As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again.
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Whether audiences notice it or not,
music is the invisible heartbeat of a movie.
It's in a pulse, the way to manipulate emotion.
This is the story of a key figure
who, more than anyone else,
shaped the art of scoring for motion pictures.
Who was he? This man who worked on over 300 film scores
and who literally became the sound of Hollywood
in its early years.
Maximilian Raoul Steiner has become recognized
as the person who not only captured the essence of his art
in every score that he wrote,
but who was the very first one to do it.
Steiner is the individual
who seemed to convince all of Hollywood
that films needed scoring.
Without realizing it,
Max Steiner was building an art form from the ground up.
Max Steiner was a maverick,
a true pioneer who gave Hollywood
one of its most enduring legacies.
To trace the origins of the Hollywood sound,
we have to travel back to another time and place--
Vienna.
This was once the capital of the Hapsburg Empire.
Aristocrats at the Imperial Court
created an environment in which the arts thrived.
Many composers lived or were attracted here.
Operas, operettas, and romantic music
filled concert halls.
The city was not only the home of the waltz,
but the undisputed center
of immortal European classical music.
No other place on earth was like Vienna.
It was against this background that a local family
by the name of Steiner would unknowingly influence
the genesis of film scoring in Hollywood in years to come.
You might call the Steiners as a show business family,
starting with grandfather Steiner,
who owned and ran the famous Theater an der Wien,
which was standing at the time of Mozart
where he performed "The Magic Flute."
It was grandfather Maximilian Steiner,
who persuaded the waltz King Johann Strauss Jr.
to bring his formidable talents to the theater
with the operetta "Die Fledermaus."
Steiner was decorated by many of the Royal Houses of Europe.
After a serious illness, he passed away in 1880.
He was laid to rest beside his beloved wife, Rosa,
in the central cemetery.
Eventually, his son Gabor,
took over the running of the Theater an der Wien
In 1882, he became engaged to actress Mari,
better known as Mitzi Holman, a Catholic.
She converted to Judaism and the couple was married
at the local synagogue.
On May 10, 1888, their son,
Maximilian Raoul Steiner, was born.
The family made their home in a suite in this hotel.
Here, the young Max spent his childhood.
His parents loved him dearly.
They gave him the finest education
and saw to his every need.
He grew up rubbing shoulders
with the best of Viennese society.
As a small boy, I loved Johann Strauss.
On my eighth birthday, he gave me a giraffe piano,
a sort of harpsichord with pedals.
I often improvised at the piano
with more modern music of my own.
Papa would always encourage me by saying write it down.
Despite a privileged lifestyle, Austrian Jews
experienced the scourge of anti-semitism.
It prevented many talented people
from holding public office.
Like other prominent members of the community,
Gabor Steiner had little option
but to renounce his faith and convert to Christianity.
Together with a 6-year-old Max,
father and son were baptized in the Gustav Adolf Church.
For the rest of his life,
Max Steiner would never discuss his Jewish roots.
From a very young age, his talents began to show.
He started to compose.
When he was 9, he had his first song published,
no doubt, through the influential contacts
of his father.
During his teens, he became a very capable musician.
He composed songs and matches for his school band.
In 1906, he accompanied his parents to London.
At the Imperial Royal Austrian Exhibition in Earls Court,
he conducted a waltz that he had composed.
At 16, he attended classes to further his musical studies.
I went to the Academy of Vienna.
I made the three years that were required for composition harmony
in choir work and choral work.
Won the gold medal.
He wrote his first operetta
"Die Schone Griechin," the beautiful Greek girl.
It premiered at one of his father's theaters
when he was 19.
That led to offers to conduct in Russia and later in England.
But while growing up, it was one man who,
more than any other,
would pave the way for him to explore his talents--
his very own father.
Gabor Steiner was a visionary.
His dream was to create a theme park similar
to a Disneyland of today.
He called it Venedig in Wien,
Venice in Vienna.
In 1894, Gabor Steiner leased what was known
as the English Garden in the city
and set about replicating the city of Venice on the property.
An arena for 2,000 people was booked
for staging operettas and concerts-- Franz Lehár,
John Philip Sousa, and even the great Richard Strauss
were among the celebrities who performed there.
He imported Thomas Edison's latest invention
from the United States.
It was called a kinetoscope parlor
where audiences could enjoy viewing moving images.
The park opened in May 1896 with huge crowds attending.
The Emperor Franz Josef also put in an appearance.
The place became Vienna's main summer attraction.
Every spectrum of Viennese society flocked to the park.
It was an extraordinary place.
Nowhere else in the world was there anything quite like it.
My father was a protégé of the Emperor Franz Josef,
who conferred upon him the Order of Franz Josef.
This was the highest honor possible
for a civilian to attain.
From his early childhood,
the young Max recognized what appealed to audiences.
He understood the public.
He conducted at the park, wrote songs,
and sought acts that would perform
nightly at its theaters.
He studied scores, observed conductors,
and arranged music all to considerable acclaim.
But Steiner's father, Gabor's good fortunes, were not to last.
By 1907, he had run into financial difficulties.
Days of adverse weather
caused visitors to avoid the Venedig in Wien.
It was not easy for me to find a job in Vienna
after my father's financial fiasco,
so I decided to go to England.
By 1909, Steiner moved to London.
There, he sought employment as a composer and conductor.
He found both success and romance
and married British variety artist Beatrice Tilt.
But in 1912, pressured by his father,
Steiner returned to Vienna to help run the Ronacher Theatre.
Difficulties mounted and unpaid bills led to bankruptcy.
Steiner gave up on Vienna and returned to London.
He found work in musical theater and vaudeville
as an orchestral conductor at West End venues.
I was one of the best known conductors
there was in Paris,
Shift Orchestra at the Alhambra,
and the Tivoli in Copenhagen,
...in Hamburg.
In South Africa, Joberg and Cape Town,
with the operetta company.
He was well-received everywhere.
But other forces were at play
that would forever change the course of his career.
With the outbreak of World War I
and fearful of arrest as an enemy alien
due to his Austrian background,
Steiner was forced to leave England.
With help from friends,
he obtained a passport and booked passage
on the SS Lackland from Liverpool to America.
He arrived in New York City on November 7, 1914.
He had $32 in his wallet.
Wandering along Broadway's great white way,
he was totally oblivious of the fact
that his real future lay far to the West.
After his arrival in 1914,
Max Steiner walked the streets of New York in search of work,
but finding gigs proved difficult.
He had few contacts and was not a union member.
After a few menial jobs,
he took work as a copyist in a music publishing house.
This led to assignments orchestrating stage music.
Steiner's talents quickly caught the attention
of theatrical entrepreneur Sam "Roxy" Rothafel.
He offered Steiner an opportunity to conduct
in a venue completely new to him-- a movie theater.
Film music began before the sound era
because silent films were never actually silent.
They were always accompanied by music, were always intended
to be accompanied by music.
These small cinemas, let's say 1910,
1911, would have been, a lot of them
would have been makeshift.
They call them shooting galleries.
They would have been storefronts such as in New York,
which would have been hollowed out and narrow and long.
And you put a screen at one end, usually have a hand-crank
projector in the middle or the back of the room.
There were no booths, really, then in those days,
and sometimes you had to play with the strength of Hercules
on a piano to get the sound to the back of the theater.
To drown out the noise of the projector and the fans,
people started using mechanical pianos,
orchestrions, just a hand-played piano,
small combination orchestras in combos as they could afford.
Well, the music was put there to serve the picture,
and the music was selected to serve the picture.
It was a burgeoning art form which attracted
a lot of composers.
Music cues were composed as an aid to musicians
accompanying films.
The music was generic.
Usually three to five minutes long,
but they served the need of the stories on the screen.
There was great demand for these cues.
By 1912, Sam Fox published the first folio of film music.
It contained a variety of moods
and themes intended to enhance the action in the movie.
As theaters grew in size, audiences grew in size.
The problem for the music was a simple piano
could not get the horses through the pass
at the back of the theater.
Wind...
Enter American Photo Player.
These were wonderful machines.
They were extremely popular,
and they were used primarily in Nickelodeon theaters
because they were inexpensive to run.
All you had to do was hire someone
that had an ear for music, a piano teacher.
Usually it was women that knew how to drop rolls
from the library.
You could go down to the music store
and buy a roll for 10, 25 cents.
Voilà. You had music. You had free, cheap music.
Theaters were growing, popularity was growing.
Beginning about 1914, 1915,
now we were getting the movie palaces
were starting to come in.
They're using orchestras.
These little theaters couldn't afford orchestras,
but they were still big enough so a pipe organ could be used,
and a Wurlitzer 1914, a Hope-John's console.
They came up with an ingenious design where you had one person
could play like a full orchestra on this magnificent pipe organ.
To play a Wurlitzer organ for a silent film
was almost as good as having a full orchestra
and if you were fortunate to live in a big city
where they had a big Wurlitzer organ,
you really got your money's worth.
The art of the music
and the science of photo players,
theater organs and mechanical machinery now reproducing
that beautiful music that gave silent film a new dimension,
a new voice.
