Early History of Sound Film: Experimentation and Development (1900‒1925)

A diversity of sound and music practices characterized the era of early cinema (Altman Reference Altman2004, 119–288). As film found a more secure footing as a medium of entertainment and narrative film increasingly dominated the market, musical accompaniment became more closely connected to the film. The importance of musical accompaniment – ‘playing the pictures’ – consequently increased with this codification of narrative filmmaking technique, as a means of representing and reflecting the narrative. Although the practice of ‘playing the pictures’ was quite varied, it was structured around three general principles: synchronization, subjugation and continuity.

Synchronization involved fitting the music to the story, through mood, recurring motifs and catching details pertinent to the narrative. Mood related music to dramatic setting, usually at the level of the scene. Motif entailed a non-contiguous musical recurrence linked to a narratively important character, object or idea and topically inflected to reflect the action. Catching the details, which would evolve into ‘mickey-mousing’ in the sound era, involved exaggerated sound or music and an exceptionally close timing with the image, as in the vaudeville practice of accompanying slapstick comedy with intentionally incongruous sound. Subjugation required that music be selected to support the story and that music should never draw attention to itself at the expense of the story. This principle ensured that the accompaniment was played to the film rather than to the audience. Through subjugation, music could also serve to mould the audience’s own absorption in the narrative. The musical continuity of the accompaniment likewise encouraged spectators to accept and invest in the film’s narrative continuity (Buhler Reference Buhler, Gilman and Joe2010).

These three principles structured the three dominant modalities of ‘playing the picture’ during the silent era: compilation, improvisation and special scores. Compiled scores, whether based on circulated cue sheets or assembled by a theatre’s musical staff, were especially common, and a whole division of the music-publishing industry was organized to support this concept. The publishing firms not only supplied original music composed to accompany conventional moods, but they also offered catalogues and anthologies of music indexed by mood and topic to facilitate compilation scoring. The most famous American anthology was Ernö Rapée’s Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (Reference Rapée1924). Compilation was the preferred practice of accompaniment in the early years and, even in the 1920s, it remained the basic method for orchestral performance.

Improvisation was the accompaniment practice over which the film industry had the least control. Typically performed on a piano or organ, an improvised score was left to musicians to invent on the fly. As with compiled scores, the improvisation would introduce shifts in musical style to fit the need of any given scene, and improvisers would commonly work well-known tunes into their accompaniments. But the results varied greatly depending on the musicians in charge, resulting in the stereotype of the inept small-town pianist. Variable accompaniment practices left to the devices of local musicians were seen, according to Tim Anderson, as ‘“problems” that needed to be solved’, as the film industry moved towards greater standardization of exhibition in the 1910s (Reference Anderson1997, 5).

Some ‘special’ scores – scores created and distributed to go with specific films – began to appear in America in the 1910s, and increased in frequency and prominence in the 1920s. Notable special scores for American films include Joseph Carl Breil’s for Birth of a Nation (1915), Mortimer Wilson’s for The Thief of Bagdad (1924), William Axt’s and David Mendoza’s for The Big Parade (1925), and J. S. Zamecnik’s for Wings (1927). The increased prevalence of special scores was part of the film industry’s attempts to standardize and systematize musical practices. Over the course of the 1910s and 1920s, movie exhibition became increasingly stratified, and film music reflected this disparity: many urban deluxe theatres devoted considerable resources to maintaining large music libraries and musical personnel, including substantial orchestras and Wurlitzer organs, but small town theatres could hardly afford to do the same, as Vachel Lindsay, among others, ruefully noted (Reference Lindsay1916, 189–97).

In Europe, cinema occupied a somewhat different cultural position, alongside its commercial and popular associations. In France, Camille Saint-Saëns composed a score in 1908 for L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise, the first production of the ‘Film d’Art’ company, which was formed with the idea of making prestige pictures that might attract a higher class of patron (Marks Reference Marks1997, 50–61). Other French composers soon demonstrated an interest in composing for cinema, most notably Erik Satie and members of Les Six. In the 1920s, surrealist artists and writers not only took inspiration from the cinema but also worked with it seriously as a medium. Additionally, ciné-clubs and journals devoted to filmmaking indicate film’s potential as high art in the eyes of French filmmakers and musicians. In Germany, too, silent film had a close relationship to modernist movements in the plastic arts, and original film scores to accompany these artistic films were quite common. Mostly original film scores were composed for such well-known expressionist films as Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920; score by Giuseppe Becce) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927; score by Gottfried Huppertz). The Viennese-born composer Edmund Meisel composed scores for German and Soviet films, including Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), one of the most influential Soviet films of the silent era (Ford Reference Ford2011). Additionally, German artists like Oskar Fischinger experimented in ‘visual music’, further linking music and the moving image through abstract visual art (Moritz Reference Moritz2004; Cooke Reference Cooke2008, 58).

European film-music practices were as diverse as they were in America, and accompaniment followed the same three principles of synchronization, subjugation and continuity, and was also organized by the same three modalities of compilation, improvisation and original score. In Germany, compilation was particularly formalized, with original compositions, anthologies and catalogues indexed by topics and moods along American lines. (Becce’s volumes of Kinothek music were especially popular.) In 1927, Hans Erdmann, Becce and Ludwig Brav published the Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik, a two-volume compendium of silent-film dramaturgy, hermeneutic theory of music and systematic sorting of musical works according to the needs of a music director of a cinema. Although it appeared late in the silent era and so never had a chance to establish its principles in theatres, the Handbuch does represent a particularly well-formulated theory of mature silent-film practice (Fuchs Reference Fuchs, Tieber and Windisch2014). Its basic idea of a musical dramaturgy, related to traditional forms of theatre but with specific problems unique to film, also seems to have been absorbed by the composers of sound film as they worked to establish a place for music on the soundtrack.

Ultimately, the American studio system, with its drive towards standardization in order to control both labour costs and quality, found it increasingly advantageous to pursue experiments in synchronizing film with recorded sound. Filmmakers and inventors had been interested in mechanically linking sound and music with image since the earliest days of cinema. Thomas Edison, for instance, always claimed his inspiration for the motion picture had been the phonograph, ‘to do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear’ (Edison Reference Edison1888). In 1895, he developed the Kinetophone, joining his Kinetoscope with a phonograph, and in 1913 his firm released a second version of the Kinetophone that allowed for better synchronization. In France, Léon Gaumont developed the Chronophone, a sound-on-disc technology that he patented and exhibited publicly in 1902 (Gaumont Reference Gaumont and Fielding1959, 65). Significant early research into sound synchronization occurred in Germany as well: in 1900, Ernst Ruhmer of Berlin announced his Photographophone, evidently the first device successfully to reproduce sound photographed on film (Crawford Reference Crawford1931, 634), and Oskar Messter’s Biophon apparatus was exhibited at the 1904 World Exposition in St. Louis (Narath Reference Narath and Fielding1960, 115). In the end, these systems had little more than novelty appeal, owing to major difficulties with synchronization and amplification.

A feverish pace of electrical research in the 1920s led to renewed effort in the development of synchronized sound, alongside a number of mass media and sound technologies. Donald Crafton refers to sound film’s various ‘electric affinities’ – including electricity and thermionics, the telephone, radio, television and phonography – that developed prior to or alongside sound-synchronization technology as part of the research boom following the First World War (Reference Crafton1997, 23–61). Perhaps most importantly, the invention of radio tubes led to a much more effective means of amplification. Companies and laboratories experimented with both sound-on-disc and sound-on-film playback technologies. Sound-on-disc sometimes (but not invariably) involved simultaneously recording a phonograph disc and a nitrate image, which were mechanically played back in sync, and sound-on-film consisted of an optical recording of the soundtrack – a physical writing of the sound onto a photographic strip that ran alongside the images. Sound-on-disc initially had somewhat better sound fidelity, and it drew on the long-established recording techniques of phonography, along with its industry and equipment. Sound-on-film, on the other hand, was better for on-location shooting, as the apparatus was more portable and the sound easier to edit. Although sound-on-film ultimately won out, for years both systems remained equally viable.

In 1919, three German inventors – Joseph Engl, Hans Vogt and Joseph Massolle – patented Tri-Ergon, an optical recording system first screened publicly in 1922 (Kreimeier Reference Kreimeier, Kimber and Kimber1996, 178). Meanwhile, in America in 1923, Lee de Forest, working with Theodore Case, patented and demonstrated a system with optical recording technology called Phonofilm. Early Phonofilms included a short speech by President Calvin Coolidge and performances by the vaudeville star Eddie Cantor and African-American songwriting duo Sissle and Blake. Several scores were also recorded and distributed for the Phonofilm system, including Hugo Riesenfeld’s for James Cruze’s The Covered Wagon (1923) and for Lang’s Siegfried (1924). Although de Forest’s system provided some publicity for the technology of synchronized sound film, the system remained mostly a novelty. While the recording process was already quite advanced, as can be heard on extant Phonofilm films, issues remained with Phonofilm’s exhibition and economics. Most importantly, not enough theatres were equipped with the Phonofilm playback equipment. De Forest claimed that as many as fifty theatres had been wired for his system in 1924 (Crafton Reference Crafton1997, 66), but major film companies, which also controlled much of the theatre market, were unwilling to risk production with Phonofilm, and this reluctance made the system commercially unsustainable.

Innovation, Introduction and Dispersion of Synchronized Sound Technology (1926–1932)

Hollywood Adjusts to Sound

The period from 1927 to 1930 was one of much uncertainty and experimentation as the industry adjusted to the technology, economics and emerging aesthetics of sound film. In 1927, AT&T and their subsidiary Western Electric founded ERPI (Electrical Research Products Inc.) to handle rights and standardize costs. ERPI installed sound technology in theatres and studios, and all major companies signed on. Soon after, RCA formed its own studio, RKO Pictures, to exploit its Photophone sound film, and the company also competed with ERPI in wiring theatres. After some initial patent disputes – due to its work in radio, RCA held strong patent positions – the two sides agreed to cross-license the basic technologies, allowing all films to be played on either system. This consolidation further quickened the pace of Hollywood’s transition.

Initially, there were three kinds of sound films: films with synchronized scores and sound effects, part-talkies and 100 per cent talkies. The first category featured music and sound effects that were post-synchronized. Essentially, these films followed silent-film strategies, recording music and sound effects that could have been performed live, using sound as spectacle or special effect. Examples of synchronized sound films include Warner Bros.’ The First Auto (1927) and MGM’s White Shadows in the South Seas (1928). While spoken dialogue was not a part of this kind of film, sometimes the voice was added to the soundtrack off-camera or in post-synchronization, in the manner of a sound effect, such as in The First Auto, parts of The Jazz Singer, White Shadows in the South Seas and Wild Orchids (1929). At the other end of the spectrum was the 100 per cent talkie, emerging out of the aesthetics established in the Vitaphone shorts. The emphasis on spoken dialogue in the early talkies resulted in a general aesthetic shift towards the comprehensibility of dialogue, sometimes at the expense of music or other sound effects. Regular production of 100 per cent talkies did not begin until 1929, perhaps in part because recording equipment and trained personnel to operate it remained in somewhat short supply (K. F. Morgan Reference Morgan1929, 268).

