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Someone at the Oscarwatch.com forums posted the whole thing!
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=hottopic&id=2353Here it is:
Composer’s career mixes old-school work ethic, cutting-edge vision
Danny Elfman wasn’t the first rock ‘n’ roller to become a film composer, and he certainly won’t be the last. While he endured more flak than almost anyone in the history of the profession — in part because he made no secret of the fact that he was self-taught — the early, often unwarranted criticism by the old guard of Hollywood music makers has largely abated.
Jon Burlingame | 9/13/06 10:00pmDanny & Tim’s big adventure
Elfman, Burton have teamed on 12 pix dating back to 1985’s ‘Pee-wee’By JON BURLINGAME, DAVID SPRAGUE
From its earliest incarnation, Oingo Boingo never adhered to any particular formula, equally at home performing Cab Calloway covers and Zappa-esque instrumentals — all filtered through the ghoulish theatricality of German expressionist theater.
That stylistic diversity drew the attention of a then-nascent director named Tim Burton, who saw in Elfman an ideal sonic foil for Paul Reubens, for whom he was helming “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.”“Danny’s stuff didn’t make sense to everyone, but it did to both Tim and Paul,” says longtime Elfman manager Laura Engel, who met the composer in the late ’70s when she was stage manager at L.A.’s Westwood Playhouse. “Tim really wanted to work with the Boingo guy and Paul was really interested in working with the guy who did ‘Forbidden Zone.’ At first, they didn’t even realize they were talking about the same person.”
The notion of split personality soon became all too real for Elfman himself. As Oingo Boingo was reaching its commercial zenith, Elfman was experiencing a seven-year itch — a feeling he says brought him to the brink of a psychic civil war. “Those two personalities didn’t like each other,” Elfman says. “The film composer saw the Oingo Boingo guy as silly and the Oingo Boingo guy thought the composer was stuffy.”
From the bouncy, Italianesque sensibility of “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” to the massive gothic melodrama of “Batman” to the children’s-choir charm and innocence of “Edward Scissorhands,” Burton and Elfman developed an artistic kinship that’s rivaled by few other director-composer teams, including the much vaunted partnership between John Williams and Steven Spielberg.
With 12 film collaborations over two decades, the kinship between Elfman and Burton represents the natural melding of two seemingly twisted minds.
“I used to go and see his band in clubs before I even had the thought that I would be able to make movies,” recalls Burton. “I had an affinity for his music long before I had the opportunity (to hire him).
“It’s a certain fit of sensibilities. We like a lot of the same things. He’s always been a good kind of guidepost, to try and help set the tone of the movie, capture the spirit of it.”
Elfman is straightforward about their long and successful collaboration: “If a director finds a composer who can interpret their vision, and do it more than once correctly, they may find a comfort level. All I know is that Tim is going to give me a much longer leash (than most directors).
“It’s not a slam-dunk,” Elfman admits. “We go through a process. But he allows me to experiment, to invent, and he’s unlikely to be thrown by something coming from a little bit off the mark.
“The thing that I like most about working with Tim is that all of his responses to my music are visceral. He either feels it or he doesn’t. But he’s never going to hit me with ‘logic.’ And if there’s one thing that’s a music destroyer, it’s logic — too thought-out, too intellectual.”
On last year’s twin bill of Burton-Elfman movies, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Corpse Bride,” Elfman “was kind of schizophrenic,” Burton says, writing multiple songs and scores for two complicated, effects-filled pics. “Two different things, and he literally had to juggle both at the same time. At the end of it all, he did a great job on both.”
Mystic knighthood
Elfman’s roots in Oingo Boingo paved way to intersection of eclecticism and theatrics
Danny Elfman didn’t begin playing music until just after his 16th birthday — a date that he says “made me think I’d missed my chance and I was too old to pick up an instrument at all.”
