Yes, I'm still working my way through all the original Twilight Zone episodes on DVD. It has taken me ten years, but I'm now on one of the final discs of Season 5.
So there I was last night watching "The Jeopardy Room" (Martin Landau in a booby-trapped hotel room, with a desire to defect to the West - no SF or supernatural trimmings). A good 25 minutes, Landau is excellent, Serling's scripting still pretty taut, Richard Donner's direction nice and tight, and the lack of fantasy makes it almost refreshing.
And of course I notice a lot of Goldsmith cues. Great stuff, and really unlike the other music he'd written for the series. In fact it was pretty unlike any of the music of his which had been tracked in from other shows. It was very much in line with the Boris Karloff "Thriller" series (stuff like "Well of Doom" came to mind).
So there I go, after the show, checking the source of those cues, and to my surprise the bulk of them came from a "Gunsmoke" episode ("Love Thy Neighbor"), from 1961. I couldn't imagine how such a sound would fit into an episode of "Gunsmoke". I must admit that I have fallen behind terribly with Yavar's Goldsmith Odyssey (just as I have with the TZ series) but I imagine it's already been covered there.
Anyone care to enlighten me on their thoughts of this music as heard in "Gunsmoke"? Or even informal banter about its use in "The Jeapordy Room". Or just informal banter about anything at all. Thanks! See you here!
It's a brilliant score for a powerful episode of television. In fact, two years ago when I first watched the episode, I was so blown away by it (the first three Goldsmith-scored Gunsmoke episodes I viewed did not remotely prepare me for what I saw) that the score kinda underwhelmed me in comparison. I remember telling my Goldsmith Odyssey colleagues that this was going to be a prominent example of the Goldsmith Ratio going below 1. But I was wrong; when we actually arrived at the score to cover it, it revealed SO much more on closer examination. A malleable main theme which is developed very well throughout the score. A score which perfectly supports the powerful episode.
If you really like this music, Graham, I highly recommend you seek out and view the episode before listening to our podcast about it; it's probably the best TV thing we have covered so far on the Odyssey; it's at least right up there with the best Twilight Zone episodes Jerry scored...and it may have moved me even more than them.
We had so much to say about that episode that somehow we spent almost three hours talking about two episodes of Gunsmoke, when a year before our podcast on Jerry's first three episodes of Gunsmoke only lasted two hours.
Enjoyed your podcast that included "Nightmare as a Child" and "The Big Tall Wish." Meant to post something then but who knows what else came up.
Hey Graham, pretty sure I saw TJR on its original airing in '64 and even though it is an offbeat episode it didn't feel that way when I was a kid. The script was Serling even if it wasn't quite Zone, per se. Add the sustained intensity within Landau's face and that must have sealed the deal. The breather at the end surely struck me in a pleasant way, too.
I just re-watched it and his major's intensity vs. the commissar's smugness immediately brought "Death's-Head Revisited" to mind. Nazi and Jew or Soviet and defector, both eps were such a product of recent past and present back then. You can confirm m'mind's ear that the cue underscoring much of the major's search also appeared in "The Odyssey of Flight 33" and a two-chord phrase sounded like something from "Back There." Either way, a grim underscore to match the circumstances.
Hi Howard - Yes, it must have seemed a really topical episode in the Cold War days. I thought it was strong TV, more akin to an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock hour than anything really TZ. And then I heard an interview with Martin Landau - and he agreed with me! Also managed "Stopover in a Quiet Town" last night. That one's generally regarded as a high point of Season 5. I think that Season 5 gets dumped on a bit too much, but I did feel that "Stopover" was actually one of the more overrated ones. Once you know the ending, everything that has gone before becomes completely dumb. Having said that, I did like the atmosphere created - and a lot of the chills came from the tracked music, mostly from "Back There" (which you mentioned in relation to "The Jeopardy Room") and "The Invaders".
