When
I moved to Sydney in 1987 I got to know the city by memorizing its coves and
bays. In Los Angeles since 2013, I’ve memorized where the studios are located.
After all, locals often think of Los Angeles and Hollywood synonymously. Paramount
is only a $10 cab fare away; Warner Bros is in the Valley. But in another sense
I’ve learned a different geography. What I would call ‘classical music’s
verities’ stand out more vividly now.
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| 'Where the studios are located'. Fox and Paramount lie in this direction; Warner Bros and Universal are over the first hill. |
I
had at first considered writing an article entitled ‘What Classical Music can
learn from Hollywood; what Hollywood can learn from Classical Music’. I was
going to include such ‘pearls’ as: ‘You’re never finished’. Film scripts, for example,
are multi-coloured documents inserting rewrites way beyond the first day of
shooting; how does that compare with classical music’s sketch, short score,
orchestration..?
‘It
Takes a Village’ (apologies to Hillary Clinton) occurred to me while sitting in
our local cinema, the Vista, at the junction of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards
(where D.W. Griffith filmed the silent epic Intolerance
in 1915 before the roads were paved) and realizing that the audience was
sitting through 15 minutes of end-credits. Such appreciation for everyone’s
work! Classical music may have gotten over the idea of the lone genius starving
in the garret. But in Hollywood you find the ‘sort of collaboration that once
yielded cathedrals’, says Billy Mernit, a story-analyst whose classes on
dialogue I’ve taken.
The
distance I’ve travelled through this landscape also makes me sensitive to
arguments about ‘New Music’. I’m reminded of a former piano teacher who said
that when he came back to the piano after a long spell at the harpsichord all
he could hear were the piano’s hammers. These days I notice the ‘shoulds’ in
the programming debates. Companies should
program New Music; people should
listen to it.
Maybe
it’s a worry that our classical music scene doesn’t seem to have a big-enough
audience for the most future-bound music of our tradition but I wonder if there
is another way of looking at this. Los Angeles suggests to me there is.
‘Should’ just isn’t in the vocabulary of anyone in the Green Room of ten million
people that is Los Angeles County.
I
guess people have been worrying about the decline in audience-appreciation for
our modern repertoire since Henry Pleasants bemoaned the loss of singable
themes in The Agony of Modern Music.
Oliver Rudland wrote in a recent edition of Standpoint
that composers stopped writing tunes because they lost their Christian faith. I
don’t even think they have to write tunes (!).
But
my favourite analysis is that of Richard Taruskin who, in a 2004 edition of The Musical Times, focussed on the idea
(fallacious in his mind) that all that matters in a piece of music is the
artist’s making of it (their ‘poiesis’), regardless of the audience’s capacity
to hear. Taruskin traced what he called ‘the poietic fallacy’ back to 19th
century critics like Alexander Serov or Franz Brendel (remember them?), but in Schoenberg’s
atonality and 12-tone music he felt that the audience had really been abandoned.
I
know Schoenberg tried to help audiences comprehend his new music by emulating
classical forms. But the classical forms couldn’t serve their previous
clarifying purpose once a composer’s means of punctuating them (Tonality) was
lost. That’s not a catastrophe, except that at some point after 1910 you could
often detect an idea that composers didn’t have to worry themselves if the
audience was left behind. The composer’s principal, if not sole, job was to
extend the musical language; it was the audience’s problem if they were
bewildered.
‘Most
of the cuts were in the First Act’ says screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, of the
Clint Eastwood film J. Edgar,
‘because we didn’t want the audience to
get ahead of it.’ [italics added] ‘Subtext helps your audience to
participate. It’s fantastic if your
audience knows a bit more than your characters,’ [italics again] says Billy
Mernit. What do these seemingly contradictory statements suggest? A filmmaker
is constantly shifting their audience’s understanding, and the audience is
granted enough of the basics to play along? I decided to collar Mernit, since I
know him, and put some questions to him.
Billy
Mernit is a former songwriter who has had his songs covered by people like Judy
Collins and Carly Simon. These
days he’s a story analyst for Universal Pictures, and is best known for his
textbook, Writing the Romantic Comedy.
Mernit
gets to see and comment on each of the seemingly interminable drafts a
screenplay goes through before the cameras roll. How important is consideration
of audience to the film work?
‘The
general rule of thumb is that with most writers, first draft is for you. Second
draft is where you start to take into consideration who it’s for and who might
respond to it,’ he says, when I catch up with him in the sculpture garden at
UCLA, where he does some teaching. ‘In the Hollywood studio system it is almost scientific. One of the first
questions any executive asks of a project is “what’s the demographic?” “who’s
the intended audience?” “how do we expect to sell this thing?” because it’s in
the studio system that you’re dealing with major money.
‘And
by the way, back in the Silent Era, in the early days of Hollywood, a lot of
the stuff that is now sort of codified, in its nascent form was responding to
audience. In some of the earliest Silent Movies, like Chaplin two-reelers,
audiences were going “give us more of that. We love that.” And only when the
audience created the demand for things, did Hollywood say, “Hmm, if we put a
woman in the picture with that comedian we’ll expand our audience” - things
like that.’
So,
could I take another Clintonian expression and turn it into one of my ‘lessons’
- ‘It’s the Audience, Stupid’?
