music – The Story Department

Preminger’s Laura: In Love With A Score

Karel FG Segers — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 12:03:13 +0000

As a student I lived only a 25min train trip away from the Brussels “Cinematek”, once hailed by Martin Scorsese as the world’s best cinema repository. Among the half dozen classics screened daily, Otto Preminger’s Laura would pop up at least once a year. I watched it; and I loved it.

Soon after I first watched this movie, I had the fortune of meeting with composer David Raksin. He told me an anecdote that teaches us a thing or two about the issues that even seasoned filmmakers face. It also shows the power of the composer.

Preminger wanted to show how the main character – a detective – was falling in love with Laura. Or rather, he was falling in love with Laura’s portrait. She herself had been murdered. The critical scene didn’t work, and without it, the entire movie would fail.

The director asked the composer to fix it, by writing a suitable music cue.

Raksin struggled under the pressure. He lacked inspiration, as he was in a dark space. His girlfriend had just broken up with him … in a letter.

About to throw in the towel, Raksin sat down at the piano, and put the letter on the music rack. He read it again, while improvising a melody. Raksin ended up composing what would become one of the most recorded love themes in cinema history.

Was it all a dream?

The story is that of Detective McPherson, who investigates the murder of Laura Hunt. In the process, he realises he is more than just intrigued with the victim.

About forty minutes into the film, for the first time McPherson is alone in Laura’s flat, and while he is admiring Laura’s portrait on the wall, the famous love theme plays.

This moment sits right at the movie’s mid point, and it could have had everything of a traditional love scene, if it weren’t for the inconvenient fact that the lover is in fact … dead.

At the end of the scene, the detective has a drink and falls asleep, which has spurred some to claim that the rest of the movie could be interpreted as merely a dream.

In an alternative cut of the film, the ending had a character suggest that the whole story had been imagined.

As you may know, both options are among the worst possible ways to end any story, so the original cut was restored.

In love with a painting

While McPherson gets more and more familiar with Laura, her surroundings and her entourage, a knock on the door introduces Waldo Lydecker, a close friend to Laura, and a potential suspect in the murder case.

If Raksin’s love theme didn’t already communicate what was going on between McPherson and the painting, Lydecker states it in his own acerbic manner: “You better watch out, McPherson, or you’ll end up in a psychiatric ward. I don’t think they’ve ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse.”

The entire film abounds in spectacular, quotable dialogue, the type Robert McKee would urge you to cut.

Admittedly, the film was made over seventy years ago and today, the lines sound theatrical. In particular the character of Lydecker boasts a language that you would now only hear on the stage. Yet it sounds sharp, to the point, and appropriate for this character, a writer of short stories – and a narcissist.

Preminger deserves the credit for bringing this delightful character to the foreground, against the wishes of the original playwright Vera Caspary.

More proof that the last thing a movie adaptation needs to do, is honouring the original.

A remake of Laura has been announced, and before you panic: the writer is James Ellroy, genius behind Black Dahlia and LA Confidential.

-Karel Segers

https://ozzywood.wistia.com/medias/oxfmpvfmwt?embedType=iframe&seo=false&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=1080

Karel FG Segers

Karel Segers wrote his first produced screenplay at age 17. Today he is a story analyst with experience in acquisition, development and production. He has trained students worldwide, and worked with half a dozen Academy Award nominees. Karel speaks more European languages than he has fingers on his left hand, which he is still trying to find a use for in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. The languages, not the fingers.

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Writing For Sound

Randy Thom — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 23:33:56 +0000

Telling a film story, like telling any kind of story, is about creating connections between characters, places, objects, experiences, and ideas.

You try to invent a world which is complex and many layered, like the real world. But unlike most of real life (which tends to be badly written and edited), in a good film a set of themes emerge which embody a clearly identifiable line or arc, which is the story.

It seems to me that one element of writing for movies stands above all others in terms of making the eventual movie as “cinematic” as possible: establishing point of view. The audience experiences the action through its identification with characters.

The writing needs to lay the groundwork for setting up pov before the actors, cameras, microphones, and editors come into play. Each of these can obviously enhance the element of pov, but the script should contain the blueprint.

The audience experiences the action through its identification with characters.

Let’s say we are writing a story about a guy who, as a boy, loved visiting his father at the steel mill where he worked. The boy grows up and seems to be pretty happy with his life as a lawyer, far from the mill. But he has troubling, ambiguous nightmares that eventually lead him to go back to the town where he lived as a boy in an attempt to find the source of the bad dreams.

The description above doesn’t say anything specific about the possible use of sound in this story, but I have chosen basic story elements which hold vast potential for sound. First, it will be natural to tell the story more-or-less through the pov of our central character. But that’s not all. A steel mill gives us a huge palette for sound. Most importantly, it is a place which we can manipulate to produce a set of sounds which range from banal to exciting to frightening to weird to comforting to ugly to beautiful. The place can therefore become a character, and have its own voice, with a range of “emotions” and “moods.” And the sounds of the mill can resonate with a wide variety of elements elsewhere in the story.

None of this good stuff is likely to happen unless we write, shoot, and edit the story in a way that allows it to happen.

The element of dream in the story swings a door wide open to sound as a collaborator. In a dream sequence we as film makers have even more latitude than usual to modulate sound to serve our story, and to make connections between the sounds in the dream and the sounds in the world for which the dream is supplying clues. Likewise, the “time border” between the “little boy” period and the “grown-up” period offers us lots of opportunities to compare and contrast the two worlds, and his perception of them.

The place can therefore become a character, and have its own voice.

Over a transition from one period to the other, one or more sounds can go through a metamorphosis. Maybe as our guy daydreams about his childhood, the rhythmic clank of a metal shear in the mill changes into the click clack of the railroad car taking him back to his home town. Any sound, in itself, only has so much intrinsic appeal or value.

On the other hand, when a sound changes over time in response to elements in the larger story, its power and richness grow exponentially.

-Randy Thom

Photocredits: Graphic Stock

Randy Thom

Randy Thom is the Director of Sound Design at Skywalker Sound.

He has been nominated for 14 Oscars, and received 2. One for The Right Stuff, and one for The Incredibles.