Yavar, I can't find that episode of Gunsmoke online anywhere. There is a suite from the score up on YouTube, and I was surprised that it sounded nothing like what was tracked into "The Jeopardy Room"! What I remember specifically about "The Jeopardy Room" was a motif, or a set of chords which struck me as being REALLY like a Boris Karloff "Thriller" episode. Maybe the piece I was concentrating on didn't come from Gunsmoke's "Love Thy Neighbor" - I noticed that there are a few uncredited Goldsmith cues listed on the music site.
And yes, so I tuned into the first few minutes of the Odyssey... but I felt I really needed to see the episode first in order to relate to what you were saying. But I tuned out again because I had to do some work, do a write-up of THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF for another site, listen to Gil Mellé's Tome VI again, clean the house, make lunch, do some exercise (I'm dying of a heart attack through not getting out much recently) and feed the cats. Two of them are twenty-one years old. Then perhaps I'll attempt to get a little bit closer to the end of Season 5 of The Twilight Zone. Then I'll have to start again. It's ten years since I saw "Where Is Everybody?" Then I'll retake the Odyssey. I think I'm at about 1957 with it at the moment, not counting the specials.
And yes, so I tuned into the first few minutes of the Odyssey... but I felt I really needed to see the episode first in order to relate to what you were saying.
It's the "fluttery" sound in TJR and in Odyssey it's paired with the "sinister" bass guitar 3-note phrase from F. Steiner's "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" per other thread.
Silent Flight is probably best known for its usage on the episode Mirror Image. It makes up most of that episode's soundtrack along with bits and pieces of Herrmann's Brave New World suite.
Thanks to all for your ongoing comments. Yavar - we finally got in touch, although I had to use my vast intelligence to complete the incomplete email address you provided.
SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much to do! I haven't even dipped into the Gunsmoke episode itself, nor touched the appropriate Odysseys, but the piece I highlighted as being VERY like Goldsmith's music for Thriller seems to be much more prominent in TZ's "The Jeopardy Room" than in the Gunsmoke episode for which is was written. As I say, I've only listened to the 8-minute extract of the music (plus dialogue and effects) on YouTube, but I don't think I'd have picked up on it from its appearance in Gunsmoke alone, if the YouTube digest highlights everything. Strange how some things can seem even more impressive when repurposed.
Those cues "Silent Flight" and "Rapid Flight" (from the TZ episode) - I wasn't too familiar with them. Interesting use of Herrmannesque PSYCHO strings (not the stabbing effect, more the skittering and slithering all over the place effect). There's also a lonely sound to one of the melodic lines which reminds me of Leith Stevens.
Right, be quiet, I have a lot to do here. First I have to paint the kitchen ceiling. That's a back-breaker it is. And in this heat.
None of the music being discussed here so far, Onya. If you want to learn more about the music in those two tracks (and hear some additional unreleased cues from their original programs), you should listen to our Goldsmith Odyssey podcast on them:
“Jazz Theme #1” on the Goldsmith TZ disc is actually a suite of cues (not the complete score but the majority of it) from a (ridiculously terrible) unaired pilot “Saturday Night in Santa Monica”, for the prospective TV series Man on the Beach.
“Jazz Theme #2” is a small fraction of the full score to an episode of Studio One, called “The Fair-Haired Boy”. At the time we recorded our podcast, we thought it was most of the score (because we didn’t ever manage to find the TV episode itself, and only a couple cue numbers were “missing”) but we have learned since then that there were many more cues after what we thought was the “final” one. A friend of ours managed to access the original written scores, and even did a MIDI realization of the complete score. We hope to offer this as an exclusive on a future special Goldsmith Odyssey podcast with him as guest...so stay tuned!
None of the music being discussed here so far, Onya. If you want to learn more about the music in those two tracks (and hear some additional unreleased cues from their original programs), you should listen to our Goldsmith Odyssey podcast on them:
“Jazz Theme #1” on the Goldsmith TZ disc is actually a suite of cues (not the complete score but the majority of it) from a (ridiculously terrible) unaired pilot “Saturday Night in Santa Monica”, for the prospective TV series Man on the Beach.
