A Conversation with William Rosar

The Society for the Preservation of Film Music - Fred Steiner (left) and William Rosar
Originally published in Soundtrack Magazine Vol.11 / No.43 / 1992
Text reproduced by kind permission of the editor, Luc Van de Ven

Would you relate what led to the formation of the Society for the Preservation of Film Music?

Around 1970 some of the film composers, notably Fred Steiner, caught wind of the alarming fact that the movie studios had been discarding their music. In particular, news had gotten out that MGM had thrown away most of their music during a studio “house cleaning” which took place in 1969, or thereabouts. The order came down from the front office that all the departments at the studio were to clear out all material up to 1964 (supposedly for economic reasons), which they did. Harold Gelman, who was then assistant music librarian at MGM, told me that he almost lost his job trying to stop the music from being thrown out and the terrible loss that this would mean. Subsequently this tragedy came to light when Maurice Jarre called Metro to get the performance materials for his music from DR. ZHIVAGO, because he had received a request to perform it in concert, only to be told that it no longer existed. You can imagine how shocked he must have been to hear this! So word of this got around among his colleagues and caused quite an uproar among them. I believe this event was one of the principal causes for the anti-trust suit which the composers filed against the studios some years ago, in an attempt to gain more control over their own music. When people such as myself, who were involved in film music research, learned that this had happened we were also really dismayed because here was our source material being discarded!

Anyway, I met Fred Steiner in 1975 in connection with my research, and I can remember an evening back in 1977 when he called a number of us to his home in Encino, with the idea of forming an organization to save film music from destruction. As you can read in the history of the Society which has appeared in each issue of The Cue Sheet for some time now, you'll know who was there besides Fred and myself: David Raksin, George Korngold, Jon Newsom, Jay Alan Quantrill, Jon Hall, Rudy Behlmer, and Clifford McCarty. The meeting didn't result in any definite plan as I remember, other than to try to encourage the studios not to throw anything away, and if they were going to throw something away, or if they thought that disposal was imminent, to please let us know and we would find a home for it. There was discussion about designing a fancy letterhead and getting a lot of “window dressing” - important names - on it, and I remember David Raksin thought that maybe he could get Saul Bass to design a fancy logo for us. And that’s as far as it got, in 1977. In any case, the credit for the idea of the Society really belongs to Fred Steiner alone. As the years passed, nothing happened, because no one, for whatever reasons, took the initiative to form the Society as had been planned. By 1983 I was working for Miles Krueger at the Institute of the American Musical in Los Angeles and I was very, very impressed by what he had done to preserve the historical heritage of musical theater, and I thought that this really was what we needed for film music. I can remember Miles saying to me, “You need a non-profit organization,” repeating advice once given to him before he created the Institute. Miles, Fred, and I even talked at one point about expanding the Institute to include film music, in as much as the Institute's collection already included a lot of material on film musicals. Wisely, we agreed that this would mean the Institute taking on too much, and abandoned that idea. But because of my experience with Miles Krueger, who was a real inspiration, I went ahead and founded the Society for the Preservation of Film Music in 1983.

Now, the object of this was, I think, to take a fairly aggressive initiative to prevent - in some way - more film music from being destroyed and perhaps also increase access to it and related documents. I originally envisioned it along the lines of the National Geographic Society, with a magazine like National Geographic that would be the mouthpiece of the organization to the general public, especially to the soundtrack collector. For an annual fee, one could join the Society and would receive the magazine.

How did the group actually form? How were some of the Advisory Board people and the film music composers brought in?

The nucleus of the Society was a group of friends with a common interest - or, perhaps I should say, a common passion - namely, film music. This was now 1983; six years had elapsed since Fred Steiner had talked about forming a Society and nothing had happened, and so I had some time on my hands and I said: LET'S DO IT! And I started writing letters and calling up people and telling them about the Society, and really what finally transpired is that I sold Henry Adams, a soundtrack collector friend of mine, to put up seed money to pay for a consultant, Christopher Dirks, an M.B.A. from U.C.L.A. with a background in arts administration, who had also worked for Miles Krueger, to assist me in filing as a non-profit educational corporation in California, and formulating a mission statement, a charter, constitution, by-laws and so forth. I brought these people together and I remember the first meeting we had was at the home of Linda Mehr, head of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences library, and I think you were there.