He wasn’t even the first member of his family to enter the performing arts; that would be his older brother Richard, whose Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo mixed alt-rock eclecticism with avant garde theatrics.Nevertheless, young Danny exhibited unusually keen instinctive gifts. “When Danny first started, he didn’t have any formal musical background nor did he have any interest in music, including rock concerts,” recalls Richard Elfman. “We got Danny a guitar when he was 16; a month later he could pick out a reasonably decent rendition of a Django Reinhardt solo. We got him a violin a few months later. After fiddling around with his fiddle for a week or two, he managed Stephane Grappelli’s violin accompaniment to Django’s guitar. … Danny has a capacity to play any instrument he picks up. … At the time Danny couldn’t read music, but he could follow anyone with the instrument.”
Danny seemed to already be following in his brother’s unorthodox footsteps by his late teens when he spent a chunk of time touring Africa with a French troupe called Le Grand Magic Surface. It was around this time that the brothers would attempt to unify their quirky artistic visions.
“Early on, the Mystic Knights were more a visual thing than a musical one,” Elfman recalls about joining the band in 1972. “We had costume changes and animation and things were very raw — at some points there were eight people banging on drums.”
Steve Bartek, a fellow Mystic Knight, says Elfman’s penchant for sonic exploration was evident early on. “He was always really influenced by Kurt Weill,” says Bartek, whose working relationship with Elfman is pushing the three-decade mark. “That was odd enough back then, but he also brought in things like Nino Rota, Balinese gamelan music. People thought the band was very challenging.”
For Elfman, who admits to having a seriously truncated attention span, steering a linear course proved to be more of a challenge. By the end of the ’70s, he’d taken his first stabs at celluloid heroism — working on his brother’s cult hit “Forbidden Zone” as well as Martin Brest’s surreal debut “Hot Tomorrows” — but found himself more drawn to somewhat more conventional rock sounds emanating from across the pond.
“I really thought we’d taken the theatrical thing as far as it could go, and then I started hearing stuff like the Specials and Madness, and I was fascinated,” is how he explains the evolutionary process that would recall Oingo Boingo. “It was really freeing to be able go onstage in shorts and just take part in a visceral sweat-a-thon.”
That abandon proved to be mighty contagious, particularly in the band’s Southern California backyard, where — thanks to the strong support of KROQ radio’s Jed the Fish — Boingo began to evolve from L.A. club band to theater-filling entity.
A series of major-label deals brought the band its share of attention on a national scale, with MTV hopping on the bandwagon for 1983’s “Nothing Bad Ever Happens” as well as the theme song from the comedy “Weird Science,” which skirted the top 40 the following year. But while the band’s public profile was one of quirk, strangeness and charm, darker, more experimental elements — creepy-crawly percussion, odd ethnic fillips and the like — were Oingo Boingo’s real fuel.
Elfman insists his film-scoring forays in the ’80s hadn’t derailed his rock career, at least solely. “I always hated the repetition of touring,” he says, “and after eight years of working 12 hours a day, going back and forth between (that and scoring), I realized I would go postal if I had to do that again.”
Oingo Boingo maintained a sporadic release sked through the early ’90s, finally calling it a day after a blowout finale at the Universal Amphitheater (captured on the aptly titled “Farewell” CD). “Had Danny spent more of his time on the band in that period, we might’ve gotten bigger,” muses Bartek, who has worked as Elfman’s film music orchestrator in the years since. “More likely, we would’ve burned out earlier. As it was, I think the crossover (into film scores) was very interesting for his work in both arenas.”
While cross-pollination is largely a thing of Elfman’s past, he still draws on the twisted pop of his early days — as borne out by his eerie “Corpse Bride” work and his vocal turns in Burton’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (in which he voiced Oompa Loompas bearing traces of George Clinton and Cornershop).
That stylistic bent is but one of the hues that inhabit Elfman’s compositional palette, however. And his insistence on keeping that color wheel in perpetual motion has kept him from succumbing to a 21-year-itch in his current gig.
“I’m always happiest when I have a lot of contrast in my life, and (films) allows me to do just that,” he says. “I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what I can do, so I don’t think there’s any chance of me running out of things to say.”
