Earle Hagen - Archive Interview Part 6 of 10
In this archival interview, Laura Hagen explains the technical and practical aspects of scoring television in the 1950s‑60s. She defines click tracks versus free timing, describing how a metronome‑like film strip keeps music locked to picture down to fractions of a second, and how conductors and orchestras use the click in one ear while hearing dialogue in the other. She details the demanding production schedule: two‑week turnaround for a half‑hour show, three‑hour minimum union sessions, and the need to write and record up to three minutes of music per day. The conversation covers adapting music for the limited bandwidth of home TV speakers—doubling low‑end parts, adding synthesizers, and monitoring mixes on actual television sets. Collaboration with sound‑effects editors and show creators is highlighted, especially in shaping cues for I Spy. The origin of the Dick Van Dyke Show theme is recounted, noting its big‑band sound and the informal demo process. Differences in scoring approaches for The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Danny Thomas Show are contrasted, including the use of character themes and underscoring. Hagen describes how she managed multiple series by hiring assistants such as Carl Brandt, jazz trombonist J.J. Johnson, and composer Hugo Friedhofer, reviewing their work before recording. The interview delves into the ambitious global production of I Spy, a 52‑day scouting trip across Japan, Hong Kong, India, Greece, and more, where Hagen collected ethnic musical ideas and created westernized thematic material for each locale, while navigating customs, equipment logistics, and unpredictable political events. Throughout, she emphasizes the balance between artistic decisions and union/production constraints, offering a vivid portrait of television music production in the early TV era.
Chapters
Before we go any farther, could we define the terms click track and free timing?
Okay. Film is immovable. It goes through a projector at the rate of 24 frames a second. If you are trying to match music to the film for reasons of a dramatic cut, a close-up, A piece of action and so forth, your leeway for being in sync with the picture is 8 hundredths of a second. That's 2 frames going through a projector at 24 frames a second. A click track is a piece of film that runs at the same speed that the projector does, and if you punched a hole every 24 frames, it would pop as it goes over the head and would be like a metronome that's in dead sync with the picture. So you would have a pop every second. Now you can break that down into frames, 16 frames a foot. You can break the frame into 8 parts in between the sprocket holes, and you begin to get into very small increments of time. So then any good composer could take a picture and tie the reels together and roll it out on the ground, and it would be probably over a mile, mile and a half long. And he ought to be able to say, on frame 106,000, I'm going to do something that'll knock you on your back, and I'm going to do it on that frame, and I'm not going to do it a frame early, and I'm not going to do it a frame late. And that's a technique that is done by, as I say, if you punch a piece of film, you develop a click track. You hear the click, and it runs in sync with the picture track. And when you start dividing that into small increments, you can predetermined by mathematics, by charts, and today by computers, that you can be exactly at the place that you want to be and at precisely the time you want to be there.
And as a tool for a conductor?
The conductor generally hears in one ear, he hears the click track, and so does the whole orchestra. And in the other ear, the conductor hears the dialogue or the music. He can hear the mix coming off the record head. And the orchestra just hears the click track, and they hear themselves play.
How often would you use a click track? Very often.
Very often. It depended upon the show. Griffith was more or less free timing. Free timing is when you have a streamer or something that goes across the picture, and you start to conduct, and you've worked it out for timing, again, within thirds of seconds, whatever you could see visually on a stopwatch. And you have tremendous freedom with free timing that you don't have with a click track. A click track is immovable. But for example, if you had to play a dance music scene and keep it in sync, you couldn't play 2 bars without a click track. You'd be out of sync. There's that much frailty in the orchestra perception and how they respond. You could give a downbeat— I said 800ths of a second in sync— you give a downbeat for a French horn, and by the time you heard him, he'd be out of sync. So it's a necessity, it's a tool, it gives you the opportunity if you wish to lock things to picture in free time, gives you the opportunity to develop emotionally what you want to do. We use click tracks very often in television because we didn't have the time to make take 2 or take 3 or take 10.
