Earle Hagen - Archive Interview Part 7 of 10 - OOS linked

You were saying that you would take— you would write a specific piece of thematic material for each general location, and that could carry through on a number of different shows.

Right. We scored each individual show, but probably the hardest thing to do is to come up with material. Let me put it to you this way. If I were a composer and a producer said to me, I want you to do a show for me. It's an hour show, adventure show, and we will average somewhere around 20 minutes of music an episode, and we're going to do 30 shows for the year. That's 60— 600 minutes, 10 hours. We're going to be on the air for 5 years, so I want you to write me 50 hours of music. You're talking about a greater output than Brahms, Beethoven, and Bach put together. And with that in front of you, you wouldn't be able to start. Now, nobody in his right mind is going to say that he writes totally original music for every show, and anybody who does that is a fool, because you live off of material. And if you can develop generic material that you can modify and you can change, and you can make accommodate the scenes, you're that much further ahead because you can't write 50 hours of original music. And besides that, you would be leaving your audience. It's very much like the case of The Andy Griffith Show. It's an identity. It's an identification that they can hang on to. So if I had a piece of generic material that I knew was going to last me for 11 shows, that isn't all we used, but we did use that. And we were able to adapt it so that it carried a framework from show to show.

How did you come up with the theme for I Spy, and how complex was that main title to score?

It was— that main title was innovative inasmuch as it was the first main title that I know of, maybe even in film, that used Graphic art, live action, and superimposition, because if you remember the shape of the title, it started with graphic art, almost like a cartoon figure of— it was cult. And then he runs into the I in I Spy, or he runs into the P or something. It disappears into the letters. I had it right the first time. And that rolled into him standing there with the bomb and throwing the bomb, and that rolled into him looking down at an inner frame of the current things that were happening in the show you were going to watch, which incidentally was later changed because they were tipping the plot for people who were really watching it. That was done by an animation company called Format Films, as I remember it, in the The designer of the graphic art and who designed the main title was a fellow by the name of Herb Klin. His name was Klin. And I got a call from him and he said, Earl, he said, give me a tempo that I can cut this to. And I said, give me an hour, because I hadn't thought about any of them. And I sat down and tried to figure out what kind of pattern and tempo I would like to have that in. And in graphic art, you can't cut into the middle of frames. It had to be a 9-frame, a 10-frame, an 11-frame, so they could cut frames in sequence. And I called him back and I said, Herb, I need a 10-frame. That'll do for me.

That was the tempo?

That was the tempo that he was going to mount all of the graphic arts to and all of the live action and everything else. He did it in 10-frame increments.

Then that locked you into that specific—

That locked me into the tempo. But that made it real easy because in the first part of the theme, I was able to stall around until He ran into the eye and you heard the gunshots and that swept into the beginning of the theme and I had it timed out to catch the bomb and all of that. Having a prefixed tempo, I worked on that theme before they ever shot it. So at least I had some idea of where I was going. I locked myself into it, but by the same token, it wound up being a great plus for me because I didn't have to worry about matching something to picture. And he cut it in the exact tempo so that I didn't have 10 frames and then the next one 8 and the next one 7.5 or something. It couldn't be a half, but 7 frames. It wasn't episodic. It was done to a beat.

When you came up with that theme, had you already seen any footage that may have been shot? Was there a pilot already?

I think there was. I honestly don't remember it because we shot the pilot in Hong Kong. And it was several months before we went into production, I think, a couple of months anyways before we went into actual production of the finished film. And the pilot was not the first episode on the air. The first episode on the air was the show that was shot in Hong Kong.

I'm just wondering if you were inspired by any of the visuals when you came up with the theme.

No, the visuals I don't think were cut in.

Okay.

As a matter of fact, there were no geographic visuals. There were signposts of Spain, Italy, and so forth that were moving by as this figure who was playing tennis suddenly turned around and came up with a gun in his hand. So there was no pictorial visual involved in that title. It was animation. And then when it came alive, it was close-up of the cult. Excuse me. And then the action-adventure that went down below were very small frames.

Musically speaking though, there is a kind of undercurrent of action-adventure in that theme.

