Earle Hagen - Archive Interview Part 8 of 10 - OOS linked
In this archival interview, composer Earle Hagen discusses his approach to television scoring in the 1960s and early 1970s. He explains why he avoided contemporary pop songs in shows like I Spy, preferring original cues and noting that the later trend of using pop tracks was driven by the desire to fill soundtrack albums rather than artistic necessity. Hagen describes his role as a "packager," where he calculated a total music budget—including orchestra, copying, rentals, and fringe benefits—and delivered the entire package to producers, often absorbing any overruns himself to protect quality. He recounts how he managed orchestra size within fixed budgets, sometimes paying extra out‑of‑pocket to maintain artistic standards, and how he juggled multiple series simultaneously (I Spy, That Girl, The Mod Squad, among others). For That Girl he outlines the creation of the theme, the involvement of Walter Scharff, Harry Geller, and the later addition of lyrics by Sam Denoff. Regarding The Mod Squad, Hagen details the visual‑first composition of the main title, the use of mixed meters (4/4, 7/8, 6/8), the network’s push for a Simon‑and‑Garfunkel‑style rock sound, and his hiring of jazz arrangers Shorty Rogers and Billy May. He explains how he incorporated 12‑tone serial techniques to add dramatic tension, and shares experimental studio tricks such as reverse tracks, heavy reverberation, and extensive multi‑track layering to handle flashback sequences and dialogue‑sensitive scoring. Throughout, he emphasizes practical considerations—budget, union rules, dialogue masking—and artistic choices that balanced commercial pressures with musical integrity.
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When you were scoring I Spy, which ran from '65 to '68, were you asked to, or did you use any of the popular music of the time in any of those shows?
No.
You didn't feel it was appropriate?
I didn't feel it was appropriate, and it didn't become a standard for form of music scoring until later on. And I think the popularity of using pop music scores per se, background music and records and so forth, is to enable a lot of shows to be able to release an album of something because they don't have a good enough score to release an album of the score or a wide enough score perhaps, you know, if you're talking about Indiana Jones or You're talking about a score of some size, and surely you could do it without having to pay licenses for pop music. But without something to fill up the record, you don't have an album to release. And that's become now— it's become kind of the avant-garde way of scoring a picture. You very seldom will see a picture now where you don't have a trailer going of 12 to 14 acknowledgments and credits of whatever the records were. But as far as the dramatic medium goes, I think it's overdone.
You did 2 great albums of music from I Spy though.
I did.
Of your music.
Of my music. That music came verbatim out of the show. I didn't write, I didn't write music for the album. The music came out of the show, literally in some cases an entire cue.
One was for Warner Brothers and one was for Capitol. I think.
That's correct. Yeah, the first one was for Warner Brothers. Unfortunately, they caught a hit record with somebody at the time. Mine was an independent record which was granted to them by license, and they didn't do much in the way of exploitation. And the second one, Bobby Gentry's Ode to Billie Joe or whatever that was, caught fire, and again, What's hot is what they work on, and what's not, they don't. And, you know, you can keep claiming that you're a victim of circumstances, but maybe the truth of the matter is that the record-buying public didn't like the music or didn't think enough of it to buy an album.
One of the terms you used earlier I want to go into a little bit. You said that you were a packager. What does that mean as a composer in television? What, what were you as a packager?
The music costs, direct music costs included the orchestra, the copying, the cartage, the rentals, the fringe benefits, whatever attendant costs there were to music. I made a figure of the entire music package so that the producer knew that his music budget would run that many And I delivered the music for that figure. And sometimes I got killed and sometimes I didn't. And when I got killed, I learned from that and tried to make sure that the package was not only good for them but it was good for me.
So does that mean that you, your company, you had a business arrangement with Thomas Leonard Productions whereby they gave you an amount of money to provide the entire music package? For a show, and then whatever profit you could make, you could, or whatever loss you had to incur was yours.
Yeah, the budgets were always reasonable. We weren't about to get rich off of any one show.
Well, wasn't that an unusual practice for the time?
I think it was.
Why did you go that route?
I went that route because it avoided having to account to a Right. To accountants and to, you know, people in production and all the rest of that. And also, it was convenient for the production company, because they could sit down and manufacture a show budget and say, well, we know the music is going to cost us $4,400 for I Spy, or whatever the number was, or we know the music is going to be $1,700, and we don't have to worry about K-2s and withholding slips and fringe benefits and Social Security and the Motion Picture Health and Industry Fund or any of that. That's in the package. So, it was a clean business deal from their area and it was a good business deal from my area.