In between was the part-talkie, which was widespread in 1928 and 1929. Part-talkies were a varied lot, and as early as 1929 they were already being discounted as an expedient ‘due to recording and production problems’ (ibid., 271). Many, the so-called goat glands, had begun production as silent films but had dialogue scenes added (Crafton Reference Crafton1997, 168–9, 177). Talking (or singing) scenes in such films could heighten the spectacle and play to the novelty of synchronized sound, much like Technicolor sequences that were also occasionally added to films during this period, although the part-talkie’s shifts from intertitles to spoken dialogue and back with little warning often strike audiences today as jarring. The disparaging contemporaneous term ‘goat gland’ suggests that the lack of integration of the talking sequences also disturbed critics (and perhaps audiences) of the time, though the way the term was deployed indicates that the critics understood ‘talking’ as an interpolation – a gimmick that had been added to a silent film akin to the description of The Jazz Singer as ‘vitaphonized’ – rather than as a conflict between opposing film aesthetics (as such films are usually evaluated today).

Some part-talkies such as The Singing Fool, Noah’s Ark (1928) or Weary River (1929) thoroughly integrated talking and silent sequences, and such films could not be as easily converted into silent films without substantial re-editing (though each did appear in a silent version, and in each case the silent version is, like the goat glands, shorter than the sound version). These part-talkies are films apparently conceived as full hybrids with some thematic thought given to which scenes would better appear silent and which would be suited for spoken dialogue or musical performances. In Lonesome (1928), masterful parallel editing, which follows Jim and Mary in turn, accelerates towards the couple’s eventual union at Coney Island, and this point of conjunction is emphasized by a shift from the silent-film technique of the parallel editing to the talking-film technique of their initial encounter. Although the spectacle of the talking film obviously means to affirm the romance as something transformational for the new couple, the actual technique of talking film here makes the dialogue scene appear (to a modern audience) laboured instead, with much of the vivacious energy, dynamism and music of the silent sequences suddenly drained away during the talking.

As the novelty of spoken dialogue began to wear off, a craze for musical films began. Musicals offered a new kind of film spectacle, featuring elaborate song and dance numbers, frequently advertised as ‘all singing, all dancing and all talking’. Stage talent was brought to the screen in droves, as actors with singing experience, Broadway songwriters and stage directors all found in Hollywood a lucrative source of income and a chance to reach much larger audiences. Many of these early musicals were revues such as The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929), The Show of Shows (1929), Paramount on Parade (1930) and King of Jazz (1930), all of which essentially strung together a series of shorts. Such films offered studios opportunities to stage elaborate musical spectacles without having to worry about a connecting narrative and the different approach to capturing dialogue that narrative film required. Like the Vitaphone shorts on which Warner Bros. had honed its techniques, the individual numbers of a revue could be conceived as stage acts, and so dialogue captured with stage diction could simply mark the recording of an act. In this respect, one important innovation of The Broadway Melody (1929), one of MGM’s first talking features and winner of the second Academy Award for Best Picture, was the way it distinguished stage and backstage in terms of sound design realized as the approach to recording. It proved an important model for the backstage musical, although Warners’ musical part-talkies starring Jolson (The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool) also largely follow this model. In the backstage musical, the dramatic action happened behind the scenes, and the musical numbers, often in colour and thematically unrelated to the principal action, would thus be given diegetic justification as performance. Operettas such as The Desert Song (1929), The Love Parade (1929) and The Lottery Bride (1930) were another important type of musical film during the transition era. Additionally, film musicals often exploited the synergy between the film and popular-music industries. As Katherine Spring has shown (Reference Spring2013), popular songs were ubiquitous during the transition period, even in non-musical films; and sometimes, as in Weary River, it is hard to tell the difference between a dramatic film and a musical.

Shifts in recording practices and sound editing affected the emerging aesthetics of sound film. Originally all sounds were recorded live on set; many accounts (and production photographs) reference musicians situated just off-screen. This posed many challenges regarding microphone placement and mixing. It also usually resulted in longer takes, since there was less fluidity with editing than had been possible in silent film. Various improvements ultimately led to sound editing and mixing taking place in post-production. Filming to playback – the recording of a song in the studio in advance, to be played back and lip-synced by the actors while the image was shot silent – was the method used by Gaumont to produce Chronophone films, and it was purportedly used in The Jazz Singer to cover Jolson’s canting (Crafton Reference Crafton1997, 240), but it was sometimes difficult to achieve a convincing illusion of precise synchronization, and the technique also posed logistical problems for complicated scenes such as production numbers. The first commonly cited example of pre-recording was Broadway Melody, and after 1929 the practice became common (Barrios Reference Barrios1995, 60; Crafton Reference Crafton1997, 236).

Dubbing and re-recording had been possible if not always completely feasible since 1927, but there was a loss of recording fidelity, especially with sound-on-film (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2012). Warners, the only studio using sound-on-disc, had a working re-recording process by 1928 that allowed music underscoring (Slowik Reference Slowik2014, 64–73). As J. P. Maxfield explained,

Maxfield’s description makes clear, however, that Vitaphone dubbing was a convoluted process that had to be done in real time. As such, the practice did not become widespread until the early 1930s, when techniques for reducing the ground noise of film had developed sufficiently to allow reliable re-recording with sound-on-film. Early on, voice dubbing would often be done directly on the set, rather than through pre-recording or re-recording (Larkin Reference Larkin1929). In The Jazz Singer, for instance, the father’s one word of dialogue and Jolson’s piano playing were evidently both dubbed in live off-camera (‘Open Forum’ 1928, 1134).

Of course, film-music composition also underwent substantial change. Initially, the organization of music departments in Hollywood was somewhat ad hoc. In the late 1920s, the Hollywood studios either called upon composers with experience in silent-film scoring from deluxe theatres or they recruited composers, orchestrators and arrangers with experience on Broadway, including songwriters for film musicals. The composers from the deluxe cinemas, such as Riesenfeld and Mendoza, were assigned to score the synchronized silent films, whereas those who had specialized in arranging and composing Broadway production music, such as Max Steiner, Louis Silvers, Herbert Stothart and Alfred Newman, were assigned to the musicals and talking pictures. These initial assignments would have important consequences as studios quickly eliminated silent-film production, leaving a set of composers trained more on Broadway than in the silent cinema to establish the musical conventions of the Hollywood sound film. As talking pictures rapidly took over, musical accompaniment shifted from the wall-to-wall scoring characteristic of silent cinema to becoming increasingly intermittent. Nevertheless, this shift seems not to have been wholly a product of inadequate technologies of re-recording, as scholars have long presumed, since many talking films from before 1930, including the first all-talking Lights of New York, have extensive music underscoring dialogue (Slowik Reference Slowik2014, 89–93; Buhler and Neumeyer Reference Buhler, Neumeyer and Neumeyer2014, 25–6). Instead, the shift seems better explained by the kinds of films being made between 1930 and 1932 – more contemporary drama – and filmmakers’ uncertainty over how closely the musical practice of the sound film should follow that of the silent film. In essence, wall-to-wall music threatened to make sound film appear a little too much like silent film.

Although the technology improved quickly during the transitional period, its advance was also highly disruptive to established working conditions, and those most threatened with displacement by the new technology hardly welcomed its arrival. Labour disputes, especially with musicians, were widespread. Many theatre musicians were laid off as orchestras and organists were replaced with synchronized soundtracks. The musicians’ union fought for the continuation of live music, but without much success (Kraft Reference Kraft1996, 47–58; Cooke Reference Cooke2008, 46–7). At the same time, the new technology prompted a need for studio musicians; and, as a result, many of the best musicians moved to Hollywood.

Additionally, standardization came somewhat more slowly than was optimal because many theatres had initially invested in sound-on-disc and did not want to pay to convert to sound-on-film. Furthermore, although sound-on-film did not suffer from potential synchronization issues as did sound-on-disc, the former initially had more problems with sound quality in exhibition. At first, many major studios released films on both formats, a procedure that continued through the mid-1930s. Nevertheless, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and subsequent deep and prolonged economic downturn profoundly affected the industry (as it affected nearly all aspects of American life), forcing studios to streamline their productions, to limit experiments and to focus on codification of best practices. By the start of 1931, Warner Bros. had joined the other Hollywood studios and begun converting to production using sound-on-film, and the production of silent films in Hollywood was also mostly over, with the exception of a few holdouts like Charlie Chaplin.

As sound-film technology became increasingly standardized, so did production practices. David Bordwell has emphasized the way the film industry worked to re-establish many of the regular production techniques from the silent film that had been disrupted with the coming of sound. These included, in particular, scene construction based on editing and single-camera shooting. The early sound film had used the soundtrack as the master shot to establish continuity in a scene. The image could be edited to the master continuity of the soundtrack, either by filming the scene with multiple cameras from various positions and with lenses of different focal lengths or through the use of cut-ins, especially reaction shots of characters listening. Through improved blimping, microphones, film stock, techniques of re-recording and other technology, the need for the audio master shot became less pressing (Bordwell et al. Reference Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson1985, 301–6).

Innovation and Resistance in Europe (1929‒1931)

While the transition to sound in the United States was rapid, the dissemination of the technology around the world was wildly uneven due to the large capital investments required and the financial uncertainty caused by the Great Depression. Because most theatres in Europe were wired for sound after 1929, the Depression created an economically chaotic situation as exhibition practices lagged behind production practices, and many sound films were initially shown silent at many theatres (Kreimeier Reference Kreimeier, Kimber and Kimber1996, 182). Furthermore, the change was, in many ways, controlled and dictated by American production and distribution companies. The United States had dominated world markets since the First World War, and American companies’ patents on sound synchronization technologies gave them a distinct advantage over the film industries of other countries, except perhaps in Germany, where the film industry took advantage of its control over key sound-film patents (Gomery Reference Gomery1976; Gomery Reference Gomery2005, 109–13). The reaction to synchronized sound in Europe provides a particularly rich story of competition, resistance and innovation in the aftermath of widespread technological change (Gomery Reference Gomery2005, 105–14).

Even as Hollywood adjusted to the changes brought on by synchronized sound, American companies sought to expand their reach (and their profits) through international distribution of sound films. They saw Europe in particular as an available market. The installation of sound equipment and distribution of sound films in countries that had not yet developed the technology to do this themselves promised to be lucrative. Engineers in Europe, however, had also made progress on sound-synchronization technology: more than fifteen sound systems were competing in Europe during the transitional period and, by 1928, the primarily Dutch-owned Tobis was formed, controlling most of the important patents in Europe, including the Tri-Ergon system (Kreimeier Reference Kreimeier, Kimber and Kimber1996, 178–9). Ufa, AEG and Siemens and Halske then launched the company Klangfilm to organize the German industry’s response. In 1929, Tobis and Klangfilm came to an agreement, and they began jointly marketing their technology as Tobis-Klangfilm, aiming to corner the European market and shut out American companies. Tobis-Klangfilm sought to stall the American film industry’s impending control of the international market, disputing patents in the hope of obstructing what they saw as an inevitable ‘talkie invasion’ by the American companies (Gomery Reference Gomery1980, 85) – not just studios, but also the activity of firms like ERPI that posed a major threat to more basic industrial concerns. In the summer of 1930, representatives from Tobis-Klangfilm and members of the American film industry conferred on neutral ground in Paris. An international cartel resulted from this ‘Paris Agreement’, and the German and American companies agreed to split up much of the world for patent rights and charge films royalties for distribution within each territory. As German and American companies held the decisive patents, other national film industries were at the mercy of foreign firms for the technology to produce and exhibit sound films. Resistance to the change was particularly widespread in countries like France due to fear that national cinematic practices would diminish.

Because the European transition to commercial sound-film production came somewhat later than in the United States (initially running two to three years behind), and perhaps because they had the American model to react to or because they needed to play catch-up, Europeans developed a number of innovative sound films as they made the transition. In England, Blackmail (1929) was originally planned as a silent film, but the quick inroads sound film was making in British theatres required that director Alfred Hitchcock re-conceive the film with dialogue sequences. As was commonly the case during the transition era, a silent version was also released for theatres not yet equipped with sound. The lead actress (Anny Ondra) had a heavy Czech accent, so Joan Barry was hired to speak the dialogue off-camera, essentially dubbing the film live because techniques of post-synchronization were not yet well developed (Belton Reference Belton1999).