“Jazz Theme #2” is a small fraction of the full score to an episode of Studio One, called “The Fair-Haired Boy”. At the time we recorded our podcast, we thought it was most of the score (because we didn’t ever manage to find the TV episode itself, and only a couple cue numbers were “missing”) but we have learned since then that there were many more cues after what we thought was the “final” one. A friend of ours managed to access the original written scores, and even did a MIDI realization of the complete score. We hope to offer this as an exclusive on a future special Goldsmith Odyssey podcast with him as guest...so stay tuned!
Yavar
Do you think the full recordings of each are gathering dust in the CBS library someplace? It seems like it would have been a lot less work to give them the complete scores rather than selected cues...
Do you think the full recordings of each are gathering dust in the CBS library someplace? It seems like it would have been a lot less work to give them the complete scores rather than selected cues...
To be honest, I have no idea. I've heard from people in the know that even if something survives in the CBS library, it might not be findable, and their archives are fairly messy here and there. Lukas asked folks on this board to search through their catalogue years ago, and at the time he said that 85% of it was "itemized", but even that was probably just an estimate: https://filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=74044&forumID=1&archive=0
It's worth pointing out that "Jazz Theme #1" *exactly* matches up, performance wise, with the Man on the Beach score in-episode. So they did pull original tapes for that, for the album suite. I think it's entirely possible they opted to omit certain cues from that suite, for time reasons.
"Jazz Theme #2" is a different matter. As I said, we haven't yet been able to find a copy of the Studio One program "The Fair-Haired Boy" itself... but I *think* that show was done live, which means that the handful of cues we have as "Jazz Theme #2", plus the little extra bits W. David Lichty was able to salvage for us from Twilight Zone isolated score tracks...well, those were probably re-recordings done for library purposes after the original (live to actor's performance) performance -- similar to the two Playhouse 90 scores ("A Marriage of Strangers" and "Tomorrow") included in the Prometheus album Jerry Goldsmith - The Early Years Volume One. And due to complicated archiving details on the written music (found by our friend) which I won't go into here, I strongly suspect that only a fraction of the larger score was newly recorded for library music purposes. So...probably a *bit* more survives of that on in the CBS vaults (probably at least the full cues when here and there we only had fragments -- listen to the podcast for details), but the majority of it was never recorded music-only, really. Only performed live on set.
Now, as a jazz fan you may be interested in what is essentially a "Jazz Theme #3"...that is, it's never been released on album as such, but it's another jazzy late 50s Goldsmith score which we know made it into the CBS music library, because a few cues from it survived on Twilight Zone isolated score tracks since it was used a bit on that show. I am referring to yet another unsold pilot Jerry scored (from 1958, so it may have been the first such pilot Jerry scored and the first time he ever wrote a main theme for a TV series...although it didn't go to series): The Sergeant and the Lady. You can watch a little bit of it on YouTube here:
Now while unreleased on CD, in addition to some cues appearing in part on some Twilight Zone isolated score tracks, there were actually some *full* cues from this program that were released on TransWorld 78s, back in the 60s. More on those here: https://www.filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=115812
We didn't put out any of those cues on our podcast because frankly the sound quality from Ron's TransWorld transfer was terrible, on those in particular. There was more noise than music. But possibly someone else out there has a better-preserved set of TransWorlds with more of this commercially unreleased Goldsmith score. I'm going to hold out hope that tapes still survive in the CBS archives and can be released some day, perhaps with an expanded Man on the Beach and maybe some other early pilot scores we haven't been able to find from Jerry's CBS years, like World in White (featuring a proto-version of Dr. Kildare) and this enticingly-titled thing with Brian Keith: https://cinema.library.ucla.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=171&recCount=50&recPointer=204&bibId=125493
Thanks to all for your ongoing comments. Yavar - we finally got in touch, although I had to use my vast intelligence to complete the incomplete email address you provided.
Hi all and apologies for taking my time. I've got a couple of things on my plate which might take a while to sort out. So, nothing much to add, not having had time to watch the Gunsmoke episode or listen to any Odyssey(s).
