Listening to Stanley Kubrick (8 page)

25. The magician Sydney refers to is Prospero, from Shakespeare’s
The Tempest.
In this play, Prospero and his daughter Miranda are exiled on a remote island. Prospero uses his magic to create a storm that will bring his brother Antonio, who has usurped the throne from Prospero, to the island, along with Antonio’s allies.

26. William Shakespeare,
The Tempest,
act 1, sc. 2.

27. In pieces like Richard Strauss’s tone poem
Death and Transfiguration
, the gong symbolizes the moment of death. In his
Treatise on Instrumentation
, Hector Berlioz states, “The gong or tamtam is used only in compositions of a mournful character or in dramatic scenes of the utmost horror.” Hector Berlioz and Richard Strauss,
Treatise on Instrumentation,
trans. Theodore Front (New York: Dover Publications, 1991), 395.

28. Irene Thirer, “Screen View,”
New York Post
, March 27, 1953, 58.

29. Samuel L. Singer, “24-Year-Old Is ‘Factotum’ of New Film,”
Philadelphia Inquirer
, Sunday Morning, July 26, 1953, 16.

30. Interview with Joseph Gelmis, “The Film Director as Superstar,”
The Kubrick Site
,
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0069.html
.

31. Bernd Schultheis, “Expanse of Possibilities: Stanley Kubrick’s Soundtracks in Notes,”
Stanley Kubrick Catalogue
, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 2007), 267.

32. Copyright 1954, King’s Crown Music.

33. Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill, “Gerald Fried,” in
Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick
(New York: Checkmark Books, 2002), 125.

34. Iris was played by Ruth Sobotka, Kubrick’s wife at the time. She was a professional dancer.

35. Quoted in Phillips and Hill,
Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick
, 126.

36. Rainer Crone,
Stanley Kubrick Drama and Shadows: Photographs 1945–1950
(London: Phaidon, 2005), 132.

37. Schultheis, “Expanse of Possibilities,” 267.

38. “Interview with Gerald Fried,”
Archive of American Television
,
http://emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/gerald-fried
.

39. Schultheis, “Expanse of Possibilities,” 267.

40. In some versions of the film,
La Marseillaise
was replaced by a percussion track. Because it was viewed as being a negative portrayal of the French military, the film stirred up controversy in France and some of its allied countries.

41. Translation mine.

42. Gerrit Bodde,
Die Musik in den Filmen von Stanley Kubrick
(Osnabrück: Der Andere Verlag, 2002), 37. Translation mine.

43. “Interview with Gerald Fried,”
Archive of American Television
.

44. “Interview with Gerald Fried,”
Archive of American Television.

45. Quoted in Caryl Flinn,
Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 37.

46. Michel Ciment,
Kubrick: The Definitive Edition
, trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Faber and Faber, 1999), 177.

47. In this episode of
Star Trek
, which is the first episode of season two, Spock must return to his home planet of Vulcan to marry his berothed, T’Pring. In love with another man, she chooses kal-if-fee, a fight to the death between Spock and—instead of her lover—Captain Kirk. Fried scored the whole episode, but his battle music is the most famous portion.

48. The music has been in many instances but is notable in the film
The Cable Guy
(1996) and the television show
Futurama
. In both cases, the music was associated with battles.

Chapter Two

Love Themes, Leitmotifs, and Pop Music

Spartacus
,
Lolita
,
Dr. Strangelove
, and
Full Metal Jacket

The four films covered in this chapter
encompass a number of different scoring techniques. The score for
Spartacus
(1960) was written by a single composer in response to the narrative of the film and the requests of the director.
Lolita
(1962) combines newly written underscore with orchestral arrangements of a preexistent tune as the musical centerpiece.
Dr. Strangelove
(1964) features two preexistent popular tunes used in ironic contexts and varied orchestrations of a military song.
Full Metal Jacket
(1987)—made more than two decades later than
Dr. Strangelove
—uses a similar template of minimal new underscore and the ironic use of preexistent tunes. In the intervening years between
Dr. Strangelove
and
Full Metal Jacket
, Kubrick changed the way he scored his films, using a new paradigm of preexistent and contemporary art music.
2001: A Space Odyssey
,
A Clockwork Orange
,
Barry Lyndon
,
The Shining
, and indeed his last film,
Eyes Wide Shut
, were part of this new paradigm. Each of these films will be discussed at length in the following chapters.

After the artistic, if not financial, triumph of
Paths of Glory
, Kubrick and his producing partner, James Harris, were looking for a new project. Marlon Brando was interested in working with Kubrick on a western loosely based on the life of Billy the Kid. It was while Kubrick worked on Brando’s screenplay for the western that Vladimir Nabokov’s novel
Lolita
was published in the U.S. Although Kubrick and Harris were both excited about adapting the novel for the screen, Kubrick was committed to the Billy the Kid project, so while he worked on that, Harris attempted to buy the rights to
Lolita
. Kubrick and Brando were both strong creative personalities, and their collaboration was difficult. There are conflicting reports of exactly how Kubrick left the film, later called
One-Eyed Jacks
, but in the end, Kubrick moved on and Brando directed the film himself.

