Earle Hagen - Archive Interview Part 5 of 10 - OOS linked

It was a different medium than film, but in some ways the same. And I wonder if briefly you could tell me how you felt about it when you got into it. Did it seem like a completely different realm than film?

Yes, it did. I guess the best way I can explain that is if I was doing a number for Call Me Madam, I was working with Donald O'Connor on a number, let's say. From the day he started to rehearse, I'd be on the stage. I might only spend a few minutes there. As the number would be formulated and formatted, I was aware of what was going on all the time. I was in constant communication with whoever the rehearsal piano player was. And as they got toward the end of finalizing a number and getting into final rehearsals on the number, I could literally start the framework of an arrangement. Oh, you know, you're talking about 28 days of preparation to do a score or an arrangement for a number. In television, we very seldom had a day. So what happens is 2 things. Number one is your time gets compressed, and number two, your decision-making gets sharpened. It becomes a different kind of— medium, you can't say, well, you know, I turned on the faucet this morning and nothing came out of it but air. I have no inspiration. I'll go play golf and maybe later on it'll be better. You know, it was do it now. And I learned a valuable lesson from George Tremblay, who was a friend as well as my teacher. And he said, don't get writer's block. Write something. Even if you don't like it, write it. And as you write, you'll start to pick up some steam and you'll begin to write things you do like. And then become a good editor. Go back and fix what you wrote, but don't sit there and spin your wheels. And television was the ultimate exercise because you couldn't spin your wheels. If you, you know, if you got into a problem of delaying it and procrastinating and letting it go back, it didn't get done. And we always got it done. Without the 6 weeks of preparation time.

At any point, did it occur to you that maybe you wanted to go back to film to have that luxury of time that you never had in TV?

There was a crossover period, and I don't really know when it happened, when I began to enjoy the idea that I could write something on Monday and hear it on Thursday. Because, you know, it's nice to have a paycheck. That's great. But when you do what we do, the real gratification is when you scribble something on paper and a bunch of musicians breathe some life into it. And then you get a chance to hear it and say, I wish I'd had more time. I could have done that better. And the next time you go at it, you try to do it better. But there was an instant gratification that took place in television, so far as I was concerned, that didn't take place in the motion picture industry. And it was nice to go back occasionally to do something for Al. The last time I worked with Al as an arranger was on Flower Drum Song. And I had one of those routines that went on forever, and it was basically bass and afterbeats and stuff. And I was sitting writing an arrangement on it, and I fell asleep. My head hit the table, and I woke up about 3 hours later with a stiff neck. and finished it. When I brought it in, because Al liked to keep the tradition of Robert Russell Bennett and the show flavor, and that's what we did. When I brought it in, he was very pleased with it, and he said, have you got time for another assignment? I said, Al, I'm never gonna make an arrangement for anybody else in my life. And I never did, except the things that I had to write for myself. There was too much time, and I just got into the habit of appreciating the fact that I could do something now and hear it Day After Tomorrow. I enjoyed that.

In the 1950s, I'm wondering if you were affected by the blacklist, or any of your colleagues or friends were affected by the entire Red Scare period?

Yes. I think probably the worst fallout I've ever seen due to it was Sol Kaplan, who was a good friend of mine. And— He was a composer. He was a composer at 20th Century Fox, and he was a good young composer. And I think his wife was a sister of Van Heflin or somebody who they were trying to— the Un-American Activities Committee was trying to get at. And they called him up and he literally, in so many words, told them to stuff it. And the next day at the music table, there was Sol and Herbie and I sitting there and nobody else would sit down with him. He lost his job shortly after that. They let him go, and he tried staying around Hollywood for a while. He had a little studio on 3rd Street near Fairfax, and he was teaching piano and conducting, trying to make a living out here, and he finally just gave it up and went back to New York. He wasn't necessarily accused of anything himself. They wanted him to talk about other people that he knew about, and he just refused to do it, and it killed him. It killed him professionally. And then Sheldon, I think Sheldon hired a lot of writers who were blacklisted writers who were writing under other names, because as far as he was concerned, he wasn't interested in their political philosophy as much as he was their talent.

Okay. Let's move on to 1960. I'm curious as to when the first time you heard that Andy Griffith was going to be given a show, and whether or not by this time, 7 years into your relationship with Leonard and Thomas, if it was automatic that you were going to write whatever theme and/or score there was for The Andy Griffith Show.