What were the group's primary goals at the time of its incorporation, and how have they been changed or modified over the years?
I think that we had this idea that we wanted to preserve film music, we wanted to save it from destruction, but of course the $64,000 Question was: HOW? How can we do that? I mean, here this material is the property of the movie companies, who were we to tell them what to do with it? As they themselves have often enough said, it's their's to do with what they want, because it belongs to them - they paid for it. I can only give you one anecdote off the top of my head about how it finally worked out - one of our “success stories,” if you will - and that's when we got a call from CBS one day, from Robert Drasnin, head of music there, telling us that they had a lot of old music in the attic above one of the scoring stages on their Studio City lot, and the Fire Department had told them that they better clear it out because it was a fire hazard. Well it turned out that the CBS/MGM lot in Studio City was originally Republic Studios, and there was a lot of old Republic music that had been left behind, and had been sitting there all these years. So, heroically, we came in, boxed up the music, and off it went to Brigham Young University where, as it happened, most of the Republic music had ended up from a previous donation. This is the kind of idealistic scenario that we had envisioned.

Also, I think we wanted to, generally, increase the consciousness of the American public, sort of “film music appreciation” through publications. We wanted to put out not only a newsletter but a journal and an encyclopaedia, and of course, you know about Film Music 1 [Clifford McCarty, Editor, New York: Garland, 1989]. We wanted to encourage serious research in film music history and scholarship and so on, as part of this, with hopes of elevating the status of this music somewhat in the eyes of the music world and academia, try to get more serious interest in it. Naturally, we also thought a lot about possibly issuing recordings because that's what most of the fans were interested in, but as you well know, all this music is so tied up in legal and contractual red tape.

How have the Society's goals changed or been developed over the years?
I don't think the goals changed; rather, the priorities changed. The one thing that we did consistently was to publish the newsletter, The Cue Sheet, which gradually grew into a journal - at least in name, if not in content. It was originally supposed to be a newsletter to report what was going on in the Society and in the world of film music preservation, and we tried to spice it up with some articles, some of them topical, some of them historical. But, again, what does that have to do with film music preservation? I think that, in a way, we feel like we've been putting out fires. A few years ago we got a call from Hugo Friedhofer's widow, and she had come across a whole raft of old acetate recordings in her closet. For an entirely different reason, she had wanted Cliff McCarty, who is in the book business, to make an appraisal of a number of books that she had gotten rid of from Hugo's estate, and she just happened to mention these records and wondered if anyone would want to buy them, and I said to her, “Well, you probably don't want to sell them, but I'd encourage you to donate them to Brigham Young University,” where Friedhofer's music is housed. And she was quite happy to do that, and of course B.Y.U. wanted to be able to play these things. They were for the most part great big platters, requiring a special stylus and a big turntable to play them. So we had a specialist, Chris Lembesis, who was at that time very involved with SPERDVAC - the Society for the Preservation & Encouragement of Radio Drama, Variety and Comedy. Anyway, he was a specialist in transferring acetates, and B.Y.U. commissioned us to transfer the entire collection of disks to tape, which we did, cleaning them up with noise reduction, and it sounded great. So that's another project. We did the same with Herbert Stothart’s personal collection of acetates for his family.

So it's really just been on a case-by-case basis, until recently, when I finally had a brainstorm. I thought to myself, the movie companies have made a lot of money on this music. Why not encourage them to pay to preserve it? After all, it's their property! And that was my strategy with Disney, and they seemed quite receptive to it - the idea, one, of preserving it, paying to preserve it by microfilming their paper music - we didn’t talk about plans for the recorded stuff - and two, donating it to a university library for safekeeping, and then paying to catalog it, so that they would have a catalog of the material should they have any need to access any of it.

What's the current status of the group and has it continued along the lines that it was initially envisioned?
There have been some very strong disagreements on the Board of Trustees about priorities, not only about the work of the Society but how to run it, its modus operandi. While I was President, my time was gradually being eaten up more and more, so that it was practically taking over my whole life (my wife divorced me), and as organizations do, the Society was growing and really needed the attention of a qualified staff person, somebody to handle it on a daily basis, because it was impacting my ability to make a living. As things worked out, I ended up stepping down as President after six years when the Board decided to create a paid staff position for me as Executive Director, and I was succeeded as president by Herschel Burke Gilbert, a retired film and TV composer, who is best known for his theme for the TV show, Rifleman. Initially everything seemed hunky-dory until Herschel and I started butting heads. He had his own ideas of how things should be done. Thinking of the Society as one might think of a business, he thought the highest priority was to amass capital first, and then pay people to do the work of the Society. He seemed to think that my job was to do nothing but raise money, though I had not agreed to any such terms. Things don't work like a business in the non-profit world, where it is just the reverse of the business world: you raise money to do work, not do work to raise money, as in the for-profit sector. His instincts were therefore, in my opinion, all wrong for the Society, and are responsible for a great deal of senseless argumentation which all but destroyed the Society. I told him that my job was, first and foremost, to get the work done, to make headway on our projects. So when I didn't raise a whole bunch of money, he ex officio pulled the proverbial rug out from under me by making it appear to the Board that I hadn't been doing my job properly. That heralded the beginning of a long, bitter feud between those who saw things Herschel's way, and those who saw them my way. This in-fighting must have gone on for a year and a half, during which time really nothing was accomplished. Very little transpired other than publishing The Cue Sheet.