Meanwhile, Kirk Douglas was preparing to bring
Spartacus
to the screen. Douglas, both producer and star, encountered plenty of problems on the way, everything from a similar competing project (
The Gladiators
) to an unusable screenplay to a difficult hunt for a leading lady. The studio funding the film, Universal, wanted Anthony Mann to direct even though Douglas had misgivings. Mann was known for his westerns, and it was his talent for filming outside that Universal felt would serve him well on
Spartacus
. Mann directed the opening section, in which Romans choose slaves for their gladiator schools, but in the sections that followed, Kirk Douglas found that he wasn’t satisfied with Mann’s work. Douglas fired Mann and suggested Kubrick (with whom he had recently made
Paths of Glory
) for the job. One weekend after Mann’s last day, Kubrick began directing
Spartacus.
He reportedly filmed a scene on Monday and then spent the rest of the week rehearsing with the actors.
1

Spartacus

Some scholars have omitted
Spartacus
from discourse of Kubrick’s work since it was not a project he developed himself. James Naremore has said of the film that it “has very few moments when one can sense [Kubrick’s] directorial personality.”
2
Kubrick distanced himself from the film as well, painting himself as someone at odds with the material. In one of his lengthy interviews with Michel Ciment, Kubrick said of
Spartacus
, “I was up against a pretty dumb script which was rarely faithful to what is known about Spartacus.”
3
Kubrick fought for changes in the script, although he wasn’t satisfied with reactions to his input. In a 1973 interview, Kubrick said: “When Kirk offered me the job of directing
Spartacus
, I thought that I might be able to make something of it if the script could be changed. But my experience proved that if it is not explicitly stated in the contract that your decisions will be respected, there’s a very good chance that they won’t be.”
4

One aspect of the filmmaking in which Kubrick had more of a say was the music. Kirk Douglas had engaged Alex North to write the score in pre-production, and North worked on it over the course of filming, which was an especially long time. Usually, film composers are given perhaps three months to complete a score, but according to North biographer Sanya Henderson, Douglas allowed North more than a year to complete the music. This not only allowed North to research ancient Roman music, but also gave him the opportunity to work out the themes in great detail and collaborate with Kubrick.
5

When production on
Spartacus
began, North was an up-and-coming composer. Previous to his work on
Spartacus
, North had written some uncredited stock music, music for television, like the theme for the Playhouse 90 anthology television series, and some film scores. Among them were the score to
Death of a Salesman
(1951) and
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1951), both for director Elia Kazan.
6
He also wrote the scores for the westerns
The Wonderful Country
(1959), starring Robert Mitchum, and
The King and Four Queens
(1956) starring Clark Gable.
7
After
Spartacus
, North began to write for more high-profile pictures, including another epic,
Cleopatra
(1963),
The Misfits
(1961) with Marilyn Monroe, and
The Agony and the Ecstasy
(1965).

Because the production time was so long, Kubrick interacted with North over the course of filming. Alex North’s biographer describes their connection as “a deep, mutual understanding.”
8
To aid Kubrick during production, North reportedly arranged a temporary track of his music using two pianos and two percussion instruments.
9
This allowed Kubrick to get a sense of the musical score as it was being written. In addition, Kubrick encouraged North to listen to Prokofiev’s score to
Alexander Nevsky
, and within that recommendation, there was the unspoken understanding that brass passages would accompany ceremony and violence, while strings would underscore love scenes.
10

Kubrick provided to Alex North a list of places where he thought there should be music, and he described to North what he thought should be there. Under the heading of “Reel IX and Reel XI,” for example, Kubrick lists the following events in the film with corresponding musical ideas:
11

Reel IX

Empty arena – NIGHT LOVE THEME

DRABA HANGING BROODING THEME

KITCHEN—GLADIATORS ENTER—MUSIC OUT

LS ESCAPING UPHILL—HEROIC THEME

Reel XI

GLABRUS—NO MUSIC

OYSTERS AND SNAILS—EXOTIC, SHIMMERING MUSIC

In addition to these musical guidelines, six months later, Kubrick made a list of “musical sweeteners,” which are musical additions to cues that have already been written (for example, an additional musical line added to a recorded cue). Once again, they’re organized by reel. Reel 7, for example, needed three sweeteners:

1. Sweetener after Kirk’s fall in Draba fight.

2. Sweetener for night brooding sequence.

3. New music cue for breakout starting with Kirk’s lunge at Marcellus.
12

Music played an important role on set. Both Kubrick and Douglas knew that directors of silent movies would play appropriately emotional music for the actors to help them get into character or to set the mood. In
Spartacus
, Kubrick decided to use the technique for scenes that were shot without sound (sound to be added later), and it proved to be very effective.
13
This is the first time it’s mentioned that Kubrick used music on set to inspire the actors, but it would not be the last.