‘Serenada’ tests classical waters
Sony BMG Masterworks to release Elfman’s orchestral piece Oct. 3
Paul McCartney’s done it, and so has Elvis Costello. Now Danny Elfman has joined their ranks, penning a piece that fits the broad definition of classical music. If that’s a far cry from Oingo Boingo or his scores to Tim Burton’s movies, so be it.
The impetus for Elfman’s “Serenada Schizophrana,” to be released Oct. 3 by Sony BMG Masterworks, came from the American Composers Orchestra in New York, which initially asked Elfman to write a chamber-sized work. “It was just sort of out of the blue,” he recalls, “but I’m always looking for any kind of challenge.” The challenge was greater than anticipated, and occupied as he was with one thing and another, he forgot about the commission — until the orchestra called for an update.“They had set the premiere for the same week my son was supposed to be born,” says Elfman. “But that was top-secret. So I immediately tried to cancel. People were saying, ‘Danny, you’re losing your nerve.'”
The orchestra offered to move the premiere from Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall’s hip underground space, to the house’s main auditorium. The composer balked, fearing that what was to have been a quiet foray into uncharted territory was evolving into a more ambitious media event. “I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ But then they mentioned that it would add months to my schedule, and I said, ‘I’ll take it!'”
Now he was writing for a full orchestra in a hall where music history had been made for more than a century. “I was intimidated looking at the scores on the walls there. I thought, ‘This is for the big boys, not a dope like me.’ “
Courage came from “Jazz Suite No. 1” by Dmitri Shostakovich. “I was impressed that a guy who wrote those deep and heavy string quartets could have a bit of fun, a frolic,” Elfman says. “It was like a little slap on the face: You don’t have to take yourself that seriously. So I just started writing and having fun.”
Never having written a pure orchestral piece not intended to support a movie, Elfman developed his own method, creating a series of improvised movements that at one point numbered more than a dozen. He pared them down to six, with titles like “A Brass Thing,” “The Quadruped Patrol” and “Bells and Whistles.” The work’s final running time is around 42 minutes, a little over the maximum requested by the orchestra.
“I ran amok a bit,” he says of the process. “I’m used to following pictures, which tells me how long I have. But here I would start the piece, and then it drove itself. It was a ton of work to get the first two minutes of each movement, but then they got their own momentum, and it was all I could do to stop them after that. “
The New York Times described last year’s Feb. 23 bow of “Serenada Schizophrana” as “music that works” and lauded Elfman as a composer with “an ear for symphonic colors and how to balance them.”
John Mauceri, the longtime music director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, was among those in attendance that night. “Danny was suddenly free to express the curves and shapes of his own imagination,” he says.
Indeed, Mauceri was so impressed, he asked Elfman to compose a piece to mark the conclusion of his 16-year tenure at the Bowl. That work, the 8½-minute “Overeager Overture,” debuts this weekend.
“It’s like two composers who don’t like each other collaborating,” Elfman says of his classical work. “One says, ‘Have fun; let’s get happy.’ And the other says, ‘What’s this in service of?’ In the end, each gets about 50% of what they want. I feel that all the time when I’m scoring, but I feel that even more so in this case.”
‘Nightmare’ before & after
Disney reissues film Oct. 20 with a bonus soundtrackReleased under the Touchstone label in 1993, stop-motion-animated pic “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” scripted by Tim Burton, was the Disney anti-musical at a time when the studio was bathing in the success of “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin.”
Centering on the exploits of Jack Skellington, the king of Halloween Town who invades Christmas Town, “Nightmare” sputtered at the domestic B.O. with a middling $50 million.“I was the first to see the film at a really bad preview,” recalls Elfman, who composed the pic’s 11 songs and lent his vocals to various characters including Skellington. “Disney was deflated by it. Nobody understood what it was. I felt the support for it evaporate.”
In the wake of the film’s initial icy reception, fanfare has grown around “Nightmare,” not only among the Goth set and holiday moppets, but rock artists who’ve adored the stylings of the ex-Oingo Boingo front man.
On Oct. 20 Disney will re-issues the feature in digital 3-D along with a double CD soundtrack comprised of the original score along with a new disc touting a string of musical acts paying homage to Elfman’s “Nightmare” music.