Walter Ruttmann devised an innovative audiovisual aesthetic in his first sound film, Melodie der Welt. Adapting the approach he took in his silent Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City; 1927), Ruttmann created an audiovisual ‘symphony’, a collage of recorded diegetic sounds corresponding to the montage of images from around the world. The soundtrack sounds almost like a prototype for musique concrète. Ruttmann also experimented with sound-only films. In 1931, Lang directed his first sound film, M, a wonderfully strange hybrid that combines silent-film technique (including fully silent sequences), a kind of voice-over narration to connect different locations, and off-screen sound to heighten suspense. Though Lang’s approach to sound in M might, like Hitchcock’s work on Blackmail, seem related to the technical challenges of synchronized sound film, it should be noted that by 1931 films coming out of the German film industry had achieved a high technical standard with respect to dialogue. Although shooting more dialogue without showing moving lips than American films from the time, deft handling of synchronized dialogue is nevertheless demonstrated in Die Drei von der Tankstelle (Three Good Friends or Three Men and Lilian; 1930), Erik Charell’s Der Kongreß tanzt (The Congress Dances; 1931) and Pabst’s Westfront 1918: Vier von der Infanterie (Comrades of 1918; 1930), Die 3 Groschen-Oper (The Threepenny Opera; 1931) and Kameradschaft (‘Comradeship’; 1931). If M was not an improvised solution to challenges posed by inadequate technology, it seems instead an experiment to avoid the obviousness of sync sound without reverting wholly to silent-film technique.

While establishing close and convincing synchronization remained a continual concern, and American films generally began a shot with a sync point of flapping lips and dialogue before passing to reaction shots, European films were on the whole less obsessed with such close dialogue synchronization and frequently shot dialogue from behind, where synchronization could be much looser. In early cases, like Blackmail and Augusto Genina’s Prix de beauté (Miss Europe or Beauty Prize; 1930), this seems to have been an expedient to allow dialogue to be added during post-production to footage shot silent. But the practice continued in later films, most notably in René Clair’s three Parisian operettas. In general, Clair explored an approach to sound film that also downplayed dialogue in favour of other sound elements. Apparent especially in his 1931 film Le Million, his first sound films use minimal dialogue, instead utilizing audiovisual counterpoint and songs to propel the action forwards. Clair does not completely avoid dialogue, but he associates it with the negative forces of economic necessity and the law. He also frequently shoots dialogue with the principal characters facing away from the camera. This strategy of loose synchronization endows the voice with a certain lightness – as though it is only barely contained by the speaking body and might break free at any moment (Fischer Reference Fischer1977; Gorbman Reference Gorbman1987, 140–50; Cooke Reference Cooke2008, 62–4). Clair’s world, inspired by vaudeville stage comedies, is comic and giddy, ruled by happenstance.

The experimental tradition of filmmaking in the Soviet Union continued for a time with sound. Dziga Vertov was the first Soviet director to make a sound film in the USSR: Enthusiasm, released in 1931. In the film, on-location sound and mechanical sound effects are woven together to create a collage, as was the case with Ruttmann. Vertov’s experimental approach to the soundtrack combined with the subject of Soviet miners, thereby reflecting the broader values of Soviet filmmakers that had begun with silent films like his earlier Man With a Movie Camera (1929) and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

Vococentrism and the Codification of Practices (1931–1935)

After 1930, due in part to adverse economic pressures from the Great Depression, codification of effective practices for producing sound film became an ever more important goal of the industry, especially in the United States. This had the effect of curtailing the spirit of experimentation, and the wide-ranging practices of the early years gave way to an increasingly ordered set of practices defined by the principles of ‘vococentrism’ (Chion Reference Chion and Gorbman1999, 5; Neumeyer Reference Neumeyer and Buhler2015, 3–49). Despite calls for continued development of the possibilities of asynchronous sound by theorists, experiments in sound design that pushed against the default vococentrism of synchronized dialogue such as films by Chaplin, Clair, Lang, Pudovkin and Eisenstein frequently yielded excellent and provocative films but little real influence on the direction of mainstream filmmaking. Whether in the United States or internationally, in the years after 1930 commercial sound film increasingly simply meant talking film, and the vococentrism of talking film meant a high preponderance of synchronized dialogue.

In practice, however, vococentrism dominated because it was a robust yet flexible principle. If vococentrism insisted on the centrality of dialogue on the soundtrack, this did not mean that dialogue was uniformly ubiquitous or that sync dialogue featured prominently at every moment in the talking film. Certainly, some films were edited primarily on the basis of dialogue, so that each new line motivated a cut and almost all of the soundtrack was taken up by dialogue. But the power of the reaction shot was understood almost immediately, as was the potential for sound effects, and to some extent music, to complement and contextualize the voice, to make a setting for it. As Clair noted in his appreciative remarks about The Broadway Melody, ‘We hear the noise of a door being slammed and a car driving off while we are shown Bessie Love’s anguished face watching from a window the departure we do not see’ (Clair Reference Clair and Traill1953, 94). Since Michel Chion draws vococentrism from an analogy with the face, it is worth lingering on this comparison. If the face dominated the cinematography and editing of narrative film, this did not mean that every shot was a close-up, or that every shot revealed a face (except perhaps in a metaphorical way: the face of things, the face of the world), or even that every shot containing a face centred it. The centricity of the face in classic style was instead interpretive: it presumed that the reading of the image would be guided by the placement and displacement of the face within and from the frame. A similar situation pertained to the voice and the soundtrack. Vococentrism meant understanding the soundtrack in terms of the setting of the voice, and the expressive potential of the reaction shot lay at least in part in the way that it shifted the audiovisual interpretive significance of the voice from cause (the source of the dialogue in the speaking body) to its effect (on a particular listener).

Even as the industry rapidly standardized practices that favoured vococentrism, sound film continued to be widely distrusted by many who worked in the industry, both in Europe and America. If American companies moved quickly to convert to sound, the rapidity of the transition by no means indicated any kind of consensus surrounding its desirability over silent film. Many still understood sound film, especially dialogue, as contrary to the spirit of cinema. Europeans, notably Soviet and French directors, were particularly resistant. In the USSR, Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov, three prominent directors, wrote an influential statement in 1928 attacking Hollywood’s approach to sound film before they had even seen one of its films. Rather than having image and sound slavishly bound in synchronized dialogue, the Soviet directors advocated a counterpoint between image and sound, a relationship that they believed was the audiovisual equivalent of the dialectical montage for which Soviet films had become justly famous (K. Thompson Reference Thompson1980; Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov Reference Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Alexandrov, Leyda, Weis and Belton1928). Initially, Clair – well known for the visual style of his silent films – was also strongly opposed to the talking film, fearing synchronized dialogue in particular would destroy the expressive power of the image. He likewise advocated setting sound contrapuntally against the image in order to resist a naturalistically constructed synchronization grounded in realism, writing that ‘if imitation of real noises seems limited and disappointing, it is possible that an interpretation of noises may have more of a future in it … We do not need to hear the sound of clapping if we can see the clapping hands’ (Clair Reference Clair and Traill1953, 91–4, emphases in original).

The opposition between talking film as slavish synchronization and sound film as a site for inspired counterpoint, or asynchronous sound, as its best antidote was picked up by most film theorists of the time, including Béla Balázs and Rudolf Arnheim. According to Balázs, sound film should ‘approach the reality of life from a totally different angle and open up a new treasure-house of human experience’ (Reference Balázs and Bone1970 [1952], 197). Arnheim, by contrast, questioned the efficacy of asynchronous sound in many instances and focused as much on the power of synchronization as its redundancy: synchronized sound transformed film, the act of synchronization opening a divide between foreground elements in the image and the background. Sound film, he noted, ‘endows the actor with speech, and since only he can have it, all other things are pushed into the background’ (Reference Arnheim1957, 227).

As Arnheim was quite aware – and none too pleased – the synchronization of the sound film had the effect of imposing an ordering hierarchy on the image: synchronized objects were important objects, and dialogue added another level that made vococentrism the technical principle that implemented sound film’s irreducible anthropocentrism. In the silent film, by contrast, the world was not divided by a capacity to articulate meaning through talk; an essential continuity between people and things was assured in their common muteness, the universal condition of the silent image. With such a hierarchy of sounds established, the focus on the voice ensured the centrality of the human figure and its subjectivity in the sound film’s new economy of meaning and intention. Music and sound effects, then, set the voice within the economy of human meaning.

Vococentrism can therefore be understood as an effective reworking of the three principles of silent-film music, recast as powers within the hierarchal order of foreground and background. Centricity rewrites the principle of synchronization as a marker of import, the site of meaning that assures the appearance of subjectivity and its hegemonic status. Continuity becomes the power of background, the guarantor that the image presents only a view, a fragment of a world that extends indefinitely beyond the frame. Continuity also establishes the more or less neutral ground of asynchronous sound against which the synchronization of the foreground figure stands out in contrast. Finally, vococentrism redeploys subjugation to unlock its full syntactical power, that of the hierarchy itself; but subjugation pertains not simply to music and effects vis-à-vis the voice or the soundtrack vis-à-vis the image, but ultimately to the subjugation of everything to narrative, the cinematic form of meaningful action. Vococentrism, then, is the principle of the voice of narrative, which organized the codification of classical style.

Conclusion: The Emergence of the New Art

The traditional historical narrative of film music places the end of the transition to sound in 1933 with Steiner’s score for King Kong, which is typically considered to be the first classical Hollywood film score and responsible for beginning an era of relatively standardized approach to composing for films. This narrative is, of course, an oversimplification. Slowik argues that Steiner’s practice in the early 1930s was less an innovation than an extension and codification of methods that had developed in the silent film and had continued as a minority practice through the transitional period. Writing on Steiner’s scores for Symphony of Six Million and The Most Dangerous Game (both 1932), Slowik states ‘Steiner’s primary contribution was to reintroduce the theme-driven score in a dramatic context, an approach that had fallen out of favor with the advent of the 100 percent talkie’ (Reference Slowik2014, 204). Nathan Platte’s work on Steiner’s early scores during this period likewise makes it clear that many innovations that have been assigned to Kong in standard film-music histories had predecessors in earlier scores by Steiner and others (Platte Reference Platte2014). Nevertheless, the music for Kong seems much more consistent with the practices that would dominate Hollywood film music during the classic era than do the sound-film scores that came before it – with the possible exception of Symphony of Six Million (ibid., 321, 328; Long Reference Long2008, 88) – and indeed many that come after it. Steiner’s innovations would seem to belong to the manner in which he evoked but also broke with silent-film practice in a way that enabled him to forge an underscore predicated on sound film. But this practice did not emerge immediately in Steiner’s music, and, as Slowik and Platte both note, Kong still retained strong affinities to transitional accompaniment practices quite continuous with those of the silent film.

