An Afternoon with Tony Thomas

Originally published in Soundtrack Magazine Vol.13 / No.51-52 /1994
Text reproduced by kind permission of the editor, Luc Van de Ven and Matthias Büdinger

Ladies and Gentlemen, May I introduce you to a man who has done more for the preservation and sheer enjoyment of film music than anybody else, and this without composing a single note of music himself...He just likes to write about the subject in groundbreaking books, manifold articles and liner notes . He enjoys producing classical soundtrack albums, he can be heard on radio... He has written over 30 books on Hollywood and film in general, he is known in the Hollywood community as a charming and pleasant Master of Ceremonies. He is one of the most respected authorities on film music without being academic, combining his great knowledge with a showbiz attitude acquired over many years spent working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In short, Ladies and Gentlemen, would you welcome the one and only Tony Thomas!

It occurred to me that this kind of Hollywood introduction would be appropriate for an interview with a man who is so used to introducing celebrities and film composers himself. It was a special pleasure to meet Tony Thomas in Munich.

Tony, I'd like to start by discussing your two books on film music Music for the Movies and Film Score. I wonder if the timing - your first book was published in 1973 - had anything to do with the poor state of film music in the Seventies, before STAR WARS came along…


No, it had nothing to do with the state of film music. It was something that I had wanted to do for a very long time. I had been doing broadcasts with all these composers for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto for many years. So I had all of these tapes. Of course by that time, I knew many of these composers personally, some have become friends. I wanted to put the accent on film composition, and given an overview of history, telling people what these men had done and how important music was in film. So it was a personal statement of mine. It had nothing to do with the condition of the industry at that time, although it became very bad in the Seventies. It didn't become better until John Williams had his success and people became aware of symphonic scoring again.

In the Seventies there were some important books on film music, for instance Roy Prendergast's Film Music: A Neglected Art and Irwin Bazelon's Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music. So there was no trend...?


No, it was just a personal mission of mine. I was not aware of the other people writing books. At that time there had been very few books about film music. So I felt that something needed to be done to state the cause. You really did pioneer work. Your books have become very popular. I suppose it was a pioneer work. But I didn't think of it as being like that. It was just something I felt I had to do. I had a great love of this form of composition. The film composers are very special men. They are much better educated than most film people. They have a great knowledge of all kinds of music, not just film music.


Was one of your goals to save the past from oblivion since a lot of these composers had become old-fashioned and more or less forgotten?


Yes, they were not very much employed. It would be exaggerating to say that I thought I was doing some great service. A man like Miklos Rozsa, for example, for all his great success and esteem, scored very few pictures in the 1960s. I couldn't quite understand that. Everyone knows that he is a great composer, not just a film composer. People like Waxman, Kaper, Friedhofer, Rozsa were considered to be geniuses in what they did, and the fact they were not being used did bother and concern me. So perhaps I had a little bit of a mission to help them. Not that I believe that writing a book would make any difference. Films are made by financiers and film Companies. They don't read books like this. Their interest in music is commercial. By that time the recording industry had become a very powerful ally of the film industry. The producers were much more interested in getting a piece of music on a record that they could have broadcast and sold than having great music written for their films.

Do you have any idea how many books have been sold since 1973?


No, I don't. It was a difficult book to find a publisher. I didn't do it with a publisher in mind. I started it in 1971, actually. Most of the publishers I went to were not interested. They said, “This is too limited a subject. There is not a big enough market or public for it.”  But I did find one publisher, A.S. Barnes, who had done a series of film books. There was very, very little money. I think they went into five or six editions. They published both of my books. Film Score was the other one, which is somewhat technical because it's the composers talking about the actual work of composition for films. Then they went out of business and sold them to another Company, and nothing happened. So after a while I got the rights back. Two years ago I rewrote Film Score, changed it a little bit and added to it, and it was published by a new Company in Burbank, California, where I live. That book has done quite well. I think they printed 3,000 copies. Now they are interested in a new version of the first book. Music for the Movies. That one should be out very shortly, with changes and extensions. Also, a German version of Film Score will be out in 1995, published by Heyne Verlag in Munich.

Most of the material you used in your books was your own, I presume. Did you use material from other sources as well?


I had to, because there were a few composers who were dead by then. Victor Young, for instance, and George Antheil. There was no way getting a comment from them (laughs). I went to Antheil's widow. She helped me with statements that he had previously made in other interviews. The same with Victor Young. I had to do research on him, because there was almost nothing published. He had no children, no estate. So it was very difficult even to find a photograph of him, as strange as it may seem. But most of my material came from interviews that I had done with the composers for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

You've put yourself on the map in film music circles, so to speak...