And there's conductor frailties as well, you know, you miss a cue and you When you were scoring The Griffith Show, if you were writing, say, 10 to 12 minutes of music for a half-hour show, that's literally half of the show being scored. How much time did you have to write, and then how much time would you take to record it?
We had— on The Griffith Show, we had 2 weeks to do a show, which was a half-hour show. The way I would do it is, if I broke a show down today, I'd record it 2 weeks from A week from today, I would break another show down. I would record it 3 weeks from now. A week from today, I would break another show down and record it on the same day. So I recorded 2 shows the same day. Some shows would take some time to do. A good composer working in an idiom that he knows should be able to do 3 minutes of music a day. So 10-minute music for a 10-minute Andy Griffith Show was heavy. Some of them were very light. If I had 4 and a half minutes of music, I'd do it in a day and a half, and then I'd have the balance of the time to work on the second one or on whatever other shows that I was doing. As far as recording time goes, we generally did 2 shows in 3 hours, and that was a minimum session. You had—
the AFM rules were that you could not hire the musicians for less than 3 hours?
That's correct.
On a call?
On a film call, yeah. Okay.
When Griffith came on, were you doing any other shows at the time? Was Danny still continuing?
Danny was still continuing, yes.
Okay.
And I had left My Sister Eileen. We were involved in the, in the early days of The Danny Thomas Show, somewhere around the end of the '50s and the beginning of the '60s with other pilots, some of which sold and went 13 weeks and sometimes more, but didn't come back for another season. So there was always a turnover going on because the town was very active with making pilots in those days. Everybody wanted on the, on the air.
I'm curious to know about the sound of music when it comes through what has usually been a pretty small speaker. At the home end. In the course of your years as a composer, did you become particularly attuned to what it would sound like at the end?
Absolutely. Absolutely. We used to dub I Spy and play it back out of a television set, because traditionally— it's only recently that the speaker systems have gotten to at least be proficient. The medium of sound, which is multiplexing FM, is great, but the cheapest component in the television set was always the speaker, which isn't as good as the one you have in your car. And consequently, you had to learn right away that there were certain losses. For instance, that nice juicy bass note that you put in somewhere came out as a puff of dust, and you never heard it. And you also began to discover especially in television, the range of recording. If you recorded a background, you had a solo instrument playing. If you had that solo instrument too far out in front, by the time you dubbed it down under dialogue, he was playing by himself. You couldn't hear the rest of the orchestra because they would get lost in the audible medium, which is pretty much in the same range as the lower end of an orchestra. So you begin to learn the parameters of how do you win on the air. Because if you don't win on the air, you don't win. And consequently, we would double up on the low end because the speaker wouldn't reproduce it. We wouldn't have too much trouble with the high end.
What do you mean double up on the low end?
Well, if we had a bass line that was important, we'd lay a couple of extra people on that. And I'm overexaggerating, but the awareness was always paid to that area that wouldn't reproduce on the air. And later on, I used— I always used a couple of synthesizers in the orchestra, using about 3 keyboards, no matter what the combination was, to make up for those things or amplify those things that I couldn't afford. And again, once again, the idea is, how is the product going to sound on the air? When we'd go in and have a playback, I didn't want to hear it on studio monitors at 1,000 watts. I wanted to hear it on an 8-inch speaker, a 6-inch speaker, At normal level. Then I know whether I've got it on the track or not. If I haven't got it on the track, we're gonna do it over. Because there's no sense in kidding yourself. You know, you go into an engineer's booth and he wants to blow you away with how great the sound sounds. But my concern was, how does it sound on the air? Because that's my medium. So you learn that lesson in a hurry if you're paying attention. You listen to your shows and you say, wait a minute, where did all that nice stuff that I wrote— Go. Well, that's your fault because you didn't have it dubbed properly.
Were there other parts of the post-production process that you needed to become involved with because of your concern about the sound beyond that?
