, Stallone was in charge of post-production, and I spotted the picture with him. He was fine. He's a good filmmaker actually.

Star Trek is such an international phenomenon now. In a recent concert I gave in Aberdeen, 40 people came in full Star Trek regalia. In Budapest, the fan club besieged me before the concert. The first movie they wrote off the foreign on it, but now it's growing and growing all over.

B&N.com: Do you have a dream project?

JG: No.

B&N.com: You're living the dream, doing what you want to do.

JG: That's right.

Awards & Nominations