Sure. That was, again, you know, you say, Why am I writing this? I can't use that on The Andy Griffith Show, and I can't use the Andy Griffith theme on I Spy, so I gotta write something that's for I Spy. By that time—

Excuse me.

I had read probably 11 scripts or so, certainly the ones that were involved in the Far East or in Japan and Hong Kong, and I knew pretty much What the action was. And, you know, there was unquestionably a travelogue and an adventure series with— it was an anthology with running characters from show to show.

What, if anything, do you know about any problems the network might have had with casting a black person in that series?

Well, I was in the office with Bob Kulp and Sheldon when the network called. And said that they were not going to okay Bill Cosby. They didn't want to have a black actor because they were afraid of losing the South.

Losing the South in terms of station clearances?

I guess in terms of people not wanting to view a black actor who was living in the same room with a white actor, and is he going to drink, wash his face in the same basin, you know, etc. all of the bigotry problems, and they were concerned about audience factor. And Sheldon just said, then we don't do the show. And he hung up and he turned around to Bob and he said, Bob, I don't think we're gonna do the show. And a couple of minutes later, the phone rang and it was the network and they said, let's go ahead with Cosby. And we did the show.

That's great.

And Cosby was not an actor and became a pretty good actor, and the show really didn't happen. The relationship between the two of them didn't happen until the 12th show, 11 or 12. It was a show where Kelp falls for a woman in Tokyo. It was a beautiful show, incidentally. And Cosby has her tagged as being an agent. He's going on a date with her and Cosby won't let him by, and they had a fight where they just beat each other to pieces, and Kulp finally prevailed and he started out the door and couldn't go because he knew Cosby cared about him, which turned the story around, and then they set up a decoy for him. But that relationship really happened in that show. From that time on, it was solid.

That's fascinating.

Up until that point, Cosby was kind of a bit actor, became a very good actor.

I'm also curious about the amount of music in I Spy. My guess is that you may have been dealing a lot of times with film which had so-so sound, or not very good sound, or no sound, and maybe music also had to cover some sins of omission. Was there a lot of music in I Spy?

I Spy was over a 20-minute average in a 47-minute show. We had shows that were not heavy, would be 12, 14 minutes of music, and we had one that was 37. I mean, that's like wall-to-wall.

At the beginning, did you try to do them all, or did you always know you would need another composer?

I tried to. I did the pilot, and I did the first The first 2 that came in, and right then I— first of all, I had other shows going on, and I knew that unless I did something which I'm not comfortable with doing, or maybe incapable of doing, which is to not pay attention to the product, I had to get somebody to help me.

How did you make the choice?

Well, Hugo was somebody that I had worked with and orchestrated for at 20th Century Is this Hugo Friedhoffer? Hugo Friedhoffer. As a matter of fact, the first time I met him I had just come out of the service and I was working at Columbia Pictures on a Rita Hayworth picture called Cover Girl. I was doing some arrangements. And the music department used to have a table at a restaurant, which is now KTLA or KLPC or one of those stations, a restaurant called Billingsley's. And we'd go over and have lunch, and I had never met Hugo before, so it'd be George Doening and Marlon Skiles and Hugo and a couple of cutters and myself, and the conversation would always come up with somebody saying something like, Hugo, did you ever hear of a guy by the name of Throckmorton Heppelwhite? And Hugo would say, yeah, Throckmorton Heppelwhite was an opera composer in 1593, and he wrote 3 operas that They all had bad reviews, and he never was a success. Going back, I'd say to Doening, what's the story with this guy? Is this a joke? And he'd say, no. He said, we go home at night, we look in the Groves Dictionary, all 9 volumes of it or whatever, and we try to figure out something that he doesn't know, and we haven't gotten it yet. He had total recall of everything he'd ever heard, said, or read since he was 2. Literally. If you said to him, oh, what a wonderful sound that is in the opening, Morty becomes a lector, whatever, he'd take a piece of paper and he'd start with the flute part and he'd write the score, which was a hang-up because when he put 2 notes together, he knew where they came from. So when we were talking before and I said we'd have to pick up the pieces for Hugo, it wasn't that he was a slow starter, a slow writer. He could write. He just couldn't get himself to find something that wasn't too reminiscent of something that he remembered from before, which is a hangup. He was a wonderful writer.