So, did you have a small company of people who handled these sort of administrative issues?
I had an accountant. That was it. I did the breakdown of the budget. Once we had an approval on the budget, it was a question of building the agency agency who paid us directly, and we didn't have to go through tons of paperwork to justify the budget. The budget generally was given to us by them. This is what we have to spend on music, and I would say, well then, this is what we can give you in return. We can't give you a 40-piece orchestra because we're only budgeted for 15, but we'll give you 15. And it worked that way, and again, that was a question of Trust. After doing a couple of shows, I think they came to depend upon me to give them a square price and give them great product for the price they paid.
When it came to a show like Mainly on the Plains, where you felt you needed a larger orchestra, did you then go back and say, we need more money this week?
Never. I paid for it.
Because you made the decision that dramatically, this is what the show needed.
That's correct. I had one instance of, well, the first season of I Spy, I manufactured a budget which I thought would be adequate and it wasn't. And by the third week, I knew I was going to get killed and I never said anything to Sheldon because at the same time, he was going through growing pains and he was getting killed financially because of logistics, statistics, and everything else that was going on. So I went through the season. At the end of the season, I called him up and I said, I want to have a meeting with you, and I had never had one before. And I went in the office and I laid down my books. I said, that's how I came out. I made less money on this show than union scale for conducting. And he said, you're running one of the great charitable music organizations in the business. Why didn't you tell me? I said, because it's not your mistake. It's my mistake. And he said, okay, what do we need to straighten it out? And I told him what I needed and he said, you've got it, that's the deal. And that was the end of that. That was the only time. Otherwise, from then on, even if I had to exceed the budget in order to deliver an end product like the orchestra and Mamey on the Plains, I did. That was my ego, that was my satisfaction. I was doing other shows. I wasn't starving. And I never wanted to cut quality because of cost. I just wouldn't do that. And I augmented the orchestra whenever I needed to. There wasn't any question about it.
And you clearly went to a lot of trouble, as in those manufacturing X number of tracks per show. I suspect a lot of composers might not have gone to the degree you did, especially when it was your money riding on this.
That really wasn't expensive in terms of recording. It was expensive in terms of time. Once I knew what the 7 different orchestras were going to do, none of them were over 3 or 4 pieces. So one had an accordion, another one had a marimba band. We took down what Colton was faking. But when you saw it on the screen, it looked real. And that was one of the few occasions where it wasn't real. And it was really part of the responsibility to make it look real. I mean, I don't know how you would have drifted through it because I was never very good at that, at faking something. Sitting down in the middle of that wild group of combinations in Marrakesh paid off in reality. When you saw that stuff on the screen, it was dynamite. And maybe it was only a matter of a minute of dynamite.
Hugo did about 1/3 of those shows, I think, all told. I don't think it was as many as half.
I'm curious— It was close to half, I think. I never counted.
I'm curious to know, given Hugo's penchant for starting over half a dozen times in a score, did he often not finish a score, or did he take it right up to the recording date where you would literally have to go— A little of both.
There were a couple of times when he didn't finish, and there were a couple of times where we got it finished, but we got it finished because Carl and I climbed the fence at his house because the gate was locked and went in and saw him in his underwear by candlelight studying something. We said, Hugo, what isn't finished, give it to us, and we'd divide it up and take his material, of course, and use it.
You literally climbed the fence of his house?
Yeah, we had to climb the fence. He had a room in the back of the property and the place was closed. He'd lock it up and we couldn't get in or ring the doorbell and he wouldn't answer it or didn't hear it. However, what he did was worth it to me. The quality was just wonderful. He's probably one of the greatest orchestrators I've ever met.
I Spy was also at the height of Multiple shows, I think, for you at the time.
Yes, sir.
Were you doing as many as 4 other shows at the same time?
I think so, yeah.
And those shows would've been?
Marlo Thomas, Van Dyke was still on. Van Dyke went on for 5 years. We actually started the physical recording of I Spy in '64, at the end of '64. Homer Pyle was still going, and Griffith was still going. Griffith lasted 8 years, started in 1960.
So, in, I think it was 1966, you went to work on That Girl, the Marlo Thomas show.
Yes.
That was also a Danny Thomas production, right? Is that how you got involved?
