Earle Hagen - Archive Interview Part 9 of 10

A couple of quick questions about shows from the late 1960s. You scored Mayberry R.F.D.

Yes.

Did that music differ substantially from the music of The Andy Griffith Show?

It did not. As a matter of fact, the theme for Mayberry R.F.D. was a theme I wrote for Mayberry. It was very gentle and very soft, and I thought, well, why not? That's what the show is about, so I used it.

Similarly, when you did Make Room for Granddaddy a couple of years later, was that similar to the situation with The Danny Thomas Show?

It was, but The Danny Thomas Show really didn't have much profile as far as music goes. It was Bridges and Q's for the most part, and so was the, the second show.

You and Hugo wrote the theme for a short-lived show called That Walter Brennan starred in.

Oh, Guns of Will Sonnett.

The Guns of Will Sonnett. And my memory was that Walter Brennan, quote unquote, sang that over the main title. Didn't he speak or sing something?

I think, I think he spoke. He spoke a prayer, and I think it wound up, it wound up over the end title or close to the tag of the show was a prayer.

It was a simple theme. Guitar, I think, maybe?

No, we had an orchestra on that. It was a very soft orchestra. And actually the only thing that I had to do on that show was the main title. Hugo and I scored the pilot. And then after that I was looking for a composer to do the show and Fred Steiner was available and I gave it to Fred, who was wonderful. And I never went on a recording date. And I didn't have to. Fred knew what he was doing and he was a good, perfect guy for it.

When did you start teaching, when did you start having classes and teaching other composers and other would-be composers?

I started that really early on in my house, in the early '60s actually. I always had time to spend with mostly players who They wanted to know about writing and they wanted to know the techniques of click track and that kind of thing. And eventually when we moved out to Calabasas in the late '60s, I made a formal class out of it. I only taught professionals and I charged them 3 dozen golf balls for 8 weeks. I had the golf ball concession of the West. I remember that. 36 dozen golf balls. And I had cutters, I had composers, and I had players. And it was very informal. And eventually, I had a huge disappointment with the Television Academy because they called me up and said, we understand you're teaching a class in film scoring. And I said, I am. I had already written Scoring for Film, the first textbook. And that basically was what I was teaching out of. And they said, well, we'd like to make this an Academy function. And I said, fine. However, there's some things I want. And they said, well, what do you want? I said, I want the opportunity to give the people in the class an assignment and have them write the assignment. I want an orchestra and I want a recording stage, which I know you can provide through the Academy. And I want each of the applicants in this class to get up and conduct his own music to picture. That's the experience that they need. And they said, fine, we'll turn it over to the head of the music committee. And a couple of days later there was a notice in the Reporter and I forgot what the name of the other one is.

Variety.

The big one?

Variety. Variety.

There was going to be a music course that was sponsored by the Academy. So I gave everybody an assignment and they all wrote it. And then we got the music back and I called up and said, okay, we've got the music. Now I need the copyist and I need the stage and an orchestra. And they said, what? What are you talking about? Nobody had done anything about it and nobody had heard it. And that was the end of that. And one by one, I would take the guys' stuff that they wrote and I would try to record it on the end of the date if I had another 15 or 20 minutes left over. And that was a big disappointment to me. And I got a call from VMI asking me if I would teach a class there for a national group. And what they were looking for was a a kind of a parallel to the Lehman Engel course in show music in New York. And I, again, raised the question, well, number one, where will the candidates come from? And number two, what about what I think we should provide? And I enumerated the same things, and they agreed. So what happened was, we put a notice in the VMI Magazine, and we had candidates. I think the first time we had 130-some-odd candidates, and I could only take 20 because that was, first of all, that's all the room would hold, and secondly, it was a 6-week spread, 2 days a week, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, all day long, and then in the 4th week, I gave them an assignment, and they had a week to do it. We had professional copyists. We had the best orchestra in town, and we had the best best available studio in town, and each one of them got to get up and conduct their music to picture, which was wonderful. And then the last session, we would take everybody's cartridge and play it back to picture, and 19 people would critique the one, and we went right down the whole 20 of them, and that was a good workshop experience.

When did that start with BMI?

It started in— well, officially it started about 1960.

Okay.