Yet you hired him anyway, despite this.

Yeah, because first of all, he was available, and secondly, he had the quality, more so than I. He was really what I considered a major league composer.

He had won an Academy Award for The Best Years of Our Lives.

He won Best Years of Our Lives, yeah.

Did Hugo alternate shows with you on that show?

We alternated shows, yeah. We just did— I did one, he did the next. I conducted them. I broke them down with Hugo. And we did that for 3 years.

Did you orchestrate your own material?

Most of the times we never even got to orchestrate. We would lay it out on a 6-line sketch or an 8-line sketch, whatever we needed, and make a layout and hand it to the copyist. On shows like the Boris Karloff episode of I Spy, mainly on the planes, that was a huge score, and we had a big orchestra. That I had Carl orchestrate behind me.

But most of the time, you—

We'd orchestrate our own. You know, there wasn't time— this time, there wasn't time to spread it out on full paper. We didn't have that big An orchestra, anyways. Spy was generally framed around a big band.

How big?

8 brass, 5 woodwinds, 2 percussion, keyboard. Sometimes I'd have a keyboard synthesizer. Very rarely would I have a string section, and if I did, I used a big one. I was a packager. It was my money. If I wanted to spend it, I spent it.

So then most of the time it was less than 20 players, you'd say, on Icebound?

Yeah, I think 18 was our basic generic orchestra. I went to 30 on some sessions. I did one show, a very stylized show, where I constructed an orchestra and I called my contractor, Wally Popp. And I said, I want 2 harps, 2 pianos, 10 percussion, 3 horns, and 3 basses. And there was this long silence, and he said, sure you do. That was the combination we used, the show called Home of the Judgment.

Why such an unusual combination?

Because it was an unusual show, very, very stylized, probably as stylized as anything we ever Everything about it, it's hard to describe, but it was shot differently. The characters were stylized. The villains were stylized. It was an extreme show, and we gave it an extreme score.

Talking about sort of exotic sounds for a second, I'm curious to know how any on-location source recordings ethnic music recordings you may have done fit into what you were doing on I Spy with a conventional scoring system back home?

I used ethnic music, especially with Mexican music, where I could bring in a group and record. I used it as background filler. Sometimes we saw musicians playing in marketplaces. I would use Background music, the stuff that we recorded. We had one episode in the Floating Gardens of Chapultepec where they shot Kulp moving through these boats, and he wound up with a marimba orchestra playing marimba, and Cosby was chasing him because he had been infected with anthrax and didn't know it, and he had to get him before he died. They didn't do that with sound. And I had 7 visual orchestras going in and out of the sequence as well as long shots, and we built every one of those tracks by themselves to match each individual orchestra. It was ethnic. I mean, we used, you know, I had researched enough of it to do it in the style of, and then we put all those, we had to prerecord, predub all of those 7 tracks and change the perspective as they came in and out, and it worked like gangbusters. That was a couple of days' effort sitting in a movieola trying to figure out where we were headed. So wherever we could use ethnic music to keep that from happening, we would. In some of the shows, one of them in particular for which I won the Emmy, we were on the island of Rhodes. after being taken into custody in Greece. And we shot a little dance company. We had some Crete orchestra, as I remember, and some dancers. And somebody, one of the orchestra told me that he had recorded ethnic music for a broadcast on the local Rhodes radio station. We went to them and I bought the reel, and it It was real live people, shoe cobblers, dressmakers, or whatever, playing the music. It was authentic. And I sat in the— we had a boat that slept 60 that was used in the show, and that was our hotel in the museum. I sat and tried to catalog that music so that at some later point, if I needed it, I could use it. And I ran across a clarinet that Cadenza. Cadenza. All it was was a guy played a G minor chord. I think it was an accordion, a cymbalum, and a bass. And they played G minor and the clarinet player started on the bottom of the instrument and played a cadenza until he ran out of breath. And they played a G diminished, G minor, and he'd go up a notch. It lasted about 5 and a half minutes. And it was exciting. It was wonderful. And I just marked on a double track. Because I had done that before on earlier episodes. And I knew someplace, sometime, I was going to get a chance to use that. And it came about in a Greek show called Lyle with Janet McLaughlin. It was a love story between Bill and Janet McLaughlin. And there was a scene where an assassin comes in and searches their room because they're suspicious that they're agents. And it was very stylized. It was done with—

Lights.

