The Extras - Max Steiner: Hollywood's Most Influential Composer

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

Emmy nominated documentary producer, author, and speaker Steven C. Smith joins the podcast to discuss his book MUSIC BY MAX STEINER: THE EPIC LIFE OF HOLLYWOOD’S MOST INFLUENTIAL COMPOSER.During his illustrious career, composer Max Steiner scored over 300 films and was nominated for 24 Academy Awards.  We explore Steiner’s career highlights starting with the groundbreaking King Kong (1933), before detailing his work on the beloved “Gone with the Wind” (1939) and the classic “Casablanca" (1942). We then review Max Steiner’s score on two Warner Archive releases in March of 2022, starting with the 1937 version of “A Star is Born” starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March,  and the 1942 James Cagney World War II classic “Captains of the Clouds.”Mr. Smith also touches on Steiner’s positive working relationships with director Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros studio boss Jack Warner, actresses Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and the relentless David O. Selznick.  And we discuss Max Steiner’s tireless efforts on behalf of composer residuals, something that eventually happened toward the end of his career and guaranteed his financial comfort, before briefly touching on Steiner's influence on some contemporary composers and filmmakers.And finally, Mr. Smith provides his opinion on the recent decision by the  Academy of Motion Pictures to not broadcast live the Oscar for “Best Original Score” and what that might mean for the future of the broadcast, and what Max Steiner would have thought of this decision.LINKSSteven C. Smith website: www.mediasteven.comLarry Edmunds Bookstore  www.larryedmunds.comMax Steiner Bookhttps://www.larryedmunds.com/product-page/music-by-max-steiner-the-epic-life-of-hollywood-s-most-influential-composerBernard Herrmann Bookhttps://www.larryedmunds.com/product-page/a-heart-at-fire-s-center-the-life-and-music-of-bernard-herrmannThe Sitcom StudyWelcome to the Sitcom Study, where we contemplate the TV shows we grew up with and...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and their release on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host. My guest today is an Emmy-nominated documentary producer, author, and speaker

who specializes in Hollywood history and profiles of contemporary filmmakers. He has produced over 200 documentaries for television and home entertainment extras. He is the author of two acclaimed biographies, A Heart at Fire Center, The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann, which received the ASCAP Dean's Taylor Award, and the subject of our discussion today, a biography on Max Steiner titled Music by Max Steiner, The Epic Life of Hollywood's Most Influential Composer. I have known him for over 10 years and had the pleasure of working with him

on a number of projects at Warner Brothers, including several seasons of the TV series Supernatural and on two terrific documentaries for The Roots' 40th anniversary DVD release, where we had the opportunity to interview Louis Gossett Jr., Ben Vereen, Sandy Duncan, the late Cicely Tyson, and James Earl Jones, among others. He's extremely knowledgeable about film scores, so I'm also interested to hear

his opinion on the recent decision by the Academy of Motion Pictures to not have the best original score presented live in the upcoming broadcast, but we'll save that for a little later on the discussion. Stephen C. Smith, welcome to The Extras. Thank you, Tim. It's a pleasure to be here. Before we get into our discussion today on Max Steiner, I thought it'd be good to hear a little bit from you about your background and how you kind of got into what you do. Well, I was very lucky in terms of where I was born and who I had as a big brother, because I grew up in the Los Angeles area with a brother who is 17 years older than I am. So he was more like my cool uncle than brother. And he would take me once he discovered that I loved movies as much as he did at age eight, he would drive me to the motion picture retirement home in Woodland

Hills and tape recorder in hand. We would interview whoever was free that day, silent film actors, Larry Fine of the Three Stooges. And little did I know as I was slating those tapes with the date and time that that's what I would do for a living. But I was fortunate also to have a family friend in Robert Osborne who mentored me from about age nine. So I think geography and family were destiny. I lucked into that and became a print and television journalist. And then, as you've said, worked on many documentaries. So like you, I just love film. And I was fortunate to know people who supported me in that. I wanted to ask you about your first book, A Heart at Fire Center, The Life and Music of Bernard

Herman, which you wrote in your 20s. Tell us a little of how that came about when you were so young, even though we're not concentrating on that book today. Well, it came about and it really gave me the career I have simply because I wanted to read a book that didn't exist. I was 19 years old. I was at USC trying to figure out what to do with my life. I loved music and music theory. I'd hoped to be a musician, realized I wasn't nearly good enough to be a pianist. And I was sitting with that same older brother, Wayne, at Thanksgiving dinner and said, you know, I really want to read a book about Bernard Herrmann, but there isn't one. And he said the words that changed my life. Why don't you write one?

Wow. And I know that's simple. And I realized that at USC, David Raxson, the great film composer of Laura and many others, Norman Corwin, one of radio's greatest producers, they were both close friends of Bernard Herman's. And I approached them about the project. And instead of saying, as you would think they would come back in 10 years when you have some life experience and we'll talk, I remember David Raxson saying, oh, that's a great idea. I'll give you the phone number for Mickey Rocha, Nicholas Rocha and Aaron Copeland. And he started naming these names to me. And sure enough, they were all people I contacted and many more. And that Herman book really got me

started. And I'm glad I did it when I did, because although I was so young and obviously had much experience and professional experience to acquire, most of those people were not living by the time the book came out. You know, I got them just in time in their in their 80s. While most people probably know who Bernard Herrmann is, maybe you can explain just for the fans, just in case who he is and why you chose to focus on him. You bet. If I had to limit it, if I had to use just three words, I would say psycho shower music. Bernard Herrmann started his career with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane, worked with Alfred Hitchcock on Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest, really created the sound of

the movie suspense score. And then in his last years was rediscovered by a young generation that included Martin Scorsese, who hired him for Taxi Driver. Kerman recorded that score in Los Angeles, oversaw it, went to bed and never woke up again. He went out with his boots on. So that's quite a career from Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver by way of, oh, and the Ray Harryhausen films and so many others. Right. And I mean, I think he's widely considered one of, well, the greatest composer of suspense score. Would that be fair to say? I think that's very fair to say. A year doesn't go by that I don't hear someone stealing his music or let's say being inspired by his music

for the Hitchcock films in particular. Well, we're not going to be going into Bernard Herrmann today, but for the listeners out there, I highly recommend Stephen's webinar on Herrmann for those who are interested to learn more. And I'll have information about those webinars in the podcast notes and on the website. And we'll get that from you later on, Stephen. But let's talk about your newest book, which came out in, was it 2020? 2020, yes. Not too long ago, it's called Music by Max Steiner, The Epic Life of Hollywood's Most Influential Composer. What led you to write the Steiner book? Well, I had loved Max Steiner's music ever since I was a kid and first saw King Kong on television.

And even though it was a small, maybe even black and white set, and the film was probably cut by about 10 or 15 minutes by our local Channel 11, I felt like I was inside that movie, like going through the wardrobe or Alice going into Wonderland. When those sailors got through that big, got through the great gate of Skull Island and were running down that log to try to save Andero, I was right there with them. And I realized not too much later than that how important the music was for our feelings,

both the sense of terror and awe we have for Kong, and then the way that Max Steiner's great score changes our feelings to sympathy and ultimately feeling like Kong is a tragic figure by the end. And the music really was critical to that film's success. So I love that score. And I was very grateful when after interviewing the writer, Gary Giddens, who's written many fine books on music and film. When I was interviewing Gary for a lot of DVD projects, he said, you know, I'm overseeing a book series for Oxford, and we're doing biographies on a lot of interesting people. And he mentioned that he wanted to oversee a book on Max Steiner. And I said, stop, that's it. I'm in. Count me in.