And I did it for 10 years. Of course, I had moved down here at the time. It may have started in 1985, I'm not sure. I had moved down here and I'd get up at 7 o'clock in the morning, I'd leave here at 7:30 and get there at 10, teach all day, stay overnight, teach all day from 10 to 5, and come back. And it used to It would take me a little over 2 hours to get in and it would take me 3 hours to get back. That 2 hours in became 4 hours in and 5 hours to 5 and a half back because I was going through both ends of the town traffic time. And eventually I just couldn't handle that anymore. I did 10 years of it. I had great students. They came from all over the United States. Some of them commuted on a weekly basis. They would fly in and take the car back. class and go home on a red-eye and Higgins is getting excited. And I miss it. I really miss it. But by the same token, the business has changed so much that I just don't have it within me to stand in front of a class and tell them about the great opportunities and to prepare them for those opportunities. First of all, they're all good musicians. Most of them had their MAs, some of them had a PhD. They all knew how to write, and what they wanted to learn was how to write music and adapt it to film, write music for the film medium. And I'm good at teaching that, but I'm not good at teaching them how to get a job. And that's become a crisis area in the music business of today.

I'm curious though why you started to teach, why you felt it was important. Why was it important to pass these techniques on?

It wasn't only that. I found it was an opportunity to learn. I learned more from the people I was teaching than I did when I was teaching than they learned from me. Let's put it that way.

And why did you write 2 books on the technique?

Well, the first book was a mistake. In 19— I guess 1970, Bob Sauer, who was then head of— president of BMI, came out and he asked for a meeting with Lionel Newman, Leith Stevens, Stanley—

Wilson.

Stan Wilson, and myself. Lionel was the head of Fox, Leith Stevens was the head of Paramount, Stanley was at Universal, and I was probably the biggest independent contractor of music at composer in the business, and what he wanted to do was essentially what we wound up doing at VMI, but he had a different attitude about how he wanted to do it. He wanted to have each college nominate a representative student and then have a board of Hollywood composers to look over the students' work and then pick a few of them and bring them out to Los Angeles for 6 weeks. And my question was, well, Number one, where are they gonna stay? Because the studios are scattered all over LA. And number two, what are they gonna use for a text? And he said, well, I don't know. That's why I've asked to meet with you 4 people. And we went around with it and there wasn't any text. There was an old book that was written by Frank Skinner, I think. And I said, well, I'll write a book. So, I wrote a book. It took me 6 or 8 months, and I did it part-time, and then when we had the offseason, I did it full-time, and I published it in 1971, and ostensibly, it was the text for the BMI class, which never happened.

And then later on, you published Advanced Scoring for Film.

I put out a second book. I had been working on it, and I came down here in In 1986, it was 2/3 done, and in 1990, it was 2/3 done. I finally decided if I don't do it, it's never going to get done, so I finished it up and put it out. By that time, I think a lot of the techniques had changed to tape rather than film, although the techniques are applicable. Film is much more, in my viewpoint, much more versatile than tape. Because you can move one track in relation to another, where on a 24-track, that's it. You can do things with each track, but you can't reverse them, you can't slide them, you can't move them back and forth and so forth, which creates a lot of the effects.

Back to television for a second. I'm curious to know how your association with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman came about, and the nature of the music that you wrote for that.

I don't really remember, to tell you the truth. I know that I was suddenly involved with writing a library for Mary Hartman again, to be recorded here. We had 4 or 5 sessions with it, you know, just providing general music. It was mostly comedy. And we created a library, which I assume they used, because I don't think I ever saw the show. And there was no show—

You mean when you wrote the show?

When I wrote the show, there was no show. It was just some scripts and some script ideas, and essentially what they wanted was what I call wallpaper. And it's the only time— Guess Where It Holed was a stylized show. That was way early in the '60s, and the library I did for that was stylized. This was not. This was more placebo.

Did you work with Norman Lear?

I did not.

You did not?

Never met him.

So he's not the one who asked you?

I don't even remember who was involved in that. I never saw the production company. It was a job that I did, which I was not very proud of because I never knew what I did it for.

How did you become involved with scoring The Dukes of Hazzard, which has got to be a very different kind of thing than you'd done before?