It was automatic. We were kind of the house people by that time for Danny and Sheldon. And in a peculiar way, it led to the split between Herbie and I. We had had some differences of viewpoints before, but it was nothing major. The Danny— the Andy Griffith Show was a Danny Thomas episode. It was a spin-off, and it was an episode where Danny is in the South and he— and a cop stops and gives him a ticket, and he says, I'm not going to pay the ticket. whatever it was, I want to see the judge. And he went into the courthouse and Andy was also the judge. He was the cop and he was the judge. And I believe the— I may be wrong, but I think the advertising agency was BBDO because if you remember in those days, television was owned— the shows were owned by sponsors, not networks. And consequently, they would have their agencies look over shows that were appropriate for whatever product they were selling. If they had a cereal, they wanted it early nighttime. If they had a coffee, they wanted it at 9 o'clock. If they had an Under Armour deodorant, they wanted it at 10:30, you know. And they had more conscience about it than the networks, you know, if you don't mind my saying that. They made the decisions on what shows they were going to select. And BBD&O, or whoever the agency was, and I believe it was Lee Rich, bought the show that night. Herbie and I were involved in doing a show at Columbia called My Sister Eileen.

Was that also a sitcom?

It was a sitcom, yeah, with Elaine Stritch, and I've forgotten who was Eileen. And we were doing pretty well with it. We were making pretty good money. And we had the same formula. Herbie did most of the arrangements, and I did most of the scoring. We also wrote the theme for that, which I've forgotten by now. And when The Griffith Show sold, it was Sheldon's show. It was his idea. He produced it. He put it on. And in talking to him, we had a whole summer to figure out what we were going to do. And in talking to him, I said, are you planning to score it live? Because don't forget, before that was— the experience was strictly with the Danny Thomas Show. This was 1960. Well, actually, the pilot, I think, was late '59 or early '60. And I said, how are you planning to do the show? He said, we're gonna score it. I said, fine. So I told Herbie, I said, we're gonna have to write a theme for it, and we're gonna score the show live. And Herbie said, no, we're not. And I said, why aren't we? And he said, because he talked to Lou Edelman, and Edelman said it was going to go track. Now, we had done the pilot for The Real McCoys. Hugo and I did that, and William Morris Agency sent me a letter telling me that the music saved the show, they were definitely gonna go live. And eventually, I got a call from the producer, asking me if I'd go to Mexico and do a library. And I said, no, I don't do that. So Emil Newman went and did the library.

Let me stop you here and make sure we can define some terms. Scoring live means you write original music for every show and record it in Hollywood, or in the United States, at least.

Correct.

dubbed into the show. Library, meaning an entire group of musical compositions is written and is often taken out of the country, and then tracked, meaning put into the show wherever they needed it, without regard to specific dramatic situations.

That's right. It's kind of overall encompassing, and then a cutter kind of trims it to fit. And it was never recorded in this country. It was always recorded overseas. In this particular instance, they wanted to go to Mexico.

For Relicoids.

For the Real McCoys, and the picture industry was going to Germany and England and using foreign orchestras. In any event, the question was, we had done a couple of other pilots that went track. That was track library. So that became a bone of contention between Herbie and I because I said, well, Sheldon told me that we're gonna score it live, and Herbie said, well, Lou said we're not. So I think we better do something. I said, I'll tell you what, if you want to do My Sister Eileen, I bow out of the show and I'll take my chances with Sheldon. And we split. Now, we were still partners because the Danny Thomas Show went on when I wrote the theme, and Herbie still gets half of the theme to this day, or his estate does. And he never heard this. He never heard the theme until it was on the air because We all both suffered with trying to find an idea that we thought would be appropriate for The Griffey Show. And one morning I got up, you know, after beating our brains out for a couple of months, and I thought, that thing ought to be simple enough to whistle. And it took me about 10 minutes to write it. So I called my drummer, Alvin Stoler, bass player, and the guitar, and booked a studio on Fairfax Avenue, and went down and made a demo. I'm a professional, so I made it 58.5 seconds. And I ran up by Lenny's 'cause they were getting ready to shoot, to start shooting the show. And I said to Sheldon, I said, what do you think about this for The Griffith Show? He listened to it and he said, that's fine. He said, I'll tell you what, I'll shoot Andy and Roddy walking along the lake with a couple of fishing poles over their shoulders. Great. That was the way it was done. I never whistled before in my life and never since.

So that was you whistling on the demo, which became the main title of The Andy Griffith Show.

