by John Lurie
We were trying to figure out how to segue from a sort of a blues into a more atmospheric piece of music. I wanted the blues to splinter apart gently, which might have been best if left to chance, with these great musicians, but I wanted to figure it out now to be safe, for the timing against the movie, which is always the tricky thing.
During this rehearsal time, at that exact moment, was when Jim’s lawyers said the negotiations had to take place. They’d had months to prepare for this, but it absolutely had to happen right now. They were asking for all kinds of things that they hadn’t asked for on Stranger Than Paradise. Said my deal on that movie “wasn’t standard.” They actually said, “We’re not going to let John get away with what he got away with on Stranger Than Paradise.”
What did I get away with on Stranger Than Paradise? I was paid a thousand dollars to do the score.
These same people who insisted that Jim, the “auteur,” must be kept in a sanitized ivory bubble, because he might be in the midst of the creative process—I had been around the guy quite a bit and had not seen this “creative process” in action—were now ruining the only rehearsal that I could afford.
It looked like the deal was going to fall apart and I had to stop rehearsal and get on the phone with my lawyer. It’s obvious how far something like this can take you away from the music, and it seems to inevitably happen. I have gotten better and better at dealing with this kind of shit, but I am sure that I have lost something because of it. Something beautiful.
I’m on the phone with my lawyer telling him that I can compromise on X, but no way on Y and Z. Jarmusch’s lawyers are playing hardball, it looks like the whole deal is going to fall through, and as much as my head wants to get back to the music, it doesn’t really seem to make any sense to do this because there isn’t going to be any music. And if this does fall apart, someone has to pay all these musicians for their time, and for the rehearsal studio, and Bisi’s studio, and Arto and Naná, and I am afraid it’s going to be me. It’s always me. My lawyer says he’ll call me back in a minute.
My head is lost in the negotiations. We only have an hour and a half of rehearsal time left and ten cues to work out before the recording.
All the musicians are sitting around waiting.
Dougie suggests that we could transition from that blues to the other piece by doing—
And I snap at him: “What do you know about music? You’re not a lawyer!”
Tony laughed his great little chuckle laugh.
* * *
—
The lawyer calls back and I just give in. I’m so anxious to get back to working on the music because it’s just hovering there, close but unfinished. I would have taken no money and no publishing to just have the music recorded and completed. So that it had a life and became an actual thing that existed instead of something I felt bouncing around in my head. I just say, “Give them whatever they want. I think it’s obscene, but I don’t want to deal with this anymore.”
I owe a lot to the musicians on a lot of music that I’ve done. Tony Garnier, Dougie Bowne, E. J. Rodriguez, Naná Vasconcelos, Marc Ribot, and Curtis Fowlkes all added a lot to the Down by Law score. And Evan, of course, who helped me orchestrate one blues thing that really made it more elegant. On a lot of it I gave the musicians the idea and they just played. It was also easier because there wasn’t the thing that you have with Hollywood films where the music had to be timed out exactly. It was possible to play musically, with soft ins and outs, so that the music could be shifted a little when they put it to picture. This way you can avoid using a click track, which can stultify the feel.
Jim and I were always creatively close and on the same page. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to be working with him like this. He trusted me completely. He never asked to hear sketches and never even made any suggestions, and only once, in all the film scores I did for him, did he ever cut a piece of music out. This was daring of him, because who knows what he might have gotten. Often by the time we were doing the music we were not getting along. I had thought more than once of giving him a score with twenty-five kazoos. But it was actually smart of him to leave me alone because he knew that, left to my own devices, I would give it my absolute best because I cared more about the music and the project than anything else.
For the most part, which is pretty incredible, Jim let me decide where the music should go in the movie. This is unheard of in Hollywood, where there are eighteen musically illiterate people making all kinds of decisions about where the music should go and what the tempo should be and whether bongos might be nice here and, most important, what’s going to be on the soundtrack album. This way they can figure out what hit song will replace something the composer has already written and recorded and how they can line each other’s pockets with shekels.
What I might have been best at in this life was doing film scores for movies, but it was almost always made so unpleasant that I had to give it up. The big movies in one way, the smaller movies in another.
I suppose they might put on my report card: Doesn’t play well with others.
But I swear that is just not true. I just cared about what we were putting out into the world.
I was always shocked at how little people seemed to care about making the movie good. If you see something that is good, mad struggles went into it. Without exception. Some things roll out in an easy and nice way, but there are always bumps. I think about the look of determination on Claire Denis’s face during Paris, Texas and Down by Law, like she was going to war. That really is what it takes to make something good.
The last Hollywood film score I did was for a movie called The Crew, directed by Michael Dinner. This was way later. Must have been in 1999.
Barry Sonnenfeld and Barry Josephson were the producers. I had had an extremely unpleasant time working with Sonnenfeld on Get Shorty and was nervous to be doing this score where he was involved.