Just to go over the trodden ground - Here's the digest of the music from Gunsmoke's "Love Thy Neighbor" -
The little bit that's REALLY like Boris Karloff's Thriller (and, I think particularly "Well of Doom") appears only once, from about the 6-min mark until 6:30, and behind dialogue. In TZ's "The Jeopardy Room", as highlighted in Lorien's post, it appears under the titles "The Killing" and "The Last Killing". I haven't been able to detect much difference, if any, between those cues in the episode, but it makes itself heard, largely without sound effects or (obtrusive) dialogue six or seven times.
Just so you know what bit I was on about, and why it really struck me in The Twilight Zone but probably wouldn't have in Gunsmoke.
Hope to get back in gear in a week or so. Be seeing you.
I've changed the heading of this thread, because it's spreading wildly outside of the jeopardy room. But firstly - Yavar, did you get my email sent yesterday? I see you've posted on other threads after I sent it. No big deal, but I just want to know that it's not lost in limbo.
So please bear with me all - I'm not sure how (or if) I'm going to organise all the following. I'll probably just do a random "man down the pub" rabbit. For starters, I managed to get around to watching the Gunsmoke episode "Love Thy Neighbor". I'd never seen any Gunsmokes before so I didn't know what to expect. Coming out of the blue like that I found it a particularly good piece of television, and looking back at Yavar's comments on it here it seems that it was indeed an unusually strong episode. I also made time (actually, I'm suffering from terrible insomnia these days, so I have 24 hours a day to do things, when I'm not zombified with tiredness) to listen to the Odyssey, the part anyway that deals with this particular episode. And yes, the piece I was talking about in relation to TZ's "The Jeopardy Room" (The Killing/ The Last Killing) is mentioned in the Gunsmoke podcast as sounding like something which wouldn't have been out of place in a Thriller episode. I said that! That was my point! Who was it who made that statement in the Odyssey? Was it Yavar? I think it might have actually been guest David (W. David Lichty AKA Lorien). Who's the guy that sounds a bit like Howard L? Howard, if you're looking in - who sounds like you? Anyway, as I said before, it's heard much more prominently in "The Jeopardy Room" than in Gunsmoke.
Thanks to the insomnia I also heard the second of the library cues Odysseys, and I now realise that I was missing a link in my thought processes when trying to determine the "inspiration" behind the cue "Silent Flight", heard in "The Jeopardy Room". I posted earlier that some of it had a kind of lonely "Leith Stevens in space" feel to it. Well, it still does (to me), but you Odyssey guys made me aware that it was actually clearly following the woozy theremin music from Rózsa's THE LOST WEEKEND. I also had said in the same post that other parts of that cue had a kind of skittery PSYCHO-ish string sound to it, like when Norman Bates is running back and forth between the house and the motel. Well, again it still does remind me of that, but I think that the Alfred Newman connection made in the podcast is more accurate. That clip from CAPTAIN FROM CASTILE made it quite clear.
I think I've said all I wanted to say about "The Jeopardy Room", although I can't guarantee that something else won't pop into my head about it before I finish here. But for now I'll move on to another piece covered in the second of the library cues Odysseys. Now here's a funny thing, and it's a bit of a mystery to me at the moment. In David's "Drama Spitball Suite", that section titled "Heartbreak"... it's just amazing. And I'd heard it somewhere before! I knew what notes were coming, because at some point in recent months I'd heard it somewhere and played it over and over. So when I heard it in the podcast I was going, "Jeez, what IS that?" My first thought was the Twilight Zone episode "In His Image", the first of the Season 4 hour-long episodes. But re-checking Dan Hollis' page, and even skimming quickly through some key moments on my DVD, it's not that. There ARE a lot of the "Autumn Love" cues, but no "Heartbreak". I think it was said in the Odyssey that "Heartbreak" was tracked into the very last Twilight Zone episode "The Bewitchin' Pool". Well, we can rule that one out because I haven't seen it yet. Anyone know what other TZ's this cue might have turned up in?