I suppose so. To be modest about it: I have had some success because of my career in broadcasting, particularly in Canada, where I was able to do so many programs about film music. That was pioneer work. Now it's quite common to have programs on film music. But when I started there were very few recordings, more than 30 years ago. Now everything is recorded. I also lectured at universities about film music, and I have been the Master of Ceremonies at several film music societies. I helped found the Society for the Preservation of Film Music. So this has been a great interest in my life. I'm very happy that I've been able to do something about it.

Have you ever tried to compose music yourself?

No, I cannot, I can sit at the piano and write very simple tunes, but it means nothing. It just sounds like imitations of my favorite composers, material they would have thrown away (laughs).

But you are very active in the recording business.

I started a company some years ago, Citadel Records. I was able to get hold of some old material and reissue it. I worked for the Max Steiner Society to put out a series of recordings of his music from the original tracks. More recently I've been involved in Production of CDs, and most recently in Berlin I produced two CDs for the Marco Polo record company. We recorded two hours of music. The first album is called Swashbucklers, which consists of a suite from CAPTAIN BLOOD by Korngold, THE THREE MUSKETEERS by Max Steiner, SCARAMOUCHE by Victor Young and THE KING’S THIEF by Miklos Rozsa.

CAPTAIN BLOOD was the first major symphonic score written in Hollywood in 1935. That same year Max Steiner wrote the score for THE THREE MUSKETEERS at RKO, not a good film, but a beautiful score. It has never been recorded, like SCARAMOUCHE or THE KING’S THIEF. I asked Christopher Palmer in London who is an arranger and an authority on Rozsa if he would put together a short suite from THE KING’S THIEF.

The other music had to be reconstructed and reorchestrated, because most of the music has disappeared. We only have the conductor's book, which is a piano reduction. The actual big score with all the instrumentation on it and the parts from which the musicians play have all been destroyed years ago. We recorded with the Brandenburg Philharmonia Orchestra. The conductor is Richard Kaufman, who is the director of music at MGM in Los Angeles. He and I did a recording a couple of years ago in Nüremberg of Rozsa's Viola Concerto and some music of Lee Holdridge. (The release was called Symphonic Hollywood, on Colosseum CST 34.8048 - LVDV). So I knew his work and respected it very much.

The second album is about historical sagas. Most of it is THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE by Max Steiner, and then GUNGA DIN by Alfred Newman and two short works by Korngold, the overture to JUAREZ and DEVOTION, which is the story of the Bronte sisters. These are both about five minutes. But half of the album will be CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE, the first score Steiner wrote when he went to Warner Brothers in 1936. It’s a massive score and a tremendous amount of music. It's like a couple of Strauss tone poems put together. There are so many notes. I think it's an extraordinary recording. It took two days just to record 10 minutes from CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE. The Orchestra was very enthusiastic about the music and very eager to play it. Sometimes symphony orchestras are not very interested in film music. They have a rather snobbish attitude, unfortunately.

These two CDs will be another example of Tony Thomas preserving...


Me being the pioneer? (laughs) Yes. I consider that my mission. That's what I should do. I was always indulging myself in film music and even getting paid for it.

How many units of these Berlin recordings have to be sold in order to break even?

 
You must sell 5,000 at least. But most of these recordings don't go into profit. It would be nice if you could sell 10,000 to 20,000 copies. This would make it really an interesting business. But the interest in film music until now is still a limited interest. There are not enough people out there. But I’m very happy that you and other people write for magazines and are interested in film music. This is very important.

Your interest in film music started in 1938 with THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD scored by Korngold, as you wrote in the introduction to your book…


I was eleven years old. I remember so well going into a cinema and hearing that title music (Tony hums the first bars). I just captured it immediately. I became a great fan of Errol Flynn. I went to see so many of his pictures. They were either scored by Korngold or Steiner. So the interests came together. I love that kind of film. This was the Golden Age of Hollywood and heroic, romantic pictures.

Is Korngold still your favorite composer?


Yes. But not just because of films. I love his entire body of work, his operas, his chamber music, the symphonic works and his songs.

How do you see the state of film music nowadays? Are you interested in contemporary music as well?