So while working at my regular job, which was doing things like, I think this was right after, Tim, you and I did Roots. I was juggling the day job with going to USC and going through the fantastic Warner Brothers production files because Steiner was really a Warner Brothers company man from 1937 to the end of his career. And it's just fascinating to really feel that era come back to life through the papers and the recordings and the music scores that survived in Steiner's own hand. The recordings that he kept of the recording sessions that they did at Warner's. So I could hear the flubs and the outtakes and the applause if the orchestra really liked the main title they just recorded. So I had a lot to work with. Well, why don't we go back a little bit into some of what you write about in the book,

and that's really his life. Maybe take us back to his early years in Austria. He came from quite a distinguished family, and then his journey to the U.S., which eventually brought him to Broadway. Yes, Max Steiner's life could have been a Warner Brothers biopic of the kind that they did so well in the 30s and 40s. He was born in Vienna in 1888, and his family, they were really like the Ziegfelds of Vienna, and Vienna was arguably the musical capital of Europe. Ligfelds of Vienna. And Vienna was arguably the musical capital of Europe. His father was so well known, he was decorated by Emperor Franz Joseph, Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And it was Max's father, Gabor, who put up that famous Ferris wheel that's still in Vienna that we see in movies like The Third Man. And his father opened this Disneyland style amusement park in Vienna.

And amazingly, it included silent movies just months after the Lumiere brothers had first shown movies publicly in France. So that's the kind of visionary that his father was. And his father was also amazing because his dad produced not only symphony concerts with friends like Richard Strauss, the composer, Gustav Mahler was a family friend, but he also did vaudeville shows and wrestling matches and brought in movies and these new records that were coming over from America, these new gramophones. And so Max was really exposed from birth to what we might call high and low culture, or let's say serious and fun things. He got all the

serious symphonic learning. And then he also saw what people liked. Johann Strauss Jr. was a family friend. His grandfather, Max's grandfather had been very influential in that composer of famous waltzes to being a composer for the stage, which made him even more famous. So Max was surrounded by famous people and was very comfortable among them. And when his family empire finally and perhaps inevitably went bust, when his father gambled on a big thing one time too many and had to declare bankruptcy, Max was equipped to go off into the world on his own. And it's an amazing global adventure story that had never been told before. And I really was having, I had great fun following in his footsteps across many continents. I didn't go to all of them, but I certainly found the paperwork about

them. And he went to London for a while. And then when World War I broke out, he was an Austrian. So he was technically an enemy alien. And he jumped on a ship to America. And he sat on the steps of rehearsal halls trying to get work after being, you know, part of the biggest family and musical family in Vienna. And somehow worked his way up to being the musical director for the Gershwins, for Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein. He worked on the Ziegfeld Follies, just an incredible career, all of which prepared him for that fateful night in 1929 when the production chief of RKO, a new studio, William

LeBaron said, Max, come to Hollywood. We're making sound pictures now and we need people to help us with music. And that led to Max really creating what we think of as the modern film score, which I know we don't really have time to get into now, but that's part of the subject of the book about how he convinced initially skeptical producers to have underscoring in films, which is kind of incredible that they resisted it, but they thought it would be too unrealistic to have musical score going under the dialogue. musical score going under the dialogue. But Max not only convinced them that it would be a good idea, but he showed how well it would work. And the culmination of that was King Kong in 1933. And that's what led to his going over to Warner Brothers as a staff composer in 1937. And Warner's was making so many... Sorry. I was going to say, before we get too far into that, I did want to go back a little bit because there's a very interesting story you tell in the book about the movie, The Symphony of Six Million, which maybe you can briefly tell us about how there's that note in the script.

Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Tim Millard, host of The Extras Podcast, and I wanted to let you know that we have a new private Facebook group for fans of the Warner Archive and Warner Brothers Catalog physical media releases. So if that interests you, you can find the link on our Facebook page or look for the link in the podcast show notes. Yes, absolutely. Many people think that the first movie to have a big symphonic underscore is King Kong. It is not. It's the first classic film that has a big symphonic score, the movie that we remember. But for a full year before that, during the amazing, really revolutionary year of 1932,

Max and the new studio production chief at RKO, a 29-year-old dynamo named David O. Selznick, agreed that, yes, underscoring would help these movies feel less slow. Because if you think of some of even the movies we love of the 1930-31 period, movies like Dracula and Frankenstein, there are long stretches with no sound other than the kind of hiss and crackle and pop of the soundtrack because it was not yet accepted to have underscore. Well, Selznick fortunately agreed with Max that it would be beneficial. And the first movie they did together is a film called Symphony of Six Million, happily available thanks to Warner Archive. And it's not a movie that people really remember today. It's a drama about a doctor who forgets his

family roots and his Jewish faith as he moves up in New York society. And that in itself was a bit unusual because Selznick, you know, made one of the most Jewish films of the time where that's really central to the story. But even more interesting than that is the fact that Selznick envisioned the underscoring as being a key component of this movie before they shot a frame of film. And I was astonished when I found a copy of the original, no, I found the original screenplay at UCLA. And page one begins, and I will paraphrase it slightly by saying, note, this entire motion picture will be accompanied by a symphonic underscoring. And that told me that as the script was being written, as it was being cast, Selznick and Max were already thinking about the

role that music would play. And I want to emphasize these aren't songs. This is a case where Max was writing individual themes for the different characters and then developing those themes as their characters changed, the music would change, or he could play the theme for Irene Dunn while we were seeing Ricardo Cortez. So we'd know that he was thinking about her and there could be lengthy scenes without dialogue that the music would carry like some very suspenseful operation sequences. So this was the first movie where underscoring and film were really conceived in the sound era in Hollywood as being inextricably combined. And fortunately for all of us, it was a great success on that front.

Most of the reviews mentioned the music very close to the top of the review and praised it, saying that this was really an exciting direction. And that allowed them to really go full tilt and work together on films like the 1932 version of The Most Dangerous Game with many of the same people who would go on to make King Kong's. And that has a terrific adventure score that in many ways, like Kong, is a template for action movies that followed ever since. That leads right into the discussion of King Kong. I think, you know, you've already mentioned already how that impacted you as a young, a young child, but this was a very important film for RKO and possibly saved the studio, right? I would say King Kong did save the studio.

