Kid Stuff: Composer Jeff Danna, Director Brett Morgen and The Kid Stays in the Picture

Excerpted from FSM Vol. 7, No. 7, on sale now...

There's an old saying in music: The devil gets all the good tunes. It makes sense though, doesn't it? The devil, as an archetypal character, doesn't have to do anything more than represent evil. He doesn't demand motivational understanding, he doesn't illicit sympathy. He's just one-dimensionally evil. In fact, through most of musical history -- up to and including film music -- the more archetypal the character, the more clear the need for a certain type of music. The hero. The love interest. The villain. The misunderstood vigilante. The loner. We can scarcely read the words before the musical tropes are arranging themselves in our heads. But real life is a bit trickier. Set a melody or two to the guy who sold you stamps last week. How about a bagatelle for the bagboy?

The neurons are no longer racing to fire.

Robert Evans has probably lived a more dramatic life than your average postal employee, or produce slinger, or film music magazine writer. He started his cinematic life as an actor, rose meteorically -- and shockingly -- to the head of Paramount Pictures, overseeing classic films such as Love Story and The Godfather. His 1994 tell-all book The Kid Stays in the Picture tells of his lady loves, his trials and tribulations over his beautiful home, the coke busts, the murder insinuations, the fall, and the scrape back to the top. But at the end of the day, he's also an aging man recovering from a recent stroke in his beautiful home near a surprisingly noisy stretch of highway. He's riddled with the same everyday complexities that beleaguer us on a daily basis yet add color and depth to the real world. He's the bagboy made good.

Directors Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein's film version of The Kid Stays in the Picture treats Evans' text as the libretto for the "great American opera," in Morgen's words. The film showcases Evans' own reading of his book -- in abridged form -- and a combination of digitally altered black and white and color archival stills and new 35mm footage. It genuinely looks like no other film, with a style somewhere between home movies, Roy Lichtenstein, and Clutch Cargo cartoons, and a more-reel-than-real sense of human drama. This opera's music is a mixture of score snippets from Evans' films (such as Goldsmith's theme to Chinatown), time and place specific pop tunes, and an original score by Jeff Danna. So it fell on Danna's shoulders to score this non-archetypal character, this real-life man. "It was one of the hardest films I ever did, because when you do a score often the tone is so clear," recalls Danna. "There are scenes in [Kid] where it is very clear, like when he's really down. That was a very obvious call for the emotional tone of the music. But other things like when he's getting his opportunity to go to New York, or when he's trying to do the deal for The Detective, or when he strikes out on his own after Chinatown, how do you approach those musically? That was really the biggest challenge in the film."

Morgen states that Danna was first hired for the job because of an Evans-esque duality present in some of his music. "We had very little time to find someone [to compose the score] so we asked our post supervisor to get us a bunch of reels from composers and we listened to all of them. We did not look at the credits to any of them, we just listened to music. We ended up hearing the score for O that Jeff had done and we were really drawn to it because it was romantic but also had a trace of discord to it. That was something we were looking for for Kid Stays in the Picture. We wanted the score to be romantic, but we also wanted there to be something off-kilter just underneath the surface." Danna continues, "With Evans they wanted almost a mythic quality. They really wanted it to be old-fashioned. There are some really old-fashioned chord movements in there that no one else would ever let me do. But it was Evans and we were talking about the '50s so it worked out fine. It opens with red velvet curtains. That tells you a lot right there."

"We called Jeff and we hired him," continues Morgen. "Fortunately Jeff took the suicidal task of having to write, record, produce and master 70 minutes of music in less than six weeks to get the film done for Sundance." At the time of Danna's signing, the "film" was still a collection of low-res graphics on video, some lush 35mm footage courtesy of cinematographer John Bailey (Mishima, Silverado, The Accidental Tourist) and the Robert Evans narration. "If you watch the film without sound, as a composer, you're going to scratch your head," says Morgen. "They started with the dialogue and they found the 90 minutes of dialogue that most summed up as much of his life as you could sum up in 90 minutes," continues Danna. "Then they laid all that onto video and listened to it until they thought, 'okay, we're listening to the story now.'

"I remember the first time I sent music in. I sent seven things in and Bret liked three or four and really didn't like three or four. Nanette liked three or four and didn't really like the other ones. They only agreed on one and the rest got thrown out. I'd been working for ten days out of a six-day write. That was a long night. I stayed up all night doing corrections really fast to let them know that it was all right I could figure out what they
wanted. Again, they're good communicators. They kept saying things like, 'We want more irony in the music.' My musical translation of irony was melodies that bent in funny ways -- a lot of chromatic stuff. That was a breakthrough.

"I think the first thing that I wrote was Evans' waltz, that twisted little violin thing with all the chromatic dips in it. The back half of that was the Ally and Robert love theme. The two of them together were [approached as] an A and B section that could be changed around and applied into the gangster music and the carnival music. That was something that I'd never done before, the carnival music. That's a lot of notes per bar! I'd never written a tarantella before. A lot of it was new ground. That was one of the things that was so great about it. There's music that goes from the '50s to the present day. And there's music that traverses these parts of his life that have such vastly different emotional tones. You wouldn't be able to have that much variety in most films.

"Bret often referred to the first half of Evans' life as almost a Tinkerbell existence, so we wanted to play a lot of it like that. The word "Tinkerbell" lends itself to a musical description. He would say things like, "His life was just a circus, but it always worked out," so we could try carnival music. There were a lot of very descriptive terms. They knew their film by the time it got to me. Bret said a couple of times, 'I'm sorry we're being so demanding, but I've lived with this film already for two years and I can't have it slip away in the last six weeks.'"

Danna and the directors used this highly thematic score to affix a cinematic arc to Evans' life story. "Music has a wonderful ability to create a resonance, so when you're watching scene 13 it resonates with scene 26," says Morgen, "that's why it was so important that the score did evoke emotion and create a cohesion to provide the audience with a cinematic experience. While Nanette and I make non-fiction films, out first love is fiction and we've always tried to score films in a way that's more commonly associated with fiction. In fact, I don't think we've worked with a composer yet who does documentaries. Part of that idea is to make sure that there are reoccurring character motifs. In narrative film there's a certain expectation for the use of music and we wanted to bring that to non-fiction. There are about three or four specific themes to the movie that are consciously reprised they way would in a traditional narrative film." The combination of Danna's thematically pointed music set behind Evans' narration establishes a delicate tone awash in oversized drama, yet sincere. Evans' unique self-image is reflected in an oddly compelling combination of old school showbiz razzle-dazzle and naïve lack of self-awareness. Love appears as a sweeping force of destiny. A dogged attention to career maintenance is likened to a gangster steeling himself for turf wars. Even an event as inconsequential as Evans' brief stint portraying a toreador on film is couched in a swarthy romanticism befitting a hero of legend.

The film pops with a larger-than-life sheen, yet by connecting the dramatic dots Danna and the directors are able to set a second level against the hyperbolic narrative -- an underlying commentary that turns a more unaffected eye toward the proceedings. "Nanette and I felt that music was one of the few areas where we could provide our commentary to the film," says Morgen. "In a documentary, whether it's in Kid Stays in the Picture or a cinema verité film like On the Ropes, you're at the mercy of your material, whether you're shooting it yourself or whether it's archival material. We like to tell stories from the perspective of our characters. Through music we are able to bring the subtext to the surface and speak directly to the audience. So that discord that Jeff would add was a way for us to create a separation between Evans and ourselves."

For the full story, see FSM Vol. 7, No. 7...
 

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