He really felt like a guy intent on making a career for himself where he was above people because of how he had been mistreated in grade school. And with me in particular; from things I gathered that he said about Jarmusch when he was at NYU at the same time, Jarmusch was the cool kid, and I was clearly cooler than Jarmusch, so I would be forced to suffer for the traumas Sonnenfeld had gone through as Mr. Not Cool Whatsoever of NYU.
Once I heard Barry Sonnenfeld’s voice, I should have run away.
Anyone who allows his voice to sound like Barry Sonnenfeld does cannot be someone who comes anywhere near music. His voice sounds like a duck wearing underwear that is too tight. He was at my place when I was working on the music for Get Shorty. As he spoke I watched the fruit, in a bowl on the counter, commit suicide and wither into a pile of rotted nothing.
I had gotten to the point where I decided I would do these film scores to have enough money to keep my music, the band, and the record label afloat, but that I would not get attached to the film score music, no matter how they butchered it, no matter how rude they were, no matter what they put me through. I would take the money and not care and make my own music with it. Of course, I could never actually get to that level of detachment.
In the contract for The Crew it said that I would be paid the second half of the money when the music was approved by their representative, though it wasn’t clear who their representative was. I turned to my lawyer, Peter Shukat, and said that I didn’t trust these people and the contract should specify who their representative was. Peter said that was ridiculous, that the director, Michael Dinner, was coming to New York and once he approved it, I was finished with the project.
This was one of those all-in deals where they give you a certain amount of money, a lot of money, and out of that money, you pay for the musicians, the studios, the orchestrator, the copyist, the video hookup, the engineer, etc., etc. If the thing stays in line, you can make money. If it goes all askew, it can be a disaster and you can lo
se a lot of money.
With composing a Hollywood movie, the timing of the scenes is what is so important. You have a scene that needs music for one minute and nineteen seconds and eleven frames. So you time it out exactly to the scene. When Hollywood sends you these scenes, they are what is called “locked,” meaning they will not be edited again. This is a sacred rule. Then you can begin your work, because there is no point in starting to map out the music against the edit until it is absolutely finished.
I have rehearsals with the musicians before we go into the studio. It makes it more organic. It makes it like actual music rather than notes placed against a click track to the frames from a computer to another computer. Apparently this is no longer how it is done, which I hear over and over again from Tom Drescher, the music editor they saddled me with. The music editor’s function is to fit the music into the movie. I’m fairly sure Tom Drescher is the man from the DMV who escorted my mother out thirty years earlier.
He keeps scoffing at the idea that I want to have a rehearsal. He has worked with James Newton Howard. No matter what I do, he says that that is not how James Newton Howard did it.
So I have forty of the best musicians in the world in the studio. We start to work on a cue and Michael Dinner says, “Oh, I think this scene may have been edited since we sent it to you.”
This is really like the air traffic controller saying to the pilot, “Oh, you are all the way over there? That’s a problem. Sorry, I was eating my sandwich. It’s a really nice roast beef with honey mustard!”
So forty of the best musicians in the world wait for Michael Dinner to call the editors and find out the actual timing of the scene.
Turns out it has been edited. Bernstein and I will have to go to my place, that night, to work on this cue before we go into the studio in the morning.
We start to work on the next cue. Michael Dinner is on his cell talking to someone about his new car. He looks up and says, “Oh, I think this may have been edited.”
Forty of the best musicians in the world sit and wait another twenty minutes while Michael Dinner calls his editing room.
Almost every scene is a different timing from the scene they sent me. The scenes I have been working on for two months.
Bernstein and I go to my house and do what I am pretty sure no other human beings could possibly do: rewrite each music cue to fit the timing that is happening now, without ruining the feel. We could just edit out bits or play things faster, but that would suck. That’s what the people do to make all the movies you see suck—though you can’t really figure out why they suck.
We get to the studio the next morning. We have not slept.
Michael Dinner is making phone call after phone call about his new car and about how to meet some attractive young actress.
There is one cue where there is a click track to count it off and then the click disappears. Calvin Weston, the genius drummer, is supposed to do a two-bar fill before the rest of the music comes in, but when we do it, Calvin botches it because he can’t hear the click.
So we’re going to just punch in Calvin’s two bars at the top. It is kind of a confusing thing to do. The click suddenly appears in your headphones and if you are not ready it is hard to catch and then play naturally as something to be punched in. Experienced studio musicians have no problem doing that, but Calvin is not that, and experienced studio musicians are certainly not Calvin.
Calvin comes from and lives in a poor black neighborhood in Philadelphia, and he talks like that.
Tom, the music editor, and Michael Dinner are sitting, shoulder to shoulder, with their heads down. Every time Calvin talks back to us from the drum booth, Dinner and Tom lean in and whisper to each other and start to giggle.
When Calvin messes up the intro, they giggle again.