In 1915, one man completely changed the movie
going experience.
He was David Wark Griffith.
The release of his "Birth of a Nation"
was a watershed in film history.
The score was a compilation of classical music,
folk songs, and music especially composed for the film.
And that was a major milestone for music
because that was a full symphony orchestra
and it had a dynamic sound,
and the film played for three hours.
"The Birth of a Nation" was promoted
as a spectacular road show.
In some of the advertising,
they call it the Eighth Wonder of the World.
After "The Birth of a Nation,"
everyone understood the importance of music
on a grand scale.
No one grasped this more astutely than legendary
New York showman "Roxy" Rothafel.
He introduced large live orchestras
to the cinematic experience.
Audiences often came to screenings to hear the music
just as much as they came to see the film.
It was really about rating the classics.
A little Tchaikovsky, a little Brahms,
a little Beethoven, a little Wagner.
This was the sort of compilation score time.
So there was very little original music.
It was not about this music,
particularly serving the needs of that picture.
It was simply the grand experience itself,
that of hearing a large symphony orchestra in a setting
like a fabulous movie palace.
And that's what thrilled people.
Movie theaters, which supported the use of an orchestra,
usually had the orchestra play for the premium showings,
which were in the evening, and the photo players
and pianist and organist played at all the other times.
Steiner became musical director in charge
of a 40-piece nonunion orchestra for Roxy Rothafel
in one of movie mogul Sam Fox's theaters.
He quickly adapted to the new environment.
In those silent days,
we played printed music and merely made
an attempt to fit it to the action as best we could.
But accompanying movies
was a mere novelty to Steiner.
His first love remained live theater.
Eventually, he found work on the Great White Way,
and in 1916, he became a conductor.
When I left my home in Austria as a very young man,
it was the Viennese operetta
that ruled the entertainment world.
Now, in the new world, I was to be in
on the formative years of the American musical comedy.
Between 1919 and 1930,
there was a sea change in American popular music.
We went from essentially operetta to jazz,
and the "George White's Scandals" of 1922
was probably the first show that he worked on,
in which there was real jazz in the score.
And Steiner conducted...
♪ I'll build a stairway to paradise ♪
which was one of the song hits that came
from the "George White's Scandals"
he orchestrated for the show "Lady Be Good,"
which included "Fascinating Rhythm"
and the title song "Lady Be Good,"
"The Man I Love."
He worked with many different composers,
including George Gershwin, Sigmund Romberg,
Vincent Youmans, Jerome Kern.
So he was top of the heap, as we say.
Steiner had to learn as the conductor of musicals
how to conduct a pit orchestra without overwhelming
the voices of singers in a pre microphone age.
You have in "Lady Be Good" a star like Fred Astaire,
who certainly had a very fine voice
and was a theatrical performer, but it wasn't a powerful voice.
And so, in supervising the orchestrations
and often creating the orchestrations himself,
he had to learn how to balance the colors of the orchestra,
not to mention simply the volume.
He was working alongside
all the most important musical luminaries of the time
who were the architects of the Broadway musical.
And so he had to orchestrate in every conceivable style.
And he also conducted, opening night only, "Blue Monday"
an operetta written by George Gershwin
that was the precursor to "Porgy and Bess."
The only show I did as a composer in those days
was a musical comedy entitled "Peaches."
The show was no good and never played New York at all.
But as soon as I was able, I brought my wife,
Beatrice, and her mother to America.
Unhappily, our marriage was not to last too many more years.
By the middle of the 1920s,
motion pictures had reached a new level of sophistication.
But many issues remained to be solved.
A constant challenge was how to synchronize the picture
with the sound to ensure consistency of playback
between one venue and another?
Major progress was eventually achieved when Warner Brothers
entered into an agreement with Western Electric
for the development of what was called the Vitaphone system.
Sound was recorded on a 16-inch disc,
played back on a turntable,
mechanically interlocked with a projector.
The intention was to maintain the synchronicity
between picture and sound.
In 1926, Warner Brothers releases "Don Juan"
starring John Barrymore.
And everybody goes to see it because
it's a Vitaphone film.
The actual feature was not dialog at all,
but it had this beautiful orchestral score
with sound effects.
A 1927, Warner Brothers released
another Vitaphone film
that would revolutionize motion pictures.
"The Jazz Singer" was the first time audiences
could hear the human voice synchronized to the picture.
It featured popular vaudeville star Al Jolson.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain't heard nothing yet.
The film was a sensation.
The so-called talkies had arrived.
But the sound was still recorded on discs.
It was a cumbersome process with severe limitations.
Something drastic had to be done.
Hollywood, said, time out, guys.
We've got to figure out what we're doing here.
Let's get our act together. Let's try and get sound on film.
Sound on film was always the elusive objective.
Many bright minds struggled with the challenge
of how to carry the soundtrack
on the same piece of film as the picture.
Many corporations and inventors devoted their efforts
to solving the issue.
Eventually, a combination
of photochemical and mechanical advances
resulted in creating an optically printed soundtrack
running alongside the picture frames on a roll of celluloid.
Sound on film had become a reality.
In 1929, thousands of people were put out of work instantly.
Actors, technicians, musicians were all out of work
because it was a different process.
By the time of the birth of sound,
the early talkie era,
Max Steiner had had such experience
and such vast and varied experience,
especially in Broadway shows.
He was a perfect candidate to come to Hollywood
and bring his Broadway knowhow.
William LeBaron was head of production
at RKO Radio Pictures in Hollywood.
On a visit to New York,
he went to the opening of a show called "Sons O' Guns,"
which Max Steiner had orchestrated.
Every one of my men played about
five different instruments.
When the show was over,
LeBaron came down to the pit and he said,
"You've got to come to Hollywood.
I've never heard such a performance in my life."
And I said, what's in it for me? He told me.
The Baron duly signed Steiner
to a contract as an orchestrator
for RKO in Hollywood.
He was 41 years old.
Now dramatic new challenges lay ahead for him.
Two weeks later, I came to Hollywood.
It took a couple of years of production in the late 1920s
and early 1930s for people to realize that actually music
could play an important role in heightening the drama
or providing a sense of emotion to a story.
And it was Max Steiner, more than anyone else
who pioneered that idea in the early 1930s.
My arrival in Hollywood occurred at Christmastime.
It was 1929, the year of the stock market crash.
This was the unpromising era
in which I started my Hollywood career in high spirits.
Some of the things that made RKO different from the other
major Hollywood studios
is it was founded in the late '20s,
specifically for sound film.
It was an extension of RCA, and they were interested
in using some of their sound and film technology,
and they realized that they needed to create a studio
in which to do that.
So it was a newer studio
and it was compared to those other studios, smaller.
Max Steiner's first responsibilities
were to orchestrate and arrange music
for RKO's busy schedule of musicals,
a genre very popular at the time.
But at the end of 1930, movie musicals
had lost their popularity with audiences,
and RKO was not doing well.
It laid off most of its musical staff,
retaining only a downsized music department.
William LeBaron was so impressed with Steiner's work,
he asked him to run the department
at a significant cut in salary.
Steiner agreed.
He began to think about using music in new ways,
perhaps even in dramatic productions.
But the studio was reluctant to try it.
The earliest sound films, the only time music is played,
is when it is source music.
You don't hear music played coming from nowhere.
And the producers said, well, that can't be.
We can't have music.
People will say, where's the music coming from?
Steiner saw things very differently.
He was one of the first to believe that music
could help the dramatization of a story.
He saw the potential
of supporting an actor's performance
with a musical underscore.
An opportunity for him to test
his theory came with a film called "Cimarron."
The front office said to me,
could you knock out something for this picture?
If we don't like it, we'll get someone else to redo it.
Just give us enough for the preview.
Steiner seized the opportunity,
but the front office was nervous.
He was only allowed to create music
for the opening and closing titles
and for the film's concluding scene.
Nevertheless, what he did exceeded all expectations.
Although he was not credited for his work,
his music was the catalyst
for what would become standard industry practice
for all motion pictures in the years to come.
The picture previewed at the Orpheum Theater downtown
and was a smash hit.
When the press notices came out,
reporters wanted to know who wrote the music
and why he didn't get credit on the main title.
This was my real beginning in Hollywood.
With the success of "Cimarron" and RKO's desire
to invigorate its sagging profits,
the studio decided to recruit new talent.
So they hired a promising young producer.
David O. Selznick came on board in the early '30s.
He was only 29 years old.
He was considered something of a wunderkind in the industry.
He began his career on the East Coast
and then worked at various studios in Hollywood
during the silent era.
He, like Steiner,
also believed that music could make a difference in movies.
The pairing of Selznick and Steiner
was the first meeting of two like-minded individuals
who would eventually become giants in the industry.
On a production called "Symphony of Six Million,"
Selznick asked Steiner
if he could write a dramatic underscore for the film.
Selznick conceived that film as one
that would have a great deal of music from the beginning
because the screenplay is something that
is highly unusual for the time,
says over and over there will be symphonic music
playing during the scene.
There will be dramatic music under this scene.
I'm sure that was Selznick dictating that idea.