It's sometimes said that it prevented it from going into bankruptcy. That isn't correct because RKO did go into bankruptcy before King Kong opened. And if King Kong had not succeeded, I think the chances were very good that the studio would have closed. David O. Selznick, who oversaw Kong and really supported it and siphoned money from other movies quietly into this very, very expensive film, David O. Selznick had left before King Kong opened. And the studio was now being run by Marion

C. Cooper, the producer and co-director of King Kong, really the man who envisioned it all. And Cooper later said that he was being told by people in New York, his bosses, go ahead and close the studio. Let's just shut down now. And the week that the month that King Kong opened was the month that the banks closed in America. You know, when Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt became president and the depression was at its worst and people were panicking, there were a few days when all of the banks were closed to just sort of take a deep breath in America, if you can imagine that. So those are the circumstances that King Kong was released during. And the story is said, and I believe that this is true, that when some of those higher

ups watched King Kong without score, they were not happy. They felt that the animation, the stop motion animation, which we all know was extraordinary by the great Willis O'Brien, but it seemed unrealistic to them. great Willis O'Brien, but it seemed unrealistic to them. And Selznick and Cooper had conceived the film to not have a lot of dialogue in the second half. So there was a lot of, you know, there wasn't a whole lot of shaping of the rhythm of the movie on the soundtrack. And Steiner was told not to write any original music for the film because it had already cost them such a tremendous amount. It had gone over budget. And what Max always said happened was that Marion C. Cooper, fortunately now in charge of the studio and the producer of Kong, said, Maxie, write the best

score you possibly can. I'll pay for the orchestra. And I looked and looked for the paperwork, which is probably locked up somewhere, I think, in New York. But I'll bet that ultimately RKO footed the bill. But it is true that in Cooper, with Cooper saying that to Steiner, what he was saying was, write the best score you can. And that's all that Max Steiner had to hear was. And amazingly, he was not a young man at the time of this. He was 43 years old when he started working on King Kong. So he'd really taken these decades of experience. They were training him so that he could write this new form of film score, multiple themes for the characters and interweave them and create such a

sense of drama and tension. And then finally, a sense of release. Like, for example, when Anne and Jack Driscoll are running from Kong and he's chasing them and they get through the wall, that's one of the great sequences in movie music. And when they get through the wall, the music finally goes into this triumphant major key, and it's just thrilling. And the movie with Steiner's music was a different movie. It was already a great film in the making, and Steiner just put it over the top. And as we know, it was a phenomenal success, and it kept the doors open at RKO. It kept the studio running. LSp4 2.70 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 ¶¶ Well, while Steiner was at RKO, he also he also scored a lot of Fred Astaire and Ginger Roger films during that time as well. Right.

So he had quite the range. He had an incredible range. And again, I think it was that extraordinary training he had of listening to everything from Viennese tunes and cafes and the equivalent of, you know, Broadway shows were in Vienna operettas, that kind of light music to the heavy music. Then coming to Broadway and, you know, working with Gershwin on jazzy shows, he could really do it all. got into the musicals business in 1933 in a big way and made the first of the Stair Rogers films flying down to Rio, Max was the musical director overseeing the scores. And as we know, those films feature songs by the great American songwriters, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, in the case of the first ones, Cole Porter, the first ones that Max worked on. So what Max would do on those is he would work with a stair and a team of orchestrators taking, you know, a three minute Irving Berlin song like

Cheek to Cheek or Isn't This a Lovely Day and Top Hat and shaping it into a, you know, five minutes potentially or a 17 minute in the case of the Continental, a very lengthy dance sequence that had its own dramatic arcs. You know, Astaire liked to have big dramatic builds in the music and a sudden stop. He liked to have contrasts. He liked to have moments where the taps soloed. And then when the orchestra came back. So Max was a partner in shaping those songs into the classic musical dance sequences that we know and love today. A lot of the listeners of this show, The Extras, follow the releases of the Warner Archive. And this March, the Warner Archive is releasing for the first time on Blu-ray, the 1937 version of A Star is Born, which has a direct tie-in to Steiner and Selznick. And, you know, there's a little story there. Maybe you

could give a little background of the leaving of RKO and moving into that movie. I will. And, you know, I think everyone listening should rejoice that there will be what I'm sure will be a definitive at last edition of the 1937 version of A Star is Born, which, because it fell into public domain, is usually seen in very poor copies. Well, Max had been at RKO for six years. He felt underpaid and underappreciated. And, you know, money just flowed through his fingers. He was something of a gambling addict. He had two alimonies to pay by 1933. He fell in love too easily and too often. But a very life-loving man, loved by his co-workers, I should say,

which, as we know, isn't always true by people in Hollywood. And I think that gregariousness, that generosity of spirit and generosity of loaning people money is part of who he was. But he needed more money and he didn't feel appreciated at RKO. So when his old friend, David O. Selznick, said, I'm opening up my own studio, Selznick International, So when his old friend, David O. Selznick, said, I'm opening up my own studio, Selznick International, I want you to be the musical director. Max quickly said yes. And you would think that they would have worked together for the rest of Selznick's career. That didn't happen.

They had a breakup after just one year. The movie that was the straw that broke the camel's back was this original version of A Star is Born, made at Selznick International in 1937. And Selznick was really working himself so hard, staying awake day and night, doing legal drugs to stay awake. It made him a pretty manic person who was always changing his mind. And he went from being a huge Steiner supporter to just eviscerating Max's, I think, very fine work that he had done on A Star is Born. And he made Max rewrite a lot of it. He threw out a lot of the music. It's a long, interesting story in the book.

Now, the music as we hear it in the final film is wonderful. And I have to say that a little of the music, some of the very fine music we hear in the film was a result of those rewrites. But Max was so hurt by how Selznick was so berating him on it and throwing out things that Max thought were really good that Max resigned. And in typical fashion, he said, I consider you a dear, dear friend. I just can't work in this way anymore. Now, he did that knowing he had another job offer on the table. And this was from Warner Brothers. And Warner Brothers had been eager to get Max over there for years. So when they made him a tremendously large salary offer to be a staff composer, he took it in 1937. And unlike Selznick, who was making one movie laboriously at a time, or maybe two, we know Warner Brothers was making

tons of movies in every single genre. And I found a wonderful letter from Steiner in his papers, in which he says, I'm here at Warner's and it is the right place to be. And I think movie fans would agree with him that the next almost three decades that he worked primarily at Warner Brothers proved that that was the right place for him. Now, who was kind of behind or who was from the Warner Brothers side kind of behind wooing him, so to speak, to the studio? Was it Jack Warner? Max was friends with seemingly everyone. He really didn't make many enemies. He had such a warm and forgiving personality. But the person who was most responsible was someone who was already a good friend. That person was Leo B. Forbes, the musical director at Warner Brothers.

And he and Max played cards a lot together. So I wouldn't be surprised if this deal came together over a game of Pinochle at 2 a.m. when Max liked to play instead of being at home. That was one reason he was married four times. He wasn't home enough. But but they were so eager to have him. And it's interesting. We all know that Jack Warner was a colorful character, not universally beloved by some of the actors or filmmakers. We also know that Hal B. Wallace, my favorite film producer,

could be very, very tough on even people like Michael Curtiz and Raoul Walsh. Well, they both loved Max Steiner. Jack Warner and Hal B. Wallace sent him telegrams, sent him letters that I found saying, in effect, thank you for saving this movie, or thank you for an extraordinary score that made this film even better. I think this is the finest film we've released. So you really see in the book I wrote, just thanks to these wonderful papers that survived in Max's collection, you see a different side of these men. And they knew what the movie was like before the music was added. And I don't mean to ever to say that the films that we love most were not good films

without the score. It's just that they needed music to complete them. It's sort of like having a recipe where if you leave out one key ingredient, you know, the cake just isn't the cake that you want it to be. And with the music, I mean, think of King Kong, think of Casablanca, think of Gone with the Wind, you know, I mean, it's almost impossible to think of those movies without the music. Well, in 1938, right after Steiner moved to Warner Brothers, I wanted to bring up this title, The Angels with Dirty Faces, which he worked with James Cagney on that gangster classic. Kind of another tie into the Warner Archive. This film was released on Blu-ray for the first time in December of 2021. And we had a podcast on that

release with author Alan K. Rohde and the Warner Archives' George Feltenstein, which I encourage everyone to listen to if you haven't yet. It's a terrific podcast. It's in two parts, but we did not discuss the score in that podcast. What can you tell us about Steiner's experience on that film? Well, Max's favorite director was Michael Cortese, or as they called him, Michael Cortez, or as they called him, Michael Cortez. But we all know him as Michael Curtiz. And Max, when asked about Curtiz's work, said his movies were made for music. And I think what he meant was that they breathed just enough.