Yeah, we, we try to work very closely with the, with the sound effects editors. I had, I had great film editors, especially on I Spy, where with a guy like Art Side would say, look, we've got a chase coming up in the next episode. What tempo would you like me to cut it in? As a matter of fact, the main title of I Spy was done that way, and we'll discuss it later.
Of course.
And then they begin to ease your burden, but at the same time, they begin to fall into patterns that they wouldn't ordinarily think of. So we're doing a trade-off because The crews that we had respected each other and were all professionals.
At what point did you hear that there was going to be a show called The Dick Van Dyke Show? When did that happen, and were you in on it from the beginning?
I was in on it from the beginning. Carl Reiner, in the swan song days of The Sid Caesar Show, called Sheldon up and And he said, look, I wrote 14 scripts that I'd like to sell you for The Danny Thomas Show. And he said, they're not about a saloon comic, but it wouldn't be hard for me to adapt them. So Sheldon said, well, good, send me a couple, Carl. So Carl sent him a couple of scripts. Sheldon read it and he said, that's a show. That should be a show of its own. That shouldn't be for The Danny Thomas Show. We ought to make a pilot. And Carl said, I made the pilot. And it didn't sell. So Sheldon said, do you have a kinescope of it? And Carl said, I do. And he said, well, why don't you have it shipped out here and we'll take a look at it. I was on the set that day and Sheldon said to me, listen, I'm gonna run a kinescope with Carl. You wanna run it with me? And I said, what's it for? He said, it's for a show that I think could be a good show. So he said, I wanna know why the pilot didn't sell. So we went and we ran it with Carl. And we got through with it and Shohan said to him, Carl, it's a good show, but you're not Rob Petrie.
Carl was starring.
Carl starred in it as the Dick Van Dyke part. And he said, you're the wrong guy, and Barbara Britton's the wrong lady. She's a good actress, but that's not the chemistry. And he went down the line with all of the people and he said, I know the guy. I know the guy it should be. And having seen Dick, When he auditioned Aaron Rubin, he flew to New York and Dick was doing Bye Bye Birdie and he got a commitment for him to do the show. So Dick came out and we started planning the show and he made— he said to Carl that if it went, Carl would be the producer story consultant. And about the time they were ready to shoot the show, the William Morris Agency got cold feet And decided that that was a bad risk for Sheldon, who had had something like 10 or 12 shows that he had directed or produced, and they all sold. And he had a roll going, and they didn't want to damage the roll, and they didn't have any confidence in the show. And they tried to talk him out of doing it, and Danny tried to talk him out of doing it. And finally Sheldon said, look, I'm going to do it. You know, get in or get out. And they all decided they'd get in. So we shot the show, and Sheldon and Frankie and Lou and myself went down to Acapulco. We traveled with them together.
Who's Frankie?
Sheldon's wife.
Okay.
Frankie Leonard. We were in Acapulco. We got a call that the first show that sold that season was Dick Van Dyke. And then Carl and Estelle flew down to Mexico City, and we celebrated in Mexico City. That was the first show that was sold that season in 1961.
At what point did you start to conceptualize the theme?
Yeah, I really, you know, it's hard for me to put a—
But you scored that pilot with what we now recognize as the theme?
I made a demo of the theme. I had an idea for the theme, and I was doing some other session on something, and I wrote out, made an arrangement of the demo, and I said— and I never did audition. I mean, never. I never had anybody say to me, I want you, I want to hear your theme. I had an idea for it. I recorded it, I brought it in, I played it for Carl. I said, what do you think? That sound— he said, yeah, that sounds good to me. Then I played it for Sheldon. He said, fine, you know, let's do it. And that was it. And then they shot it 2 ways. You know, I had that funny little fill-up in it.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. First, it was a kind of a big band sound.
It was a big band sound.
Why did you go that route?
I haven't the slightest idea.
Instinct?