So Selznick was making a very big point
of introducing music in this film.
And of course, he had the ideal collaborator in Steiner.
And I said, let me try it.
And he says, okay, you do one scene.
It was where the old man dies, but his own son operates on him.
And I wrote it.
And when Mr. Selznick heard it,
he said, this is just wonderful.
And it was probably the first score
that we really had almost complete music to a thing.
And they noticed-- they saw the effect it had on people.
The story centered on a protagonist
who was a doctor and the critical decisions
he had to face in life.
In an early scene, the central character is seen
playing chess with his father
while his sister plays a piece of music on the piano.
All right, move. Steiner took that melody
and then wove it into his own score,
bringing the theme back to highlight the thoughts
and feelings of the protagonist.
It was a brilliant
and innovative technique for its time.
Steiner was excited by the opportunity
to bring the Wagnerian approach of using leitmotifs
with different themes for different characters,
of carefully writing music under dialog to the medium of film,
which largely hadn't been done.
The million dollar hands of Dr. Felix Klauber.
And then another opportunity came along.
"Bird of Paradise"
benefited from the two men's productive symbiosis.
The film was scored with almost a wall to wall music.
It was a remarkable leap forward.
Steiner made full use of the Hawaiian setting of the story,
even introducing a full chorus of singers.
Selznick had big ideas for RKO.
In addition to a schedule of run of the mill productions,
he wanted to turn out a few prestigious high-budget films.
"Bird of Paradise" was one of them.
But although it was an expensive and ambitious project,
it did not make money at the box office.
What it did do was introduce audiences to a rich,
full-bodied musical score,
setting it apart from any other film of its day.
Steiner understood music used dramatically.
He was no less a writer of great leitmotifs than than Wagner.
And that may sound sacrilegious to some people,
but when you consider the hundreds and hundreds of themes
that he had to write for every conceivable
and inconceivable situation and character, it is dizzying.
And how he never ran out of inspiration.
And he was able to tailor it to every single style and project
from the very beginning.
David O. Selznick gave RKO in 1932 its first grade A
year of movie classics, beautifully produced,
and in the process,
Steiner and Selznick changed the history of film music.
Steiner's talents were equally at home
on a wide variety of films.
With his help, RKO returned to producing musicals.
Now they were more lush and spectacular than ever.
Steiner worked on all of them.
His Broadway experience paid off handsomely
on the stages of Hollywood as RKO
began to reap profits from these lavish spectacles.
Audiences loved them.
He also was the musical director of
Astaire and Rodgers' pictures, too,
with scores by Irving Berlin.
And so, he had no problem being a musical director
of a light musical film.
And these films are very sophisticated musically
and also problematic for any musical director
because there is chorus after chorus
after chorus of the given song
that is a song and dance by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
and then the...
and whoever else does it.
And so, it was up to Steiner as musical director of the picture
to find ways to present multiple choruses of this piece of music
heard over and over again by changing the orchestration,
changing the key, creating the transitions,
and working with the rehearsal pianist.
Steiner still was able to draw on his Broadway experience.
Yet it must have been rather schizophrenic
going from an Astaire Rogers picture to "King Kong."
"King Kong,"
a film that would forever enshrine Steiner's name
in the annals of film history.
At the foot of the Rockies in Provo, Utah,
lies an unusual place, a repository of great milestones
in American motion picture history.
James D'Arc was curator at the Brigham Young University's
Division of Special Collections.
He acquired all the Max Steiner artifacts and memorabilia
from Steiner's late widow, Lee, in 1981.
Within these, air conditioned vaults
are stored priceless treasures.
Many of Steiner's original musical sketches
and first iterations of original scores
are preserved for the study and enjoyment of future generations.
Some are beyond value.
And there is the main title
to one of the most historic music scores
in motion picture history, "King Kong."
By Max Steiner.
This is probably the first film that audiences took notice
of what music could do in motion pictures.
Steiner's work was so powerful
that it turned an 18-inch
animated model of an ape into a 100 feet tall monster
that terrified millions.
D'Arc: This notation on the score refers
to what's up on the screen.
The picture fades in the harbor at night.
There was no music until the ship
The Venture leaves the New York Harbor
and approaches Skull Island.
So when the fantasy begins, the music begins.
There's the cue title, A Boat in the Fog
as they approach Skull Island.
That was a part of Max Steiner's philosophy.
It was not only when you have music,
but it was just as important to him when you don't have music.
The music had to be subservient to the motion picture,
to the story aspects.
He was sparing on the music
until they actually got to Skull Island,
where they meet Kong and all of the incredible events
go to the time they bring the ape back to New York City
and you have music for the rest of the film.
When the picture was completed,
they thought the big gorilla looked unreal
and too mechanical.
They didn't want to waste any more money on it
and told me to use old tracks.
Merian C. Cooper, the producer, then came to me
and asked me to score it to the best of my ability
and that he would pay the cost of the orchestra.
Steiner used 46 musicians,
but he had to play different instruments
to simulate a much larger orchestra.
He ran up a bill larger
than any previous studio recording session.
But it was worth every cent.
You really could get inside the characters.
And he wrote from the inside
so that whether it's the terror of the islanders in Kong
in trying to find King Kong or if it's the heart
and feeling of Kong himself for Ann Darrow,
he is taking us inside the movie through his music.
It's the Steiner score that gives Kong his soul.
He becomes sympathetic as a result of the music.
Steiner had the ability to capture the emotion
of what the characters were thinking and feeling,
and the evocation of the set and the style and the period,
all of that.
He could capture that very succinctly,
and that, aside from all of his other gifts,
is an extraordinary ability that suddenly came to life.
Max's score was so full and so rich and so evocative
and added so much to that incredible film
and its success that everyone took notice.
What he did was really rather extraordinary.
And as if by magic, a fever spread over Hollywood.
And everyone said, oh, I guess we should have music.
For "King Kong,"
Steiner found a professional partner to augment his work.
His name was Murray Spivack.
He was a sound engineer
who specialized in creating sound effects.
Already an employee at RKO,
Steiner took him under his wing to assist
with creating the soundtrack for the production.
The relationship paid off handsomely.
When it was recorded, Spivack was overseeing that
and he has notes to himself about what should be done
with the microphones, how they should be moved,
how certain instruments should be brought out of the texture.
And so he had a huge impact on on the sound of that music.
It was a really powerful and important partnership.
And I think when we think of Max Steiner's legacy
and sort of changing the art of film music,
we should also be thinking of Spivack
because he was right there sort of helping that happen.
But is really the first time that a composer
demonstrated conclusively the power of music
to make a film a hit.
One year after "King Kong,"
Max Steiner's versatility was applied
to a film of a very different nature.
D'Arc: So here is the score to his first Academy Award winner,
"The Informer."
1935 was the second year
of the music category
awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
And this was a much celebrated score.
And it's this score that Max said he really demonstrated
what movie music could do.
When this picture was being made,
our executive producer wasn't too sold on it.
Who wants to look at a picture that's always in the fog,
he asked.
Steiner was a master at creating recurring themes
to identify characters,
their actions, and also locations in the film.
The technique was first used in 19th century opera
by Richard Wagner.
Underscoring a film this way helped audiences to identify
with the story's emotional heart
and the beats of its narrative drive.
It was a huge leap forward in motion pictures.
All this information is about ideas.
Thinking and emotion is told by the music,
and the leitmotif is perfect because you establish a theme,
the audience remembers the theme.
And every time the audience should think
in a certain direction, they will bring up the theme
because of the strong melody, they still remember.
Maybe not consciously, but subconsciously.
Without question, Max Steiner was one of the great
melodists in Hollywood history.
His thought of melody seemingly was inexhaustible.
Not only was Steiner a master of the leitmotif
and melodic themes, but he had the ability
to musically catch the action on the screen.
He wrote scores to synchronize or match movements
or gestures by the cast.
It was a technique the industry called Mickey Mousing.
Max was not offended by the term Mickey Mousing.
He used it a couple of times himself,
saying, I'm using that term facetiously, of course,
because for him it was Wagnerian that in Wagner's operas
that when a character moved,
kneeled, turned, stood, did something,
the music matched.
So he saw it as a continuation of a very legitimate
kind of 19th century dramatic writing.
And I didn't know what I would say.
But now I remember.
There was a sequence in a cell
where the water is dripping.
The property man and I work for days
trying to regulate the water tanks
so it dripped in tempo and I could accompany it.
People were fascinated, trying to figure out
how we managed to catch every drop.
To achieve this exact synchronization,
Steiner employed the use of what was called a click track,
a series of audible clicks similar to a metronome.
The sound was fed to the conductor through headphones
to maintain the beat.
With this device we could match the movement on the screen
with complete accuracy.
It also saved a lot of time on the recording end
because without it, it would have been quite difficult
to catch the tempo and start and end at the exact time.
The film is extremely stylized.
It all takes place in a few hours
and it's bigger than life.
So Max wrote a score that is certainly operatic.
One cannot stress enough how bowled over audiences
were by this score.
They simply were not used to this degree of musical intensity
in a film.
At the time, it was by far Steiner's most acclaimed score,
and for many years people would say,
Max Steiner of "The Informer."