Right. Well, what happened, I had to do it over again because this was just a demo record. But when we got into the union situation, then I did it over again. And I remember when Dick Link came in town, who was Andy's manager, I think Aaron or Sheldon played him the demo. And he said to me, gee, that's really catchy. I can't wait to hear it in the orchestra. I said, what orchestra? I said, Dick, if you want me to write an orchestra piece, I'll write an orchestra piece, but that's that joke. That's something that everybody ought to be able to whistle. And I'll tell you, John, that Andy can't go anywhere without somebody starting to whistle that theme at him. You know, it's become one of those identification pieces of material. And it also— I think it amplifies the purpose of the theme, and that is that if you're in your living room and somebody is in the other room and they hear the Griffith theme come on, they say, hey, Griffith's coming on, let's go watch it. It is an identification mark. It's like having the swoosh on sports gear and so forth, you know. And today I saw a new show. I didn't see much of it, but I saw the opening opening of it, and the opening couldn't possibly have been more than 10 seconds. And it's hard to pin an identification on something when you don't have time to at least let an audience absorb it, even if it is short, because 58 seconds is not a lot of music.

Also, conceptually, with regard to The Andy Griffith Show theme, wasn't it more than just you needed it to be simple enough to whistle? Was it also about the fact that he was a kind of a simple kind of guy?

Sure. Sure, that was what made it so hard, you know, because we think of Americana in terms of Copland. And I designed a combination for that show, which was the first time anybody had just used cellos for a string section. It was always soft. It was 3 horns, a flugelhorn, 3 cello, 3 woodwind. I had an accordion, played piano. And the show was very gentle, and it happens to be one of my favorite shows, because it had such great values. And it's become— Mayberry has become utopia for a lot of people.

So, musically, it needed a softer sound?

Yes. Okay.

Did you write individual character themes for—

Yes.

You did?

Yes.

For example, was there an additional theme for Andy beyond that, or—

No, Andy, I usually used some version of the Whistling theme. I had 2 themes for Don. Why is that? Well, because Don was a twitchy character, and my philosophy about comedy music is you don't play things that are funny. You just try to amplify the character visually. If he's twitchy, I wanted to make him more so. And when he was overbearing, I had a march that was like Dragnet, you know, the ultimate cop on the beat. So I had 2 themes for Don. I had a theme for Frances Bavier, Aunt Bee. I never had any thematic material beyond those main characters, but if they were in there, I would try to integrate what they were doing with the music.

How much music was there in The Andy Griffith Show?

The Andy Griffith Show averaged about 9, 9.5 minutes of music, which is a lot for a comedy show. Why?

Why did it need that much?

Well, in the first place, it wasn't done 3-camera-wise, so it wasn't trimmed out tight, like a 3-camera show would be. It was a single-camera show. And there was an attitude about the show that had long spaces of time. And sometimes, you would have a sequence where you felt like you ought to score That 30 seconds, let's say. But there was no place to really enter it without feeling it, because the entrance of music is a tremendous dramatic additive. I don't care whether you whisper it or whether you shout it, you feel it. Even if you bring it in under a sound effect and it's just there, the additive of music is noticeable. And I would always try to find someplace, even if it was 4 minutes earlier, to bring the music in so that it developed along with the scene and then Arrived at that 30 seconds, which was invaluable. And it worked. The music— incidentally, that was the best dubbing job in television. You hear those shows today and you hear the music in real perspective because they didn't have a laugh track. And the fellow who dubbed the music and the dialogue, Jimmy Stewart, had dialogue in one hand and music in the other, and he used the music as fill. So that the music was up to the level of the dialogue. I never covered it because I didn't cover it in the first place. If there was dialogue, I thinned out, I got softer and so forth. And Jimmy played that thing, and you hear those shows today, and I know of no television show on the air that has the dubbing quality or the presence of music like The Griffith Show.

And is that more about the guy who was doing the dubbing, or is that about Sheldon's overall philosophy?

No, it was not Sheldon's philosophy. Sheldon didn't ever go to a dubbing. He had somebody who was in charge of dubbing. And it was really a show philosophy. That was my arena. There were times when we'd go in and fight with the dubbing crew about, you know, was the tire squeal more important than what the music was doing at that point in time. And I think it was just a— A highly professional, theatrically motivated group of people who looked at the end result instead of everybody fighting for their individual terrain. If you understand what I'm saying, you know. It's pretty hard to judge the effectiveness of a fender crash or a car going into the water, as opposed to dialogue. Dialogue's gonna be there. And if you have music, it has to be in proportion to what its dramatic effect is. And we always leaned on the music very heavily.

And I gather that music was considered an important partner in the overall production.

Yes, it was.

Which is perhaps less so today.

It really was, yeah.

Did you work at all with Andy himself?