Like The Jazz Singer, Kong was perhaps primed to become a signal event, and to serve as the moment of origin for the classic Hollywood film score, because its soundtrack thematized its problem and so could be allegorized into a general solution. Slowik notes structural affinities between Kong and the earlier Symphony of Six Million with respect to music: both films initially develop an opposition of space articulated with music (island, ghetto) and without music (city, uptown). Six Million begins in the ghetto and returns to it, and throughout music remains bound to the ghetto, which is rendered exotic and pathetic in virtue of its musicality. Kong inverts this arrangement, beginning with the city devoid of music, devoid of life; the exotic island is then suffused with music, and Kong’s forced appearance in the city has the effect of releasing music into it (Buhler et al. Reference Buhler, Neumeyer and Deemer2010, 331). According to Slowik, ‘What marked King Kong as unusual was not a musical decision to tie music to fantasy but rather a narrative decision to depict urban reality and exotic fantasy in the same film and to blend them together in the final act’ (Reference Slowik2014, 234). And Slowik rightly notes that Steiner’s score for the film is fully consistent with film-music practice that had developed at the end of the transitional period. Yet this revisionist claim, although broadly correct, is akin to the one that would minimize the influence of The Jazz Singer in the transition to sound; neither claim accounts for the fact that these stories began circulating almost immediately. They may well form crucial pieces in the mythology of sound film, but the myth was already forming at the moment of origin. If Steiner could quickly represent Kong as having opened a new path for music in film (Reference Steiner and Naumburg1937, 220), it is likely that he seized on this film and not his previous or later work for a reason, even if he had a strong self-interest in promoting his own work.

While films like The Jazz Singer and Kong have become iconic in the history of film sound and film music for their innovations framing the transition period, the myths surrounding these films obscure a much richer history: one of codification and experimentation, of unexpected continuity and major disruption and of negotiation and confrontation. The shift occurred in markedly different ways in Hollywood and in Europe, and the technology’s dissemination to the rest of the world reveals further dimensions and complexities to the story of the transition. Emily Thompson, for instance, in her study of the installation of sound technology around the world, writes that sound film ‘provided a powerful new means by which to articulate national agenda, and the end result was not a single, standardized and unified modern voice but a cacophony of competing signals and messages’ (Reference Thompson and Erlmann2004, 192). Within this period, the role of music and sound in cinema shifted in many dramatic ways, but emerging out of the transition period the major principles motivating their use remained. The maintaining of these principles was by no means inevitable, as producers, directors and composers around the world negotiated the role of music and sound in the soundtrack; moreover, experiments with the soundtrack did not cease after the transition period. Many of the most innovative uses of sound in later films came from directors and composers who bucked the trends of established practices. Yet the manner in which film music and sound practices were standardized by the mid-1930s reveals certain constants from the silent to the ‘classical’ era of filmmaking: sound film, organized under the principle of vococentrism, ultimately had the effect of tightening the already powerful grip of narrative on cinema.

The Principles of Optical Recording and Projection

A fundamental principle of sound recording is that of transduction, the conversion of energy from one form to another. Using a microphone, sound can be transformed from changes in air pressure to equivalent electrical variations that may then be recorded onto magnetic tape. Optical recording provides a further means of storing audio, either through the changes in density, or more commonly the changes in width of the developed section of a strip of photographic emulsion lying between the sprocket holes and the picture frames. Figure 2.1(a) displays one of a number of different formats for the variable-width track with a solid black edge on the left-hand side, which is termed the unilateral variable area, shown in Figure 2.1(b). Other alternatives (bilateral, duplex and push-pull variable areas) have solid edges on the right side or on both sides. In variable-density recording, the photographic emulsion can take on any state between undeveloped (black – no light passes through) to fully developed (clear – all light passes through). Between these two states, different ‘grey tones’ transmit more or less light: see Figure 2.1(c). In digital optical recording tiny dots are recorded, like the pits on a CD.

Figure 2.1 35 mm film with optical soundtrack (a), a close-up of a portion of the variable-area soundtrack (b), a close-up of a portion of the variable-density soundtrack (c) and a simplified schematic view of a variable-area recorder from the late 1930s (d), based on Figure 11 from L. E. Clark and John K. Hilliard, ‘Types of Film Recording’ (Reference Clark and Hilliard1938, 28). Note that there are four sprocket holes on each frame.

The technology for variable-area recording, as refined in the 1930s, involves a complex assembly in which the motion of a mirror reflecting light onto the optical track by way of a series of lenses is controlled by the electrical signal generated by the microphone: see Figure 2.1(d). If no signal is present, the opaque and clear sections of film will have equal areas, and as the sound level changes, so does the clear area. When the film is subsequently projected, light is shone through the optical track and is received by a photoelectric cell, a device which converts the illumination it receives back to an electrical signal which varies in proportion to the light impinging on it, and this signal is amplified and passed to the auditorium loudspeakers. The clear area of the soundtrack, between the two opaque sections shown in Figure 2.1(b), is prone to contamination by particles of dirt, grains of silver, abrasions and so on. These contaminants, which are randomly distributed on the film, result in noise which effectively reduces the available dynamic range: the quieter the recording (and thus the larger the clear area on the film soundtrack), the more foreign particles will be present and the greater will be the relative level of noise compared to recorded sound. Much effort was expended by the studios to counteract this deficiency in optical recording by means of noise reduction in the 1930s, the so-called push-pull system for variable-area recording being developed by RCA and that for variable-width recording by Western Electric’s ERPI (see Frayne Reference Frayne1976 and Jacobs Reference Jacobs2012, 14–18).

Cinematography involves a kind of sampling, each ‘sample’ being a single picture or frame of film – three such frames are shown in Figure 2.1(a) – with twenty-four images typically being taken or projected every second. Time-lapse and high-speed photography will also use different frame rates. Early film often had much lower frame rates, for instance 16 frames per second (fps). The illusion of continuity generated when the frames are replayed at an appropriate rate is usually ascribed to persistence of vision (the tendency for an image to remain on the retina for a short time after its stimulus has disappeared), though this is disputed by some psychologists as an explanation of the phenomenon of apparent or stroboscopic movement found in film: as Julian Hochberg notes, ‘persistence would result in the superposition of the successive views’ (Reference Hochberg and Gregory1987, 604). A major technical issue which the first film engineers had to confront was how to create a mechanism which could produce the stop-go motion needed to shoot or project film, for the negative or print must be held still for the brief time needed to expose or display it, and then moved to the next frame in about 1/80th of a second. Attempts to solve this intermittent-motion problem resulted in such curious devices as the ‘drunken screw’ and the ‘beater movement’, but generally a ratchet and claw mechanism is found in the film camera.

Some film projectors still use one of the most ingenious of the early inventions, modelled on the ‘Geneva’ movement of some Swiss watches and called the ‘Maltese Cross movement’ because of the shape of its star wheel: see Figure 2.2. The wheel on the right has a pin (a) and a raised cam with a cut-out (b). As this cam-wheel rotates on its central pivot, the star wheel on the left (which controls the motion of the film) remains stationary until its wings reach the cut-out and the gap between the wings locks onto the pin. The star wheel is now forced to turn by a quarter of a rotation, advancing the film by one frame. Unlike the intermittent motion required for filming and projection, sound recording and replay needs constant, regular movement. A pair of damping rollers (rather like a miniature old-fashioned washing mangle) therefore smoothes the film’s progress before it reaches the exciter lamp and the photoelectric cell, which generate the electrical signal from the optical track and hence to the audio amplifier and the auditorium loudspeakers. As the soundtrack reaches the sound head some twenty frames after the picture reaches the projector, sound must be offset ahead of its associated picture by twenty frames to compensate.

Figure 2.2 The Maltese Cross or Geneva mechanism.

Soundtracks on Release Prints

Early sound films only provided a monophonic soundtrack for reproduction, and this necessarily limited the extent to which a ‘three-dimensional’ sound-space could be simulated. This was an issue of considerable importance to sound engineers. Kenneth Lambert, in his chapter ‘Re-recording and Preparation for Release’ in the 1938 professional instructional manual Motion Picture Sound Engineering, remarks:

Whilst it was possible to suggest the position of a sound-source in terms of its apparent distance from the viewer by adjustment of the relative levels of the various sonic components, microphone position and equalization, filmmakers could not provide explicit lateral directional information. If, for instance, a car was seen to drive across the visual foreground from left to right, the level of the sound effect of the car’s engine might be increased as it approached the centre of the frame and decreased as it moved to the right, but this hardly provided a fully convincing accompaniment to the motion. In order to create directional cues for sound effects, further soundtracks were required. Lest there be any confusion, the term ‘stereo’ has not usually implied two-channel stereophony in film sound reproduction, as it does in the world of audio hi-fi (the Greek root stereos (στερεός) actually means ‘solid’ or ‘firm’); rather, it normally indicates a minimum of three channels. As early as the mid-1930s, Bell Laboratories were working on stereophonic reproduction (though, interestingly, no mention is made of these developments in Motion Picture Sound Engineering in 1938), and between 1939 and 1940 Warner Bros. released Four Wives and Santa Fe Trail, both of which used the three-channel Vitasound system, had scores by Max Steiner and were directed by Michael Curtiz (Bordwell et al. Reference Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson1985, 359).

Disney’s animation Fantasia (1940), one of the most technically innovative films of its time, made use of a high-quality multi-channel system called Fantasound. This system represented Disney’s response to a number of perceived shortcomings of contemporaneous film sound, as was explained in a 1941 trade journal:

In its final incarnation, the Fantasound system had two separate 35 mm prints, one of which carried four optical soundtracks (left, right, centre and a control track). Nine optical tracks were utilized for the original multitrack orchestral recordings (six for different sections of the orchestra, one for ambience, one containing a monophonic mix and one which was to be used as a guide track by the animators). These were mixed down to three surround soundtracks, the playback system requiring two projectors, one for the picture (which had a normal mono optical soundtrack as a backup) and a second to play the three optical stereo tracks. The fourth track provided what would now be regarded as a type of automated fader control. Tones of three different frequencies (250 Hz, 630 Hz and 1600 Hz) were recorded, their levels varying in proportion to the required levels of each of the three soundtracks (which were originally recorded at close to maximum level), and these signals were subsequently band-pass filtered to recover the original tones and passed to variable-gain amplifiers which controlled the output level: see Figure 2.3 for a simplified diagram. The cinema set-up involved three horns at the front (left, centre and right) and two at the rear, the latter being automated to either supplement or replace the signals being fed to the front left and right speakers.

Figure 2.3 A simplified block diagram of the Fantasound system (after Figure 2 in Garity and Hawkins Reference Garity and Hawkins1941). PC indicates photocell, PA power amplifier and VGA variable-gain amplifier.

As part of the research and development of the sound system, Disney engineers also invented the ‘Panpot’, or panoramic potentiometer, a device to balance the relative level of sounds in the left, centre and right channels that has become a fundamental control found in every modern mixing console. Using the Panpot, engineers could ‘steer’ sound across the sound-space, allowing them to produce the kind of lateral directional information discussed above. Given a cost of around $85,000 to equip the auditorium, it is perhaps unsurprising that only two American movie houses were willing to invest in the technology required to show Fantasia in the Fantasound version, although eight reduced systems, each costing $45,000, were constructed for the touring road shows which used a modified mix of orchestra, chorus and soloists respectively on the three stereo tracks (see Blake Reference Blake and Lambert1984a and Reference Blake and Lambert1984b; Klapholz Reference Klapholz1991).

Stereo sound in film was intimately tied to image size, and in CinemaScope – Twentieth Century-Fox’s 2.35:1 widescreen format which dominated 35 mm film projection from the early 1950s – the soundtrack complemented the greater dramatic potential of the picture. The numbers 2.35:1 indicate the aspect ratio of the width and height of the projected picture, that is, the image width is 2.35 times the image height. (The Academy ratio which prevailed before widescreen films became popular is 1.33:1.) CinemaScope was not the first widescreen format: Cinerama, which was used for the best part of a decade from 1952, had a seven-track analogue magnetic soundtrack with left, mid-left, centre, mid-right and right front channels, and left and right surround channels.