It was a different thing. I had had open heart surgery. And I hadn't worked in a while, and then when I wanted to work, it was the off-season and there wasn't much work around. And I had worked on a show called Eight Is Enough for 4 years, and the producer of that show was an old friend from Fox, Bobby Jacks. And I got a call one day out of the blue from Bobby, and he said, are you busy right now? And I said, no, I got something coming up with Ernie Frankel, but it isn't gonna happen for a few months. Why?

Why?

I'm producing the Dukes of Hazzard, and he said, would you like to do the show? And I said, sure, let me come in and look at it. And I came in and looked at it, and I thought there were some things that I could do that would make it more interesting, although they were a success by then.

Oh, the show was already on the air?

Well, I think I came in the 4th year. I think it was about the 4th year. I think I did 3 years of it, 2 or 3 years. I don't remember now because I I was involved with Mike Hammer starting up at the same time. And it was kind of a fun show to do. It was totally different. I had done some country shows in Nashville with Ernie Frankel. We did Concrete Cowboys at Nashville '99. And I liked that idiom, we have good players. And it was another curve in the road. It was kind of fun to do.

Did you use a kind of bluegrass kind of—

Yeah, I did. It took me a while to figure out the thing. But that's what they wanted because they kept referring to it being in the Deep South, which it wasn't. And one day I was sitting with Ralph Riskin and I had written a country score which kind of overpowered him. Not that it was overpowering, but it was not what he was used to hearing.

Ralph Riskin was?

Was the post-production producer.

Okay.

And it finally dawned on me, I said, you know, what you're really looking for is bluegrass. That's Indiana. And he said, well, I don't know what that's called. And I pressed the microphone and Larry McNeely, the banjo player, was outside. I said, Larry, where were you born? He said, I was born in Indiana. I said, thanks. And I said, now I know what you want. And from that point on, we were on the same page.

Mm-hmm.

I still did what I do. I still worked the picture and did those kinds of things. And eventually, I got to where Ralph would say, I think you missed a cut over there. Okay.

That's great.

Yeah, it was good.

And you stayed on that show for how long?

I think it was 3 years.

I'm dying to ask how How Harlem Nocturne became the theme for Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer.

Okay, that was Lou Gallo's idea. Lou Gallo was the line producer on Mike Hammer.

You were in on Mike Hammer from the very beginning, right?

Well, this is before the beginning. He was the producer of pilot. And he called me up and he said— Lou and I were close friends. He worked as an AD on a couple of shows and I did a show for him at Fox. He said, you know, this character, the quality of this character is 1940. He's a throwback. His values are the values of 1940, even though he's living in the present time. And he said, I think Harlan Nocturne would a great theme for the show. Is it available? Now, I didn't publish Harlem Doctrine. That was published by Shapiro Bernstein, who bought it when I was at Ray Noble. And I said, I don't know whether it's available or not, but I can find out easily enough. I'll call them and ask. So, I called Leon Brentwood and I said, Leon, would you like to have it in the show? He said, I really would. I said, are you prepared to be reasonable? And he said, I'm prepared to be reasonable. So, I called Lou back and told him so. And he said, you have a record on it? I said, I got a lot of records. You want something generic? And he said, I want something generic. So I sent him, I think, a Georgie Auld record, just saxophone and rhythm. And he cut it into the temp track in the picture. And Stacy, who's a jazz piano player—

Stacy Keach.

Stacy Keach went nuts about the idea of using Harlem Nocturne. So when we finally had the running for the pilot, Lou had the furrowed brow look, and I said, is something bothering you? And he said, no, no, no, everything's fine. We ran the show and spotted the music, and then he said, we have to go talk to Jonathan Axelrod. And I said, what's— what is a Jonathan Axelrod? And he said, well, he's Vice President in charge of television production here. I think Columbia was the releasing entity. I said, is there a problem? And he said, no, no, no. He said, he just wants to talk to us. So, we went up. A youngish guy, And he had an assistant who was a very nice young man. And he said to me, tell me, Mr. Hagen, he said, what did you think of Midnight Express? And I knew where he was going right away. I said, I thought it was an interesting score mixed in with chanting and Turkish sound effects. I thought it was very effective. I said, he also had— Moroder had the advantage of having a smash hit record, which was an 11-minute disco record. And about a minute of it was in the score, but it didn't make any difference. It increased the effectiveness of the music.