I'm not sure. I'm not sure whether it was— I guess it was Danny's, yeah. I got involved because I knew Marlo, and she asked me if I would do the show, and I said I'd do the show, but I would do the first couple, and after that, I couldn't do I couldn't do that anymore because I just had too much going. So I did the pilot and I hired a very good composer by the name of Walter Scharff, who came to me and said, I understand you're gonna do the Marlo Thomas Show. And I said, well, I'm not gonna do it. I'm trying to find somebody who will do it. And he said, I'd like to do it. He said, I think she's great. So I said, you got it. So he was on 10 weeks and the problem of the laugh track drove him mad.
Nuts.
Because strangely enough, Walter's experience came out of radio and in radio, when somebody told a joke, you had a little brief rest and then you started the cue. Well, in television, when you had a brief rest, they started the laugh track, which is where he started the cue and he couldn't work his way around that problem, which was only a problem for him because Waller was one of the few people that recorded the dialogue. I never ran dialogue until the playback, because I had it on the cue sheet. I knew what the dialogue was. And he finally quit the show, and then I had to pick it up and do it for a few weeks until I found Harry Geller, who was available, and I hired Harry, and he came on the show and did a good job.
How hard was it to come up with that theme song?
Not very hard.
Did you have the phrase That Girl in mind, thinking that potentially there would be a song here?
Sure, same as I Spy. The format, the formation of the music is I Spy. I mean, it's the enunciation of it.
Although there wasn't a lyric to That Girl initially, right?
No, there was a lyric— there was no lyric originally, and then Sam Denoff wrote one. He wrote a good lyric too. It isn't performed a lot, but he is the writer of record for the lyric on that show.
Was it the 2nd or 3rd season that it was actually sung on the air?
It was the— it could have been the 2nd season, because I left the show after the 1st season, and a new producer came in who I didn't get along with, and I resigned the show before it started. And actually, I wasn't doing the show. I had Harry doing the show. the show and he wanted somebody else, and I, I didn't think it was appropriate because Harry was doing a good job and it was his lead show. I knew that before he did anything else, he would do that, and rather than make a fuss about it, I resigned the show. When he left 2 years later, Marla called me up and asked me if I'd come back on the show, and I did for the last 2 years, I guess. I think the show lasted 5 years.
Was there much music in That Girl?
Yeah, there was enough. It was what I would call a medium burden for comedy shows, probably 6, 7 minutes, sometimes longer, sometimes less, depending upon the fabric of the show.
Again, original music every week?
Original music every week.
Okay.
I didn't— the only time I ever fooled with the library was on a show called Guess Where Ho, done by Desi Lupe.
That was around 1960 or so?
Yeah, it was pretty early on. And they wanted a library, and I just said, look, I won't do that unless I can get the union to allow me to record it in the United States. So they said, well, try. So I went to the union and I said, look, you want it to go overseas? Or at least let me have 4 sessions here. And they did, and I made a library for them, and the show only lasted one season, so at least they had 4 sessions out of it.
That's great. Right.
I did one later on called Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. I did the library for that.
Yeah, I want to talk about that a little later.
Okay. I don't remember much about it.
But I do want to ask you about The Mod Squad. I think this is 1968 now. How did—
'68.
Yeah. How did you get involved with that show? Was that also a Thomas Leonard production?
No, that was a Thomas Spellings production.
Aaron Spelling.
Aaron Spelling became a partner of Danny's in a sidebar venture and came up with the idea for Mod Squad. And of course, he did himself, he did a bunch of spinoffs of that with The Rookies and Starsky and Hutch. It was all Buddy Copula, which actually was the start of it was I Spy.
Sure.
Oh, the buddy cop.
The original buddy cop show.
And Aaron asked me if I would do the music, and I said I would, and I did.
How did you create that main title theme? It's so dynamic, I think, to look at. One wonders whether— and to listen to— one wonders which came first, the visuals or the music.
The visuals came first. In that one, the visuals came first. And it again was It was a format similar to I Spy in that the show started with a teaser, and the music that came out of the teaser had to go right into the main title. So it had to resolve into that downbeat chord, which I forgot what it was, C I think, or D. It was a C. I can't really tell you how I did that job because I was married to Some action and some freeze frames. You would see Clarence Williams running down the street and they'd come in close up on him and freeze. And then the same thing with Peggy, and then the same thing with Michael Cole, and then finally Ty Andrews.
Ty Andrews.