And they also had dramatic tension to them where they were very, very fine films, but they invited music to be part of the storytelling. I mean, think of a film that Curtiz co-directed that Max did invited music to be part of the storytelling. I mean, think of a film that Critiz co-directed that Max did not score, The Adventures of Robin Hood. We think of that great Korngold score. And that's what Max meant was that Critiz has such a great sense of dramatic rhythm. And Hal B. Wallace, who oversaw those movies as producer usually, has such a great sense himself of rhythm. I mean, if you look at the notes for these films, Wallace will be looking at the final cut saying, take out and he'll be talking in frames or feet

of film, you know, just little tiny trims for the rhythm of it. And sometimes I'm sure they would open things up because they knew that Max was going to be scoring them and it was and that he would be able to make his contribution there. So I will say, and this surprised me to discover it writing the book and going through Max's correspondence, which is voluminous. I mean, I'm so grateful that his papers, his scores, these outtakes were saved. He gave his all to movies like Angels with Dirty Faces. And he was very proud of that film. At the same time, he felt that he was getting typed around 1937, 38 as doing too many gangster films. And he really wanted to score The Adventures of Robin Hood. I mean, who wouldn't if

you're a film composer? And after jumping ahead just a bit after Gone with the Wind, it's interesting, Max doesn't score as many gangster films, let's say, as many crime films, but he never looked down on them either. I mean, he really, I'll quote another composer, Bernard Herrmann, because he says something that I think was Max's philosophy. Herrmann later said, a composer's first job is to get inside the picture, to get inside the film. And that's what Max Steiner did so brilliantly. When he looked at Angels with Dirty Faces, I'm sure that he felt that he was the Cagney character. He felt he was Pat O'Brien's character. He saw the world with great, great heart and emotion and empathy for what people were going through, which I think is why his music is so powerful. I mean, it's amazing

that in so many stories that could be overly sentimental in the music, you don't feel that way. You don't get embarrassed by the emotion that Max brings to them because it's absolutely sincere. And I think that's what made him a great film composer. So when you look at a film like Angels with Dirty Faces, he provides, well, first, a great main title that has great intensity. And he tells you always within a minute and a half what the tone of the movie is going to be like. But then when there's, when there are the gentle scenes and, and the, the finale that is, is a sort of quasi religious finale, he can write that music from the heart as well. So he had a great, great range. And, uh, I think that angels with dirty faces shows his versatility all within one film. Yeah. That partnership, um, between Curtiz,

Steiner, how all of us, I mean, wow, that's something for another podcast. But just talking about the individual films, it's an amazing one. And I was just looking at IMDb and in, you know, the number of years, just the output that they did every year and the quality is pretty amazing. It is amazing. And looking at Steiner's work, holding the scores that he wrote in my hands and seeing them in his handwriting, and this is the old school way where you're writing individual notes. So you're writing, you know, many, many chords in every measure for hundreds of pages. I don't know how he did that from 1930 to 1964 with very little sleep, virtually no

vacations without having a heart attack. I mean, he had the kind of job that either killed you or you lived a good long life. And fortunately, in Max's case, it was the latter. He lived to be 83. I don't know how he did it because he will write in the score frequently to his orchestrator, who's often at Warner Brothers, Hugo Friedhofer. And that's the person who's translating Max's notes into parts for the orchestra. He'll be writing things like, Hugo, SOS, help. The orchestra session starts at 10 a.m. and it's 6 a.m. and I'm dying. And so he's writing against the clock. At the same time, I think Max enjoyed having that kind of pressure. I know he loved it when Jack Warner would say, please, Max, you're the only person who can who can save this movie, which they often said if

they wanted him to work on, say, two films at the same time when they wanted something superhuman. They knew they could appeal to his ego by saying you're the only one who can help us. And he always it's amazing. I, you know, I'm not saying everything he did was great, but I think he really gave it his all. However, bleary eyed and sleep deprived he was. And unlike Selznick, he did it without drugs. He just had that kind of adrenaline. Before we move on from from Angels with Dirty Faces, I did want to ask you just how did he interact with Cagney? ask you just how did he interact with Cagney? Well, it's interesting. I'm glad you asked about that because Max did know some of the actors well at the studios. He and Betty Davis were very fond

of each other. And, you know, she once said he often made our acting better. And he I don't think he had any personal connection with Cagney. I was never able to trace one. And we know that Cagney had his own issues with Warner Brothers. And so I don't think that Cagney was involved much with the post-production. And I should say in those days, we all think now of director-composer relationships. In those days, it was a director-producer relationship. Very, very few directors had any say in the music of a film at Warner Brothers in the 1930s or 40s. So Max would either work with Hal Wallace or Henry Blanke, who produced several of them, maybe one or two directors like Curtiz. But that was it. But and even seldom with Curtiz because they trusted him so much. But getting back to your question about Cagney, there is a great story. I found in Max's papers, several occasions when he, when for

special groups, uh, special like women's, they called them women's groups at the times, these groups would come to Warner brothers and Max would give a lecture on film scoring. And he didn't just talk. They showed scenes from contemporary Warner brothers movies without the music and with them. And boy, do I wish that there was a recording of those sessions. Because you look at what they showed, Jezebel, Angels with Dirty Faces, you know, all the classic movies of the time, The Life of Emile Zola, all the movies he was doing. And how fun it would be to hear from Max Steiner himself to say, look at what I did. Fortunately, there are news reports of some of those newspaper men who covered them. And one of them recounted a great story that Max shared about angels with dirty faces. If you know the film and spoiler

alert, tune out for the next minute if you don't know how it ends, Cagney's character goes to the electric chair and, let's say, becomes very, very emotional as he approaches it. And there are several suspenseful shots of Cagney being led by the prison guard and the priest is speaking. And again, it's a sequence that is paced in a way for music to be part of it, to create the suspense and the power of it. And Max said at this private showing during this lecture at Warner Brothers that he had great difficulty scoring that scene because he didn't want to match the footsteps of people exactly because that was comic. He's often accused of Mickey Mousing, as they say, of catching the

action. And yes, he did often catch action closely, but he learned pretty quickly after starting that it worked best if you approximated the feeling of movement versus matching it. So he didn't want to be exact with it. And even if he had wanted to be exact with those footsteps, he couldn't because you had a bunch of different people whose feet were walking in different steps. Right. And he tried and he said he went through multiple versions of it. And then he finally subtly adjusted the music so that whoever is most prominent in the image,

that was the person who Max would sort of favor the tempo of it. So he had the music that he wanted. And then he was the absolute master of slightly slowing down and slightly speeding up using something that some of your listeners may have heard of called the click track. And although Max didn't invent the click track, he was very much the person who perfected it for its use in movie scoring. And that's where the composer puts on headphones and hears a series of clicks in his or her headphones that will say, slow down the music now, slow down, now speed up,