With Arriflex handheld cameras, and this guy did everything with a knife, opened the drawers, rifled through the clothes, and so forth. A cop comes in on him. He doesn't see him, but he sees everything is in disarray, and the guy jumps him, and there's a close-on handheld camera fight. Very stylized, very dark. And I went to David Friedkin, and I said, David, I'd like— I got an idea for that sequence. And he said, what? He said, okay, what is it? I said, I'm not sure yet, but I know it's going to involve taking out the sound effects. So he said, okay.

That was a pretty big decision.

That was a major decision.

No sound effects.

Then Sheldon said to me later on in the day, he said, David said that you're going to score that fight sequence in Lyle without sound effects. Are you going to catch the fight? And I said, I don't think so. He said, what are you going to do? I said, when I finish thinking about it, I'll let you know. I took that clarinet cadenza, we brought it down on the stage, Kenny and I, checked the pitch, it was about a quarter tone flat. We put it on a variable speed dummy and brought it up to speed. I had 5 copies made of it. And we sat down on the movieola and I cut each cadenza to fit that particular piece of action and we gapped it out. We just cut the track, gapped it out so that the next one carried on and the next one And so forth. And the sequence only lasted about 2 and a half minutes, whereas the condenser ran about 5. But this guy covered the range of the instrument, so at one point he was just screaming. And I cut that to fit that sequence, and then I made a quarter-inch tape of it for myself, timed it, set down a click track, and provided an orchestral accompaniment for it. When we recorded it, first of all, I would never have had the nerve to You don't stay on the G pedal on the bass for 2 and a half minutes. You know, you don't do that. While we were recording, I could see the guys in the orchestra figuring, you know, that I was ready for the funny farm because nothing really much was happening. And when they had a bar rest, they'd look at the screen and they'd see a fight going on. When we played it back with the clarinet cadenza, it blew everybody away. And I could see Ronnie Lang saying to Ted Nash, did you do that? He said, no, I thought you did. Who did that? Finally, they said, who did that? I said, it's some guy in Rhodes, a guy who was a shoe cobbler playing a little painted sea clarinet. It's a wonderfully effective scene, and along with the score that— and a song that I had written for it, pre-wrote because I had the script, and Gene Leach did the lyric called Voice in the Wind, which was the tag of the show, that got me an Academy. And I think that particular film clip had a lot to do with it.

Yeah.

Although I think it was a good score. There was 26, 27 minutes of music.

How often would you use actual recordings of ethnic music in the show? Did it happen very often, or did you mostly write ethnic music designed to—

I used ethnic music, especially in the Greek shows. I actually went into Athens and recorded George Anvitis, who was a He was a bouzouki artist, had an orchestra. He wrote 4 songs for me that we used in 2 on-screen appearances, one on the island of Santorini where they had a band in the shot, and George and his group played it. And then in another episode of the Greek episode, we had him on camera too. And then I had the ability to use that music, and I didn't use it as scoring, I used it You'd walk through the Acropolis and you would hear this, or you'd have scoring that would trail into it as they go into a marketplace or a restaurant, and it became kind of local Muzak.

When you wrote flavorful, exotic kinds of sounds, did you have to find unusual instruments in Hollywood where you were scoring, and was that difficult?

Not often, John. Finding a bouzouki player in Hollywood who could Right. And I had Alan Roos put a paper clip on his guitar or banjo and played it for some of the Japanese things, it sounded like a samurai. We faked some of it. Sometimes if we could find a player, we would hire them. And most of the times I kept the flavor of the country but still westernized it.

How often did you actually travel with the company? Did you— I mean, you had so many shows to do, you couldn't possibly have traveled much.

