David O. Selznick was worried. A scene in Duel in the Sun called for some off-camera sex between Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones. Selznick needed "screwing music," but Composer Dimitri Tiomkin's score had a windy, rasping sound. "Dimitri, the music doesn't have enough shtup," Selznick said. "It doesn't sound like the way I make love." Tiomkin defended his score. "You love your way and I'll love mine," he said. "To me, that's lovemaking music."
Tiomkin, 76, is perhaps the best-known practitioner of an exacting, lucrative profession: writing music for movies and television. There are no rules for capturing a visual image, an emotion or a color in sound. "I once taught a U.C.L.A. course on composing for TV," remembers Lalo Schifrin, 40, composer of the Mission: Impossible theme. "I asked my students to write the sound of the color orange. Every response was different, and each was equally correct."
Fear in D Minor. Many movie composers—Schifrin, Joe Raposo, Billy Goldenberg and Jerry Goldsmith, for example—have classical music backgrounds. Goldsmith majored in music at U.S.C.; Goldenberg studied piano with his father. Schifrin's father was concertmaster of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra. Raposo studied in Paris with the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger. "You have five more years of counterpoint," warned Mme. Boulanger when he announced his impending departure. She worried about her pupil's attraction to popular music: "What will happen to you is the same thing that happened to Gershwin." Replied Raposo: "I certainly hope so."
Commercial composers knock out as many as six full-length scores a year, along with other assignments. For a 110-minute feature film they allow between six and eight weeks. A 90-minute TV movie can be polished off in two weeks. Jerry Goldsmith, 46, a veteran of some 65 films, churned out the music for Chinatown in ten days.
Frequently the film is in the can before the composer sets to work. While he watches the movie, he jots down musical ideas, which he then talks over with the producer and director. After that head session, cue sheets are made that include dialogue, action and music suggestions. A typical entry might go like this: "Actor crosses room, opens door, looks about fearfully (D-minor chord)—12½ seconds." Now all that remains to be done is to write the score.
Sometimes there are interruptions. At work on Up the Sandbox, Goldenberg received daily phone calls from Leading Lady Barbra Streisand. Since shooting sessions lasted far into the night, the actress rang punctually at 2:30 a.m. "Hum me the music for tomorrow," she would request. During one predawn chat, Streisand asked Goldenberg if the movie's final measures could be extended into a song. "Sure," he replied. "Have it by 4," purred La Barbra. "I wrote like mad," Goldenberg recalls. "When she called, I hummed her the tune. She liked it, and the next day we got the word writers, Marilyn and Alan Bergman, to fit it out with a lyric." They booked an orchestra, and within a few weeks If I Close My Eyes, the movie's single, was ready for release.