CinemaScope films have four audio tracks, one each for right, centre and left speakers at the front of the auditorium, and one for effects. These are recorded magnetically rather than optically, with magnetic stripes between the sprocket holes and the picture, and between the sprocket holes and film edge. (A 70 mm format called Todd-AO, which had six magnetic soundtracks, was also available.) The Robe, Henry Koster’s Biblical spectacle of 1953 with a score by Alfred Newman, was the first film to be released by Fox in the CinemaScope format. Although around 80 per cent of American cinemas were able to show films in CinemaScope by 1956, only 20 per cent had purchased the audio equipment required to reproduce the magnetic tracks, and viewers had the mixed blessing of a superior widescreen image and an inferior monophonic optical soundtrack. Theatre managers were reluctant to adopt magnetic reproduction, not merely because of the up-front cost of installing the equipment, but also because of the much greater hire charge for magnetic prints, which were at least twice as expensive as their optical equivalents.

A revolution in film-sound reproduction occurred in the 1970s with the development by Dolby Laboratories of a four-channel optical format with vastly improved sound quality. Dolby had found an ingenious method of fitting the three main channels and the effects channel into two optical tracks, using ‘phase steering’ techniques developed for quadraphonic hi-fi. Ken Russell’s critically pilloried Lisztomania of 1975 was the first film to be released using the new format called Dolby Stereo, and it was followed in 1977 by George Lucas’s Star Wars (later renamed Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, both of which made great use of the potential offered by the system. Dolby Stereo involves adding the centre channel (dialogue, generally) equally to both left and right tracks, but at a lower level (-3 dB), the surround channel also being sent to both tracks, but 180° degrees out of phase relative to each other (on one the surround signal is +90°, on the other it is -90°). A matrixing unit reconstructs the four channels for replay through the cinema’s sound-reproduction system: see Figure 2.4.

Figure 2.4 A simplified diagram of the Dolby Stereo system. On the left side are the four source channels, in the centre are the two film soundtracks derived from them and on the right are the four output channels played in the cinema.

Dolby Laboratories improved the frequency response and dynamic range of the analogue optical audio tracks in 1987 by introducing their ‘SR’ noise-reduction process, and in 1992 a digital optical system with six channels was made available, which had the standard three front channels, one for low-frequency effects and two separate left and right rear channels for surround sound. Dolby’s consumer formats, which have similar specifications to their cinema-sound products, have seen wide-scale adoption, though competing multichannel digital formats include DTS (Digital Theater Sound) which, in an approach that looks back to Vitaphone, uses six-channel sound stored on external media and synchronized to the film by timecode, and Sony’s SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital Sound), which employs the ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) compression technology designed for MiniDisc.

The technical improvements in sound quality have required cinema owners to invest in their projection and reproduction equipment if they wish to replay multichannel film sound adequately. A standard for such equipment, and the acoustics of the theatres which use it, was established by Lucas’s company Lucasfilm, certified cinemas being permitted to display the THX logo, and required to apply annually for re-certification. The standard covers such diverse issues as background noise, isolation and reverberation, customer viewing angle, equipment and equipment installation. THX can be seen, perhaps, as an attempt to complete the democratization of the cinema, for unlike the picture palaces of days gone by, every seat in the house should provide a similar (though not identical) hi-fidelity aural experience, which ideally relates to that of a soundtrack reproduced on a digital format with high-quality headphones.

In late 1998, agreement was reached between Dolby Laboratories and Lucasfilm THX for the introduction of a 6.1 surround-sound format called Dolby Digital-Surround EX, which includes a centre-rear speaker for more accurate placement of sound at the rear of the auditorium. The format, initially employed in 1999 on the first film in Lucas’s second Star Wars trilogy, Episode I: The Phantom Menace, brought together two of the major players in film sound in an attempt to improve the sonic quality of the cinematic experience even further.

Cinema sound has continued to be a major focus for technical development, including the introduction of further digital formats such as Dolby Surround 7.1 (which employs a pair of surround channels on each side) in the release of Toy Story 3 (2010); Barco Auro 11.1 (which places the 5.1 system on two vertical levels with an additional overhead channel) in Red Tails (2012); and Dolby Atmos full-range surround with up to sixty-four channels on separate levels in Brave (2012).

Soundtracks at the Post-Production Stage

The soundtrack of the final release of a film is mixed from three basic types of audio material: dialogue, music and effects. These three elements (known as ‘stems’) are usually archived on separate tracks by the production company for commercial as much as artistic reasons: many films are also released in foreign-language versions and it would be expensive to re-record music and effects as well as dialogue, which is added by actors in an ADR (automatic dialogue replacement) suite as they watch a looped section of the film. The quantity of sound actually recorded on set or on location and used on the final soundtrack varies between productions, partly for pragmatic and partly for aesthetic reasons. At one extreme, all dialogue and effects may be added during post-production (after the main filming has been completed), and at the other, only location sound may be used. Although one of the first films to have a soundtrack created entirely in post-production was Disney’s Mickey Mouse short Steamboat Willie (1928), the transition to this being the norm for most live-action sound films took another decade (K. Lambert Reference Lambert1938, 69). If the film is recorded on a sound stage in a studio, much of the dialogue will probably be of acceptable quality, whereas audio collected on location may suffer from background noise, rendering it unusable. For example, in Ron Howard’s Willow (1988), 85 per cent of the dialogue was added in post-production, whereas in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), only 25 per cent was (Pasquariello Reference Pasquariello, Forlenza and Stone1993, 59). James Monaco notes that in some instances Federico Fellini had not even written the dialogue for his films until shooting had finished (Reference Monaco1981, 106).

Sound-effects tracks can be subdivided into three main categories: spot effects, atmospheres and Foley. Spot (or hard) effects may be specially recorded or taken from effects libraries on CD or other digital media, and include most discrete sounds of relatively short duration: dogs barking, engines starting, telephones ringing and so on. Atmospheres (or wild tracks, so called because they are non-synchronous with the action) are of longer duration than spots (though a hard-and-fast line between the two types can be hard to draw), may be recorded on set or specially designed and are intended to enhance the aural impression of a particular space or location. Foley effects are named after Jack Foley, who pioneered the recreation of realistic ambient sounds in post-production at Universal in the late 1920s. Foley artists work on a specially designed sound-proofed and acoustically dead recording stage where they watch the film on a monitor and perform the sound effects in sync with the action to complement or replace the background sounds recorded on set. Creature sounds, many of which must be invented to supply the language of extinct or fantastic animals (for example, the dinosaurs of Spielberg’s 1993 film Jurassic Park, or the aliens in Star Wars), form a further sub-category of effects. These may derive from real animal sounds which are recorded and processed or superimposed – for example, Chewbacca in Star Wars is in part a recording of walruses.

An alternative strategy for dealing with effects tracks is to consider them in terms of the apparent location of their constituent elements in a flexible three-dimensional sound-space. Thus it is possible to discriminate between a sonic foreground, middleground and background that can dynamically mirror the equivalent visual planes (irrespective of whether the sources are in view). The accurate construction of these sound-spaces became more significant with the development of sound systems like Dolby Stereo and Dolby Digital in which finer detail could be distinguished, and the re-equipping of cinemas with high-quality reproduction equipment according to the THX standard. Sound designers such as Alan R. Splet, who worked closely with director David Lynch on his films from Eraserhead (1976) to Blue Velvet (1986), showed just how creative an area this can be, for their work often went beyond the naturalistic reproduction of sound-spaces, at times adopting a role analogous to that of nondiegetic music. Lynch’s own telling remark that ‘people call me a director, but I really think of myself as a sound-man’ underlines this trend to place the sonic elements on an equal footing to that of the visuals (Chion Reference Chion and Julian1995b, 169).

During the dub, a final stereo mix is produced from the dialogue, effects (including atmospheres and Foley) and music tracks, and this is used to generate the soundtracks on the release print. The dub is normally a two-stage process, the first of which involves a pre-mix in which the number of tracks is reduced by combining the many individual effects and dialogue tracks into composite ones. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, for instance, twenty-two tracks were sometimes used for Foley alone; for the television show Northern Exposure (CBS, 1990–95), up to sixty-nine analogue tracks held music, dialogue and effects; and twenty-eight eight-track recorders were used for effects on Roland Emmerich’s 1998 blockbuster Godzilla (James Reference James1998, 86). The pre-post-prodmix results in individual mono or stereo tracks (four or six, depending on the system) for dialogue and effects (Foley, spots and atmospheres), and these are mixed with the music tracks by three re-recording mixers at the final dub to generate the release soundtrack. A track or group of tracks called ‘music and effects’ (M&E) is also mixed from the individual music and effects tracks to retain decisions made by the director and editors about the relative levels of the individual components, for the reason explained above.

Synchronization

In every case, the soundtrack must be locked or synchronized to picture, and this has provided problems since the earliest sound films with a score. For dialogue and effects tracks it is largely a matter of matching a visual image with its sonic correlate (for example, the sound of gunfire as the trigger of a gun is pressed, or engine noise as a car’s ignition switch is turned). Often there will be an unambiguous one-to-one mapping between image and sound, and difficult as the operation may be for the editor, there is a ‘correct’ solution. This is not necessarily the case with music, for although the technique of tight synchronization between image and music (mickey-mousing, otherwise known as ‘catching the action’) is frequently found, there will generally be a much subtler relationship between the two.

Steiner has often been credited with the invention of the click track, as an aid to his work on the score to John Ford’s The Informer (1935), though in his unreliable and unpublished memoirs he makes various unsubstantiated claims about his invention or use of the click track for earlier RKO films produced in 1931 and 1932 (Steiner Reference Steiner1963–4). It seems that Disney’s crew had used a similar device some time earlier, to assist the synchronization of animated film and music, filing patents in 1928, 1930 and 1931. In Underscore, a ‘combination method-text-treatise on scoring music for motion picture films or T.V.’ written by the prolific composer Frank Skinner in 1950, the main uses of the click track in the classic Hollywood film were enumerated:

Although the technology used to generate the click track may have changed over the years, its function is still much the same for scores using live musicians.

The click track produces an audible metronomic tick calibrated to the prevailing tempo at any point in the score, and this is fed to the conductor (and normally the other musicians) by means of a distribution amplifier and headphones. In its earliest form, it required holes to be punched in the undeveloped (opaque) optical track on a film print. As film normally travels at 24 fps, if a hole is punched in the optical track next to the first sprocket hole of every twelfth frame, an audible click is produced each time a hole passes the sound head (every half a second), producing a metronome rate of 120 beats per minute. In order to provide a greater range of possible tempi, holes can be punched in any of eight different positions on a frame – next to a sprocket hole, or between sprocket holes (see Figure 2.5). Thus, for example, to set a tempo to 128 beats per minute, a hole is punched every 11 frames.

Figure 2.5 Punched holes in the optical soundtrack. The punch in frame A is at the top of the frame, the punch in frame B is at the 3/8 frame position. Numbers at the left-hand side of the frame indicate the frame position for punches. (Note that the film is travelling downwards, so the numbering is from the bottom of the frame upwards.)

Given that each 1/8th of a frame of film represents approximately 0.0052 seconds, it is possible to calculate the length of time, and thus film, that a crotchet will take at any metronome mark. For example, if the metronome mark is 85, each crotchet will last for 60/85 seconds (around 0.706 seconds). Dividing this latter figure by 0.0052 gives just over 135, and dividing again by 8 (to find the number of frames) produces the figure 16⅞th frames. Accelerandi and rallentandi may also be produced by incrementally decreasing or increasing the number of 1/8th frames between punches, although this can require some fairly complicated mathematics. For many years, film composers have used ‘click books’ such as the Knudson book (named after the music editor Carroll Knudson, who compiled the first such volume in 1965), which relate click rates and click positions to timings, allowing the estimation of where any beat will lie in minutes, seconds and hundredths of a second.