And Giorgio Moroder was more or less an all-synth guy.

It was all synthesizer, yeah. It was not a piece I happened to like, but there are a lot of things that are successful that I don't happen to like, except I wish I had written them. And then he said to me, well, what'd you think of Chariots of Fire? And I said again, I thought it was interesting they used electronic music. music against a period piece. And the guy had a good theme, and people like good themes. And he said to me, well, he said, you know, that's the music of today. I said, okay. And he said, you probably aren't aware of this, but people don't like saxophone. I said to him, I'm not aware of that. How do you account for Joel Pescan and some of the rock players on every record you hear? They're wailing their brains out in the background. I thought people liked saxophone. He said, they don't like saxophone. I said, how did you find that out? And he said, we tested it. And I said, and? You found out that your audience didn't happen to like saxophone, is that right? He said, that's right. And I was trying to figure out whether he hated Harlem Nocturne or he just didn't like saxophone. I said to him, well, what'd you think of the theme for Lou Grant? That was a saxophone piece that Pat Williams wrote it, which I thought was great. And he said, thought it over very carefully, and he said, unquestionably that show would have been on the air another 2 years if they hadn't had a theme with a saxophone in it. I said, okay, Mr. Axelrod, I understand. Lou, do you understand what he's saying?

Yeah.

We walked out the door and I said, what is that guy, you know, is he killing saxophone players of the world? Does he hate Harlem nocturne or what? He said, well, I don't think that's it. I said, look, I could do it for anything. It's been recorded by Randy Brooks. It's been recorded by Stan Kenton. It's been recorded by Ted Heath. I don't have to have a saxophone. But that's kind of nonsense, isn't it? And he said, well, you know, he's in charge. And I said, okay. So about a day later, or the same day later in the afternoon, the network had seen the cut, finished cut 2-hour show, and they decided there was a possibility of a series in it.

Really?

So, they called Jonathan Axelrod and they said, why don't you go down and just have a little conversation with Stacy Keach and see if he's interested in doing that? So, they went down and Garry Nelson, who directed the pilot, happened to be there and he had just landed a great plum, which was Noble House, which was a 3-year commitment. And Jonathan Axelrod asked Stacy if he would be interested in doing the pilot. Doing the series. And Stacy said, sure. You know, he said, you have to talk it over with Jay Bernstein and see whether he wants to go on that basis. But he said, there are a couple of things that I want. The first one, I want to use Harlem Nocturne because I think that's the perfect theme for a guy who's a throwback. And Axelrod said, well, that's okay. He said, just as long as we don't use a saxophone. And Stacy said, what's the matter with a saxophone? And he said, people don't like saxophone. And Cary Nelson said, you're crazy. Where'd you come up with that? He said, we tested it. So anyways, Stacy said, I don't care what Earl does with it. Just let him do what he's going to do. And he said, well, I certainly hope he doesn't use a saxophone. By the time I got the cue sheets, Jonathan Axelrod was gone and Stacy and Lou said, what did he test? So they called up the guy who took his place. place, the assistant, I've forgotten his name, and they said, is there any chance of getting the pilot that they tested the saxophone on? And it was a Mickey Rooney pilot. And it wasn't a saxophone, it was a clarinet, and it was terrible. So he went from there, from Columbia, someplace else in the world killing saxophone players. We used saxophone. I used Bud Shank.

He was a great saxophone player.

He was a great saxophone player.

Did you—

I later done it with trumpet. Now there's a new version Now they're doing 26 more. That's also factual.

How many episodes did you actually do of the show? Did you do a season or 2?

I did 2 seasons. I did 2 2-hour shows. The second season was cut short after the 14th show because Stacy went back to stand trial expecting a slap on the wrist and didn't get it.

Right.

And they had to call the show at the end And then when I did the 2-hour show when he came back, and then I passed on, that was when I retired and they went on for another season I think. Okay.

And you wrote mostly a kind of jazz score for My Camera?

Pretty much. Contemporary I would say. I got dramatic in a lot of spots. I had big orchestras. I went into 12-tone. What the show called for. I did one show about American Indians who are steelworkers. They're the guys who do the high stuff, and I used American Indian background on it, and it worked. It worked real well.

You retired in 1986.

Yeah.

And your last show was Return to Mayberry?