North was excited about the challenge of the project. It was certainly a bigger film than anything he had worked on before, a multimillion-dollar epic, and North wanted to do his very best. In addition to researching ancient music, North investigated different kinds of instruments to use on the score. The subject matter of the film, and the skill of the players in the orchestra, gave North free rein to experiment with both “exotic ethnic instruments, and various unusual combinations of instrumental groups within a large symphonic orchestra.”
14

North’s score for
Spartacus
was massive. The film itself was more than three hours long, and North’s music was present for more than two-thirds of the screen time. Norman Kagan reasoned that the film valued action over dialogue. This leaves much of the dramatic weight on the physical characteristics of the actors—their facial expressions and bodily movements—and on the music.
15
The official cue sheet for the film has more than seventy musical cues over twenty-six reels.
16
In her biography of Alex North, Sanya Henderson provides a detailed analysis of the score to
Spartacus
, outlining a number of musical phrases that take on meaning and are repeated throughout the film. The technique is the use of what are called leitmotifs.

The concept of the leitmotif was born in the Romantic period in music (roughly corresponding with the nineteenth century). Any music that has no text, but aims to relate a narrative or some nonmusical idea is called programmatic. A number of composers in the Romantic period began assigning extra-musical meaning to their compositions and specifically to musical phrases. In 1830, French composer Hector Berlioz wrote a programmatic, five-movement symphony about a man who falls in love with a woman. The object of affection was musically represented by the
idée fixe
, a melody that would appear whenever the main character encountered her or even thought of her in the course of the narrative. Opera composers of the late Classical and early Romantic periods would use what are called “reminiscence motifs,” musical melodies that represented characters, emotions, or events and could create connections among them within the drama. The reminiscence motifs often appeared unchanged and were not often used extensively throughout an entire work.

German opera composer Richard Wagner, however, extensively used leitmotifs. Although Wagner himself did not use the term, it is most closely associated with his operas. A leitmotif in a Wagner opera could represent something abstract like love, or something concrete, like a sword. Leitmotifs included everything from characters to emotions, and Wagner’s use of them was all-encompassing; one opera might contain dozens and dozens of leitmotifs.
17
In contrast to reminiscence motifs, leitmotifs may form a system that can reach over multiple works. In Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a set of four operas that tells a single complex narrative, the composer uses leitmotifs that retain their meaning throughout all four operas. There is a web of leitmotifs shared among these works that is both complicated and subtle. The orchestral appearance of many leitmotifs in a single scene might musically paint an intricate picture of what is going on in the story.

Leitmotifs emerge in the orchestra, rather than in the sung parts, and they often reveal the true thoughts or feelings of the characters onstage. They might reveal subtext that is different from what was being sung. The fact that these musical ideas conveyed ideas beyond the words made them ideally suited for film. Leitmotifs might easily lead the audience into associations or emotions to help the narrative move forward.

Leitmotifs in film can refer to emotions or objects, but often musical themes are there to identify specific characters. Many of the early film composers used the technique, and indeed the idea of what film music scholar Mervyn Cooke calls “codified scoring practices based on the economic variation of recognizable themes according to dramatic context” had been in place since the 1920s.
18
Although leitmotifs were used by composers like Max Steiner and Erich Korngold, their use was by no means universally praised and accepted. Outspoken critics of film music like Theodor Adorno and Hans Eisler, for example, deplored the use of these musical signals, which, they complained, were rather simplistic and repetitive and not at all creative. They also argued that a film score provided an inadequate amount of music in which to explore a musical leitmotif; its meaning could never be developed beyond the very rudimentary recognition of a character or emotion. Film scores must serve the visual narrative and therefore have cuts and interruptions that don’t allow the composer the necessary continuity to explore the themes.
19

Despite the complaints of Adorno, Eisler, and others, the leitmotif technique has survived into the present day. Perhaps the most successful film composer of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century who used the leitmotif technique is John Williams. Like Wagner before him, Williams extended a system of leitmotifs beyond a single work. Williams’ scores to the six films of the
Star Wars
series and his scores to the first three
Harry Potter
films each use a system of musical gestures that develop throughout, while retaining the same basic meaning in all of the movies.

North’s use of the leitmotif technique in
Spartacus
was particularly effective, since it allowed the audience to recognize—within North’s wall-to-wall score—certain important musical gestures. The character of Spartacus has a theme, as do the slaves. Spartacus’s love interest, Varinia, also has her own theme. North not only wrote different melodies for these themes but chose different instrumentation based on the context of the scene. The orchestra at North’s disposal had almost ninety pieces, including some unusual instruments North thought would enhance the sound of the cues.
20
He was also aware of the emotional associations of certain instrumentation.