Frank Capra sent him a telegram saying,
"This is the greatest film score ever written."
I like his definition. Music is a glove.
That fits to the scene and he's knitting this glove
that it fits perfectly to the scene.
One of the great gifts that Steiner had was the ability
not only to transport an audience
while watching a film,
but in many cases to create music so indelible
that they remembered it many years, even decades later.
Maggie! Maggie!
Your mother forgives me.
Max Steiner took things that other people had used,
and he combined them into what I would say
is the grammar of film music.
He synthesized it all and essentially created
the grammar of film music as we know it today.
D'Arc: So here we have
Max Steiner's first Academy Award.
See in these days the composer didn't get the Academy Award.
The head of the music department got the Academy Award.
That was changed later on.
Happily, though, the head of the music department
and the composer were the same person.
As musical director of RKO,
for nearly six years,
Steiner had set the bar on how films should be scored.
I remember Max saying that when you write a score,
you have to write for the musically intelligent people
in the audience, and I think he said
also the idiots meaning that you have to communicate
to everybody, even the music illiterate.
Good as he was,
Steiner was always under great pressure.
He found methods for tackling every challenge.
I never read a script
because I may form a wrong opinion.
I imagine the characters different, the story different,
and sometimes I'm terribly disappointed.
When the picture is finished, I run it.
I run it with the producers, sometimes a director,
sometimes without anybody.
And then I start my music.
In other words, I decide I play here, play here, play here.
Then I time it.
I mean, the time to the minute and seconds.
Sometimes I drive just
the very end...
And he had his music editor there,
and it was his job to note the frames
that they wanted to start a cue and then end the cue.
And he would make a script of the dialog of everything
happening on the screen.
Do a third of a second.
While these cue sheets are being made,
I began work on themes for the different characters and scenes.
I run the picture reel by reel again to refresh my memory.
Then I put my stopwatch on the piano
and I begin the actual and tedious work of composing
according to my cue sheets.
I know he used to have a glass of whiskey
on his piano when he worked, right? Yeah, yeah.
But he used to love having that cigar and his whiskey on it. Yeah.
And he would record all night.
He got up early and composed
and usually to call-- an orchestra loved him
because he always give them over time or do it at like 9:00
till three in the morning when they get double time.
And of course, they were happy about that.
Often he would write notes in the margin to his orchestrator
and his orchestrators, Hugo Fryhofer, Murray Cutter,
others would know his style well enough
that he could write in this shorthand.
Hugo, please compare cue sheet with this music.
So you know what I am unsuccessfully trying to do?
Maxi. Fin. Hurrah! Thank God. Schmaltz.
Because he had this great camaraderie
with the orchestrator, he would have them come over
when he could give them a sketch orchestra,
he would play it at the piano and tell them,
you know, I want trombones there or something.
And Max would use his sketches or a conductor book to conduct
because he'd get a lot more music on three lines
than he could on a full score pages.
You could have the greatest music that was ever written.
You could have Richard Wagner. I don't care who.
And if the picture stinks,
may I say that the score will fall down?
Music will help the picture, but it can never save it.
The most towering of all of Max Steiner's work
lies penciled on the pages stored within this container.
It is his most beloved score-- "Gone with the Wind."
The main title and the foreword to "Gone with the Wind."
Prior to that immense project,
Steiner's busy life at RKO was all-consuming.
He found little time for anything other than work.
But one day in 1932, while conducting,
he noticed a shapely young harpist in the orchestra--
Louise Klos.
I couldn't help noticing her not only
because she was attractive,
but also because she was a phenomenal harpist.
In 1927, Max had married Aubrey van Lieu.
She was a starlet who was performing
in ensembles on Broadway.
But that relationship came to an end in 1933.
His heart was now set on Mr. Klos.
They were married in October 1936.
They bought a piece of ground on Cove Way in Beverly Hills
and began building their dream home.
Their street ran into Summit Drive
where many celebrities owned houses,
including the likes of Mary Pickford, Fred Astaire,
Charlie Chaplin,
and Steiner's RKO colleague, producer David O. Selznick.
I learned that on Cove Way lived Max Steiner,
who had composed so many of my father's films.
I actually asked my father
if he could introduce me to Mr. Steiner.
So at one point, I guess when I was three or three and a half,
I was brought across the street to see this shy, balding man,
terribly sweet, soft spoken with a European accent.
He said, "Danny, would you like me to play for you?"
And I said, "Please do."
So suddenly, this incredibly sensitive human being
was playing this beautiful music.
And only as the years passed and I began to see all the films
that my father had produced in those early years at RKO,
did I realize how much they were enhanced by Max Steiner scores.
I think Mr. Steiner must have said to me very early on, Danny,
any time you feel like coming over here,
you don't even have to call in advance to just feel free
to knock on the front door and we'll be happy to have you.
So I would spend 30 or 45 minutes
or an hour just sitting
and watching Mr. Steiner play at the piano.
While working at RKO,
Selznick had always nurtured a dream
to establish his own studio.
In 1935,
he formed Selznick International Pictures in Culver City.
Steiner was still on RKO's payroll at the time,
but Selznick managed to gain access to his services
through a loan out arrangement.
The purpose was to have him write the music
for "Little Lord Fauntleroy"
the first film produced under the Selznick banner.
After this production,
Steiner became a full-time employee for Selznick.
The idea of hiring Max Steiner, who my father discovered
so early in their joint careers together at RKO
caused my father to keep using him again and again.
David had always liked me and appreciated my work.
He gave me so much a better contract than I had had at RKO
that I couldn't turn it down.
"The Garden of Allah" was Steiner's next project.
It was an exotic Technicolor spectacle
starring Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer.
But Steiner's relationship with Selznick
was not always an easy one.
David O. Selznick did not have formal musical training,
but he cared deeply about the music in his films
and wanted to be as involved as he could be.
But it also meant that he had ideas about what he imagined
the music would do once it was in the film.
And sometimes what Steiner wrote did not fulfill that.
And so he would say,
"Well, that's not what I had in mind. Can you redo it?"
Or "We're going to take your music out
and put some other music in."
Particularly in the later '30s,
he was concerned that Steiner was doing too much
so-called Mickey Mousing.
And so their relationship is peppered
with these alternating moments of sort of mutual admiration
and then sort of mutual annoyance.
The disagreements between Selznick and Steiner
came to a head in 1937 on "A Star Is Born."
Max wrote what he thought was a very fine score,
and when Selznick heard it, he was really unhappy.
For the first time,
just wrote a page of notes excoriating cue by cue
what Max had done and writing, NG, NG, NG,
no good, no good, no good.
And he basically made Max rewrite the score.
Many studios hankered for Steiner's talents.
Prior to his writing of "A Star is Born,"
Selznick had loaned him out to Warner Brothers
to work on "The Charge of the Light Brigade."
That studio had long been urging him
to join their permanent staff.
After completing the rewrite for "A Star is Born,"
Steiner sends Selznick a letter of resignation.
He did this reluctantly because he knew Selznick was about
to produce one of the most ambitious films of all time.
Selznick had optioned the bestselling novel
"Gone with the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell.
It was a story that had taken
the American reading public by storm.
Selznick kept waffling about who he wanted to score
the movie right up until, I believe it was March of 1939,
well into production.
Fortunately, Selznick,
after considering everyone else returned to Plan A
and asked Steiner to score "Gone with the Wind."
Even though he was now at Warner Brothers,
his heart was set on scoring the film.
Mr. Warner, I am perfectly willing to do
"Gone with the Wind,"
either on leave of absence or under my contract,
but it is as necessary for me, my pride,
my standing, and my future activity
to do "Gone with the Wind" as it is
as necessary for an actor to get a break once in a while.
Jack Warner agreed,
and it was to Warner's advantage to loan Steiner out
because Selznick would pay top dollar.
He would pay Jack Warner more than Jack Warner
was paying Max Steiner.
So Warner would make a profit.
And Max was indeed loaned out to score
"Gone with the Wind."
Almost until the film's premiere,
which was on December 15, 1939.
Max was jumping between film projects,
some of them at Warner Brothers,
then going back to Selznick to work a little
"Gone with the Wind."
Then to score a different movie
because Selznick needed help on "Intermezzo."
Max really didn't have time to start working on
"Gone with the Wind,"
nor was there a really locked cut
until late in October 1939
became creatively the most
fulfilling and nightmarish year of Max's life.
Nuremberg, Germany, September 12.
Apart from his hefty professional schedule
of scoring 11 films in 1939,
Steiner also had to deal with the trauma of the violence
sweeping across Europe.
Hitler was on the warpath.
And the old world that he had known in Vienna was crumbling.
His mother, Mitzi, had divorced his father, Gabor,
and had passed away in 1937.
Steiner was compelled to bring his father from Vienna
to live with him and Louise in their new home in Beverly Hills.
Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!
One of the scores for Warner Brothers that Steiner
had composed that year was "Confessions of a Nazi Spy."
It dealt with the break up of a German spy ring
in the United States.
Afraid of repercussions for any family members
still living in Nazi occupied Austria.