And in laying the blocking out where those freezes occurred and making up my mind that I was going to accommodate them in one way or another, it didn't fall into any given pattern. And that theme wound up being a tempo layout of 4/4, 7/8, 6/8, 4/4. And it suggested a musical pattern that seemed appropriate, and I went with it and let it happen, and it happened real well, I thought. It was a good title inasmuch as the music didn't sound Like it was accommodating the picture necessarily, if you listen to the track alone, but it accommodated everything in the picture.
Was there any pressure at all, because these were young hip cops, to do a kind of rock and roll kind of score?
There was, definitely.
And where did that pressure come from?
It came from the network, who said in effect, we would like to have a Simon and Garfunkel type of score. And I said, with or without words? And I've forgotten who the network guy was, said, well, no, without the words. Well, Simon and Garfunkel without the words is a couple of rhythm guitar players. What are you talking about? Well, we'd like to have that kind of modern rock 'n' roll beat. You know, there are 11,000 different different kinds of rock and roll. And I hired Shorty Rogers to do the part of the pilot with me because we were really pressed on time. It was an hour and a half pilot or 2-hour pilot, I forgot. I think it was an hour and a half. No, it was 2 hours. And Shorty was into that much better than I.
Shorty was the great jazz arranger.
Yeah, and trumpet player. He was a fine writer too. He wrote the end theme, which That I thought was wonderful. We used it every week as a walk-off into the sunset theme. And we did the pilot, and rock didn't work very well. It worked okay in the chases, in the car fights and car chases and fights and all that stuff, then the rock worked great. But for scoring, it has— rock and roll is not harmonically very sophisticated, and unless you have rhythm going, it doesn't really work well. As a dramatic entity. And by the 3rd show, I tried mixing serial music in 12-tone, and I expected to get some screams of pain, and I didn't. And we wound up doing the rest of the shows. Shorty didn't make the show. He got hung up with somebody in Las Vegas, and I hired Billy May to alternate with me, because by that time, I knew that I had to have somebody do every other show. I couldn't handle it. And Billy was wonderful, and we went into 12-tone.
2 quick questions there. One is Billy May, of course, is also a great jazz arranger.
Wonderful arranger. I think he's a genius.
I think a lot of people agree. And the other issue is maybe you could just briefly define what 12-tone music or serial music is and how you applied it to the Mod Squad.
I don't know how to define serial music. It's the use of all 12 notes in the scale. You very seldom have key centers. It's a study of its own. I studied for years with George Tremblay, who was a serial teacher. It's more aligned to the evolving current music.
It's a 20th century technique.
I think it's probably 21st century technique now as applied to how it's developing. Originally it was very pointillistic and non-melodic, and it doesn't have to be. And I know it's just very hard for me to describe how we used it, but—
Why was it right dramatically?
Because it creates dramatic tension. You can make it hurt the fillings of your teeth if you want it to. By the same token, it could be soft and at the same time it doesn't resolve itself the way you're used to listening to. And it just seemed to me like there wasn't a standard format that would have worked with rock 'n' roll, in the standard musical format, and then go into rock 'n' roll. It would be kind of like 2 different genres going on at the same time. For some reason or other, which I can't explain, As I say, I expected to get a scream of pain and never did. Everybody that I worked with, well, mostly it was Harv Bennett and Tony Barrett, who were the Loewe producers, they accepted it, they liked it, it worked, they left me alone.
Did you continue to use any kind of sort of rock beat during the chases?
Always.
Always?
The chases were pure rock.
Okay.
They were orchestral rock. Probably as advanced as heavy metal or as the Stones. It wasn't that kind of thing. But everything that had a beat was rock. We didn't fool around with that. That was easy. What was hard was the dramatic scoring because rock just didn't cut it.
How big a band did you use on the Mod Squad?
Pretty much a dance band-oriented group, probably. Probably 16 to 18, yeah, sometimes more.
Had Billy also— had Billy May also studied 12-tone?
No, I don't think so. It's hard to tell with Billy. But the minute we set down the guidelines, he was into it. And he was into his own version of it, which was fine by me.
Because it worked dramatically.
Because it worked, yeah. And Billy didn't write anything like me, and I didn't write anything like Billy. And there are many times I wish I could. But I just didn't. What he did worked. It was suitable to the dramatic value, and Billy could get more out of less than anybody I ever knew. I think he's a true genius in writing.
Did you have any contact at all with the young stars of the show?
None.
When you score a show, and I'm thinking especially of The Mod Squad, A lot of times I'm wondering, do you have to get around dialogue, or when they ask you to score, or when you choose to score under dialogue, are there certain techniques that you have to observe?
