On the television monitors inside the Paramount Pictures recording studio, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise is squared off against an evil Son’a leader named Ru’afo, whose major crime appears to be that he doesn’t want to grow old.
“These movies basically are about goodness, and even the villains aren’t all that bad,” suggests Academy Award-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith, who today is adding the final touches to the score of “Star Trek: Insurrection.” “The villain in this picture just wanted to live forever, and who wouldn’t? He just went about it the wrong way.”
As he approaches his 70th birthday in February, the pony-tailed Goldsmith seems to have found a Fountain of Youth of his own, and he isn’t going to begrudge Ru’afo an attempt to find eternal life on the Briar Patch planet of Ba’ku. That task falls to the crew of the Enterprise, who must prevent the forced eviction of the peaceful Ba’ku people–including Picard’s new beautiful and brainy 350-year-old sweetheart–from their idyllic home.
“Star Trek: Insurrection” is the ninth installment of Paramount’s highly lucrative film series. Goldsmith has contributed three previous scores, including those for “Star Trek: The Final Frontier,” “Star Trek: First Contact” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” for which he was nominated for an Oscar. (In 1995, he won an Emmy for his theme to UPN’s “Star Trek: Voyager.”)
Today, only three weeks before the release date for the picture (it opens this Friday), he’s putting a 96-piece orchestra through its final paces, reworking the music to be heard during the film’s final explosive confrontation between Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Ru’afo (F. Murray Abraham) on the bridge of the Son’a spacecraft. The ending recently was changed to juice up the special effects, and producer Rick Berman and director-star Jonathan Frakes are on hand to supervise the session.
Goldsmith is bouncing between the podium and the mixing room, where a dozen people are monitoring the digital playback equipment to determine if the soaring soundtrack is obscuring the sound of explosions on one of the spacecraft. It is, but ever so slightly.
Still, the conductor returns resolutely to the auditorium, raises his baton and asks his orchestra for a bit of a tweak in volume and tempo. That accomplished, the musicians are released and Goldsmith is saluted with a hearty round of applause.
“I’ve been working with some of these musicians for 40 years, and I’ve developed a relationship with them,” he said later, responding to the ovation. “You can be cynical and say, `They’re just being nice to you because they want to protect their jobs.’ But that’s not true.
“They’re certainly not going to be rude to you, but there’s a certain indifference that comes when they’re bored or annoyed. They can’t conceal it.”
In fact, Goldsmith’s popularity is such that he is being feted on his landmark birthday by the musicians in the orchestra. In this town–where stars and working stiffs seldom mingle socially–that kind of gesture is unique.
“Writing the music is 50 percent of it,” emphasizes the Los Angeles native, over lunch in the studio commissary. “If you can’t get it performed right, then you’re cooked. It’s the musicians’ skill and artistry that makes it all happen, and we really need them.
“This group out here is wonderful because they never see the music until the morning they walk in. I finished writing the music we did today at about 10 a.m. yesterday, but, by the time it got orchestrated and copied, it was sometime last night.”
It helps that composers and transcribers now can rely on advanced technology to speed up the sometimes exhaustive process.
“You noticed the instance where there was an explosion and we didn’t want to cover it with music,” he said. “We were able to manipulate that because we have a computer that figures out the timing now. The music editor tells the computer where I want to be–at such-and-such a bar–and it tells me what the tempo should be, and if I need to take out some beats to make up the time.
“It takes five minutes. Years ago, the copyists would have to come in, and the orchestra would have to return next day to perform the music.”
Goldsmith still does most of his work by hand, or at the piano, the way he did when started writing music for film in 1956, for the otherwise forgettable “Black Patch.” Since then, his vision has been shared in more than 175 films, including such disparate titles as “Lonely Are the Brave,” “The Sand Pebbles,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Patton,” “Papillon,” “Chinatown,” “The Omen,” “Alien,” “Hoosiers,” “Basic Instinct,” “L.A. Confidential” and “Mulan.”
His music has been performed by orchestras around the world–most recently in Spain and Japan–and it has inspired three ballets. He is in constant demand as a guest conductor and, this year, is a Regents’ Lecturer in the Department of Music at UCLA.
He finds the growing acceptance of film scores by symphony orchestras and audiences encouraging.
“I’ve always been billed on the pop series, and, usually, the musicians hate those things, because they’re mostly playing vocal arrangements and they sit there without having much to do,” says Goldsmith, who began studying with Jakob Gimpel and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, then learned to score for television and radio from Miklos Rosza (“Spellbound”) at USC. “When I come in, though, they open the book and they’ve got all this stuff to play. It’s a shock to them.
“I’ve found that orchestras rather enjoy playing music from films, because it’s a nice diversion from Beethoven and Mozart. It gives them a chance to do a little bit more, especially the brass. They go nuts for it.”
The musicians also realize that this kind of music helps fill seats, and, once movie fans are drawn into the world of orchestral music, they often come back for more.
In Hollywood, when business is booming, classically trained musicians are in almost constant demand and they can make a very good living. Even though studios are injecting more and more pop tunes into their pictures, original scores remain an important part of the filmmaking process, and there’s a growing audience out there for soundtrack albums. (An expanded “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” 20th anniversary CD is expected this winter, as well as an “Insurrection” album.)
While Goldsmith is pleased to note that the major studios are willing to commission more music for their pictures and hire larger orchestras than they did in the ’60s and ’70s–largely because of the marketability of soundtrack CDs–he voices concern over the inability of filmmakers to decide when to say, “The End.” Composers can’t begin their work until they see what’s on the screen.
“If you’re lucky, you have five weeks to compose 60 to 70 minutes of music,” he points out. “Thirty years ago, you’d get 10 weeks to produce 40 to 50 minutes of music.
He tries to avoid working on films that are saturated with pop songs, although he understands the desire of studio executives to re-create the success of pictures like “Sleepless in Seattle,” which sold 2 million soundtrack albums and reintroduced Louis Armstrong to the masses. (Recently, “Mulan” brought Goldsmith his first gold record, and “Frontiers”–which focused on his sci-fi themes–also was well received.)
“I haven’t been asked to do that kind of picture,” he says. “The most I’ve had to deal with was in `L.A. Confidential.’ There was a very valid reason for those songs, because they told a story. Curtis (Hanson) was establishing the period and making an observation, which I agreed with.
“But, I loved `Sleepless in Seattle,’ although I’m sure an original score might have been just as effective.”
This month, Goldsmith will visit Japan and Britain, where he’ll also work on the score for “The Mummy.” Next year, he has a big gig scheduled at the Hollywood Bowl, with the L.A. Philharmonic, and he’s also doing the music for “The Haunting of Hill House” and “The 13th Warrior.”
Goldsmith, whose long white hair contrasts starkly with his all-black outfit, is philosophic about turning 70.
“A large part of being good is being experienced, and I couldn’t have 40 years of experience if I was 23, so it’s rather exciting,” he concludes. “The challenge still is to write a good, original piece of music. There have been some ups and downs, but I’m a very lucky person.
“At 12, I decided I wanted to be a composer, and, at 14, I decided I wanted write music for movies. That’s what I’m still doing.”
