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Posted: |
Mar 13, 2011 - 2:57 PM
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By: |
Yelojack
(Member)
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Thanks for this post--I can certainly say Fried is among my favorite half dozen composers if not my favorite. I can't speak to all of this but I can address a couple of issues since I've spoken to Fried several times and DeVol once. Fried and Kubrick DID have a falling out although I can't say exactly when. Fried's perspective was that he had argued that he had a hand in Kubrick's early success, while Kubrick (evidently while moving on to the Spartacus project) seemed to think he was getting too "big" for Fried. It's unclear what the details are there--I would think that even if Kubrick had wanted to use Fried on Spartacus, there would have been virtually no chance that Fried would have been hired to work on such a gargantuan production. While Fried had his own fascinating approach to an epic sensibility shown on things like Star Trek and TV movies like I Will Fight No More Forever and Mystic Warrior (which is a fascinating counterpart to James Horner's Avatar score BTW because of the use of choral and pseudo- Native American stylings), he never did anything on the kind of massive scale required for the widescreen epics of the fifties and sixties.
As far as Frank DeVol goes, in speaking with him he specifically mentioned falling out with Robert Aldrich over The Killing of Sister George because DeVol was utterly disgusted with the film's lesbian subject matter and Aldrich's graphic handling of it, and DeVol refused to score the movie. I do think it's a little misleading to speak about Fried's television work as some kind of great failing in his career--just about every major composer working in the sixties did television work, both people near the end of their careers (Herrmann, Waxman) and people on their way up (Goldsmith, Williams and many others). The volume of Fried's television work shows him to me as a very successful composer. I think he did have disappointments but in speaking with Fried he is a very good-natured man who had a lot of fun with the assignments he did. The one thing we can both agree with is that it would be wonderful to have more of Fried's music on CD, from the rest of his Star Trek music to his exciting made-for-television movies and his other film assignments. His style is unmistakable and his music is always a blast to listen to.
Hmm, so he's still alive? Interesting. He also was one of my favorites. I've gotten pretty good at spotting his stuff in shows other than Star Trek. His work showed a great deal of sophistication. Old school. Nice. Something that I believe is lacking in the world of music
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Posted: |
Oct 21, 2014 - 4:04 PM
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By: |
filmusicnow
(Member)
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Gerald Fried started his film scoring career collaborating with director Stanley Kubrick. Fried wrote music for Kubrick's short films and his earliest feature films:
• Day Of The Fight (1951)
• Fear And Desire (1953)
• Killer's Kiss (1955)
• The Killing (1956)
• Paths Of Glory (1957)
Gerald Fried contributed a unique musical voice to 1950s cinema - bold and modern. While utilizing the standard-sized studio orchestra, Fried could provide jazzy idioms just as well on demand as dramatic orchestral commentary, not unlike an Alex North or an Elmer Bernstein, helping to give '50s movies scores those distinguishing differences from the customary symphonic Romanticism of the prior 2 decades. Fried avoids the syrupy sentimentality of a Frank Skinner while nevertheless possessing a lyricism which shines through much of his work. Not quite the serial atonal composer that Leonard Rosenman was, Fried is no slouch dishing up palatable dissonance for our soundtrack consumption. FSM's liner notes (for their "Wild, Wonderful World of Gerald Fried" 2-CD set) likens this composer to Bernard Herrmann with attention deficit disorder. While it is true that Fried frequently relies on a Herrmannesque bombast, he also gives us light-hearted comedy music, jazz, and some pop tunes here and there. I rather think a comparison with Elmer Bernstein might also be appropriate, as both Bernstein and Fried have mined similar veins (comedies, crime, B movies, war films, exotica, serious dramas), while always remaining faithful to their distinctive respective harmonics.
When Gerald Fried entered the scene with his high-school friend Stanley Kubrick, it might seem to indicate that a composer for films could have had no better an entrance into cinema than his association with a budding directorial auteur garnering critical acclaim. Indeed, "Paths Of Glory" is considered one of the best films in history, along with classification as one of Kubrick's masterpieces. "Paths Of Glory" is very sparsely scored by Fried (probably because most of the film's content is so dramatically gripping that an abundant underscore would be redundant and intrusive). The high-profile status of "Paths Of Glory" had probably helped Gerald Fried obtain film-scoring commissions for the next few years. Fried had already scored 4 other films in 1957, and went onto a white-heat period of creativity at the close of the 1950s. It would appear that Gerald Fried's career was on the fast-track towards greatness and Grade-A productions. However, this was not to be.