Yeah, I think there are. You have to accommodate dialogue. I remember doing a guest shot at a class in UCLA where somebody was teaching film scoring, and he said, and now we'll discuss dialogue. He said, what's good under dialogue? And somebody said, well, how about a guitar? Well, that's good. And how about a small string section and a flute? Well, that's good. He went down all this nonsense and I was there as a guest and I got up and said, you know, in the format of the show, I didn't want to get involved with being contradictory and I just said, I answer questions. And somebody said, What's good under dialogue? I said, well, if you've got 2 people standing at the corner of Colorado and the Arroyo Seco Boulevard and the New Year's parade is going by in front of the Rose Bowl and you see a marching band behind you, you can't use a flute and a guitar. That won't work. You have to use a marching band. Now, the level at which you record it and you dub it back, it has to be consistent with The picture, but by the same time, it has to protect the dialogue. That's basic. Sure, you thin an orchestra out. You hear composers expound about, well, you want to stay out of the range of the human voice. You can't stay out of the range of the human voice. I'm in the bass clef somewhere. My wife is somewhere in the soprano clef. You're not going to play anything, just top and bottom. You have to play the music that's appropriate, and then you have to design it so that You don't have open brass screaming when people are whispering. At the same time, you don't have a guitar and a flute playing when somebody is threatening to kill somebody at the top of his voice. The dramatics indicates the level of emotion that you put into the music, and that's a matter of common sense. You can't create a dramatic value at high intensity unless the music has Dramatic value at high intensity, one level below the intensity of the dialogue, so that it amplifies the dramatic intensity. If you don't do that, you're not doing anything, because that's essentially what we're hired for. We're hired to heighten the emotional stakes, and if we don't do that, we're getting a free paycheck for not doing anything. And there isn't any set formula for it that I know of.
It's my understanding that you did, by the time you did the Mod Squad, and certainly you studied a lot of 12-tone, you used experimental techniques, what I would characterize as experimental techniques, such as running tracks backwards and things like that. Can you give me some examples of the kinds of things you did?
We had a— We had a Mod Squad show where Clarence Williams gets mugged and he's picked up by a young Mexican girl and his mother and they bring him into the house and they bandage his head and when he comes to, he had these flashes of memory. And the cutter, whoever cut that particular show, the film editor, started with the 3-frame flash and then an 8-frame flash and then reality and then a 16-frame flash and then maybe a 3-minute flashback so that he was— what it was, it was a bottled show. They were using old film to pad out a show, but they did it very cleverly and it turned out to be a good show. So here you had this impossible framework of 3 frames, 24 frames a You got an 8th of a second. Then you had a 6-frame, an 8-frame, and now bang, you're into a flashback. No film treatment of the flashback because they lifted it lock, stock, and barrel out of the previous show. The flashes take him into remembering when he was being chased by somebody with Michael Caine. Their hair was like this and their pants were like that, you know, and so forth. So there was no film accommodation. Later on, they did some Vaseline smears on it. It didn't really work. There wasn't any dissolve. There wasn't any film treatment to let you know you were in a flashback. You can do one of several things. You can ignore it and say, you know, tough luck, guys. There's nothing I can do. And there's nothing that you can play in an 8th of a second that's discernible. So I started out by reversing the track. And if you've ever heard a reverse track, it has kind of a thwip sound. You start from an impact and you go to nothing. Now you reverse it, you start from nothing and go to an impact. And you could lead the cut by 8 or 10 frames and make a sound that would explode into that 3-frame clip and then do something else that would go into an 8-frame clip. And then finally, you would do that same trick and go into a forwards track that was the flashback and treat that so that the track wasn't a straight track. It was highly reverbed, it was highly equalized so that it was distorted and create the effect that they were trying to create with the film. That became a pattern for the show, and I think at one time I had 14 tracks running at the same time. From a recording standpoint, it was not really very hard because what was hard about it was the union will not allow you to overdub yourself. So I had to write the cue and then whoever was left over that I didn't use in the cue provided the reverse track. And the last sequence in that picture was, I think, 8 and a half minutes long involving flashbacks, involving forwards tracks. Treated tracts. It was very effective, and probably nobody in the world knew how it happened, but they really, they weren't concerned. They were concerned it happened.
But it had an undeniable dramatic impact.
It had undeniable dramatic impact, absolutely, and it was worth it to me.
Okay, let's change tapes.