The following might be more at home on the Odyssey thread, but I'll put it here because it's another Twilight Zone comment. One thing that my retaking of the podcasts has done is to not only increase my appreciation of Jerry Goldsmith (even "rekindle" a dormant interest, as David said - I think...), but to drive home that there's SO MUCH detail in what one might call "run of the mill" TV, that repeated viewings bring out the best. There were so many nuances in that Gunsmoke episode (both the episode itself and the score) that I "could" watch it two or three more times. Strange that they were only ever "meant" to be watched once. Same with all TV/films I suppose. I wonder why composers, in fact all the crew, bothered to even be good.
Which leads me on to Twilight Zone's "The Encounter". Season 5, starring Neville Brand and George Takei. With The Twilight Zone I actually often do watch the episodes twice (unless they're really annoying ones), and I tend to get much more out of them on the second viewing. I could probably spend the rest of my life just watching and rewatching The Twilight Zone. "The Encounter" is an interesting episode which was apparently contoversial enough for it not to make it to syncication. I didn't quite "get" it, and that's one of the reasons I should watch it again. Apart from the story (I always had a kind of "plot dyslexia" anyway, which means that I often miss the plot details), this has two terrific performances, with some great sparring dialogues in what is essentially a two-man show, like HELL IN THE PACIFIC. Brand is hypnotically great, and Takei was never this good in all his years on Star Trek. Oh and the music! Terrific tracking of Herrmann (I must investigate that "Moat Murders" thing) and Fred Steiner, but also a lot of use of Tak Shindo's "In a Japanese Temple". Coincidentally, Shindo was (apparently) music director for Gunsmoke (?). Even more ironic (or perhaps it was deliberate) is that Tak Shindo himself was "incarcerated" at the Manzanar Relocating Center as part of the WWII Japanese American Internment policy (if "The Computer" can be believed). I'm going to watch this episode again. When will I get around to listening to Miklos Rózsa's JULIUS CAESAR? And I have to finish painting the ceiling. All the time in the world... If only.
AND FINALLY (Oh thank the Lord), while we're "in" The Twilight Zone... This is something I asked before, and probably got an answer, but since I can't remember I'll ask again. Wilfred Josephs' name keeps appearing on the Dan Hollis cues site for a piece called "Six Undertones". It's apparently in dozens of episodes. Now, I don't know much about Wilfred Josephs' life or career, but what I do know doesn't really coincide timewise or continent-wise . How did his music end up in The Twilight Zone?
... In David's "Drama Spitball Suite", that section titled "Heartbreak"... it's just amazing. And I'd heard it somewhere before! I knew what notes were coming, because at some point in recent months I'd heard it somewhere and played it over and over. So when I heard it in the podcast I was going, "Jeez, what IS that?" My first thought was the Twilight Zone episode "In His Image", the first of the Season 4 hour-long episodes. But re-checking Dan Hollis' page, and even skimming quickly through some key moments on my DVD, it's not that. There ARE a lot of the "Autumn Love" cues, but no "Heartbreak". I think it was said in the Odyssey that "Heartbreak" was tracked into the very last Twilight Zone episode "The Bewitchin' Pool". Well, we can rule that one out because I haven't seen it yet. Anyone know what other TZ's this cue might have turned up in?
Try these:
"A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain" at ~11:31 "Death Ship" (why don’t I know where? Ah!) ~13:26! "Incredible World of Horace Ford" at ~46:20 "Ring-a-Ding Girl" at ~21:21
All this talk about "Silent Flight" and I didn't need to go and listen to it as the mind's ear got it right several posts ago: Same as heard in "The Odyssey of Flight 33." As for The Lost Weekend reference: The theremin cue along with the rest of the Rozsa score are also indelibly stamped in the mind's ear and I hear nothing related to it in TJR.
But Graham old potato, ya want a a TZ-Goldsmith state of mind? Come on in, the water's fine!
>> "With The Twilight Zone I actually often do watch the episodes twice (unless they're really annoying ones), and I tend to get much more out of them on the second viewing. I could probably spend the rest of my life just watching and rewatching The Twilight Zone.
Wouldn't that be a Twilight Zone episode in and of itself? Witness a man who watches every episode of the same show over and over...He has just entered the Twilight Zone.