I'm interested in anything that's good. I don't hear a great deal of good film music these days, but that’s not so much the fault of the composers as of the producers and the kind of pictures they are making. A composer has to have an opportunity to write. In the days of Errol Flynn with Korngold and Steiner, there were wonderful opportunities. Korngold always looked upon his films as operas without music, and they were. They had more than an hour of music, all symphonic, with long melodic lines, excitement and romance. But we don't make pictures like that today. So if Komgold were alive, he probably wouldn't be interested in working in films. Occasionally we have the opportunity to do something like that, but it mostly goes to John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith. STAR WARS is obviously in the style of Korngold. We do have the composers. One of our younger ones - well, he's in his forties - is Basil Poledouris. With CONAN THE BARBARIAN he proved that he can write symphonic music.

Producers today want a contemporary, popular sound. Films are made mostly for the young market. Most of the people who see a film are under the age of 30. That’s where the money is. Films have always been commercial, but they are more commercial now than they have ever been, because of the huge amounts of money it takes to make them. Films today cost tens of millions of dollars. So when producers raise that kind of money, they don't want to risk anything. They want to go directly to popularity. In fact, most of the old-fashioned style of filmmaking is more to be found in television than in the cinema. I have a great admiration for Laurence Rosenthal. He has done many historic symphonic scores in TV, for instance PETER THE GREAT and GEORGE WASHINGTON.

A big difference between film composers from the past and contemporary film composers is that the older composers derived their musical material from post-romanticism idioms (Strauss, Wagner, Liszt, Mahler, whoever), whereas contemporary film composers are faced with different role models, that is, they are asked to imitate other film composers.


Yes. You have to remember that everything is of its time. Korngold and Steiner were a product of Vienna in the first years of our century, that was a very strong influence. Vienna was the Mecca of music in those days, as Hollywood became the Mecca of film. So the style of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and even the influence of Puccini and Verdi was the education of those men. That was their concept of how to write the music. Rimsky-Korsakov, Delius, Ravel, Debussy - this was the world in which they were born and grew up in.

The younger composers today have a much wider range of influence. They might be interested in composers that even I don't like very much, people like Gorecki. Or avantgarde music. But most of them realize that you can't put that kind of music in films, because people don't understand it. Film music has to be direct. For the most part, you have only one chance to reach your audience. You cannot be complicated or devious. You must state your point immediately in a film. So you can't be avantgarde. It means nothing in the ears of the audience, who don't realize that they are listening to music anyway. The emotional impact is still the strongest factor in the scoring of a film.

In the introduction to Music for the Movies, you mentioned asking a friend whether he liked the music in a film… “What music?”


I fear for that question all my life!

Does your son David still ask that question?


(laughs) No. Of course not. He is a man in his early thirties now. If he said that to me, I would be offended. My daughter as well. But of course their tastes in music are much more popular than mine. Again: They are of their time, as I am of my time. I come from an older line of thinking musically. My tastes came from growing in the 1930’s and 40’s. They run to a Germanic kind of music, to Central-European symphonic music.

You've gotten to know many film composers. Have some of them become friends?

I became a very close friend of Miklos Rozsa. I’ve known him for almost 35 years. I see him twice a week, usually on Wednesdays and Sunday mornings. Other friends are David Raksin and Elmer Bernstein. I like them so much. They are such interesting men.

Would you like to comment on Henry Mancini, who passed away recently?


Well, Henry Mancini was another man whom I liked very much on a personal level. I first went to interview him in the early 60’s, and as we say in America, we got along very well. When you meet someone, you sense that there is some kind of rapport. He was such a nice man, kind, generous, he didn't act like a celebrity, even though he was. I also felt that his music was quite remarkable. He made such great changes in the musical style. He wrote a purely American style, although his background was Italian. He had the Italian gift of melody, but he knew about American jazz and band music. So he brought a new kind of instrumentation, a lighter sound that started with PETER GUNN on TV, which was an enormous hit. But then it carried over into his film scores. He had this wonderful facility to write these charming songs for Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews, for pink panthers and baby elephants. Mancini was also a serious composer. There are several scores of his which are quite symphonic, dark and dramatic, like WAIT UNTIL DARK.

Are there any projects that you'd like to do on behalf of Henry Mancini?


I’m working on a documentary on film music for the American Movie Channel. We want to use part of the interview Jörg Bundschuh and I did for German television. It's too late now to write obituaries. The most I can do for Mancini is to include him in this program and pay tribute to him, and perhaps record more of his music later on. There are still some scores of his which need to be recorded. The lighter side of Mancini has taken so much of the action, as we say…

You have written liner notes for many soundtrack albums, a lot of them produced by yourself. What is your approach? I guess you don't want to be musicological.


No, you can’t write in terms of musicology. You have to understand that the audience for this kind of music are not people who have received academic, musical education. I’m not capable of musicology, anyway. But you have to get across what it was that these men were trying to do, and what it did for the picture. Mostly it’s obvious, but you have to point it out. I try to give the background of the composer, what the picture is about, whether or not the composer has been successful in writing the score. I've written the notes for almost 50 albums, I suppose, and five times for Mancini.