He took no screen credit
and simply signed the score as staff.
1939 would also bring a set of challenges
for the Selznick family.
In my childhood,
my mother and father seem to be madly love with each other.
There were certainly fabulous parents.
I don't say for a moment that I was not very much aware
that I was privileged.
David O. Selznick's wife, Irene,
was a daughter of Louis B. Mayer.
He was the legendary head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
As a result, the young Selznick had grown up with celebrities
all around him from his youth.
He was exposed to stories of the trials and tribulations
of the film industry.
In 1939,
his mother, Irene, was deeply concerned about the pressure
making "Gone with the Wind" was having on her husband.
My mother said years later she wondered
whether he could survive it
because it was like a nine-month shoot.
It's almost unimaginable for any picture.
And he'd gone to his doctors, apparently before it started,
said, I need 20 or 21 hours a day.
Are there any medicines on the market that you could give me?
Well, so he took benzedrine, dexedrine for the nine months
shooting "Gone with the Wind,"
and then he could not get off them.
So he was-- his entire stability was destroyed
from that point on.
And I think it's one of the things
that finally ended my parents' marriage,
because my mother said he was no longer the man
that she'd married,
which is really heartbreaking to me.
Nevertheless, Selznick would leave
an incomparable legacy of films
with musical themes by Steiner that would live on for all time.
But my favorite theme is...
...I love that.
But he wrote themes for every character.
But that main theme...
Steiner always played his themes on the piano
for Selznick's approval before scoring them.
Timeless.
Themes from "Gone with the Wind" they had to be pieces of music
that would endure through the film
where you could hear something repeated over and over again
and you wouldn't get tired of it.
And so, he was writing themes that sometimes are very simple.
And I think, my God, that's so simple.
But that is another sign of genius.
The film is said to have this big splashy we can't move
it premiere in Atlanta on December 15.
So the pressure was really on and Selznick began to panic
and Max began to panic.
And it was a very tense atmosphere.
And Max assembled an enormous team of people to help him.
Anyone would have needed a large team to help him write
over three and a half hours of music
for a nearly four-hour movie.
His collaborators were all composers
in their own right.
They were more than capable of executing
Steiner's musical ideas and themes,
but it was an enormous undertaking for all concerned.
Because he had at least eight other composers
working with him on it because of the tight deadlines.
He signed it. Steiner and company.
So in the score, you're not only see the music
in Max Steiner's hand, but you see it in the hand
of many other composers who helped him.
He sent the melodies and they did the fill in,
fleshing out the entire score.
Despite the additional help,
Steiner was in trouble.
The movie's opening date was fast approaching.
Time was of the essence.
Finally, in early November, Steiner said, I can't do it.
I can't finish the score on time.
Producer Selznick privately contacted
Herbert Stothart, who was the longtime chief composer at MGM.
He was a born and bred Southerner
and dearly wanted the job.
But then, as now, gossip spread fast in Hollywood.
Word got back to Steiner and he said, absolutely not.
No one is going to score this movie except for me.
And he basically worked for the next month without sleep.
He would get a benzedrine shot each morning
after a couple of hours of sleep to get him alert again.
And he would just work nonstop on the film.
Exhausted,
Steiner and the other composers met the deadline.
The score was completed in time
for the film's much publicized release in December.
Where shall I go, what should I do?
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.
The finished production
ran 3 hours and 40 minutes.
It was a record for its time.
Leonard Bernstein says something
to the effect of all you need
for a wonderful project is a great idea
and not quite enough time.
And I think there's a lot of truth to that.
And I think actually to some extent,
the pressure cooker of the situation,
the fact that they had to work quickly
and yet give their very best work
did allow tremendous results.
I wasn't even allowed to see "Gone With the Wind"
until I was nine years old.
I kept campaigning every year.
Can I see-- no, no, you're not old enough.
And of course, as everybody knows who see
"Gone with the Wind" even once, what do they remember?
They remember Vivien Leigh
and they remember Max Steiner's score.
I'll think of some way to get him back
after all, tomorrow is another day.
I think that Max responded to
"Gone with the Wind" on a level that many people don't realize.
It sounds funny to say,
but it was really his story as well.
Max was someone who grew up
in Vienna at the turn of the century,
this magical world in his own version of a mansion,
a plantation, this wonderful fantasy world that his father,
Gabor, had created.
And then Gabor lost everything.
He lost his money. His marriage ended.
All the theaters that he operated
went to other people.
Steiner was a beggar at that point.
And by 1939, Hitler had annexed Austria.
So really, the story of a lost land of beauty
and also the desire to rebuild and restore the family name
was something that meant a great deal to Steiner,
something he wanted to do.
He wanted to rehabilitate his father.
He wanted to rehabilitate the legacy of the Steiners.
So I think that he responded to "Gone with the Wind"
on a very deep and personal level.
Steiner eventually sold his house
on Cove Way to Glenn Ford and his wife, Eleanor Powell.
Mr. and Mrs. Ford would sometimes invite me
into their living room, and there was a piano there.
Mr. Ford said, does this bring back memories?
And I'd say, Mr. Ford,
it brings back memories of Max Steiner and...
I can't begin to tell you
just standing in this room brings him back to me.
And I hope from time to time
you stop and realize whose home you're in.
Prior to the advent of the "Star Wars" franchise
in the 1970s,
if anyone was stopped in the street
and asked to name a film score,
they would have invariably said "Gone with the Wind."
It had monumental power and had become woven
into the very fabric of American cultural history.
It's the incredible music that provided the feeling
and the emotion of the old South.
Its triumphs, its tragedies, the love affairs,
the broken love affairs,
and most of all, the famous Tara's Theme.
All that one needs to do is come a bar or two of Tara's Theme
and just like "The Wizard of Oz" or "Star Wars,"
people will recognize instantly the tune that you're humming
because it's just musical shorthand for the story
of the grand old south that was "Gone with the Wind."
"Gone With the Wind" won a record 10 Academy Awards
and is now enshrined for posterity
as an American treasure.
But for Max Steiner, he's best was far from over.
When Hollywood was at the apex of its golden age
in the '30s,
the sprawling production complex that was established
by the Warner Brothers was thriving.
The studio was headed by Jack Warner,
a notoriously tough taskmaster,
but he was very partial to the music of Max Steiner.
When Max wrote that resignation letter to Selznick,
he knew that there was going to be another job offer
on the table because he knew that Jack Warner
loved his scores.
So sure enough, within days,
Max had signed a contract with Warner Brothers
and became a staff composer.
And there he found
what he called in a letter the right place to be.
I once asked Jack Warner,
how much music do you want in the picture?
He answered, for my money,
you can start on the first frame and finish on the list.
At Warner Brothers,
Max could be purely a composer at a studio
that had tremendous appreciation for his ability.
As I see it, the most important thing about
screen composing is the judgment involved in knowing
when and where to start and stop the music.
Underscoring helps the action sometimes.
Jack Warner loved Steiner's music.
By 1939, Jack Warner was telling Leo Forbstein,
head of the music department,
I want everyone to do what Max Steiner's doing.
You know, show them what Max's latest movie is.
That's what I want.
If anything, Max was loved too much at Warner Brothers
because they worked him nearly to death.
Truly, the workload he had at
Warner Brothers would have killed many people.
When I scored two films in six weeks,
the session producer came to me and said, Max,
how could you write all that music for two pictures
with such different moods in such a short time?
I answer them, I have an electric pencil sharpener.
This story went all over Hollywood.
Because he came from a family of workhorses
because he was very proud of his craft
and his ability to deliver
because he wanted to prove to the world
that the name of Steiner still meant something,
Steiner worked himself night and day, day after day,
with very little sleep,
doing what would be impossible for most people.
The only thing that made him more upset
about having to work day and night
was hearing that someone else had been assigned to a movie.
And then he would write and say, why wasn't I assigned to that?
In 1937, the famous Warner Brothers fanfare was used
for the first time in a film called "Tovarich."
Composed by Steiner,
it was featured again in "Gold Is Where You Find It."
Then it became the musical signature,
heralding every Warner Brothers production for almost 20 years.
Now, this is one of Max's
many scores for the year 1939.
This score is important because Max Steiner
was really the founder and innovator of expansive
Western themes for Western movies.
Both music to define Indians and Indian attacks,
as well as the wide open plains.
The film is about the founding of Dodge City
and the role of the railroad in doing it.
It's Max's music that gives this film its incredible sense
of vastness, wonderment,
the settling of the American West,
which he would carry it on in Westerns
such as "They Died with Their Boots On,"
"The Oklahoma Kid."
Steiner was a master at this kind of thing.
What's this? "My Life with General Custer."
Oh, darling, that's my diary.
D'Arc: With Max Steiner having had the classic European musical
training that he did,
claiming to have been instructed by Gustav Mahler and others,
he brought this tradition of lush,
full scores to the United States.
And this time period in the 1930s
and '40s with Erich Wolfgang Korngold
and Alfred Newman was the great time for the lush
middle European type of film scoring.