As well as the audio cues provided by a click track, several forms of visual signal, known as streamers, punches and flutters, can be provided. Until the 1980s, streamers were physically scraped onto the film emulsion as diagonal lines running from left to right, over forty-eight to ninety-six frames (two to four seconds of film). Figure 2.6 illustrates a streamer running over nine frames – normally these would extend over three, four or five feet of film, and the line would look less oblique than it does here. When projected, during which process the film runs downwards and the image is inverted, a streamer appears as a vertical line progressing from the left to the right of the screen, terminated by a punched hole in the film (roughly the diameter of a pencil) which displays as a bright flash. Flutters offer a subtler and looser means of synchronization than the click track. Here clusters of punches in groups of three, five or seven are placed on a downbeat or at the beginning of a musical cue, each punched frame having an unpunched frame as a neighbour (the pattern of punched [o] and unpunched [-] frames can be imagined as forming one of the following sequences: o-o-o, o-o-o-o-o or o-o-o-o-o-o-o). This method of ‘fluttering’ punches was devised by prolific film composer and studio music director Alfred Newman, and has been called the Newman system in his honour.

Figure 2.6 Schematic illustration of the visual cue known as a streamer, shown running over nine frames.

Almost invariably in contemporary film work, some form of computer-based system will generate the click track and visual cues in conjunction with a digital stopwatch on the conductor’s desk. Auricle: The Film Composer’s Time Processor, released in 1985 by the brothers Richard and Ron Grant, combined most of the time-based facilities required by the composer, including streamers in up to eight colours, allowing differentiation between varying types of cue. More recently, software applications such as Figure 53’s Streamers have been widely adopted by composers and studios.

For many film composers, the real significance of such software is its ability to calculate appropriate tempi to match hit points. These are visual elements to be emphasized, often by falling on a strong beat or through some other form of musical accentuation. It is not difficult to calculate a fitting tempo and metre when there are only two such hit points, but the maths can become considerably more complicated when there are three or more irregular ones. Appropriate software permits the composer to construct the rhythmic and metrical skeleton of a cue rapidly.

Time Code

Much of the functionality of such software is premised on SMPTE/EBU (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers/European Broadcasting Union) time code. This offers a convenient way of labelling every frame of video by reference to its position in terms of hours, minutes, seconds and frames (hh:mm:ss:ff) relative to a start-point, and is available in two basic forms: vertical interval time code (VITC) and linear or longitudinal time code (LTC). There are a number of different and incompatible standards for time-code frame-rate: 24 fps for film, 25 fps for British and European video (PAL/SECAM) and 29.97 and 30 fps for American and Japanese video (NTSC).

Frame rates for video are related to the mains frequency. In the United Kingdom this is 50 Hz, and the frame rate is set to half this value (25 fps) whereas in the United States, which has a 60 Hz mains frequency, 30 fps was originally established as the default rate. With the development of colour television, more bandwidth was required for the colour information, and so the frame rate was reduced very slightly to 29.97 fps. Given that there are only 0.03 frames fewer per second for 29.97 fps than for 30 fps, this appears a tiny discrepancy, but over an hour it adds up to a very noticeable 108 frames or 3½ seconds. Thus ‘drop frame’ code was developed: the counter displays 30 fps, but on every minute except 0, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50, two frames are dropped from the count (which starts from frame 2 rather than 0).

To accommodate these different rates, time code must be capable of being written and read in any version by a generator. In each case, a twenty-four hour clock applies, the time returning to 00:00:00:00 after the final frame of twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds. By convention, time code is not recorded to start from 00:00:00:00, but shortly before the one-hour position (often 00:59:30:00 to allow a little ‘pre-roll’ before the start of the material) to avoid the media being rolled back before the zero position, and confusing the time-code reader.

SMPTE/EBU time code is found in every stage of production and post-production, except in initial photography on analogue film, for it is not possible to record it on this medium; instead, ‘edge numbers’ sometimes called Keykode (a trademark of Kodak) are used, marked at regular intervals during the manufacturing process in the form of a barcode. Most film editing is now digital and takes place on computer-based systems, which have almost entirely replaced the old flatbed 16 mm and 35 mm editing tables such as the Steenbeck (which in turn ousted the horizontal Moviola). Computer-based editing is described as a non-linear process, because there is no necessary relationship between the relative positions of the digital encoding of the discrete images and their storage location, which is dependent upon the operating system’s method of file management. An important aspect of editing performed on a non-linear system, whether the medium is video or audio, is that it is potentially non-destructive: instead of physically cutting and splicing the film print or magnetic tape, the operator generates edits without affecting the source data held in the filestore. This will normally involve the generation of some kind of play list or index of start and stop times for individual takes which can be used by the computer program to determine how data is to be accessed.

Sound, picture and code are transferred to the computer where editing takes place and an edit decision list (EDL) is created, which indicates the start and end time-code positions of every source section of the picture or sound and their position in the composite master. Where analogue film is still used, this list (see Table 2.1 for an example) is employed to cut the original negative from which the projection print will finally be made once its time-code values have been converted back to Keykode frame positions.

Composers now generally work away from film studios, often preparing the complete music track in their own studios using a version of the film in a digitized format to which a MIDI-based sequencer is synchronized. Functionality provided by sequencers has become increasingly sophisticated and most not only record and play MIDI data, but also digital-audio data files recorded from a live source such as an acoustic instrument or generated electronically. The integration of MIDI and digital recording and editing has greatly simplified the problems of synchronization for the composer and sound editor, for interactions between the two sources of musical material can be seamlessly controlled. This is particularly relevant to the fine-tuning of cues, especially when the composed music is slightly longer or shorter than required. In the analogue period there were two main methods of altering the length of a cue: by physically removing or inserting sections of tape (possibly causing audible glitches) or by slightly speeding it up or slowing it down. In the latter case, this produces a change of pitch as well as altering the duration: faster tape speed will cause a rise of pitch, slower speed a fall. This may be reasonable for very small changes, perhaps a sixty-second cue being shortened or extended by one second, but larger modifications will become audibly unacceptable; for instance, shortening a one-minute cue by three seconds will cause the pitch to rise by almost a semitone, and produce a marked change in timbre.

MIDI sequences preclude this problem, for the program can simply recalculate note lengths according to the prevailing tempo, and this will cause the cue to be appropriately shortened or lengthened. Digital signal-processing techniques offer an equivalent method of altering digital-audio cues called time stretching, which does not result in a change of pitch. At one time such procedures were only available on expensive equipment in research institutes and large studios, but the enormous increase in the power of computer processors and reduction in the cost of computer memory and hard-disk space has made them readily accessible to the composer working on a personal computer or hardware sampler.

Music and the Processes of Production

It is customary to consider the making of a film as being divided into three phases called pre-production, production and post-production. Depending on the nature of the film, the composition and recording of musical components may take place in any or all the phases, though the majority of the musical activities will usually take place in post-production. If music is scored or recorded during pre-production (generally called pre-scoring or pre-recording), it will almost certainly be because the film requires some of the cast to mime to an audio replay during shooting, or for some other compelling diegetic reason. Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991), a movie about Jim Morrison, is a good example of a film with a pre-recorded soundtrack, some of it being original Doors material and the rest being performed by Val Kilmer, who plays the lead role (Kenny Reference Kenny, Forlenza and Stone1993). Production recording of music has become generally less common than it was in the early sound films, largely because of the problems associated with the recording of hi-fi sound on location or on sets not optimized for the purpose. Bertrand Tavernier’s jazz movie ʼRound Midnight (1986), with a score by Herbie Hancock, is a somewhat unusual example, being shot on a set specially built on the scoring stage where orchestral recordings normally take place (Karlin and Wright Reference Karlin and Wright1990, 343).

For the majority of films, most of the nondiegetic music is composed, orchestrated, recorded and edited during post-production. By the time the composer becomes involved in the process, the film is usually already in, or approaching its final visual form, and thus a relatively brief period is set aside for these activities. Occasionally composers may be involved much earlier in the process, for example David Arnold was given the film for the 1997 Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies reel by reel during production (May to mid-November), very little time having been allocated to post-production. Karlin and Wright indicate that, in 1990, the average time allowed from spotting (where the composer is shown the rough cut and decides, with the director, where the musical cues will happen) to recording was between three and six weeks. James Horner’s 1986 score for James Cameron’s Aliens, which has 80 minutes of music in a film just short of 140 minutes in duration, was completed in only three and a half weeks, and such short time scales remain common. Ian Sapiro has modelled the overall processes associated with the construction of the score at the level of the cue in his study of Ilan Eshkeri’s music for Stardust (2007) and this is illustrated in Figure 2.7 (Sapiro Reference Sapiro2013, 70).

Figure 2.7 Ian Sapiro’s model of the overall processes associated with film scoring as a decision matrix.

Directors often have strong feelings about the kind of music they want in their films, and their predilections will govern the choice of composer and musical style. As an aid during the film-editing process, and as a guide for the composer during spotting, temp tracks (i.e. temporary music tracks), which may be taken from another film or a commercial recording, and will have some of the characteristics they require, are often provided. In some cases, these temp tracks will form the final soundtrack, most famously in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), for which Alex North had composed a score, only to have it rejected in favour of music by Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss and Ligeti (see Hubai Reference Hubai2012 for a detailed study of rejected scores). If a film is rough-cut to a temp track, it may take on aspects of the rhythmic structure of the music, limiting the composer’s freedom of action.

Spotting results in a list of timings and a synopsis of the accompanying action called timing notes or breakdown notes (see Table 2.2) that are given to the composer. Like the edit decision list discussed above, these notes provide a level of detail which not only suggests the kind of musical codes to be employed (given that the majority of films and television programmes rely upon the existence of commonly accepted musical forms of signification), but also gives information about its temporal character (metre and rhythm). Cues are listed according to the reel of film in which they appear (each reel of film being 1000 feet or just over eleven minutes), are identified as being a musical cue by the letter M and are numbered according to their order in the reel.

As already implied, the ‘factory’ conditions of music production prevailing in the classic Hollywood system have partly given way to a home-working freelance ethos, with composers operating from their own studios. Certainly, high-budget films often still employ a large retinue of music staff including a music supervisor taking overall control, a composer, orchestrators, copyists and a music recordist, with orchestral musicians hired in for the recording sessions; but many lower-budget movies and television programmes have scores entirely produced by the composer using synthesized or sampled sounds (‘gigastrated’), and returned to the production company on digital files ready for final mixdown. While this reduces the cost of the score dramatically, and lessens the assembly-line character of the operation, some of the artistic synergy of the great Hollywood partnerships of composers and orchestrators may have been lost. Although it may be theoretically possible, using a sequencer connected to sound libraries, to produce scores of the density and finesse of those written by Hollywood partnerships such as Max Steiner and Hugo Friedhofer, or John Williams and Herb Spencer, the short time frame for a single musician to produce a complex score can restrict creativity.

New Technology, Old Processes

Since the 1980s, digital technology has infiltrated almost every aspect of the production and reproduction of film, and in the second decade of the twenty-first century the major US studios such as 20th Century Fox, Disney and Paramount moved entirely to digital distribution. Despite this, the processes that underpin filmmaking have remained remarkably stable, and although pictures and TV shows may no longer be released on physical reels of celluloid, many of the concepts and much of the terminology from the analogue period retain currency. Equally, while the function of film music has been more elaborately theorized concurrently with the period of transition from analogue to digital, the role of the composer in US and European mainstream film and cinema, and of his or her music, has changed less than might have been expected in this technologically fecund new environment. While there certainly have been some radical developments, particularly at the interface between music and effects, the influence of ‘classical Hollywood’ can still be strongly detected in US and European mainstream cinema, an indication, perhaps, of both the strength of those communicative models and the innate conservatism of the industry.