I don't want to flatter you unduly, but I always have the impression that whenever I see an album with liner notes written by Tony Thomas, the album gets a certain kind of esteem. When you're writing the notes, do you sometimes find that you are writing something that you are not really feeling, but you have to write something just to be polite?


Of course, you must do that. Otherwise, they wouldn't ask you to do it. You have to realize that a recording, like a film, is a commercial property. It has to be sold. It's out there to earn money. So you can't write liner notes which are negative. You have to help the album. It’s a commercial form of writing.

You don't have any problems with that?


No. I'm part of the business. I know the job. I don't write anything that I don't like.

What are the projects that you are most proud of?

 
I’m happy that I wrote the two books on film music. I’ve written a total of 30 books now, all on Hollywood subjects, some of them have done quite well, others only so-so... I'm generally very happy with what I’ve done. I’ve made a living doing what I like. I’m not just interested in film music. I love music. That's my religion. My father was a musician. So I grew up with it. Film music has helped me to understand an even greater range of music. This is true for many people. They hear music in films they would not otherwise listen to. They appreciate what they are hearing. So film music can be an education. It does open the doors and ears. The more you understand about music, the more you will enjoy it.

You wrote the copy for at least two Academy A ward shows. What did you actually have to do?


I wrote the introductions of all these actors and actresses who come out and introduce the next piece. It’s all written down for them, and they are reading off teleprompters. (Tony at his most ironic now...) Most actors can barely say, “How do you do, Ladies and Gentlemen,” without it being written on a card. How they memorize all these texts for stage and screen, I don’t know, but they are never expected to memorize anything on an Academy Award show. The acceptance speeches, of course, I did not write, and I wish we could cut those. Usually, the Master of Ceremonies has his own writer who writes the jokes for him. I’ve also been a producer of little film montages for these shows, but it’s not a show that I really enjoy working on, it’s very complicated and very commercial, full of intrigue. Hollywood at its worst.

I suspect there's no point in saying anything positive about the Oscars music awards...


Again, it’s a commercial business. The nominations are made by members of the music branch. But the selection of the score is then open to the entire Academy. There might be 3,000 to 4,000 members, hardly any of whom really understands film scoring. What they are going for is a melody they can remember, and a title of a film. If the film title is a great success, that is on their mind, and they hear just the melody that goes with the title. That's what they are voting for, not the true effectiveness of the score.

You helped to found the Society for the Preservation of Film Music. What is your position right now?

 
I'm just an advisor. I was on the Board for a long time. Most people don't understand the need to preserve film music. So many of the great scores have been thrown away. Part of the idea of the Society is to persuade the Studios not to throw music away and they don't anymore. The Society has been able to find out where a great many music scores were sent. Many of the composers contributed their scores to universities. Brigham Young University has a great collection of film music. We have a listing where all this music is, even the conductor parts. We give an award each year to a great composer, so that gives some Publicity.

Do you know whom it will be next year?

 
No. The problem is that we are running out of great composers to give awards to. I rather suspect somebody like John Barry or Maurice Jarre...

... to continue the European connection established this year with Ennio Morricone?


I don’t think of it as being European. In Hollywood we are so used to people coming from all over the world. So much of the talent has come from everywhere else. In the golden days of Hollywood, so many of the composers had come from Europe.

It was a terrible kind of irony, as you wrote in your book: they were forced to leave Nazi Germany, but it became a turning point in their careers.


Yes, it was one of the great ironies of history that Hitler and his Nazis gave us all this great talent, not only in music, but also in science.

What are your next projects?

 
I want to do more and more recordings. I've lined up two more albums which Marco Polo has accepted. This depends of course on the sale of what we have done so far. We did one CD, Music of Hans Salter, that has sold quite well. Later this year in the former Czechoslovakia we are doing some more of Salter's horror scores. Also later this year (in October) we are doing Rozsa’s IVANHOE in London for the Intrada record label, the complete score, which had to be reconstructed and reorchestrated.

Tony, you are now nearly 70 years old. But in your profession I imagine there is no time to say, “I want to retire”, I suppose...


I’ve reached the official age of retirement, but the idea of retiring doesn't mean anything to me. People in the Arts and in the entertainment industry keep going as long as they can. As long as I can write and produce, why should I stop? I've now reached the point when I can do this kind of work without having to worry about it being an income. I can afford to devote myself to the cause of film music more and more. I enjoy it. That's my life.