I'd like to talk a little about the achievement awards. How did those begin?
We thought it would be nice to honor the composers whose music was the “raison d’être” for the Society. It was never intended to be a “career achievement” award, like AFI's award, or others. I don't know how it came to be called “career achievement award” - personally, I've always thought that was a rather pretentious, pompous name for it. In any event, we wanted to honor the composers and their work. The first honoree was Miklós Rózsa because Leslie Zador, the former Secretary of the Society, was very fond of his music. Zador's father, Eugene Zador, orchestrated most of Rósa's scores. This then became an annual affair, and the dinners got bigger and fancier. Then a few years ago we thought these things were getting so big and expensive, why not turn it into a fund raiser for the society? So that's what we did, the first time with George Duning Award Dinner. We priced the tickets up and we made a little money - I don't remember how much off hand. And each one was progressively more successful after that. The Elmer Bernstein Award Dinner I think must have earned us about $20,000, though the Ernest Gold Dinner actually was a little less successful, and I think this year, the John Williams Award Dinner brought in $30,000 or more. But I don’t think that we were ever trying to compete with the likes of the American Society of Music Arrangers or the American Film Institute, and that's why I always felt we should avoid pretention - but of course in Hollywood that's very difficult, because people seem to expect it!

What can you tell me about the Union Catalog of Film Music, one of the major projects of your tenure?

Let me explain first what a union catalog is, for starters. Probably the most well-known union catalog is the National Union Catalog, a library catalog compiled by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Now, first of all, what I mean by catalog is what you use at the library, like a card catalog, to find material. A Union Catalog is different, in that it lists all these items and tells you what libraries across the United States have them. So if I were to look up, say, your book, Musique Fantastique, I would find a listing under that title of, a cross section - basically a survey - of the libraries across the countries which have that book. So, as you also know, there are a number of repositories across the country where the studios have donated film music material, composers have donated them - I mentioned Brigham Young University already earlier, the University of Wyoming, Library of Congress has a lot of stuff. So, Fred Steiner had the idea to create a central data base that you could look up any film title and find out where the music was, whether it was in a University library or whether it was in a studio library, because we intended to catalog the contents of the studio music libraries. So, basically, this would be an invaluable reference tool, a research tool, for anybody doing research on a given score, and we intended to include - along with just listing the music - any documents that were filed, correspondence and so on.

Now, what happened, ultimately, with the executive director position was that the job was given to somebody else, a woman named Jeannie Pool, who has been very active in the women-in-music movement. She has a lot of experience as a fund-raiser - which was what Herschel and his supporters wanted most - a lot of experience with music promotion, but unfortunately, she's “not into film music,” to quote something she said to me when I initially invited her to join the Board of Trustees. She certainly didn't feel competent to continue the work on the Union Catalog, and, since it was a paid job, the Union Catalog basically came to a standstill in 1990. Now I have to add that the preparation for a union catalog is enormous. Library cataloging on the whole, which the lay person probably has no understanding of at all, is a specialized, technical skill. People go to library science school for, among other things, to learn how to do library cataloging. So, the groundwork required to create a union catalog that would encompass all of these selections, and how to organize this information, in itself required a tremendous amount of preparation.

You've recently been removed from the Board. Can you indicate how this transpired and how this will affect the direction of the society?
Herschel Gilbert's supporters had come to dominate the Board of Trustees of the Society, and we had really reached an impasse: either Herschel was going to prevail, or I would resume presiding over the Society, and things would get back to normal. I would have no part of it otherwise. The Board made their choice, and on the basis of several trumped up allegations against me as an excuse, they ousted me. I can't predict how it's going to affect the future of the Society. In January of 1990, I was supposed to be full-time executive director, the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs foundation had made a grant to the Society to pay one third of a full-time salary for two years for an executive director, a full-time staff person. And the purpose of this staff position, one, would be to provide editorial support for the Union Catalog of Film Music, the writing and implementation of a three-year plan, basically public representation, project development, the usual things that an administrator does. I wrote the grant proposal for that and submitted it and they funded it, they were all for it. And, basically, when it came time for me to assume that position, in January of 1990, Herschel and a few other Board members, became opposed to it, because they felt that my primary responsibility was to raise funds.