I think we recorded Mayberry after Mike Hammer, I believe.

Which was the reunion movie of Andy Griffith.

Yeah, that was the— I think it was the 3rd largest audience in the history of television.

It was huge. Why did you decide to retire?

Well, John, I'd been at music for 50-some years, I'd been writing for 32, and anybody that tells you that they can continue to not invent themselves is You reinvent yourself all the time. Hopefully you— because you are what you are, what and who you are. You can't disguise that. You can modify it, you can change it, you can dress it up in different clothing, but eventually you are who you are. And pretty soon you get to the point where you're saying, not only am I repeating myself, but I'm not capable of not repeating myself. And you look back at a career which has been very good to me and very successful and you say, I'm 66 years old. I've lasted a lot longer than most people and now it's time to move away from that and do something else.

And you had already moved down here?

Yeah, we moved down. Well, we moved down concurrently. I quit in— the last show I did was in April and we bought a house down here. We had had a place down here. And we bought a house down here shortly afterwards. We sold our place in Calabasas and moved down, and we've been here ever since.

Can you talk in general terms about the role that music plays in television, how important a factor music is in a dramatic medium like television?

Then or now?

I'd like to talk in general terms.

I think music is important in any medium. I don't care It has a contribution to make if it's allowed to. I had a devastating experience with a good friend of both of ours, Bruce Babcock, who in conversation told me that he had just bought a new 4.5 gigabyte hard drive. Well, that's a lot of hard drive. He said, well, you know, he said, I have to do this stuff electronically now, and the hard drive goes to dubbing. And I said, don't you go to dubbing? He said, no, composers aren't allowed. So now the representative music is a hard drive, which can't make a comment, which can't discuss values, which effectively makes the composer ineffective because the composer, if he's good, has something to offer. And if you cut that off, it's like saying to a writer, you can't write. Right for us because you've had too much experience. And it's not only just currently. I went through that on the Marlo Thomas Show where I had a producer who came in on the last year say, you know, what would really be great is if we got a rock group, a contemporary young rock group in here and just showed them the picture and let them play. I said, why don't you go the whole way? What are you talking about? I said, well, there are a lot of young writers walking around barefooted. These guys know how to write. Why don't you give them a script? He said, well, they wouldn't have any idea how to write a film script. I said, what makes you think a bunch of guys looking at a screen would know what they were doing? Oh, he said, okay. So that diminution of the importance of the contribution destroys the contribution, or it destroys the effort to make a contribution. And when you give a guy one day to write a score, he can't perform. And when you say to a composer, put it on a hard drive and send the hard drive to dubbing, don't show up because I don't want to hear your comments, you've cut off the nature of the business and the contribution that it's capable of making, and you've rendered it ineffective.

So then it's clear that the composer was more respected in in the '50s and '60s, and maybe the '70s, than he is today, you think?

Absolutely. Partially because the people who guided the entertainment business came from the entertainment business. They had people who took care of bottom line, who had to budget, who had to advise them on budgets, but their main function was the creation of entertainment, and they knew what they were doing. And today, you have a lot of people who are more concerned with bottom line than they are the end result. And what happens is you wind up with the upside-downness of it is that in protecting the bottom line, you lose the entertainment value and most of the times you can't control the people who are creating it and the bottom line goes up. When you look at the cost of the show, we got $185,000 an episode for I Spy.

That was the total budget?

That was the total budget. And granted, the times are different. You can't shoot a show in a studio That's right. An hour show for a million today? You can't. It's impossible. And it's not necessarily the way it should be, but if you're talking about how it should be, I think it should be people in the entertainment business should provide entertainment. People who take care of bottom line should provide bottom line. There's room for both. But you put the wrong people in control of entertainment, and you're changing it to a bottom line industry. I think that's what's happened.

Let me go in a different direction for a second. Are you ever surprised by the enduring nature of what you wrote, the popularity of some of these themes that practically everybody in this country can hum?

I am. I'm surprised and I'm pleased by it. It isn't only me. You know, Mission: Impossible was a great theme. Ben Casey was a great theme. Hill Street Blues that Mike posted was a great theme, more memorable than anything else he's written. It was very simple. Identification and being able to provide something— somebody with something to hang on to is important. And I'm always surprised when it's recognized.

Okay, let's take a break there.