‘Well,
the slight confusion in the question, the thing that’s being conflated is
...it’s creator versus producer, meaning a creator may not be thinking of the
audience; a screenplay might be a very personal endeavour. But the producers of a screenplay are thinking
audience first and foremost.
‘I
don’t want to be too glib about this because if you’re a story analyst who’s
worth what they pay you, on a certain level there’s this naive, fundamental
“does this get me excited?” You have to have a personal response to it. And
that, by the way, goes with producers as well. You don’t necessarily get into
producing unless you have a great love for movies, like a good story and want
to be involved. So I’m responding as a human being, that’s the litmus test. If
it grabs me and I’m thinking “I’ve gotta keep turning these pages”, I am the
audience; with the producer’s hat on. I don’t think of things in terms of what’s
commercial or not. It’s more “is there something in the story that speaks to some
kind of audience beyond myself?” Everything should be personal, of course, and
the most personal projects are quite often the most impassioned and unique,
right? but it’s a communicative medium.’
A
producer like 1930s whizkid Irving Thalberg (the model for F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s ‘last tycoon’) thought that the success of a movie was arbitrated
solely by the audience, director Billy Wilder’s ‘wonderful people out there in
the dark’. I wonder if the classical music fear of giving so much consideration
to audience response is that we would lose out on masterpieces?
Says
Mernit: ‘Well, it’s not like Mozart or Verdi or Vivaldi were writing extremely
esoteric masterpieces that were being foisted on an unsuspecting public; they
were using the popular vernacular. But the crucial difference is that Hollywood
is not attempting to make the general public watch a Godard movie. You can have
a Best Picture winner like 12 Years a
Slave and it’s something that people can relate to, whereas much modern
classical music - unless it’s Minimalist - is very difficult for most audience
members to even hear. It’s as if you were making a movie with a strange lens on
the projector.’
I
find myself wondering if classical music would ever get to this level of
deference to the public. After all A
Composer’s Cohort, an article on the Opera America website, says, ‘...try
not to worry about the reception....Whether the audience likes your piece is
arbitrary but informative.’ I can’t help feeling that not only would this be a
strange abdication of skill in the movie world which is premised on predicting
hits (and often does), school teachers wouldn’t say, ‘I have no idea at what point I lose my students’ nor
would sales personnel concede, ‘I have no idea when I’ve lost the buyer.’
And it’s not as if classical music
was always in such an unknowing position. A classical composer knew that if you
put an A minor chord after a G while you were in the key of C, an audience
would experience interruption. Wagner knew that if he kept withholding
resolution of the ‘Tristan chord’ we in the audience would lean in with
yearning. And I’m convinced Tchaikovsky set his audience up so that they would
burst into applause at the end of the march in the ‘Pathétique’ and feel all
the more excruciatingly the wrench into the Adagio
lamentoso which in fact ends the symphony.
Do classical music writers want to second-guess
the audience? Do they want positive reinforcement of their vision that badly? I
wonder what would happen for contemporary repertoire if the practitioners began
to ‘Think like Thalberg’; if classical music had its equivalents of film
producers, people in orchestras who could stand between a CEO and a Director of
Artistic Planning, a CAO (Chief Artistic Officer) if you like, with the authority
to say, ‘Look, the audience feels you’ve got ten minutes more music than
thematic material. I saw them fidgeting at the preview we set up to test their
responses.’
These are just some of the thoughts
that have come to me from immersing myself in a different artistic milieu. But
to come back to an earlier promise, what can Hollywood learn from classical
music? I said above I was thinking of writing about each artform’s lessons for
the other.
So far I only have one, but it’s
big, and fairly reaffirming. Paradoxically it’s something about form. In Save the Cat, probably the most popular
screenwriting text of today, the book that every second aspiring screenwriter
working on WiFi in Starbucks has sitting by their elbow, the author Blake
Snyder says ‘Act II begins on page 25. No, please. Don’t argue’. Yes, but I
will. (By the way, since screenplays are formatted so that one page equals one
minute of running time, this is even more restrictive than it sounds.)
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| Every second person working on a script. Actor Joey Marino studies a screenplay while working in Bru Coffeehouse, Los Angeles |
Classical
music wouldn’t buy this. Classical Sonata Form, for example, is a 3-Act
structure. It was a screenwriting teacher, Sydney’s Linda Aronson, who made me
think about this. Classical Sonata Form contains exposition, development, and
recapitulation. There are certain goals it must satisfy but look, there is a
world of variation in the way Haydn, Beethoven, Mahler, Shostakovich and others
even closer to our time went about it. Classical music proves you don’t have to
be rigidly formulaic.
But
screenwriting may not be as schematic as I think. I put this to Billy Mernit. ‘It
gets moved around a lot,’ he says. ‘The A-teamers are not slaves to those kinds
of restrictive formulas really.’ And then I think of Pulp Fiction - three acts functioning traditionally but out of
real-life chronological order, containing enough that’s familiar for an
audience to appreciate what’s fresh. Yes, even as I continue to try to learn
from classical music, Quentin Tarantino (Pulp
Fiction’s screenwriter/director) proves you can create an innovative
masterpiece that is also popular.
©
2015
This article
first appeared in the 7 May edition of Symphony Australia’s The Podium under the title: A Different Geography:
how LA has affected my musical thinking
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