now speed up. And the composer or the conductor is looking at the movie being projected behind the musicians. And that way the conductor can exactly match the action as it is slowing up and speeding down to the click track and the headphones. So the finale of Angels with Dirty Faces was a great example of how Max used the click track and his own dramatic sensitivity to find the right rhythm to create a very powerful musical sequence. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Well, we can't talk about Steiner without talking about the epic Gone with the Wind, which you briefly mentioned earlier, but there's a lot more to that story. This again was his old buddy Selznick, but he's at Warner Brothers. So there's a story here. How does he go back to work on Gone with the Wind? Well, Gone with the Wind may be the ultimate example of be careful what you wish for, because even though Max left Selznick in 1937, well, Selznick was already beginning work on Gone with the Wind at the time. And Max Steiner very,

very much wanted to score Gone with the Wind. And yes, it was the biggest movie of its time. Yes, everyone had read the book and people were talking about it daily. Not only was it in the newspapers daily, but I was astonished to find, as I did my research, having heard this was true, it is true that Adolf Hitler, after starting a war, after invading Poland, says at some point in his correspondence, you know, Gone with the Wind is about to come out. I can't wait to see it, which I think is the most surreal thing of all. That's how much it was impacting the culture, the world events. So Max wanted to score this movie. Selznick wasn't quite sure who he wanted. That was very typical of Selznick. But he finally decided on his old friend, Max. And Max wrote an extraordinary letter to his boss, Jack Warner, which survives and which is in my book. And he pleads to be granted permission to go to Selznick's studio for the months needed to work on Gone with the Wind. I'll do whatever you want. But sometimes and he even says, all of us who work in this business, who score films, we have to be a little off. We're a little off. He admits to his own eccentricity in a charming way. And he and he just said to miss this opportunity is something I could never get over.

Please, Mr. Warner, I've done everything you've ever said. I mean, it's just imploring. And Jack, Jack Warner writes back this, this wonderful letter, giving him permission and says something in the PS about, and stay away from the racetracks on such and such a day. Cause that's when I'm there, you know, it's just this great inside Hollywood stuff. The thing, however, is that not only did Jack Warner make a great deal of money loaning Max Steiner out to Selznick, who would of of course, pay top dollar for the composer, just as he would for actors on loan. And Jack Warner could pocket the profits. But Max not only had to write three hours of music in about three months, he had to write two other scores for Warner Brothers movies. And very strangely, Selznick had Max write another score for him, for Selznick, while writing Gone with the Wind.

So Max is doing four movies at the same time in three months for a producer, Selznick, who is changing his mind practically every day about what he wants musically for Gone with the Wind. So it's almost like Groundhog Day. He had to keep rewriting this movie over and over and over. And finally, there was a point where Max did the math in his head and realized that they simply could not finish the way they were going and make that famous premiere in Atlanta that happened in mid-December. And Max said that to Selznick. And Selznick did something that was sort of genius. I don't know how much of this was intentional, how much he knew this would happen this way. But Selznick approached Herbert Stothert, MGM's top composer, quietly and said, you

know, I'm not sure Max is going to be able to do this. Do you think you could score Gone with the Wind before it's done? And Stothert said, absolutely. Well, Hollywood being a very small town, word got back to Steiner within hours that Selznick was going to hand this movie over to Herbert Stothert. And that turned Max from being the racehorse war admiral into being Seabiscuit. He ran three times faster than the fastest horse. And with help from an incredible team like Hugo Friedhofer and several other orchestrators who, under Max's supervision, had to write some of the lesser cues using Max's theme with him sort

of dictating how he wanted them to be used. He probably said which key they were in and what instruments. He probably verbally dictated the parts that he didn't physically write. They finished just in time, but it was touch and go. They barely finished that movie by the time that those prints had to be struck for the, the print had to be struck for the Atlanta premiere. the time that those prints had to be struck for the, the print had to be struck for the Atlanta premiere. So how Mack survived that, I don't know. And, uh, it was, it was an achievement. He was understandably very proud of, and here's something extraordinary. We all love our soundtrack albums and we love our, you know, we can get them with a click on streaming in 1939, gone with the wind after three years of promotion, gone with the Wind had tie-ins with

perfumes, with clothes. I think there might've been puzzles. Selznick contacted William Paley, who owned Columbia Records, and said, and I'm paraphrasing, you know, I know that normally music from movies isn't put out if it isn't a song, but the music from Gone with the Wind is, and I remember this phrase, quite beautiful. Would you like to put some of it out on record? In other words, Max Steiner's Great Terra theme and other things like that. And the response was, movie music? No, we don't want to put that out. Thank you very much. No, no, thank you. It's extraordinary. And Max was such a visionary because he'd been pushing to have albums. I think that's why he kept these recordings of the sessions, the live sessions for his own collections, because he knew it was valuable. And it wasn't until the mid 50s that there was a really substantial recording of Gone with the Wind music and not until much later than that, that there was a really solid, good, you know, stereo one.

So it's a remarkable film. And yes, we could talk about that movie for a whole podcast. Yeah, I was going to say, we were just briefly touching on it. Obviously, you need to get the book to get more of that story. But it was just kind of interesting how Selznick comes back into the picture. I mean, they had kind of a falling out, would you say? They had a falling out. And talking about Max and his kindness and generosity, even though he knew Selznick,

working with Selznick was always going to be a frustrating experience, or as he put it once to his wife, a killing job. He said, I'm going back to Selznick. It will be a killing job. Even though he knew it was tough, when Selznick called him on a movie like Nothing Sacred, which is scored by Oscar Levant, and David Selznick said, Max, I'm unhappy with this music. Can you help me? This was in 1937, not long after their breakup on A Star is Born. Max went back, redid some of the music, no credit, no pay, did it for a friend. That's the kind of person he was. Yeah. Well, professionally, then they just had this friendship that endured even when you had those creative differences.

And I can't resist saying they lived across the street from each other, which also turned out to be not a great thing on Gone with the Wind because Max would get calls at like three in the morning when he just probably gotten half an hour of sleep. And Selzink said, come over to my house. I want to show you a change we made in reel eight. Wow. That's a great story.

I mean, well, there's just so much more there, but let's jump ahead in the Steiner story to 1942, which was a huge year. I mean, I'm looking, he released, he had six films released that year. And the first of that year was the movie Captains of the Cloud. Is it Captains of the Clouds? Captains of the Clouds, yes. Which released in February of that year. And then we'll talk a little bit here in a bit of the film that released at the end of that year, Casablanca.