So influential that it was carried on
into the last part of the 20th century
and the first part of the 21st century
by the great John Williams,
whose legendary association with Steven Spielberg
and his films have shown that that kind of composition
has not gone out of style at all,
even though many of the films of that kind are considered passé.
People love the rich, full scores,
and many composers acknowledge
that this came from this classic era of film composition
in which Max Steiner led the way.
Warner Brothers had one of the best music
departments in town.
It used only the top talent available.
Steiner wrote quickly,
but was given all the time he needed to rehearse.
His tenure at the studio lasted for almost 30 years.
During that period, he composed the scores for 150 films.
He set the gold standard and adapted to changing times.
Most of all, he was beloved by everyone he worked with.
Max was not a Toscanini by a long shot.
He'd make mistakes, you know, conducting.
And we never said anything to him because of why.
And of course, with that huge cigar all the time
that the ashes would fall all over the music,
all over the stand, and all over everything.
That cigar was always in his mouth.
He had a fantastic sense of humor.
Absolutely fantastic.
And if things got tense and tight
and he felt it in the orchestra,
he would then either tell a story or a dirty joke
or something to break the tension.
I mean, there wasn't anybody in the orchestra
who didn't adore him.
I mean, there was a great love for him.
And it showed in the performance that the orchestra gave him.
He was a very warm and a very funny man.
Musicians loved him. Hollywood executives loved him.
It was just a joy to be around.
He was funny, he was enthusiastic,
and he loved his work.
And when you look at his scores, you can just tell the energy
and passion that he brought to it all.
Steiner's humor is borne out by his notes
in the margins of all his scores,
particularly to his orchestrator, Hugo Friedhofer.
Hugo, I don't think there should have been music
over this scene, but they want it.
This is awful. I think.
Lieber Hugo! Dahke fur alles.
Viele kuesse. Shostakov Steiner.
Music unfortunately by Max Steiner.
My only contact with Max was through telephone calls.
Generally around two or three in the morning and through notes
that he would scribble on the side of the orchestral sketch.
To orchestrate for Max,
you had to be clairvoyant about what he really wanted to hear.
Naturally, working with him for upwards of eight years,
I knew actually what was kicking inside.
At the end of "Dark Victory,"
as Bette Davis is dying and Max
is writing this gorgeous music, he will write an instruction
to his orchestrator Hugo Friedhofer,
saying, Hugo, please make this heaven so beautiful
that no studio supervisor will ever be able to get inside.
He was an inveterate manufacturer
of simply horrible puns.
It was so bad, that they were good,
particularly in our early morning
or late night telephone calls.
We used to do an awful lot of kidding.
I'd be down in my study working
and the phone would ring and they would pick it up
and do a simulated Japanese houseboy type accent.
You know, I'd raise my voice about an hour it would be,
hello, hello, who are calling, please.
And Max found that for some reason
tremendously amusing.
And there's got to be a sort of a trademark between us.
One of the most famous stories about Steiner
is when he was working on the Warner Brothers lot
and he ran into the other giant of film music,
Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
And Korngold humorously said to Max, Max,
why is it that is, as years go by,
my scores get better and better and yours get worse and worse.
And without missing a beat, Max said,
that's because I've been stealing from you
and you've been stealing from me.
He had an innate shyness and sweetness that no matter
how important he'd become throughout the world,
he still was the same, simple, sweet Max Steiner.
Played once, Sam, for old times sake.
I don't know what you mean, Miss Elsa.
Play it, Sam. Play "As Time Goes By."
Well, I can't remember it, Miss Elsa.
I'm a little rusty on it.
I'll hum it for you.
In 1942,
Steiner produced another perennial score.
It was for a film that has become recognized
as one of the greatest of all time.
Based on an unproduced play called
"Everyone Comes to Rick's,"
the film was "Casablanca."
Here's looking at you, kid.
But the famous song "As Time Goes By"
was originally written in 1931 by Herman Hupfeld.
Max Steiner had to use somebody else's theme
as the leitmotif of Rick and Elsa.
He told his wife,
they have the lousiest tune you could imagine,
and I have to write my music about.
And Herman Hupfeld wrote in his autobiography,
that he had ongoing arguments with Max Steiner
and he hated the song and so on.
But of course, the producer prevailed and Max Steiner
had to write this music about the song "As Time Goes By."
Max grumbled and screamed and yelled
until he finally got down to work.
And then from that time on,
I heard no more about his objection to the tune.
The segments of this theme are very easy to be used
in all kinds of leitmotif work and the harmonic part.
This is the more interesting part in music.
That's the part that the audience rather feels and hears.
But this is mostly the part of the music
that the composers used to manipulate the audience.
Steiner brilliantly used the different colors
of his orchestra,
like a painter, uses colors on a palette to evoke emotions.
I think it's very fair to say
that it is the melody that we hear
and it is the harmony and the construction of the music
around that melody that makes us feel.
And no one did that better than Steiner. No one.
The score incorporates many popular
and standard songs of that period.
But Max's score is the through line.
It's the through line that takes us from one scene
to the next in a seamless way.
He used "As Time Goes By,"
ultimately as one of the motifs of his score.
Every time we hear the motif "As Time Goes By,"
it's a kind of remembrance of their common history in Paris.
And without "Casablanca,"
nobody today would know the song "As Time Goes By."
In typical humorous style,
he signed the last page of the "Casablanca" score.
Dear Hugo. Thanks for everything.
I am very pleased with you. Yours, Herman Hupfeld.
While Steiner was nominated for an Oscar
for "Casablanca,"
he didn't win, but the film itself
won the Oscar for best picture of 1944.
It's his ability to be one with the audience,
to not only be inside the story,
but to love the glamor of those actresses
and also to imagine himself to be Clark Gable
and to identify with Rick Blaine in Casablanca
and to feel the loneliness of those characters.
And for a man who was successful
and and seldom without female companionship,
I think there was a great longing with him.
There was a period where he and his third wife
were separated for a number of years,
and it was excruciating for him.
I think it's not coincidental
that he wrote some of his most beautiful and romantic scores,
like "Casablanca" during that period of their separation.
When that plane leaves the ground
and you're not with him, you'll regret it.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.
And for the rest of your life.
But what about us?
We'll always have Paris.
We didn't have we--
we'd lost it until you came to Casablanca.
We got it back last night.
When I said I would never leave you.
And you never will.
At the end of the film when they split up,
it's Max's music that provides so much emotional heart
to that story.
Max really responded to beauty. He loved romance.
He loved falling in love.
He loved falling in love with the actresses in his films,
the way that we do when we see them.
He was entranced by Vivien Leigh.
He was enraptured by Ingrid Bergman.
And I think when you hear that music,
it's the music of someone who,
in a very appropriate way at a distance,
is falling in love with those characters
and also the actresses who embody them.
When I think of Max Steiner, I think he taught us
how to care about characters on screen through music.
And I think that is perhaps his most lasting contribution.
Not only how do you depict a character's subjectivity
or their point of view through music,
but how do you shape an audience's relationship
with a character through melody and through musical sound?
I think that's the reason why he was Bette Davis's
favorite composer as well,
is that in films like "Now, Voyager" and so many others,
he is really giving us insight into a character
that we would not necessarily have without the music.
Bette Davis famously commented that Max Steiner was possibly
over anticipating the dramatic pinnacle of a scene
she was doing in "Dark Victory"
and that he was going to reach the top of the stairs
before she did.
It's a funny remark, but it may also have been true.
She knew the value of that music,
the effectiveness of her performance in that
and many other films.
I don't think any actor appreciated him
more than Bette Davis.
She wanted him to score his films
when she produced her one film
at Warner Brothers "A Stolen Life,"
she asked for Max to score it.
And years later, she once said, Max Steiner was my composer.
Well, I'm not going to struggle with you.
That's right.
No telling what sort of primitive instincts
you might arouse.
Isn't it beautiful?
Max was very much a creature of late
19th century romantic music.
But that music,
that style really fit those movies in that time.
What's amazing is how much fabulous music,
the grand melodies, the great themes that we still remember.
He could be both inspired and practical at the same time.
In 1943, Steiner won his second Academy Award.
It was for "Now Voyager."
There's 12 notes on the piano.
There's 12 notes in the scale.
How is it that people right and right
and right and right with this limited number of notes,
and especially for one composer as prolific as Max.
How did he do it?
Yes, there were borrowings at times,
but for the most part it's fresh and it's fresh for the period.
And he kept up with the times because he just,
I think, organically absorbed everything.
He could make it fresh by altering the rhythm,
changing the style, the harmony.
He knew all of the tricks of the trade
to adapt something to make it sound appropriate.
Steiner understood how to do that,
and he had to do it because of the amount of work
that he was engaged in.
Because he wrote so quickly, he just did it.
And he trusted his ability and it came out a certain way.
I don't think that he slaved over much of anything.
He wrote inspirationally.
And that was in spite of the fact
that he really had to write perspirationally.
Because you'll never be anything but a common frump
whose father lived over a grocery store
and whose mother took in washing.
With this money, I can get away from every rotten,
stinking thing that makes me think of this place or you.
Veda!
In the 1940s,
the style and content of moviemaking
was broadened to include a new genre
that historians later called film noir.