Collaborative Approaches to Art

Contextualizing composers within a community of creative personae certainly downplays the authorial power traditionally accorded them; and although Western musicology is now far more willing to recognize the complexities of authorship discourse, the figure of the ‘genius’ composer continues to cast a long shadow. Film studies, too, laboured for many years under the burden of a mode of thinking that privileged the creative efforts of individuals, most commonly a film’s director. Gradually discredited by the theoretical impact of structuralism in the 1960s and, later, post-structuralism, this auteur theory gave way among scholars to a greater emphasis upon collaboration in their discussion of studio-era filmmaking – though auteur theory continues to be of importance to non-dominant groups (Staiger Reference Staiger, Gerstner and Staiger2003). Its attractiveness in the first place, though, rested on its ability to resolve, albeit simplistically, a fundamental question of film theory: how can an industrialized, collaborative product be interpreted as art?

With a few exceptions, early film scholars had regarded collaboration with suspicion, as somehow threatening to the interpretation of cinema as art. Inheritors of a Romantic aesthetic of authorship, they found alien the notion of a collective creative process. Instead, the studio system was seen as a factory-like destroyer of artistic integrity, the commercial ‘whore’ of Wall Street, restricting the creative talents of the true defender of cinematic art, the director. Indeed, the factory analogy was often overplayed to reinforce the achievements of the director in overcoming these obstacles. There were a few, however, who proposed an alternative view. The anthropological studies of Leo Rosten (Reference Rosten1941) and Hortense Powdermaker (Reference Powdermaker1951), for example, stressed the complexity of human relationships within the studio system, resisting the rigid application of industrial models and assigning creativity to a collective body of people. In the 1980s, film studies embraced this view of authorship, acknowledging (in André Bazin’s immortal phrase) ‘the genius of the system’ (Bazin Reference Bazin1985 [1957]), as an extract from Thomas Schatz’s study of the same name demonstrates. Auterism, argues Schatz, effectively stalled

In contrast, the image of the studio system as the factory-like destroyer of creativity in the musicians associated with film was, until relatively recently, firmly entrenched – despite balanced contributions to the debate by figures such as Lawrence Morton (Reference Morton1951). This is attested by disapproving references in the literature to the changes made to the work of composers Bernard Herrmann or Aaron Copland by their respective studios (see, for example, Kalinak Reference Kalinak1992, 151–8). Gradually, though, such a position has been challenged. In addition to my own work (Reference Winters2007) on Korngold’s score for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), other recent contributions by Nathan Platte (for example, Reference Platte2011, Reference Platte and Wierzbicki2012, Reference Platte2014), David Neumeyer and Platte (Reference Neumeyer and Platte2012) and Hannah Lewis (Reference Lewis2014) have helped enrich our understanding of film composition in studio-era Hollywood film. Through close critical engagement with archival sources, such studies often reveal Hollywood scores to be provocative sites for creative collaboration rather than battlegrounds for the competing authorial claims of individuals. In their guarded rejection of an uncomplicated individual authorship in favour of a sociological examination of a complex of relationships, the approaches pioneered by film studies have provided musicology with a useful model to apply to the study of a film’s score. For studio-era film music, this requires investigating direct creative contributions to the score by non-musician elements at the studio (such as a producer or studio executive), in addition to tracing the more prosaic interactions between composer and music department.

Everyday Working

Although the working practices of a Hollywood music department varied from studio to studio, the basic structure remained consistent. Under the control of a musical director, employees might carry out a number of tasks, such as securing the legal rights to use copyrighted music, liaising with recording engineers or preparing cue sheets for composers. Composers and orchestrators themselves were often under studio contract like any other member of staff, and therefore required to turn their hands to whatever assignment came their way and to relinquish all control or ownership of the material produced. Indeed, a typical contract might include the following clause:

Max Steiner, one of Warner Bros.’s most prolific composers between 1936 and 1965, certainly recognized the authorial power of the studio:

This studio ownership was something initially enshrined in award ceremonies. When Anthony Adverse (1936) won the Academy Award for Best Musical Score on 4 March 1937, the award was presented to music-department chief Leo Forbstein. Korngold, as the score’s composer, did not even rate a mention (B. Carroll Reference Carroll1997, 266, 285). Though this practice was to change later, it gives an insight into the industry’s efforts to maintain corporate control over its output at this time.

The work of composers was also monitored closely by their music-department head and, in some cases, the producer. Unsurprisingly, this was not always to the composer’s liking. Kate Daubney has pointed out that Steiner fell out with David O. Selznick over the constant re-editing of Gone With the Wind (1939), and she draws our attention to a remark halfway through a cue in Steiner’s short score for They Died With their Boots On (1941): ‘Music stops – if it were my picture’ (Reference Daubney2000, 17). Indeed, Platte has recently explored Selznick’s role in shaping the scores of Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin and others, noting ‘his persistent involvement throughout the scoring process’ (Reference Platte and Wierzbicki2012, 123). Similarly, Hal B. Wallis, the executive in charge of production at Warners, is known to have provided copious notes to his music department, and his undoubted ability for understanding music’s role in film is evidenced by his remarkably specific cutting notes for Casablanca (1942):

This close collaboration between employer and employee was, in any case, nothing new in music, and the Hollywood studio system merely highlighted and exaggerated relationships of power to which composers had always been subject. One only has to think of the long history of composer patronage or, for example, the detailed instructions to which Tchaikovsky worked in his ballet collaborations to find parallels that could be almost as prescriptive. The dominance of the ballet master in Tchaikovsky’s time, and his contractual authority over a composer (Wily Reference Wily1985, 1–10), perhaps suggests a direct forerunner of the relationship between composer and movie producer. Nor was it, necessarily, a negative intrusion into the creative process. No matter what Steiner may have thought, Wallis’s contribution to the music of Casablanca was both important and effective.

In a rather more obvious example of the fragmentation of authorial control, the smaller major studios (Universal, Columbia and United Artists) and low-budget studios (such as Republic) would often choose a more economical approach to scoring that made use of multiple composers, classical music libraries and a stock of pre-written original musical material (sometimes called ‘library music’). Randall Larson (Reference Larson1985, 17) has indicated how Universal’s music department, for example, re-used original feature-film music from Bride of Frankenstein (1935) in the serials Flash Gordon (1936), Buck Rogers (1939) and Radio Patrol (1937). When James Dietrich supplied music for Universal’s 1932 horror film The Mummy, director Karl Freund replaced half of the score with stock melodies from the studio’s library, including extracts from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (ibid., 27). Indeed, such was the level of co-operation between members of Universal’s music department, ‘quite often a single score would be created by an entire cadre of composers, each one taking a hand in the composition, orchestration and what-not in order to get it done in time’ (ibid., 37). Such collaborative practices were not restricted to the smaller studios: Steiner is known to have contributed to some scores at RKO at the beginning of his career without receiving a screen credit (Daubney Reference Daubney2000, 9), and David Raksin (Reference Raksin and McCarty1989) described in detail the ‘team composition’ undertaken at Twentieth Century-Fox. This must have been commonplace in the culture of creative collaboration engendered by the studio system.

Among the unsung heroes of a studio’s music department were the orchestrators, some of whom were not given screen credit for their contributions. Korngold’s score for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), for example, was orchestrated by Hugo W. Friedhofer and Milan Roder, yet only principal orchestrator Friedhofer is mentioned in the title credits. Obviously, composers may have preferred to orchestrate their own music, but the time constraints involved in producing a film score in, perhaps, a matter of weeks made the orchestrator a necessary and significant member of the creative team. Friedhofer describes the process of working with Korngold thus:

Friedhofer also worked with Steiner in an equally close relationship, though he reports once disagreeing with the composer over the orchestration of a particular passage. Rather tellingly, it was Steiner who relented in the end:

Orchestrators were genuinely creative collaborators who interacted with their composers, offering suggestions and improvements; on occasion, they were even called upon to compose (ibid., 63). Their contributions to the overall sound of the studio-era film score should not be underestimated.

Korngold and Warner Bros.

Even with an awareness of the working realities of the studio system, however, there is still perhaps a temptation to buy into an image of at least some film composers rooted firmly in romanticized notions of creativity. Korngold, as one of the canonic names of early classical Hollywood film music, is particularly susceptible to a sort of mythmaking that seeks to ascribe to him the characteristics many associate with the act of composition in a less obviously commercial sphere. In particular, Korngold’s relationship with the technology of film has often been portrayed as that of a genuine artist coming face-to-face with the realities of an industrial product, and as a result certain dubious ideas have been propagated as fact. Michael Haas’s recent study of Jewish composers banned by the Nazis thus claims that, whereas Alfred Newman and Steiner ‘supplied music by the minute and used stopwatches to measure to the second what was required … Korngold’s practical mastery was unheard of … Most astonishingly, he knew instinctively how much music was needed for, say, twelve inches of film, and never used a stopwatch’ (Reference Haas2014, 198). Similarly, in Mervyn Cooke’s history of film music, we read: ‘While recording, Korngold scrupulously avoided click-tracks and stopwatches, preferring to rely on his innate musicality to aid the process of synchronization’ (Reference Cooke2008, 95).

These statements draw on a long tradition. Jessica Duchen, for example, talks in her Korngold biography of ‘an unerring instinctual understanding of the relationship between music and time’; claims that Korngold never used cue sheets, on which a technician would have written the exact timing for a scene; and finally concludes that ‘Korngold refused mechanical aids of all types’ (Reference Duchen1996, 152). According to Kathryn Kalinak, Korngold ‘shunned the standard devices for synchronization’ (Reference Kalinak1992, 96), while Russell Lack talks about the composer ‘effortlessly’ matching music to picture cues (Reference Lack1997, 128). One of the earliest and ostensibly most authoritative sources for this view, given his personal correspondence with the composer, is that written by Tony Thomas. In his book Music for the Movies, originally published in 1973, Thomas states that Korngold ‘never used timing sheets, cue marks, or earphones. If a sequence called for forty-two and two-thirds seconds, he would write a piece of music and conduct it so that it would fill forty-two and two-thirds seconds’ (Reference Thomas1997, 172; cf. Reference Thomas1973, 130–1, where the text reads ‘cue marking on the screen’ rather than ‘cue marks’).

All these accounts seem to stress an innate, effortless ability to manipulate music to very precise degrees without the assistance of technology. This is the mark of Korngold’s greatness as an artist, it seems, transcending naturally the world of the so-called hack composer – who in contrast worked with stopwatches, cue sheets and click tracks, which represent both the technology-mediated everyday world and the Hollywood industrial product. It is a view so ingrained in large parts of the Korngold and film-music literature that it is almost the first thing anyone thinks to mention about him; and yet, as a portrait of the composer, it is simply not supported by the evidence. Examining the materials held in the archives of Warner Bros. reveals that not only did Korngold use cue sheets, but he also appears to have worked routinely with timing aids on the scoring stage after 1938, both to provide tempo indications and to aid music’s synchronization with image.