When I talk to Calvin about the best way to approach it and Calvin responds, they whisper again and giggle.
They are having a big laugh because of how Calvin talks. But these fools are devoid of rhythm and do not have any idea what a rare talent Calvin Weston is.
I get pissed.
“Tom, do you know why black people hate the music of James Newton Howard?”
“No, why?”
“Because he sucks.”
The look on Drescher’s face is so sour, I think he’s going to have to rush off to the men’s room.
But that also puts any hope of things’ being civil with Dinner to bed. I have basically just told them they are racists, because they are acting like racists.
The thing is plodding along. Michael Dinner is spending most of his time on the phone talking about his new car. We finish a cue that he has not been listening to and when I ask if it is okay, he wants us to play it back for him because he has been on the phone talking about his car.
Every second in the studio with all these people and things being paid for by the hour is costing me money.
We play him the cue. He is not sure.
We play it again. He is not sure. He is not sure why he is not sure but he is not sure.
I rewrite it. We rerecord it. He is on the phone talking about his car.
We finish. Play it for him. He is not sure.
I am paying for all this indecision and he should have been paying attention from the top.
One of the musicians starts talking about this wild composer named Manolo, who punched a director while they were recording and knocked him out.
I say, “Oh thanks! That had never occurred to me as an option.”
Michael Dinner now looks like a seven-year-old at his first day of school.
There is a cue that is a flashback to one of the lead actors’ thinking about his estranged daughter. It is Super 8 footage of a little girl playing. I think what I wrote is quite nice and simple.
Michael Dinner is not sure.
“What are you not sure about?”
“I think that chord at the end.”
So I set up a keyboard and play him every single possibility that that chord can be in the middle of this musical progression.
He has the look of someone who has eaten some bad Mexican food. He doesn’t answer.
I play another chord.
Same face.
Then another.
Same face.
And I am sorry, but then I start to laugh. The musicians start to laugh. And Michael Dinner runs from the studio, I presume to his mother, as first grade has been rough for him.
The next day, he comes back and apologizes. Says he flashed back to being in the first grade. Which I guess I already knew. Danny Hedaya, an actor I kind of admire, stops by the studio. I hold out my hand, and he refuses to shake it and walks by me. I guess Michael Dinner has tattled on me.
The last day goes kind of okay. Michael Dinner approves every single cue and I think it is over.
Three days later, my new film score agent calls me and says that they do not like the score.
“Who doesn’t like it?”
“The producers.”
“Which one?”
“Barry Josephson.”
“I can rewrite and rerecord some of the pieces, but I need to know what the problems are and what they want.”
“I will have him call you.”
“No, I should get this in writing. So I do not have to rewrite and rerecord up to the point that I am losing money on this project. I can’t then have the next producer say they don’t like it for other reasons.”
I suppose this all gets colored for me in an even worse way because of Jon Ende.
Jon Ende is my dear friend. He named The Lounge Lizards. He is now dying of AIDS. He is on his last legs and is in hospice. I insisted to his friends that it was better that he be taken home. So that we could all be around him. I would help.
Jon was moved home. There is a nurse. But the place is a sha
mbles. I always believed the stereotype that gay men were neat. But Jon Ende’s friends, Roy among them, are the messiest gay men, or men of any kind, I have ever met, and I was cleaning up the apartment while they ate Twinkies and dropped the wrappers on the floor. I am exaggerating a bit, but it was kind of like that.
I go to Bed, Bath & Beyond and buy him new sheets and pillows. I wash the dishes.
I am supposed to go back the next day.
But then, I get a nine-page handwritten fax from Barry Josephson sent to my office. It barely makes any sense.
There are sentences like, “When the guys approach the boat, I don’t like part of that music.”
But in the movie, the guys approach the boat about ten times and there is music in several of those scenes.
Which scene? Which part don’t you like?
I call my agent. She has already made it quite clear that she would prefer to be in the good graces of Barry Josephson and Barry Sonnenfeld and that she will not protect me, no matter what comes next.
She says, “You should call Barry Josephson at home. Here is the number. He is expecting your call.”
So I call.
The woman who answers the phone pauses that weird pause of a liar and then says he is not there. But you can tell in a moment that he is there. And in my experience with someone who responds like she did, he is sitting right next to her.
I call the agent back and say that he is not there, though I suspect he is there but won’t come to the phone.
She says that I should call in the morning, but do not leave my place until I hear back from them. They have threatened to not pay me the second half until I have fixed this. And I have to do it by Monday, meaning I will have to book the studio and musicians once I know what the hell I am rewriting.
This is a problem for two enormous reasons. I have to go to Jon Ende’s house first thing tomorrow to make sure he is okay. And they have advanced me half of the money for the score, and this money has already been well overspent on the studio and musicians, etc. If they withhold the second half, I will be out of pocket about $100,000 for my last two months’ work after I pay everyone.