Richard Kraft, Elfman’s agent with partner Laura Engel, says his inspiration for the new “Nightmare” soundtrack stemmed from a 1988 LP titled “Stay Awake,” a compilation of Disney songs covered by emerging ’80s artists like Sinead O’Connor and Suzanne Vega.
At the top of the “Nightmare” soundtrack roster is Goth rocker Marilyn Manson, a longtime public fan of the film. He specifically chose a Skellington tune and will sing the pic’s intro track, “This Is Halloween.”
“I couldn’t really resist the opportunity, as I everything I do is Halloween and Halloween needed me to be a part of it,” says Manson. “I liked the different characters the song has and it was a chance for me to ham it up and make it the musical representation of my ‘Sybil.’ I still wanted to keep the song in a world where it wasn’t a cover; rather, it remains with the same tempo, arrangement and orchestration.”
Engel felt Fiona Apple was an excellent choice for “Sally’s Song,” given the singer’s affinity with the haunted, melancholic character.
Other artists include Fall Out Boy (“What’s This?”), She Wants Revenge (“Kidnap the Sandy Claws”) and Panic at the Disco (an alternate version of “This Is Halloween”).
While Elfman initially was inspired by Kurt Weill and Gilbert & Sullivan in penning “Nightmare,” what resulted occupied its own retro space.
While early ’90s animated features were employing a contemporary Broadway sound, Elfman intentionally sidestepped it.
The three-year process of shooting of “Nightmare” proved to be a liberating one for Elfman.
Rather than compose material for a film he hadn’t seen, he was continually involved in pre-production through Burton’s drawings and Skellington stories.
After hearing Elfman’s song demos, which he sung, the filmmakers were convinced that Elfman was Skellington.
“I was at a point where I had a band and was also the king of a little kingdom,” says Elfman. “We were both confined and wanted to escape. The more I got into Jack, the more he came from a common place. We had mutual feelings of alienation and love.”
In their own words
Sonnenfeld, Hackford talk about working with Elfman
Danny Elfman scored “Men in Black” (1997) and “Men in Black 2” (’02) for Sonnenfeld. While “MIB” highlighted a reeling, comical, sci-fi sound, “MIB2” was a throwback to ’60s swinging lounge music.Environmental mood
“In Danny’s composing room he has these Mexican figurines of death, skeletons and ashtrays with skeletons painted on them. I think there was also a stuffed cat. His room was fairly cluttered, filled with computers and TV monitors and a couch; however, I would sit next to him at his console. We would always work together late at night (11:30 p.m.), and it was always raining when I went to his place, making me miss the turn to his place two or three times. I’m afraid of ghosts and supernatural things, so getting to his house was an emotional challenge.”“Men in Black”
“I wanted a certain kind of sound that was big and specific for ‘Men in Black.’ Danny would play a temp score and he’d synch it against the image. I would listen and make small suggestions like, ‘Don’t put a button on the cue’ or ‘Make it more manly.’ I spoke in shorthand. I would occasionally say, ‘Can we not help the comedy?’ I didn’t want the score to be a comedy score. … At Danny’s, I would have a cup of coffee, be lost for several hours in the music, then leave thrilled and delighted, fearing once again the walk to my car.”TAYLOR HACKFORD
Danny Elfman scored two films for Hackford, 1995’s “Dolores Claiborne” and 2000’s “Proof of Life.”
“Dolores Claiborne”
“When I came to work with Danny, he was known for his more whimsical scores such as ‘Batman’ and ‘Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.’ For ‘Dolores,’ I was listening to an Estonian composer, Arvo Part. So I had this vision in mind for the film, since we were shooting in Nova Scotia with ever-changing skies. It was Richard Kraft, Danny’s manager, who brought to my attention that Danny had cut his teeth on Russian composers like Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky. … Kathy Bates portrayed Dolores as a person who has a rough exterior, but there’s a lot of pain and depth inside. Danny’s score provided an emotional context. … I went to his house and he had composed the score on computer … but when he plays with the computer, the arrangements are complete; you can hear the woodwinds, strings, horns and percussion. I was blown away.
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