Now, this was not something that I ever agreed to because, for an interim period for about eight months prior to that, I had been working half-time as executive director. I stepped down in March of 1989 as President, to become a half-time executive director. Somewhere in all of this, even though it was pretty well clarified to the best of my understanding, that one of several functions that I was to perform on a half-time basis, was fund-raising. And, of course, fund-raising is not a sure-fire thing. You can spend a lot of time writing grant proposals and hitting people up for money, and not raise a dime. And that doesn't mean that you haven't done your job, it just means that people aren't interested in giving money or that you haven't found the right people, or the right approach. I finally came up with the idea of approaching Disney to underwrite the cataloging and preservation of their music library, which I thought was a splendid idea. Unfortunately, this was towards the end of the year, in 1989, and as you know studios get backed up with production at that time, and so it had to be put on hold, but Disney was very interested and we had some very promising discussions with Andy Hill, who is second in command of their music department over there, and that's where it stood. Well, I brought this to the Board, early in 1990, and they weren't satisfied that this was pending and they offered to continue my half-time employment, not the full-time employment, for three months, in which time I brought in this project, as well as a project which was to catalog all of Alfred Newman’s music (something to be funded by the Newman family, spearheaded by David Newman) and which was, again, in the talking stages - these things can't be rushed. And they just felt that somehow I hadn't “closed the deal,” as they put it.

What do you see for the future of the Society? Do you have any association with it at this point?
I don't know. I'm starting a new Society which will try to do everything that S.P.F.M. was originally intended to do, but wasn't able to. It's to be called the International Film Music Society.

What plans do you have for this new Society? How will it differ from the S.P.F.M.?
One thing is that I think we will start with the first scholarly journal of film music, and I think I'm going to call it The Journal of Film Music* or something like that, and really have in-depth, well-researched articles and, this might sound a little, high-brow, but there is no such magazine or journal at the present time, most journals as you know are aimed at the fan, there is no scholarly journal devoted to film music, at present. I've already talked to U.C. Press about possibly publishing it, and they did express some interest.

What would be an example of what you'd be doing there?

Oh, I think probably it would be like a musicology journal, maybe you could compare it to Popular Music, which is published by Cambridge University Press, something like that, or the Journal of Jazz Studies, something along those lines. We're also interested in making a central, sort of little research library, where we will have a xeroxed copy of every article ever written on film music, and we want to issue a kind of ongoing bibliography of what's published, an international bibliography of film music articles. Again, with the intent of encouraging research and writing about film music. Since S.P.F.M. seems to have abandoned the project, we're going ahead with a union catalog of our own.** Besides that we are going to publish an International Encyclopedia of Film Music, which will have biographical entries on virtually every film and TV composer living and dead, definitions of terms and subject entries on everything from “Mickey-Mousing” to click-tracks, and brief histories of the movie studio music departments. We want it to be the reference book for film music. We also have some ideas about issuing selected historical recordings and are working with Dave Fuller of Screen Archives Entertainment of Texas in this regard.

As far as the Society of Preservation of Film Music itself is concerned, where do you think that might be going in the future?

Who knows? Who can say? I can’t predict the future other than to just say that unless they can do something more than stage these dinner parties which they have once a year, I see it turning into a professional fraternity, just another public relations entity for the careers of film composers - something it was never supposed to be. Ironic as it may sound to you, this is why I had - and still have - very strong reservations about a film composer heading it.

I can't emphasize enough that the composers should not be running the organization, because it then tends to have the appearance of a self-serving, private interest group. The composers already have their own professional associations for that purpose - the Composers and Lyricists Guild of America, ASCAP, BMI, the American Society of Music Arrangers, and of course, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, which has a music branch run by film composers. All of these organizations already put on award shows and dinner parties. The Society for the Preservation of Film Music should be run by persons outside the film industry: in my opinion, the film music aficionados.

* Rosar founded and is editor of The Journal of Film Music published by Equinox Publishing. Volume 1 No. 1 was published June 19 2009. In September 1997 the SPFM organization was renamed The Film Music Society with Marilee Bradford as Producing Director since 2005.

** William H. Rosar, and Leslie N. Andersen (Editors), Union Catalog of Motion Picture Music, The International Film Music Society, 1992.