Yeah, I just— I don't. I don't think I've ever had 2 themes that were the same. I sort of try to adapt myself to what the character of the show was. And the band that I used for the theme was the band I used for scoring the shows. And I didn't marry myself to it, but it just seemed to me to be appropriate at that time. And what happened with the little flip in the orchestra was they Lenny, I think, shot the pilot photograph, Dick coming in, and he tripped over the chair. So they shot it again with him going around the chair, and we had 2 versions of it, and the cutter would put in whichever one he wanted. And a lot of people didn't know that it was— I think it was a mistake when he went around it, and they had him trip. So they had 2 versions of it.
That's great.
But still to this day, you don't know which one's gonna come up.
How did scoring Dick Van Dyke differ from scoring Andy Griffith? It was a different sound, right? And I'm sure that there was a different kind of music.
It was. Again, Dick Van Dyke was a 3-camera audience show, and it was more of a— it was more of an out-front comedy show than than Danny Thomas. Danny Thomas was more of a storyline show. Not that Dick Van Dyke wasn't, but they had a lot of comedians. I mean, you had Rose Marie, who was a good wisecracker. You had Maury Amsterdam. You had Richard Deacon. You had Carl. And they would go in with a normal script, which would probably be 27, 28 minutes long, and by the time they got through with the audience and spreading for the audience, they'd wind up with 35, 36 minutes and then edit down to the 26 and a half minutes, or whatever it was we had to deliver. And consequently, the music predominantly was bridges and cues. There were musical numbers in it. Those we prerecorded. We didn't do very much in the way of live music onstage, like we did with the Danny Thomas Show.
Was there some? Was there a band?
There was a band.
And you were leading it?
We did it the same way, yeah. We did it the same way. I'd go in and score 2 shows to stopwatch. The band would play them on and play in between and so forth because we had a 3-hour session. And when there was a production number, that we would prerecord.
Okay.
So it was closer in context to the Danny Thomas Show, which is also a 3-camera show. It was different in the framework of the show.
And because it was that kind of show, there was less music required than, say, Andy Griffith.
Much less.
And did you ever write character themes, or wasn't there room to do that?
There was not room.
Okay.
There really wasn't. And we didn't— we, we did practically no underscoring.
When there was talk about that, would you work with Carl on those issues, or would you work with Sheldon?
No, I'd work with Carl.
And what was Carl's attitude toward music in general?
Carl's— Carl was great. Carl's a good musician. He really is. He's a very knowledgeable guy and very educated in music. And it never really got into that much because there wasn't generally— there was, there were very few opportunities to underscore. When there were, we took advantage of them.
Again though, would you spot— would you and Kenny spot the show as you did The Andy Griffith Show by yourselves, not with Carl or anyone else? You just compare later?
No.
Compare notes or whatever?
Just compare later. Yeah.
Okay.
Most of the time we didn't even do that on that show. It was, for want of a better expression, it was kind of a formula that we were going through, and they were happy with the formula. And once again, nobody micromanaged anybody. They did their job, we did ours.
Did you get to know both Dick and Mary Tyler Moore well?
I didn't know Mary too well. I got to know Dick pretty well. Dick and Margie lived out in Encino, not too far from where we lived, and a lot of the nights that we shot the show, Margie would come over and And kibitz with Lou, and then Dick would come back to the house, and we'd have a drink or two and go home. He was a rather shy person, not given to socializing very much, at least not with us.
Was there any working at all with the directors on those shows? Did you work with Jerry Paris closely? I worked with Jerry.
I worked pretty much with everybody who was on there, but once again, The only time you really got involved would be when there was a specific incident that was going to be featured on screen.
Okay.
I saw him tap you. Can you edit that out?
Yes, we're going to. If it gets to be around 1962, '63, '64, you must be doing 2 or 3 shows at the same time. Am I right?
Yeah, we had spun off— now without a database of shows in front of me, I can't tell you the exact dates, but in that period of time, we had spun off the Gower Pyle Show and—
That's about '64.