But this film, Captains of the Clouds, is also being released by the Warner Archive for the first time on Blu-ray in March. So I thought our listeners would be interested to hear from you about the score on this release. Obviously, it's a reteaming of Steiner and Cagney and Curtiz as well. Yes, I'm so excited that Captains of the Clouds is being released by Warner Archive because this is a visually stunning film. We'll get to the score, but I have to say this is a Technicolor

movie that is gorgeous. I mean, it's even a, it's all about flyers in Canada fighting World War II. And this speaks to the fact that the Warner Brothers, so much, so very much to their credit, were really the first studio filmmakers to take on Hitler at a time when other studios were still releasing their films in Nazi Germany, which most of them did, you know, well into 1939. The Warner Brothers faced a lot of resistance, but they insisted on making anti-Nazi films years before America was in the war. And Captains of the Clouds is one of those movies because it was shot in 1941. So the way you can have James Cagney fighting the Nazis is by having him be part of the Canadian Air Force. And by the

time the movie was released, America was at war. It was released after Pearl Harbor, but it just shows the perspicacity of the Warner Brothers that they were making this film just before. It's one of the many fine films that Max Steiner scored that is strongly anti-Nazi. He had worked on the earlier Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939 and continued doing that in films like Captains of the Clouds. So I just want to say for a moment that the war was a very personal crisis for Max Steiner because he had so much of his family back in Vienna. And of course, in March of 1938, the Anschluss happened. Hitler went into Austria and claimed Austria without much resistance. And Austria became part of the Third Reich. Well, Max's father, who was born Jewish, was still living there.

And Max spent many months working with the U.S. State Department, pulling every string he could to get his father out of Vienna before it was impossible to do so. And his father would have ended up in a concentration camp. And Max was successful. He got his father out. his father, couldn't bring any money out with him, but he got him out. And his father, Gabor, lived his last years very comfortably in Los Angeles. And so Max felt the war from the 1930s on. I mean, as soon as Hitler became chancellor in 33, he's making comments in the margins of his RKO scores about Adolf Hitler. So he's really on his mind. And so when Max got to score Captains of the Clouds, when he scored Casablanca, which we'll get to, those movies met a great deal to him as an Austrian. What can you tell us, or is there anything about the score itself that you could fill us in on? Yes, yes. I will say that Max, it's interesting.

People sometimes compare him, if they're taking concert composers, they think of Richard Wagner, the opera composer. And yes, Wagner was a big model in that Wagner used what they call light motifs, themes for different characters. And Max did that too. Max, though, as much as he admired Wagner as a dramatic composer, he didn't like Wagner's music as much. He thought it was very bellicose and bombastic. He knew that Wagner had been a fierce anti-Semite whose music was being embraced by Hitler and used all through the 30s at the rallies. And Max's favorite composers from the symphonic world were people like Debussy and Ravel, French composers who wrote in a style called impressionism. And impressionist scores are very much like film scores. They have texture and they're moody and

atmospheric. And so in Captains of the Clouds, when your listeners buy it, and I hope they do, watch for the sequences in which there's fog, because Max writes these beautiful sequences that are very much like Debussy and Ravel that are impressionistic and they're beautiful and mysterious. And Max could both do this with great seriousness and also joke about it at the same time. So that is he's writing the and he's notating how many strings to have and harp and what instruments are creating this simulated sound of fog, if you will. He writes to Hugo Friedhofer, his orchestrator, make it very foggy with two Gs. So, I mean, just funny little linguistic things. I mean, learning English as a second language, I think, made him very sensitive to puns,

which he loved to tell. And so his music is very impressionistic. And then, of course, it's very heroic and exciting. And it's also a great example of how he takes a song written for the film by the great composer Harold Arlen and lyrics by the great Johnny Mercer. And he incorporates that song into his score. And that's something that he did all through his career at request. Usually by request, he'll take either a new song like that one and incorporate it into the score. So it sounds as if he wrote it into the score so it sounds as if he wrote it in the best possible sense. In other words, it doesn't sound shoehorned in as part of his music. Or to satisfy David O. Selznick on Gone with the Wind, he incorporates a great

deal of period music from the Civil War era because Selznick at one point said, I don't want any original music. I only want music that was written during the Civil War. Well, Max didn't think that was a good idea, but he found a great compromise by taking Stephen Foster melodies, by taking so many of that other music and incorporating it into the Max Steiner sound and writing his own original theme. So that's what he does wonderfully in Captains of the Clouds. You write something that is stirring, that has, it just makes you want to go and enlist, you know, when you listen to this movie and watch it. Well, and all the Warner Archive Blu-ray restoration, they put an awful lot of effort into the sound restoration as well. So I'm really looking forward to hearing that when it comes out here in March. The other biggie which we've touched on, I mean, it's obviously one of Steiner's most beloved film scores

because it's one of the most beloved films as well. And that's The Incomparable Casablanca, which came out as the last of the six films that he worked on that year of 1942. It came out in November of 42. And there's quite an interesting story behind his work on that film. Maybe you can fill us in on some of 1942. It came out in November of 42. And there's quite an interesting story behind his work on that film. Maybe you can fill us in on some of that. There certainly is. It's fascinating how the movies that we love best and the movies that we think are going to be the most remembered aren't necessarily the movies that people think are going to be most remembered while they're

being made. And Max loved the film Casablanca when he saw it. He, again, as an Austrian, as someone who, you know, certainly understood the plight of an emigre, which he had been during World War I, he related to on that level. His third wife, Louise, who he loved very much, had just left him because various domestic incidents, strife had occurred. He wasn't around occurred. He wasn't around enough. He wasn't getting enough sleep. He was difficult to live with. So Max's third wife,

Louise, had just left him, moved to New York from Los Angeles. So I think he related very strongly to Rick Blaine, you know, being at that train station, getting that letter from Ilsa, you know, losing the love of his life there. And he was begging Louise in letters to come back while he was writing the score for Casablanca. So he was very invested in the movie and he very much wanted to write an original love theme for the film. Well, its producer, Hal Wallace, who was very hands-on in the best possible way in this movie, had his own ideas about the love theme. He wanted to use the song As Time Goes By, written in 1931 by Broadway composer Herman Hupfeld. Why did he want to use

this fairly obscure song in Casablanca? Well, because it was used in the play that Casablanca was based on, Everybody Comes to Ricks. And Wallace correctly decided that it would be a terrific love theme for the film. So he told Max to incorporate it into his Max's score. And that's the kind of thing that Max would have done with no argument had he not wanted to write his own love theme so much. commercial success for the movie Now Voyager. He wrote a love theme that became the song It Can't Be Wrong and sort of became Bette Davis's theme song after that. Whenever you see her walk onto a talk show or get her AFI award or something, they're playing that theme from Now Voyager that Max wrote. So he really wanted to write his own theme. And Wallace finally said, enough, no more arguing, Max, you're using as time goes by. And I was amazed to find that Max did indeed write his wife as he's begging her to come back. He's giving her the day-to-day story of what's going on at Warner Brothers and says, they have this lousy song they're making me use.

And here's the amazing thing about Steiner. He was such a professional that when you listen to the score of Casablanca, you would not only think that he loved the song as time goes by, you would think that he wrote it because he gives it a rather Viennese quality. He takes the rhythm of the song, which isn't exactly a love theme rhythm, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta, and he makes it very flowing and puts it into meters, into rhythms that are more romantic. And I would say to listeners, take your DVD or hopefully your beautifully restored Blu-ray copy out and look at the scene when Ilsa knows that she's seeing Rick for the last time and says goodbye and knocks that glass over. And then, of course, the farewell scene at the airport.

To paraphrase Steven Spielberg, just when Casablanca almost pulls that tear out of your eye, Max Steiner makes sure that it rolls down your face. You know, he scores those so beautifully. And he also had a sense of humor about the experience of having to use Herman Hupfeld's song. On the last page of his handwritten score, he has a little note for his orchestrator, Hugo Friedhofer. And he says, Dear Hugo, I am very pleased with you. Thank you very much. Yours, Herman Hupfeld. So and Max did get an Oscar nomination for that score.