Subjects dealt with the duality of the human psyche.
Embracing good and evil, light and dark.
After World War II,
audiences were ready to explore the darker side of human nature.
It became a very popular form of entertainment.
Steiner rapidly adapted to the style.
He wrote 40 scores for films like "Mildred Pierce"
and "The Big Sleep."
During Steiner's years on the Warner Brothers lot,
he wrote scores for many of their major films.
Those were movie factories then,
both at RKO and then at Warner Brothers,
where even a celebrated composer like Steiner had to turn it out
almost like on a factory assembly line basis.
But he tried very hard not to treat his scores
like just so much fodder.
He always delivered the goods, you could say.
If my numbers are correct,
Max scored 19 Bette Davis films and 14 with Humphrey Bogart
and at least a dozen, I think, with Errol Flynn.
So when you think about these great actors,
all of whom were at Warner Brothers
for a long period of time in the 1930s
and '40s and beyond,
it's hard to separate those performances from that music
that's helping us feel something.
And all of these films, you can't think of them
without remembering the Max Steiner score.
These are all classic films, and in every case,
Max's music elevates their performances
and elevates the storytelling.
Another Oscar winner.
Here are all three of Max Steiner's Academy Awards.
The Academy Award for "Since You Went Away"
was a score done very hastily for David O. Selznick
for this 1944 film of America,
The Home Front during World War II
while the men were off to war.
Bye, darling. Oh, Bill, I'll keep it!
I'll keep it with me all the time.
So long, darling. Bye!
D'Arc: Steiner quoted generously from his earlier
David O. Selznick score the 1937 film
"A Star is Born."
It's a peculiar thing on "Gone with the Wind"
everybody won an Academy Award except me.
And in "Since You Went Away," nobody won.
And I was the only one who did win for music.
So we got even.
With the pressure of his workload
and the many accolades he received
life was Steiner during this busy period was bittersweet.
On the 2nd of March 1940, my son Ronald was born.
This was probably the most joyous event in my whole life.
As things turned out, he was to be my only child.
I adored him and indulged him
perhaps too much while I had him.
Steiner was 51 when Ronald was born.
He loved his son dearly
and gave him the nickname Ronnie.
But there was drama at home.
After bringing his father,
Gabor, from Austria to live with him in Hollywood,
his presence made things difficult.
The two men, father and son, spoke only German to each other.
Steiner's wife, Louise, could not speak the language
and began to feel left out.
With personal friction,
aggravating things in the marriage,
in 1941, she left husband and son
to pursue a career as an opera singer.
This took her to Italy and New York.
Steiner was heartbroken.
In September 1944, at the age of 86,
Gabor took ill and passed away.
His many earlier accomplishments in Europe
were remembered in the national press.
One event stands out in my memory in 1945,
the divorce from my wife, Louise.
She wanted to remain in New York
and refused to live in California.
I had a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers
and I had made my career here.
It was agreed that Ronald would stay with me for a while,
then with her, then back to me.
This is exactly what happened with unhappy results.
With the finalization of his divorce,
Steiner bought a smaller house.
At the same time, he renewed a friendship with a woman
he had known for a while.
Her name was Leonette Blair.
That was the start of the romance.
In 1947, we were married in Las Vegas.
She is probably the kindest person I have ever met.
She has a great sense of theater and a terrific memory for music
and was always a wonderful stepmother to my son Ronnie.
Although she did not sanction my overindulgence of him.
Steiner's dream was to see
Ronnie become his successor.
I had hoped Ronnie would take some interest in music.
I had him take piano lessons
from the age of 6 until he was 12.
I had to pay him for practicing,
but he simply wouldn't keep at it.
So we finally gave up.
As Ronnie grew into his teenage years,
he became moody and difficult.
He was notoriously disobedient at school.
Yet Steiner tried to give his son everything he could.
Except for two things his attention and his time.
He was just too busy working.
My dearest boy. Many, many happy returns of the day.
Love and kisses.
Then, my dear Ronnie, I was very unhappy
and extremely disappointed to hear from your mother
that you've been such a bad boy.
I also feel very much ashamed that my little boy,
whom I love so much,
spends most of his time sitting up the hall
being punished.
My dearest boy, you are now 15 years old,
and that means you're almost a man.
So try and change your ways. Be nice to your mother.
Ronnie and his father always remained in close contact
with one another,
but by the time he was 22, he had become a lost young man.
On the 29th of April, at 7:00 in the morning,
Associated Press called me up and told me my son was dead.
He had committed suicide at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel
in Honolulu.
Ronnie had suffered from emotional disturbances
for quite a while
and had been under the care of various specialists.
I was absolutely devastated at the news.
I loved my child very dearly.
He was a wonderful boy, 6-foot-2 inches,
very handsome and a fine gentleman.
And I don't think I shall ever fully recover
from the grief and shock.
I was very ill for many months.
Max Steiner was a workaholic,
but his dedication to his craft came at a price.
His eyesight began to fail.
The solution was to have large scoring sheets
specially made so that musical notations
could be large enough for him to see when he conducted.
Lee helps me with my cue sheets and my timing
and is actually my musical secretary.
She is without doubt the best thing
that ever happened to me in my life.
When Steiner got the assignment
to write the score for "Don Juan,"
a Warner Brothers swashbuckler starring Errol Flynn,
he was especially inspired.
Lee Steiner told me how the famous main title theme
for this motion picture came about.
He wasn't getting much inspiration,
and yet he was under tremendous pressure.
They decided to drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas
to do some gambling that Max Steiner just loved.
And it was during one of the games in a casino
that he got the inspiration for the main title,
and yet no scoring paper to notate.
He hummed it to his wife, Lee.
She would hum it back to him, and as she told it to me,
we were humming it all the way back from Las Vegas in the car
until we finally got home.
We got the music paper
and he was finally able to write it down.
And what a beautiful score it is.
It's considered to be one of his best scores
and certainly one of his most colorful.
In the early '50s, a serious decline
began to erode the condition of the film industry.
Despite years of popularity,
the movies were losing their audience.
The culprit was a device placed
in the living room of most American homes.
Television was luring people away from the big screen.
Hollywood had to come up with a solution.
The result was the development of new motion
picture presentation systems
for making the movies bigger and more lifelike than ever.
One of the first of these new widescreen systems relied
on projecting three separate strips of film
alongside one another on a giant curved screen.
The resulting picture virtually wrapped itself
around the audience.
Not only that,
but the new miracle of what was called Cinerama
brought multiple channel stereophonic sound
into the theater.
The effect was breathtaking.
A 1951, Steiner's old friend, Merian C. Cooper,
was developing the first Cinerama production.
Steiner had worked with Cooper
in the '30s when he produced "King Kong."
To introduce Cinerama to the audiences of the world,
a full-length travel documentary feature went into production.
It was simply called This Is Cinerama.
One day, Merian sent for me.
Max, he said, I want you to write the best music
you've ever written in your life for this first Cinerama film.
Warner Brothers would not release Steiner
from his contract or from the film
he was scoring for them.
But he agreed to write the music without Warner's knowledge.
His good friend and colleague, musical director Louis Forbes,
viewed the film for him and created cue sheets
that he could use to secretly compose the score.
Needless to say, I was half dead by the time
the Cinerama and the Warner picture was finished.
But This is Cinerama was such a smash success
as everybody knows.
I got no screen credit and no remuneration.
But Mr. Cooper sent both Lou Forbes
and me a beautiful wristwatch which I still wear and treasure.
In 1955, Steiner teamed up again
with Merian C. Cooper, this time to score a film
that has become a classic Western.
It was called "The Searchers."
Directed by John Ford,
it was epic in scale, but it preserved the integrity
of its very human drama.
Shot in Technicolor and VistaVision with scenes
set against the panorama of the West,
it gave Steiner the opportunity
to deliver one of his most memorable scores.
But the strain of the work was beginning to show.
It's often said that our strengths
are also our greatest weaknesses,
and that's probably true in the case of Max,
and that his passion was both what fed his his imagination
and was to some extent, his undoing.
He loved to gamble. He loved to buy things for his wives.
There were four. He paid a lot of alimony,
even beyond the point where he really needed to
if he ever met a friend from old Broadway days
that needed money, he would hand it to them.
And not surprisingly, he was always in debt
as a result.
Steiner never discussed his Jewish roots or identity.
Nevertheless, he had the payroll office
at Warner Brothers deduct funds from his weekly paycheck
for contributions to needy Jewish charities.
With his abundant generosity and alimony payments,
he was often unable to keep his head above water.
And then in 1959, his fortunes changed with the royalties
he received from his latest project.
His financial struggles finally came to an end.
"A Summer Place" is Steiner's most or most popular song.
It has lyrics, but even though there are lyrics, you don't--
you don't hear the words very often.
The arrangement. The arrangement by Percy Faith
sounded so characteristic of the time.
It sounds like a '50s almost doo wop thing
with that 12/8 thing going.
And it's characteristic of how Steiner,
even late in his career,
could capture a sense of popular styles, the popular sounds.
It is like many great popular songs, deceptively simple.