Yeah. And Marlo Thomas Show, That Girl. Gower Pyle was fun. We had a lot of music on that, strangely enough.
I want to ask you about that. I can remember the theme was a march.
Yeah.
There was a lot of music in Gomer Pyle?
More so than you'd expect in a comedy show.
Why do you think that was?
Well, we had a lot of opportunity to play, you know, because there was a lot of on-field stuff that went on. There were, there were quite a few episodes that took place in the rec hall with music going in the background and so forth. That was a single-camera show, and the pilot was hysterical. We went down to see the shooting of the pilot. It was really funny because they had to give Jim the Marine haircut, and that took about an hour and a half to set up because Aaron brought his own barber down, and they finally got a Marine barber who zipped him in about 8 seconds. It was really funny. I thought Jay was going to faint.
Each one of these shows, it seems to me, went on several seasons. Did you stick with each individual— with each of these shows as the sole composer, or were you busy enough at some point that you had to bring in other people?
I had 2 people who were under contract to me, Carl Brandt and J.J. Johnson.
And when did they begin to work for you?
They began to work when we doubled up with— when I— I think by the time I had 3 shows, I put Carl on. When I had 5 shows, I put J.J. on, and then I used other people too. That was pretty hectic, 5 series a week. It was a lot of product. And that's why I had Hugo Friedhoffer do some cues for me, which eventually wound up in a relationship on I Spy. And I used other composers around town on an as-needed basis. And there was just too much burden for any one person to do it. But nothing went on the stage that didn't go across my desk.
So, even if you were hiring other composers to work on shows, you would look over their work before it went to the recording stage?
Yes.
Okay.
In the case of Hugo, I didn't have to do that, but a lot of times, we had to finish the score, because Hugo would get hung up on something, and He wasn't slow.
No.
He was just a slow starter.
We'll get to that on I Spy in just a minute, but let me ask you about Carl Brandt. Tell me a little bit about Carl, how you two met, and why you chose to hire him.
Somebody recommended Carl to me as having had a lot of cartoon experience, and I gave him a couple of cues to do on the show, and he was good. He was very professional. He knew the mechanics. He knew Especially coming out of the cartoon industry, you know the mechanics. And he could write pretty much in any genre, and I just thought that would be a valuable guy to have. He was with me for a long time.
And when you mentioned J.J. Johnson, that's the famous jazz trombonist.
Still is, yeah.
How did you encounter him, and why did you hire him?
He was a pupil in one of the classes that I had in my home in He wanted to study film scoring, and he brought me some things that he had written and recorded, and I thought they were great. So I gave him some cues to do, and he did a good job, and I thought, if I'm gonna have somebody, I might as well have somebody like him, because he liked to work, and working long hours and staying up nights like we all did didn't bother him very much. And a lot of times he'd play in the band besides, because he's a super player, still is.
Well, let's talk about I Spy, which I think is a lot of people's favorites of a lot of the things that you've done. Do you recall when Sheldon first mentioned that he might do a spy show to you? What the circumstances were about?
Yeah, the, the circumstances— what started it was he said, I'm gonna send you a letter. I said, why? We talk every day. He said, I want to send you a letter. So he sent me a letter which said, Dear Mr. Hagen, Mrs. Leonard and I are planning a scouting trip around the world, and as the musical director of the show to be called I Spy, we would like to have you and Mrs. Hagen accompany us if you have the time. We, we just happened to have the time.
Would this have been in 1965?
1963.
'63.
Yeah, and we made a trip around the world. I don't think you could duplicate that trip today because wherever we went, we were met by a car, a driver, and an interpreter who stayed with us for the length of time in the country. We started in Japan and we stayed, I think, 3 days in Tokyo. That was all. And we spent 2 weeks in Japan, but we went through the countryside down to the southern island of Beppu. We came back in through Tokyo and went up to Nikko. We really covered the territory, and we eventually wound up shooting 11 shows in Japan. From there we went to Hong Kong, and we spent 10 days in Hong Kong. The pilot was shot in Hong Kong, and I think we did another 10 or 11 shows between Hong Kong and one, I think, in Taiwan. We went from there to Bangkok, to India, To all over India, to Israel, Greece. We made the Aegean trip. We were 52 days on this trip. First-class airfare, first-class transportation, and car driver, interpreter. And then we went to Rome, Paris, New York, and home.