Stanley Kubrick's next film, and his first for a major Hollywood studio, was "Spartacus".
"Spartacus" is much discussed, and its original soundtrack by Alex North is on many a soundtrack collector's wish-list. Not much discussed, however, is why Gerald Fried did not write the music for "Spartacus". Was there a falling-out between Stanley Kubrick's and Gerald Fried's friendship? Or did Universal Studios refuse Kubrick any consideration of Gerald Fried in their quest for a bigger name to score this epic? Indeed, Fried's assignments after "The Killing" were mainly for "B" pictures. Kubrick was not the only director with whom Fried forged a working alliance. In 1957, Fried scored "The Vampire" for director Paul Landres. Fried went onto providing music for 3 more films directed by Paul Landres in 1958:
• Man From God's Country
• The Flame Barrier
• The Return Of Dracula
Also in 1958, Gerald Fried was involved with 2 Roger Corman features:
• I, Mobster
• Machine-Gun Kelly
Was Kubrick, who was on his way to making important big films, disappointed that his friend Gerald Fried went down the path of second-rate movies (like a Ronald Stein)? Or was Fried too busy scoring these types of programmers to have ever been on the radar for "Spartacus"? We may never know. It's nonetheless interesting to speculate what "Spartacus", "Lolita", and "Dr. Strangelove" might be like had Gerald Fried scored all of these pictures. By the time of Kubrick's "2001", though, Kubrick (and the subsequent films he made) seemed no longer to need the services of the film score practitioner. Kubrick not only rejected the music that Alex North wrote for "2001", he also dismissed Frank Cordell, the initial composer considered. "2001", "A Clockwork Orange", "Barry Lyndon", "The Shining", etc. all relied heavily on pre-existing music for their soundtracks. Wendy Carlos' music for "A Clockwork Orange" and "The Shining" co-existed with classical selections; and Leonard Rosenman was chiefly an adaptor on "Barry Lyndon". Later films by Kubrick had female composers attached to the projects, such as Jocelyn Pook for "Eyes Wide Shut"; Kubrick's own daughter worked on "Full Metal Jacket". Kubrick passed away in 1999, but Gerald Fried is still with us. While Fried never collaborated again with Kubrick, let's look at the unusual patterns of Fried's post-Kubrick career.
After his peak year of 1958 (including Albert Band's "I Bury The Living" and "Cry Baby Killer" by Justus Addiss), the momentum of Gerald Fried's film scoring assignments began to de-accelerate in 1959 down to only 3 films:
• Timbuktu (by Jacques Tourneur)
• High School Big Shot
• Cast A Long Shadow (by Thomas Carr, with whom Fried did "Dino" in '57)
In 1960, there were no feature films released with music by Gerald Fried, though in this year he was writing for episodic television programs such as "Shotgun Slade" and "Riverboat". Why was this? Fried was on his own path towards being a prolific film composer, and, as soon as his star had risen, it just as quickly began to fizzle-out and fall. Was Fried's musical fingerprints, at once instantly recognizable and (it must be admitted) rather unsubtle in their boldness, working against his career?
Things got a little better in 1961, with Fried getting work on:
• A Cold Wind In August (by Alexander Singer)
• Twenty Plus Two (by Joseph M. Newman)
• The Second Time Around (by Vincent Sherman)
However, "The Cabinet Of Caligari" was the only score Fried issued in 1962 - but what a score it is! Of all the Gerald Fried soundtracks I've heard (and there are not that many available), "The Cabinet Of Caligari" is my reigning favorite.
During 1963/1964, Fried apparently worked on a sequence of television specials for United Artists with no feature film assignments, save for "One Potato, Two Potato" by director Larry Peerce.
1965 proved to be another year like 1960 for Fried: no films, but a decent amount of work for TV (a dozen episodes of "Gilligan's Island" plus over a half-dozen shows on "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.")
The Vic Morrow-directed film "Deathwatch" was released in 1966 with a score by Fried, whose name was also attached to 2 theatrical films culled from several segments of "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.", a series on which Fried continued to work on in 1966 as well as "Gilligan's Island", "It's About Time", "T.H.E. Cat", plus one episode each on "Mission: Impossible" and "Star Trek".
1967 saw Fried's final contributions to "T.H.E. Cat", "It's About Time", "Gilligan's Island", & "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.", plus he scored more than a dozen shows for "Mr. Terrific", 3 segments apiece for both "Mission: Impossible" and "Star Trek", a couple of "Lost In Space" shows, and another film based upon "U.N.C.L.E." episodes bore his credit.