Yeah, I spent a lot of time with Andy, and we've remained good friends over all these years.

Was he musical at all? Did he ever have thoughts to contribute or suggestions to make?

He never had thoughts about post-scoring. You have to remember that I'd go on the stage. I had my own projection room at Motion Picture Center, which was above the Griffith stage, and I'd always stop on the stage and talk with he and Bob Sweeney, who was a close friend, and Don.

Bob was?

Bob Sweeney was the director. And then I'd go up and run the picture, and then I'd come down and Andy'd say, what'd you run? I'd tell him, we would talk about it, and it led into a, into a Strange relationship. And that was— they had done a picture, and they'd worked hard on it, and I ran the picture. And I thought there was about 2 times as much story as they had time to develop. And I thought the result, to me, came out dull. And I made the mistake of going back on the stage. As a matter of fact, Andy was singing a tag, and I always covered that, because he was very sensitive about his pitch, which was incidentally good. But he— when he had to sing on film, he wanted somebody to reassure him that it was okay, or to stop it if it wasn't and say, hey, Andy, let's do another one. And he would do it. And I stopped on the stage and he said, what'd you run? And I told him the show. And he said, oh, that's a great show, isn't it? And I said, I don't think so. He said, what do you mean? I said, I thought it was dull. And he went up in smoke, because Andy had a temper. And I finally said to him, look, I didn't offer that. You asked the question and I gave you a straight answer. And I could be 100% wrong, but I have the same right that you have. Maybe you're 100% wrong. At least if you ask me the question, I'll tell you what I think. And I walked out. That show went on the air about 6 weeks later, something like that. And before the end title credits came on, the phone rang. It was Andy. And he said, Earl, you were right and I was wrong. He said, I'm sorry. I said, okay, we established something. You ask me a question, you get an answer you can depend on. You may not like it. We've been friends. I talked to him the day before yesterday. I got a copy of the new album that he made. He made a Christian album last year. It was the number one selling album in the country in Christian music. He sold, I think, half a million CDs. And he just made a new one, and his producer Steve Tyrell sent me a pre-release copy, and it's great. It is just great.

I understand there are lyrics to The Andy Griffith Show theme.

There are.

Did you have anything to do with that? Were they added later? Did anyone ever sing them?

They were added later. We recorded it. Andy recorded it. They've just re-released a record with him singing it. The lyrics were written by Everett Sloane, who was a wonderful actor. And Everett called me up one day— we were friends— and he said, do you mind if I write a lyric to the Griffith theme? And I said no. And he wrote a thing called A Fishing Hole. And it's an outstanding lyric. It's one of the few add-on lyrics I've ever seen that really made some sense. It has not been heavily recorded. I don't know of anybody but Andy who has a record on it. Because some years ago, I think in 1961 or '62, we did an album of The Griffith Show for Capitol, and Andy had written a monologue. That's the way he started, was as a monologist. And it was called Jack the Giant Killer. It was about a 7-minute piece, and he said, I always wanted to do this with a big orchestra. So I said, why don't we do it on a record date? And he said, fine. And I wrote a piece to fit the monologue, and we recorded it live. I had a 38-piece orchestra at Capitol Records, and Andy was in the booth, and we did it like you would do a stage performance. And it's great. It's a wonderful piece.

And the rest of the album consists of music for the Andy Griffith Show?

It consisted of I had an orchestral version of the whistling version of the Griffith theme. I had the Mayberry March. I had a piece of Don Knotts for Don. I had Aunt Bee's theme. And then we did some country music with the Dillards. And then we— then the capper on it was the last 7 and a half minutes with Jack the Giant Killer.

That's great.

Yeah, it was a fun album.

Aaron Rubin was on that show, as I recall.

Yeah.

Did you work closely with Aaron? What was he like?

Yeah, I did. Aaron was great.

What was his job?

His job was as the producer, story consultant. Both jobs. I mean, he was the head of both jobs. And it's an interesting thing about Aaron. Shelton went to New York to look for a producer for The Griffith Show. And Aaron at that time was directing Sergeant Bilko for Nat Hiken. And he took Sheldon to see a Broadway show where he had written sketches for a guy by the name of Dick Van Dyke. And the show, I think, opened and closed in 3 days. And then later on— And Sheldon hired Aaron. And Aaron came aboard as the producer and the executive story consultant. Then later on, when the Dick Van Dyke property came up, which was a pilot that was done by Carl Reiner, Sheldon said, I know the right guy, and went to New York and got Dick, who was doing Bye Bye Birdie. So that was his introduction to Aaron Rubin. Aaron came on The Griffith Show, and he stayed with it until they launched Gomer Pyle, and then he went with—

CBS.