The music for "A Summer Place" turned out to be one
that the biggest successes that they have known
at Warners in 20 years.
The record sales were fantastic.
Over 30 versions of them were made,
the best of which was Percy Faith's.
He was 71 when he wrote that.
It turned out to be a pop hit.
It seemed that he was actually still in touch with his notions
of what music for young lovers would be like.
That's an extraordinary accomplishment.
Even though Max was not a pop songwriter,
when they prepared popular songs taken from his movie themes,
he often would write a verse or an introductory theme
for the pop song.
So it's clear that even though writing popular songs
was not his main focus,
he still was very much hands on with these songs because he then
saw the potential for success on the hit parade.
Here is "It Can't Be Wrong" from "Now Voyager."
♪ Wrong, would it be wrong to kiss ♪
♪ Seeing I feel like this ♪
♪ Would it be wrong to try ♪
♪ Wrong, would it be wrong to stay ♪
For the sheet music, he turned it into a song
with an ending that slightly changes
the theme from the movie.
♪ So when I need you so much ♪
♪ And I have waited so long ♪
♪ It must be right ♪
♪ It can't be wrong ♪
He could have been a great songwriter.
Sheet music was another way
of selling film music apart from the film.
Max Steiner had contracts with different music publishers
to sell both individual themes from films.
He also had a couple of occasions
where themes would be bundled together and sold.
A good example of that would be 10 piano miniatures
from a "Gone with the Wind."
Selznick became very interested in this idea of music tie
ins during the silent era, and then when he started
working with Steiner at RKO in the early '30s,
he was very excited about the possibilities
of selling film music outside of film.
They would take Max's music and they would broadcast it.
It would be part of a radio show
where they would talk about the film.
They'd have some of the cast members speak,
and then Max Steiner would conduct
some of his music from the film.
Now, these are the original lacquer discs.
Created by the studio
as they record the film score
right on the set.
For the sound recording
for synchronized sound motion pictures,
they would record
on the recording stage with a movie screen,
Max, as the conductor would look out
as he conducted the orchestra.
Microphones would pick it up
and it would be recorded optically on film.
At the same time they were recording optically on film,
they were cutting a sound disc like this so that they could
instantaneously hear all of the cues,
all of the takes afterwards and choose
which take to print optically.
Max wanted copies of all of his scores.
So he would order acetate reference recordings
from the lab that he could take home and own himself.
The studio long ago threw away most of the optical tracks
that were used to make these copies
for Max for the most part,
these are the only copies that still exist.
A lot of them sound great today. Yeah. Yeah.
And it's great guy Ray Fiola back in New York.
He's gone through and cataloged these things,
put them together digitally, getting rid of all the clicks
and pops from all the wax disks.
What a legacy we have because of these discs.
Although film music is written to accompany action
on the screen,
the best of it can sometimes stand alone and be enjoyed
without the picture.
For "Since You Went Away,"
radio publicist for Selznick said
if we had a way of promoting
some of this music away from the film,
particularly on radio, I think that might be very compelling.
And Selznick says, okay, yeah, go ahead.
And so Lou Forbes, who's again the music director
for that film, recorded about 10 minutes or so,
and they sent out about a thousand
copies to radio stations around the country.
And they got such a response to that that they started
releasing soundtrack albums of music from Selznick's films.
This is a 16-inch transcription disc
of a portion of Steiner's score for
"Since You Went Away," for which he won an Oscar.
But it shows how important he was not only to Hollywood,
but also to the exploitation and the success of a motion picture.
This is a set of production discs for the Steiner score
for "She" and it says on the label Mood Music from RKO
picture "She" composed by Max Steiner.
Also in this book is a set of discs for his Oscar
winning score for "The Informer."
It's lovely to have this recorded document
of Max's earlier music.
John Morgan and William Stromberg hold
Max Steiner in very high esteem.
To cement a special connection with the man they admire so much
they are sometimes able to work at Steiner's personal piano.
It is one of the treasures
in the collection at Brigham Young University.
Can you imagine all the great scores
that have been written on this piano?
Just imagine Max using that baton.
They study his sketches and listen
to the original studio recordings
on the surviving acetate discs,
working tirelessly to replicate his music.
Since the early 1990s, Morgan and Stromberg
have rerecorded 16 Steiner scores.
Recordings were great at Warner Brothers
had the best recording system
and the '40s music period had so
when you get dialog and sound effects,
you miss a lot of the music
and by recording it by modern standards and stereo
or surround sound, you can really hear the detail
that you never really get from looking at it with the film.
So we're able to breathe new life into it.
Morgan and Stromberg rerecorded Steiner's
"Charge of the Light Brigade,"
"They Died with Their Boots On,"
and the "Adventures of Don Juan"
with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.
The superb Russian musicians were enthusiastic
to play the music of Hollywood.
This was our dream come true.
We're able to realize these great scores of Max Steiner
in full symphonic form so you could hear every note of it.
We'd be working with the orchestra and a viola player
would come up to me and go, I saw it last night.
They were playing "Adventures of Don Juan" on TV.
I can't believe we just played it.
It was very fascinating.
It was fun. The orchestra really got to like us.
And they enjoy playing Max Steiner
music immensely.
His music will always be in my soul. And I just.
I can't think of another composer
that means as much to me.
By the 1960s,
Steiner had just about lost his eyesight.
Recognition of his work is encapsulated
in the many awards he received during his lifetime.
I have three Academy Awards Oscars,
had 26 nominations.
I also won the World Award in the festival in Venice
in 1948 for "Treasure of Sierra Madre."
I got decorated by the French government,
by the King of Belgium and my fan mail
it's mostly teenagers.
I get them from all over the world.
I get the letters from Japan and even from behind
the Iron Curtain sometimes. Is it right?
Steiner had a huge fan base.
The Max Steiner Music Society was formed in 1965 by Al Bender.
It had chapters all over the world.
Newsletters and journals, shared views,
and the celebrated the great scores
so admired by his followers.
On his 80th birthday in 1968,
his life was celebrated by friends and colleagues
from the American Society of Composers,
authors and publishers who sang tributes to him.
♪ Max, you're the master ♪
♪ We are all in your debt ♪
♪ And we salute all the music you composed ♪
♪ Music the world won't forget ♪
♪ Slower or faster ♪
♪ What you write takes the cake ♪
♪ And you are blessed with the talent to ♪
♪ Conduct your lovely music ♪
♪ And all of your music is so much better ♪
♪ Than the puns your make ♪
I may buy a plot now near
where some of my dear friends are buried
and have a sign placed there coming attraction,
Max Steiner.
When his health finally fell from
a congestive heart condition,
Maximilian Raoul Steiner
passed away on December 28, 1971.
He was 83 years old.
His death severed the link
not only with the golden age of Hollywood,
but with the last glorious years of the Vienna of Emperor
Franz Josef.
Today, it is a city proud to celebrate his legacy.
Every year in the Vienna Concert Hall,
the prestigious Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award
is presented to a motion picture composer
who has achieved exemplary status for his or her work.
In 2018,
it was the famed German-American to be accorded the honor.
And the Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award
of the City of Vienna goes to...
Hans Zimmer.
♪ Maxie, dear ♪
♪ Listen here ♪
♪ There's a summer place ♪
♪ Where you and I ♪
♪ 'Neath the sky ♪
♪ In the air ♪
♪ Years ago ♪
♪ Oh, how I wept that day ♪
♪ When you crept away ♪
♪ To the old ♪
♪ USA ♪
Steiner's lifetime of achievements was celebrated
when his name was enshrined in a star
on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in December 1975.
Accepting the honors this morning is his widow,
Mrs. Max Steiner,
and representatives of the Max Steiner Music Society.
Well, I am very honored and very happy,
and excited you could all be here.
I think they've found a beautiful day
for it, again,
I want to thank you for your presence.
And I love seeing all of you.
With his personal metronome
and baton finally at rest,
the maestro's work will forever be enshrined
in the history of film scoring.
Steiner had such an incredible mastery of the orchestra.
It's why he's really stands out
among all the great film composers.
There are many.
But I think he's still the giant among all of them.
The music itself will always find new devotees.
The films will survive
and people will always be moved by that music,
and therefore it will always be a part of our lives.
I think that a lot of what we do today in film
owes a great debt
to how Max Steiner really designed
and almost invented the art form of film scoring.
I don't think we would have "Star Wars."
I don't think we would have the scores
for the big action blockbusters
that we have today without Max Steiner.
He really set the bar.
He created the template
and he scored many of the greatest films of all time.
When you look at the range that goes from "King Kong"
to "Casablanca" from "Now Voyager"
to "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"
from "White Heat" to "The Searchers,"
it's an extraordinary filmography.
And he was an extraordinary man.
If you're tracking the history of American film,
Max Steiner's name has to be included,
along with the great directors, the great writers,
the great cinematographers, the great actors.
He is on that same pedestal.
But because he worked on these incredible movies
that are still shown and loved around the globe,
he will never be forgotten.
♪ As long as I live ♪
♪ You'll always be part of me ♪
♪ You'll live in the heart of me ♪
♪ As long as I live ♪