He didn't win. But there was a lovely telegram I found in his collection from from Michael Curtiz saying something like, this is your finest achievement. You thank you for a supreme achievement, your finest score. So they really, you know, Steiner was appreciated by the people he worked with. And I also liked finding cases where Curtiz, who we know could be really something of a tyrant on the set, had a very, very warm friendship with Max. They would go over to the smokehouse, have a few drinks, have lunch, share stories about what was going on. And I think it really humanizes them. Well, there's a, there's a similarity there. I think you and

I have had a few lunches at the smokehouse. If only we could be at their level, but. Well, at least, you know, yes, that's, that's true. And what's funny is that jumping ahead in, in, in 1953, they both left the studio at the same time. Max was 65 and the studios were getting rid of staff as much as possible, you know, hiring just the people they needed as their film, the number of films they made was being reduced by television and all those factors that hit the movies after the war. Well, we don't have time to go into Steiner's full career at Warner Brothers, but maybe we should mention, I think, a brief highlight of some of Max brilliantly combines suspense, mystery, romance, and humor in the music. Howard Hawks chose him for that movie because he knew he could get it all with

Steiner. Listen to a movie like Johnny Belinda, where you have a character who can't hear or speak and how the music is the voice of her character. Watch Adventures of Don Juan and hear how at age 60, he writes one of the great swashbuckling scores of all time and gives us a main theme that not only made the orchestra cheer and applaud after they recorded it, but which Steven Spielberg uses in The Goonies. It's such a great rousing theme. And then watch a movie like Pursued, a Western noir starring Robert Mitchum, which is extremely minimalist, where for the suspense climax, you hear this ominous two note pattern for piano, low piano notes just going bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, while these low strings play over it. And it's it sounds like a Jerry Goldsmith score. It's amazing how after the war, Max stayed attuned to changes in music, so much so that

in the act that accidentally saved his life financially, at the age of 71, when he was asked to score the film A Summer Place, he dashed off a sort of pastiche of teen rock and roll ballad music of the time with a triplet pattern sort of like Blueberry Hill and this dreamy theme for strings playing over it. Well, Max dashed off this little teenage love theme for Summer Place. It became what Billboard magazine later called the best selling instrumental of the rock and roll era. It won the Grammy for Record of the year over Elvis, Sinatra, Ella, Ray Charles. It was a financial blockbuster beyond anything that Max could have ever hoped for. And thanks to that single piece of music, his entire life of debt was eliminated,

and he enjoyed a very, very financially secure retirement. And he enjoyed a very, very financially secure retirement. Well, just before we leave the final list of some of his films, there were a few others I think that that might be worth at least or maybe they're not notable for the score, but he worked on the score. And that was what Mildred Pierce, Big Sleep, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo. Yes, yes. I think Mildred Pierce is a great example of how he could get inside a character, whether it be female or male. And he would make these notes on the score. And these are just ordinary blank pieces of music in those days. It's not the way things are done a little more in a much more sophisticated fashion.

He's taking simple music sheets and he's not only writing the notes, but he'll write lines of dialogue over it. And believe me, it gave me a chill when I would read things like here's looking at you kid or to his beauty killed the beast written over the notes. But he was so attuned to the actors that in the case of The Big Sleep, if people who've seen that movie many times will notice that when when Philip Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart is thinking, he'll do a little ear tug. And Max writes at the score on his score page in a few places, ear tugging business. So he's noticing that little detail. And that's a

moment where he plays the Philip Marlowe theme. And in the case of Mildred Pierce, back before there was there were so many people sort of imitating Joan Crawford's qualities. He he's writing, he's scoring the very first scene where we see her by the pier, standing there in a very resolute fashion. And he writes on the score, jaw clenched. And he's writing that for his orchestrator, that just that notion of jaw clenched, he wants that heard in the music. So when you're writing, you know, when you're putting the notes down for the cellos and the violas, that clenched jaw is going to come through maybe in the woodwinds.

But I just found it so interesting that someone who incidentally had poor eyesight, nevertheless had 20-20 vision when it came to both noticing things on screen and also getting inside the hearts of the characters. You mentioned The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. That was one of his very favorite films that he worked on. He was so moved by it and he was so excited working on that film. And for some people, that movie is a little overscored. But I think that his music is a really important component of it. I think that what he wanted to do in that score is have the music be very strong in establishing the bond of the three men so that when that bond breaks up over greed, that is reflected in the music. He didn't write a separate theme for the three

characters played by Humphrey Bogart, Walter Houston, and Tim Holt. He writes a single theme that he called partners after a line of dialogue, partners with a D. And that is the whole notion that it begins in a kind of brotherhood and it and again spoiler alert so skip the next 30 seconds if you haven't seen it when one of those characters the bogart character falls apart max writes this great kind of psychologically dissonant music really really modern music for its time it sounds like buzzing bees for bogart's you know psychotic state and he's the only character that dies and when the the other two men who are good at heart, Tim Holt and Walter Houston's characters,

when they survive and say goodbye to each other, Max brings back that theme, that partner's theme, brotherhood. And he said he wanted it sung like, it's a German term, but a men's choir. And that whole notion that people are good fundamentally. And that's all told in the score. And just one last example from the movie, when there's a mind collapse, and even the good person played by Tim Holt knows that he hesitates for a moment before saving Holtz stands there. And we know he's thinking, if he dies, I get that gold. And then while the camera just stays on Holtz's face, Max changes to the partner's theme. And

he's thinking, no, no, I have to save him. I'm a human being. And that's what film music can do. It's extraordinary. Well, there's just such a long and amazing list of films that he worked on. an amazing list of films that he worked on. I'm sure you go into those in more depth in the book. And it's another reason for people to get the book so that they can really hear all of these amazing stories. Before we finish up the podcast, there were a couple of things I wanted to just touch on briefly. I found it very interesting that later in life, Steiner did this very important work in ensuring royalties for film composers. composers. And, you know, you have mentioned already his financial problems before there at the end of his life when he had the one record. But what was that process for him? Was it something took years? And how did it come about that he was able to get these royalties for film composers? I'm so glad you brought that up, Tim, because to me, one of the most extraordinary discoveries I

had in writing a book, and it was full of things that astonished me, the people he worked with, the scope of his life before the movies. But I was floored to realize that Max Steiner played, if you will forgive the pun, an absolutely instrumental role in composers for film and television and now video games and whatever, getting royalties. And I checked this with everybody in the business to make sure that I was not overstating the case. In 1933, after King Kong, when he realized that music was going to be an important part of movies, he reached out to ASCAP and wanted to join and wrote this in a typically sweet letter saying, I'm so honored to be joining you. And he received a reply that in effect said, we don't handle your kind of music. ASCAP isn't concerned with what you do.