The Gomer Pyle Show. Aaron was easy to work with in the sense that he, again, like Sheldon, was hands-off. You did your job. You didn't do your job, you weren't there to do it, which is not a bad way to work. I gotta tell you that you never, you never waste time.

I'm curious about the nuts and bolts of scoring The Andy Griffith Show, and I suspect these may pertain to your other shows as well. Could you take me through the process, from the first time you look at the film to the time you recorded the score? I'm spotting. Who would you spot this picture?

Okay. I had an agreement with the producers, because it made sense, that instead of them sitting in a projection room for an hour and a half while we broke a picture down, which means we had to stop and go projection machine, and I would sit there with my cutter, Kenny Johnson, and I'd say, let's start here, and we'd run it. We ought to be out by now. Let's go back up and see where a good place to get out is, and we'd start to framework the music. But generally, in later-day television, you had the producer sitting there all the time. And I started it actually on The Griffith Show, which was a single-camera show and had an opportunity for some music. And I said to Aaron, look, let me break the show down with Kenny. And then we'll come to your office. I'll tell you what I think should be covered. You tell me what you think is missing. And it'll take us 15 minutes and you won't waste a day in the projection room going back and forth over music. And that worked. It worked very well for them. It worked very well for me. So I would sit in the projection room with Kenny and we would break the picture down. We'd go through the picture. We'd stop. If it was a 2-hour, I'd generally run it straight through. Find out what the picture's about, then start over reel by reel and do stop-and-go until we decided where the music was going to go and where it was going to go out. And then Kenny would make a cue sheet telling me in increments of— finally wound up with tenths of seconds— what was happening on the screen. And a good, a good cutter can select those things which are really pertinent because All music and all timing written in text looks equally important, and they're not. And you would get— when I worked at other places, the cutter would say, at 2 minutes and 5.3 tenths seconds, the dog whirls and jumps over the fence. Wait a minute. When did he start to whirl? When did he jump? And when did he land? You can't do that in 2 tenths of a second.

And And you as a composer need to know.

That's right. I need to know if I decide I want to do something with that. I need to know when it stops and starts. By the same token, once I said that, now I got every frame of picture broken down in dialogue, which is meaningless. Because as you select the things you're going to do, the cutter that you work with— and I worked with Kenny for practically my entire career— he knew what you were looking for. And there were times when I'd call him, working at home at night, and say, Kenny, that doesn't feel right to me to go in. See if there isn't a cut about a second or 2 seconds earlier that we can lean in on. And he'd call me back and give me a change. He'd find something that— or we would get out at a different place and so forth. And we always had to stay in communication with each other so we're on the same page. Once I had the cue sheets, I would sit and write as they came in. I would sit and write the music. And we always had what we call a Bible, which is all of the cues in the show, just with a little caption that tells you how they're going to be done. For example, the opening, free timing. That meant I was going to conduct it to the stopwatch, because I didn't want to thread up a projector. The second one would be click track, and I would pick the frame of the click track. It would remind me what it was. The next one would be a combination, start in clicks, go to free timing. So you had a complete picture in front of you of what the whole score was gonna be like. And maybe especially in a show the length of I Spy or Mod Squad, a 2-hour show or an hour show, you would have a piece of material that you wanted to expose in reel 6. And you'd think, well, let's see, I've got an opportunity up here. I'm looking at the bible and I see I'm gonna do a music entrance here. Maybe I can plant it there, and somewhere in reel 2, I can develop it a little more. 5, I can reiterate it, and in 6, I can pay it off. So the formation of how you broke a picture down also became a form which gave it some substance. It wasn't just extraneous music per se for every time there was a musical event. We wrote scores. You listen to some of the— listen to some of the I Spy's, and you'll find that there is score. They have— they They have a thematic content, they have a development content, they have a payoff content. They're done just as if they were a feature. They may be miniaturized, because we had 45 and a half minutes, and a feature has an hour and 45 minutes. But the intent and the philosophy of it was, write a score, give it some character. And as you were saying at lunch, that one week we were in Japan, the next week we were in Spain, and the content of the show changed with the terrain. And you had an opportunity to do that and to develop it. And it all starts in the projection room with the way you lay it out. And then once the music was written, the copyist would pick it up. I had somebody in the booth all the time, Carl Brandt, who worked with me, and we would record it to picture, and then one of us would cover dubbing and make sure that it went on the air, because it only counts on the air. That basically was the process.

Okay, let's take a break there.