How much of this was pure pleasure, and how much of this was really musical research on your part?
It was kind of both. Wherever I went, I started picking up ethnic music.
Picking up how? Did you record it?
Record? No, no. I recorded it later when I went out with the company, but pre-preparation, I bought everything I could in the native country and had some pretty funny adventures doing that. When the company traveled, too, I had— Dave Friedkin was— Mort Fine and Dave Friedkin were the writer producers on the show, the line writer producers. And Dave Freakin was a graduate of Juilliard. He was a violinist and he was a musician, a good one. And we had, we had no problem in meeting of the minds, you know. And I said, Dave, wherever you go, or if you're not there, I want the company to pick me up and we'll go to Athens Records. I don't know whether I'm going to use them or not, but I'm sure going to use the influence. And that probably would be considered passé today, but I Spy was the first adventure action show that was on television that actually traveled. It was the first show that used a radio mic, and it wasn't very well perfected yet because we were picking up rock and roll stations and radar sweep and boats going through the harbor and everything. It was a very innovative show in every respect, and the logistics of it were horrendous because We forgot— one summer I went with the company to— I met the company in Marrakesh, and we shot in Marrakesh, and then we came back to Casablanca, and then we all got on a plane and we were gonna fly to Greece. And we found out we couldn't land there because the government— there had been a military coup. So we wound up in Portugal, in Estoril. And 3 days later, through a liaison agent, We were the first plane to land in Greece and we were taken into custody. And we were put up in a hotel overnight. We had to get off the mainland the next day. We just scattered everybody. We were going to shoot in Rhodes. And some guys had suitcases with underwear and some guys had shirts and no underwear and everything got split up and it finally came together on Rhodes. The logistics, the timeframe, of that show were just absolute unexplored territory because even films shot in foreign countries had preparation. This way we were crossing borders where you couldn't get the equipment across unless you paid somebody off and you start running into the local customs. It was, it was an exciting venture from the day go. How—
there's a lot to ask here. I'm gonna begin, I think, by asking you With that many locations and that kind of— that kind of seems like music preparation in a way, of you trying to do research, that kind of thing. Didn't you need more time and more help even to get these shows done and on the air? I mean, did you ever know when you were going to see a show if the film was coming in from Hong Kong or Bombay or wherever?
Well, once again, we had, we had a company that had some discipline to it. We knew they were only going to deliver 3 shows a month. That was maximum. And we were prepared to finish 3 shows a month. As far as the preparation goes, when they went down to a location, for example, Japan, we knew they were going to shoot 11 shows and we had the scripts. The scripts were all done beforehand. If there was pre-preparation, I had an opportunity to do it before the company left. And if there wasn't pre-preparation and there was post-preparation, that was a job we just had to meet. We didn't have the opportunity to do anything else. And what I did was I took a country like Japan, and I wrote a piece of thematic material to open the show with that had that flavor. It was westernized. Because that's where our audience was. Typical Japanese music would not satisfy a Western ear, I don't think. So it was Westernized, or at least I took the liberty of doing that. And that piece of thematic material ran through those 11 Japanese shows. And when we went to another area, Rome, I did the same thing. Wherever we were locked into a country, we did 10 shows a year in Mexico. There was a piece of material that opened up for Mexico that we used on a week-to-week basis, although we recorded it over again depending upon what combination we had. But we tried to keep, or I tried to keep, a homogeneity going, and when Hugo came aboard to alternate shows with me, Friedhofer, we cross-used our material.
Okay, let me stop you there. We've got to change tapes.