And that was the start of what was a 27-year battle started by Max in 1933 that ended, if I recall correctly, in 1960. It took him that long to unite all the composers in Hollywood. And ultimately, it became many, many people, groups of different names. But he started the fight. He was a symbol of the fight. He stayed in the fight saying, this isn't right. You know, we should get royalties for our music. And the thing that I think really tipped the scale in the composer's favor was when the studios, starting with RKO, sold their libraries to television. And once those movies were on, who sold their libraries to television. And once those movies were on and everyone was seeing King Kong in the late 1950s on television, it gave all these composers ammunition to say, the studios are still making money from this. We should too. And coincidentally, Max and all the other composers

won this victory right at the time that Max had just written A Summer Place, that musical theme that was recorded. And the theme from Summer Place, that musical theme that was recorded. And the theme from Summer Place, it's used in Tim Burton's Batman. It's an animal house. It's in the shape of water. Anytime you want to evoke a kind of late 50s feeling, you hear that theme of Max's. Well, from that one title, that one theme alone, you know, came very much money. Then you think of 300 movies he worked on and the majority of them survive and are playing on television. You know, it was a financial windfall he didn't expect. And it also brought back movies when those films were sold to television that no one involved in

them, least of all Max, thought would ever be seen again. And there's a very poignant letter from him that I found from 1936 when he's just been turned down yet again to have his music published and to receive royalties. And he says in that letter, it's a hell of a thing for a man to have written all the music I have done in my life and to know that all of it is dead. And by that, he meant once the movie is gone from the screens, no one's ever going to see it again or hear it again. Thank goodness how wrong he was. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. It's an amazing story. And a lot of people have him to thank for some of their income every year. So the other thing that I was curious about, and I don't want to take too much time on this,

but how can we finish our discussion on Steiner without maybe looking at his influence on other composers, either living now or who came after him? Is there one or two that you think have made it pretty well known how much he impacted their career? Yes. Max Steiner influenced every composer who came after him, even if they write in a completely different style, because he established the ground rules, if you will, the grammar of what a movie score was. And I'm not saying he invented it. Sort of the way D.W. Griffith in the silent era took the close up and editing and all those things and synthesize that into what we think of as the way stories are told on screen. That's what Max did in the beginning of the talkies. He took all these different ideas about how to write music for drama and put them all together and really created, if you will, the recipe for the film score. So you will find his impact everywhere. Today, I would say the person most directly influenced is John Williams. And John

Williams is an incredibly original, special, unique composer. In no way am I saying John Williams takes from Max Steiner. I'll just say that he is a continuation of the great tradition of Steiner, of Korngold, of Waxman, you know, Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman. And John Williams very kindly wrote a letter praising Max Steiner that was read at one of the webinars that I gave. And he talked about Max's importance in the industry. And that moved me tremendously that he took time to do that. And I will just say that when George Lucas was creating the temp track for Star Wars, when he was putting on music from other movies or concert pieces of music to play

for John Williams to give him the idea of the mood that he wanted for Star Wars, there was music on that temp track by Horngold. And there was music on that temp track by Horn Gold, and there was music on that temp track by Max Steiner. So there's a little DNA of Max Steiner, at least the spirit of Max Steiner in Star Wars. And Steven Spielberg has a nickname for John Williams. And it's also the name that Steven Spielberg chose for his first son. And that nickname is Max. for his first son. And that nickname is Max. We just talked a little bit about what Steiner did for film composers and royalties. And that kind of leads me to the last thing I wanted to ask you about. And that is this current controversy that has created a lot of discussion amongst the Hollywood community.

And that is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announcement on February 22nd, that the categories of, and I'll just go through these real quickly because they are all deserving. Documentary short, film editing, makeup and hairstyling, production design, animated short, hair styling, production design, animated short, live action short, sound, and best original score would not be presented live in an effort to streamline the broadcast, which has seen declining ratings. Now, instead, these Oscars will be handed out in the hour before the broadcast begins with clips of the speeches to be folded into the live broadcast. Now it's the 94th year of Oscars and last year was the least watched broadcast. So I want to have that backdrop. I mean, they had a 50% drop from the previous year in viewership. So it's understandable

that changes need to be potentially made or looked at, but what's your take on this being their answer to declining ratings? Well, I'm sure that there will be very polished editing done in compressing these categories. And at the same time, it saddens me that they are not being presented as part of the broadcast. At the very least, I wish they do what the Tony Awards has done, which is have a broadcast, say, an hour early where you can tune in and watch it and see those and be part of that and then have the show. And I will say that I think Max would be very disappointed as well. He was involved with the Academy from the very start of the time that it incorporated music as a category because music

was not part of the Academy Awards at the beginning. And he was among those that the Academy asked to consult about how to set up music categories. And the Academy Awards meant a great deal to him, maybe a little too much because it broke his heart when he did not win for Gone with the Wind, which is a whole other story too long to get into for now, but it's talked about in my book. But he saw the Academy Awards as the ultimate accolade, the ultimate endorsement of your peers. And coming from a family that was so successful and then being on his own and impoverished and traveling around the world, just trying to survive and then working his way up to the top of the film profession, he really, really wanted to win all of those 24 Oscars that he was nominated

for. And it hurt him when he didn't win. I think he'd be very disappointed that it was not part of the show. And at the same time, like you, I understand that desire to compress the show. Do I think it's going to make a difference in the ratings? Well, by the time some people listen to this, we'll know the answer, but I don't think it's really going to make a difference. And I'm certainly going to miss seeing all of those composers' faces as they wait for that moment because it's suspense. I mean, all of those categories, even when we're not necessarily invested in them, I think our personal moments, they're so important to those people's lives.

And writing the Steiner book, I knew just how much each of those Oscar ceremonies meant to Max. And if I may, I'm just going to end with an amusing story about the Oscars for Max. He won three. His second was for Now Voyager. And for whatever reason, they seated him at the very, very back of the auditorium. And they called his name a couple of times. And he didn't come up. And they didn't know what happened. And finally, they realized he was making his way back from the back of it. And I believe it was Hedda Hopper who wrote in her review of the ceremony. She said, best line of the night, went to Max Steiner, who when after his name was called several times, finally came up and said, back here, I'm on location. Which was just kind of his sense of humor. So, yes, he was in a great mood that night. It's just kind of his sense of humor. So, yes, he was in a great mood that night.

Well, like you say, some people who listen to this will be after the broadcast. And you'll know the Academy has not said that they will, you know, that there's going to be this way from here forward forever. But it'll be interesting to see what the eventual, you know, opinion on that and then things of that nature are. And let's hope that they bring it back in the future. I agree, Tim. Well, Stephen, it's been a real pleasure having you on the podcast. Before we go, how can people find out more about your books and webinars? Well, I'm so glad you asked. It's very easy to do.

I have a website and I would love to hear from your listeners. I can be contacted at www.mediasteven.com. M-E-D-I-A-S-T-E-V-E-N, mediasteven.com. And my books are available from, as Claude Rains might've said, or Louis Renaud, The Usual Suspects. But you can also get signed copies of my biographies of Max Steiner and Bernard Kerman if you order from the great Hollywood bookstore, Larry Edmonds. That's Larry Edmonds with a U-L-A-R-R-Y-E-D-M-U-N-D-S dot com. Because it's close enough to me, I'll be happy to sign copies for your listeners. So Media Steven is the quickest and easiest way to reach me. Well, that's terrific. I will have

information on the books and webinars. If you don't have a pencil, it'll be on the website and we'll have some links to your social media and the notes to the podcast as well. So for those of you interested in learning more about this podcast and all of our other episodes, please check out the website at www.theextras.tv. So thank you so much, Stephen, for coming on today. My pleasure, Tim. Great talking with you. If you're on social media, you can follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at The Extras TV or Instagram at The Extras.TV.

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