Gerald Fried had yet to attain age 40 by 1967, yet it seemed as though his bright and promising career as a film composer was already truncated unfairly by (whatever) circumstances, and he was prematurely a has-been, working alongside Alexander Courage and Fred Steiner (both of whom also had brief late-'50s film careers that petered-out into television assignments) on "Star Trek", with older industry veterans George Duning and Sol Kaplan.
1968 saw a closure to Fried's involvement with both "Star Trek" and "Mission: Impossible". Fortunately for Fried, his next cinematic collaboration occurred with "The Killing Of Sister George", a film by Robert Aldrich, his most important director relationship after Stanley Kubrick. Why did Aldrich not use his usual composer - Frank DeVol? The reason(s) for Aldrich's (temporary) suspension of DeVol's services may not be readily available to this author, but it did happen before with Aldrich's "Sodom And Gomorrah" (Miklos Rozsa) and later again with "Twilight's Last Gleaming" (Jerry Goldsmith).
Robert Aldrich's production company provided Gerald Fried with his 1969 film commission: "Whatever Happened To Aunt Alice?", directed by TV vet Lee H. Katzin. The next two Aldrich/Fried collaborations were:
• Too Late The Hero (1970)
• The Grissom Gang (1971)
Also in 1971, Fried scored "The Enchanted Years" for Nicolas Noxon , with whom Fried would later work on "Birds Do It, Bees Do It" in 1974. In between these, Fried wrote what I consider his finest film score for Ted Post's "Baby". Of all the unreleased Fried music, this "Baby" score would be most appreciated on disc! It has perhaps Fried's most memorable main theme, combined with outstanding horror/thriller music (not unlike the "Catspaw" segment in "Star Trek"), all superbly orchestrated, and containing on-target motifs plus echo-effects on some of the instruments. A must-have.
At this stage in Fried's timeline, he began to receive scoring assignments for made-for-TV movies, commencing with 1975's "I Will Fight No More Forever". Between this and his famous work on the mini-series "Roots" (1977), Fried had gotten a couple of 1976 film commissions : "Vigilante Force" and, of all things, a Mexican movie about cannibalism (after the '72 airplane crash in the Andes), released as "Survive".
Fried's last feature film score is for 1979's "The Bell Jar", directed by Larry Peerce. This came amongst numerous TV-Movie assignments from the late '70s, including 2 more "Roots" specials, 2 "Gilligan's Island" reunions, plus a couple of scores for "Emergency!"
The 1980's had Gerald Fried continue in his duties as a television composer; no feature films were coming his way. There are too many made-for-TV shows that Fried did to list them here, but some recognizable ones are 1980's "The Ordeal Of Dr. Mudd" (very good music in this one), "The Return Of The Man From U.N.C.L.E." (1983), and 1984's "The Mystic Warrior", one of the very infrequent Fried scores to be released on a soundtrack CD. After the '80s, Gerald Fried entered into what could be described as a Sibelius silence. Perhaps Fried, being over age 60 at this juncture, went into an early retirement. I rather think, though, that the entertainment industry had changed so much by the early 1990s, that composers with highly-individual musical voices such as Gerald Fried and Leonard Rosenman would not have been able to get much more work anyway. [had Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Fielding lived on into the '90s, I fear a similar fate would have befallen them]
In retrospect, isn't it peculiar that Gerald Fried does not enjoy any greater acknowledgement from within the film score and soundtrack collecting communities? Fried most likely will not be anyone's favorite film composer, or even show up on a "Top 10" listing. Yet, he possesses both the traits that seem to polarize film score buffs. Movie music aficionados who prefer composers whom have distinctive harmonic styles (such as Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann, Georges Delerue, John Barry) should have as much to appreciate with Gerald Fried's highly-idiosyncratic music as those who admire the chameleon composers (like Laurence Rosenthal, Jerry Goldsmith, Lalo Schifrin, Stanley Myers) who adapt themselves to the films' contents, which Fried is also capable of doing. Fried can provide many different ethnic colorings, or choose a jazz approach; Fried could touch us emotionally with heartfelt solo strings just as easily as thrill us with his brassy and percussive hyperbole...
...I think it's sad that Gerald Fried's music for "Star Trek", as good as it may be, seems to be the only thing that he'll be remembered by, as if, for a man who had written music for 10(!) films in 1958, he has no more to his credit...
Was "Wild, Wonderful World Of Gerald Fried" the title that preceded the C.D. inlay notes on F.S.M.'s "The Return Of Dracula/The Cabinet Of Caligari" 2 C.D. set?
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Not cool to post people's e-mail addresses in a public forum without their permission...
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