When the company was moving in the summertime, or in what essentially was the off-season, because they had to start a different cycle. Don't forget that we would be off-season. After we did the pilot, we would start, and if we had 6 or 7 shows bottled up in the can by the time By the time the season started, that was a lot. With I Spy, we had to have at least 13 bottled up. So now they had to work backwards. So they were traveling, most of the other shows were off. If the location was a tough location, I didn't go. I went with them to Africa and I went to Greece. I was gone 17 days on that trip and came back and went to work. We did 10 shows in Mexico and we would always find 2 weeks when Lou and I would go down, fly down to Acapulco. It was tough duty. Somebody had to do it. And we would stay there for a couple of weeks and then come back. And you'd always find me chasing the mariachis around with a tequila in one hand or a beer and trying to figure out what the hell they were doing because nothing's on paper.

Would you actually record some of these yourself?

I did. I carried a Ure recording. battery recorder with me. We had one instance in Marrakesh. There is a marketplace, the floor of which is about 5 times the size of the Colosseum, and the stores are underground warrens. And the day I got to— the night I got to Marrakesh, Sheldon said, Nick, tomorrow, he said, I want to show you a place you won't believe. Well, we went over there, and if you bought a bottle of beer, you could sit on the roof of this taverna and look out over this field and there were snake charmers and storytellers and crowds and you heard local Berbers, cymbal bands and all this exotic stuff. And I said to him, that's great, when are we going to shoot it? He said, we shot it yesterday. How? MOS, without sound. I said, you got any money in your pocket? He said, why? I said, we're going down. And I had the Ure battery recorder with me. And I sat in the middle of all of those groups and recorded everything they knew, all over that whole place. And then I walked the warrens of stores with the battery recorder running. We matched everything that I recorded to picture because there was no way you could duplicate it. You had a band which consisted of 12 guys playing clapper cymbals and bass drums and stuff. I mean, you couldn't afford to do it. But everything that I recorded worked, and I recorded ambient sounds. The sound of Marrakesh, for example, was birds and high-pitched drums. And we were doing a show with Maurice Evans, and they needed some fill, and there wasn't enough clear dialogue for them to make a loop of fill. And I said to Jimmy Stewart, I said, Jimmy, I sent all that stuff back. It's in the library.

Oh, really?

And we had it and we used it. Wherever there was unusual sound, I recorded it.

Jimmy Stewart again was—

Was the mixer, the dialogue mixer.

Okay.

And particularly involved with filling background.

Do you have a favorite episode of I Spy, in terms of a favorite score, in addition to Laia, your Emmy winner?

Yeah, I think— well, there were several of them. Mainly on the Plains, which was the show that they did with Boris Karloff, which was shot on the La Mancha Plains. It was freezing cold and he was wonderful.

Why was that a favorite of yours?

Well, first of all, the recording, a lot of the recording, the dialogue recording between he and Karloff in the beginning, Carlton Karloff, was poor quality recording and we used the music to cover And there were long, long sequences, which gave me an opportunity to introduce material and develop a couple of themes that I used throughout the show. And there was a tremendous amount of music in that one, because it was a storyline of a professor of thermonuclear whatevers who was a nut on Don Juan Quixote. Is that Don Quixote? And he had books of Don Quixote in every language. And he began— they were taking him from, I forgot what city, to Madrid, and he began to relive Don Quixote. He started tilting windmills and letting prisoners go. And it was a comedy, but it was a fun show to do. It was loaded with music, and I think it was a good score.

Did the opportunity present itself to write character themes for Culp and Cosby, and if you did not, why not?

I wrote a theme called Hi-Yo Scotty, which started out as being a theme for Cosby, who was more of a comic character, comedy character I should say, when it started, and then eventually I used it for the two of them. It became a particular favorite of mine for tags because the tags were mostly comedic. And we developed it into material for the show. Generally, I didn't do that because there were only 2 characters in the show that were consistent from show to show. It wasn't like The Andy Griffith Show, for example, where you knew Ronnie Howard was going to be there, Frances was going to be there, Andy was going to be there, Don Knotts was going to be there. And they were gonna be there practically every show. I mean, not that other people didn't move in and out of the show and carry the weight, but the set characters were there week to week. That wasn't the case with Spy. Spy was Kulp and Cosgrove, period.

And always different locations.

Always.

Always different stories.

Pretty much always different locations and different storylines, which brought in different leading characters. And that show, I was more inclined, both Hugo and I were inclined to go off the content of the show rather than the character. Okay.

We should take a break here and change tapes.