As I have revealed elsewhere, Korngold certainly used both typed and handwritten cue sheets (some in his own hand) when working on The Adventures of Robin Hood. The seven extant cue sheets range from simple breakdowns of scenes, in which the duration of shots is specified, to more lengthy and complex cues – including an especially elaborate one for the climactic duel between Robin and Sir Guy written in Korngold’s own hand (Winters Reference Winters2007, 83–5). Moreover, in addition to timing information, on some sheets a music editor has also noted down lengths of film in feet and frames – which certainly suggests an engagement with the Moviola, a device on which composers or editors could measure footage. Nor was this compositional aid restricted to Robin Hood. Cue sheets held in the Erich Wolfgang Korngold Collection at the Library of Congress from other Warner Bros. films – for example, The Sea Hawk (1940) and Devotion (1946) – reveal similar or greater levels of detail, and include holograph pages or annotations in Korngold’s hand in addition to prepared typed sheets. Thomas’s statement that Korngold never worked with cue sheets might therefore have been a misreading of the sort of evidence provided by the composer’s widow, Luzi Korngold. Luzi states that Korngold’s technique of composition differed from other film composers in that they worked with cue sheets, whereas he was assigned a projection room so he could consult the film itself (Reference Korngold1967, 67). At no point, however, does she suggest that these two methods of composition – the use of cue sheets and consulting the film – were mutually exclusive. That Korngold did not rely on cue sheets supplied by technicians and a stopwatch to compose his scores seems certain, but that he did use them at some point in the process seems equally incontrovertible. Indeed, an interview article with Korngold that appeared in a 1937 issue of Etude magazine reported: ‘even Korngold, while he worked on the film “Anthony Adverse” … had to work with stop watch in hand; for in such cases accurate and precise timing is of paramount importance’ (Arvey Reference Arvey1937).

Perhaps the most beguiling aspect of the myth surrounding Korngold’s working practices at Warner Bros. is the notion that he required no mechanical aids to assist him when conducting during recording sessions. In preferring to rely on his innate abilities, the myth seems to say, he asserted his creative independence from the Hollywood industrial product. Certainly, Luzi Korngold stated that her husband never worked with a click track (a sequence of audible beats much like a metronome: see Chapter 2) but rather accompanied the image as if working with opera singers – where, of course, such timing aids were neither available nor necessary (Reference Korngold1967, 68). This assertion is not obviously contradicted by any of the manuscript materials. Yet the click track was not the only synchronization device available to a conductor, and evidence from the manuscript full scores of a number of post-1938 films held in the archives of Warner Bros. – including The Sea Hawk, Kings Row (1942), The Sea Wolf (1941) and The Constant Nymph (1943) – suggests that this part of the myth can also be questioned. The scores reveal a number of pencil marks in Korngold’s hand, which are often placed before the beginning of a cue or, significantly, at a change of tempo. They are combined with the vertical strokes with which Korngold routinely notated his beat patterns, suggesting they were connected with his conducting activities, and consist of a series of circles with an associated number that likely indicate regularly spaced punches made in the visual part of the celluloid. When the film passed over the projector lamp, each punch would create a brief flash of light on screen, thus providing a kind of intermittent visual equivalent of the more constant audio click track. The number above or below the circle gave a frame rate for the spacing of the punches, and thus can easily be interpreted as a metronome mark. Since the punch spacing could be altered as necessary, it was a far more flexible system than that offered by the click track, which at the time offered only fixed-frame spacing rather than the variable click track of later years.

It seems fairly clear that these punches may have had two functions. First, they established tempo at either the beginning of a cue or at the time of a tempo change (indeed, they often seem to occur during a fermata, preparing Korngold for his next tempo). Figure 3.1 shows an example of this from The Sea Wolf, cue 4A. The warning punches at the beginning occur every 10 frames. For film running at 24 fps (and thus 1440 frames per minute), this would give Korngold four flashes of light at a tempo of 144 beats per minute and thus the Allegro crotchet beat of the cue’s common time. The punches’ other function is more intriguing: they assist precise synchronization of image and music. In an early scene from Kings Row in which Parris Mitchell appears at the window of his childhood home to greet his grandmother, the music is closely aligned both with the scene’s jump cuts and the panning movement of the camera. Figure 3.2 shows some detail from Korngold’s full score for part of that section. On beat three of bar 2 we are shown Parris’s grandmother, and on the downbeat of bar 3 we switch back to Parris. The duration of the shot of the grandmother, however, requires a lengthening of the second half of bar 2, and it is in this bar that Korngold indicates punch markings on the second and fourth beat (at a distance of 20 frames, which equates to 72 beats per minute). The music is audibly slower in this bar. The next bar, however, is marked Più mosso in the composer’s hand, and the punch in bar 4 (presumably occurring 18 frames after the calculated downbeat) acts to ensure Korngold has reached the required tempo; indeed, the music rather rushes through the first two beats of this bar, as if he had not been quite fast enough in the previous three beats of Più mosso. Korngold must ensure that the beginnings of subsequent bars are precisely aligned with the point at which the camera finishes its panning shot as it tracks Parris moving from window to window. Both the synchronization of chord change with the view of Parris’s seated grandmother and the alignment of downbeats with the end of the camera’s panning shot are aided by the visual punches that have been marked in Korngold’s hand in the full score.

Figure 3.1 Detail from Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s score to The Sea Wolf, cue 4A.

© WB MUSIC CORP. (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of Alfred Music (on behalf of Warner Bros.).

Figure 3.2 Detail from Korngold’s score to Kings Row, cue 1D.

© WB MUSIC CORP. (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of Alfred Music (on behalf of Warner Bros.).

A second example from Kings Row also involves the close synchronization of each bar of music with changes in the image. The scene involves alternating shots of Parris and the reclusive Mrs Tower, as he takes his leave after Cassie’s birthday party. Figure 3.3 shows some detail from the full score for the passage, which reveals that Korngold’s markings allow for changes between punch rates of 16 frames, 14 frames and 20 frames. In other words the first bar is at 90 beats per minute, the second at almost 103, with the third slower at 72 beats per minute. Evidently Korngold had written this particular passage with the camera work very much in mind, but the length of the shots required some subtle alterations to his tempo on the scoring stage to make the fit precise. Rather than simply rely on his skill as a conductor, he has used the technology available to assist him.

Figure 3.3 Detail from Korngold’s score to Kings Row, cue 1E.

© WB MUSIC CORP. (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of Alfred Music (on behalf of Warner Bros.).

Clearly, then, the idea that Korngold shunned mechanical timing aids is simply incorrect – though he may admittedly have used them less consistently than his colleagues. It is worth considering, though, from where these misleading ideas concerning the composer’s relationship with the technology used at Warner Bros. spring, for they clearly have their origins somewhere, no matter how distorted they have become. The picture is a complex one. Luzi Korngold, for instance, reports a story in which the composer asks Henry Blanke upon first visiting the studio how long a foot of film takes to be projected (Reference Korngold1967, 67), supposedly revealing (as Brendan Carroll has claimed) that Korngold had ‘instinctively worked out his own mathematical method of scoring a scene’ (Reference Carroll1997, 279). Another important piece of the puzzle is provided by the critic Josef Reitler’s oft-cited story, in which Korngold – suffering a particularly pedestrian performance of his opera Die tote Stadt (1920) under the baton of Franz Schalk – turns to his companion ten minutes before the end of the first act, and announces ‘I’ve finished.’ Again, Duchen takes this as further proof of Korngold’s ‘unerring instinctual understanding of the relationship between music and time’ (Reference Duchen1996, 152), though it is perhaps just as likely an example of the composer’s quick wit. Finally, we have the oral history of Friedhofer, the composer’s trusted orchestrator at Warner Bros. Friedhofer certainly states that Korngold ‘had [the tempos] in his head, and was infallible about it. He had a built-in sense of the speed at which something should move’ (Danly Reference Danly1999, 42–3). Moreover, he contrasts this with Steiner, who after running the picture once or twice would henceforth depend entirely on cue sheets and who also used click tracks a great deal when recording. Nevertheless, Friedhofer certainly makes no blanket statements along the lines that Korngold shunned mechanical timing aids or never worked with cue sheets.

In retrospect, even without the evidence provided by the full scores, we should always have been suspicious of these technology-shunning claims of Thomas and others. Indeed, the myth flies in the face of common sense. Korngold’s abilities would have to be practically infallible to ensure he did not require numerous takes to match picture to music exactly – and these are scores that are often closely aligned with visual action. For a studio that thrived on its efficient working methods (stories abound of Jack Warner walking round the back lot turning off light switches to save electricity), the thought that a composer-conductor would be allowed to waste potentially thousands of feet of film attempting to get a perfect match between music and image without using any mechanical means whatsoever seems a little far-fetched – even for an artist of Korngold’s stature. Specific evidence was always there, however. Ernst Korngold told Kalinak that although his father did not use a click track he did remember punches and streamers (see Chapter 2) in recording sessions for ‘insurance’. The comment is somewhat buried in an endnote in Kalinak’s book Settling the Score (Reference Kalinak1992, 222 n. 39). Likewise, Friedhofer’s oral history, which describes Korngold’s composition process in great detail, provides a good deal of corroborating evidence. He recounts the composer watching the film before going home and inventing themes, returning to watch and improvise on a piano, before making some very rough sketches, which he’d take home and refine. Korngold would then

In other words, the manuscript evidence merely confirms a picture that, although relatively clear in the primary evidence, has been somewhat glossed over in existing secondary accounts. Although Korngold may not have liked timing aids, Thomas’s portrayal of a man with ‘very little mechanical aptitude’ (Reference Thomas1997, 171), who possessed an almost superhuman ability to do away with them when composing and recording his scores, seems somewhat wide of the mark. But why has this myth persisted? What function does it serve?

In the mid-1980s, Andreas Huyssen – postmodern theorist of the ‘great divide’ – argued for a connection between the aims and techniques of the historical avant-garde and those of Western mass culture (Huyssen Reference Huyssen1986). In its attempt to close the gap between art and life, the historical avant-garde had attempted to destroy a bourgeois vision of art that rested on the autonomy of artistic creation, one that emphasized its natural or organic qualities. Huyssen’s point was that, like the mass culture that followed and partially fulfilled this utopian project, the avant-garde relied on technology to achieve its aims; and in that sense, it found its zenith in photography and film. The prevailing image of Korngold as film composer, though, appears to be reliant on those very aspects of bourgeois art that both the avant-garde and mass-culture movements sought to critique. Moreover, as the great émigré artist, Korngold is often presented in contrast to his fellow Viennese composer, the Warner Bros. workhorse Steiner (see, for example, Haas Reference Haas2014, 266). Friedhofer, as I indicated above, explicitly contrasts their working methods, noting Steiner’s reliance on cue sheets and his use of the click track – although he also suggests that Steiner used the click track in ingenious ways (Danly Reference Danly1999, 43). This depiction of a contrasting pair of composers, one of whom writes and records his music effortlessly without the need of technology, while the other sweats over cue sheets and click tracks, is a powerful one that has notable precedents. As Bruno Nettl has revealed, similar imagery surrounds popular conceptions of a more illustrious Viennese pair, Mozart and Beethoven. Mozart is the composer associated with some supernatural power, who could compose without trying, and was a superb improviser (the instinctual composer); the Beethoven myth, on the other hand, suggests that music did not come easily, that it had to be worked at (Nettl Reference Nettl1989, 7–8).

Nettl outlines the myth partly in order to debunk it, and it seems clear that a similar Mozart myth has surrounded Korngold in Hollywood – though Steiner is perhaps too genial a character to occupy the Beethoven position fully, a role that in some respects appears to fit the irascible Herrmann better. Korngold, of course, had been named Erich Wolfgang in honour of Mozart, and Ernest Newman had compared Korngold with his namesake as far back as 1912 (Duchen Reference Duchen1996, 53–6) – and clearly it was his status as a Wunderkind that had prompted the comparison. This association appears to have continued to shape his image in later years. Thus, as with the popular reception of Mozart, Korngold in Hollywood has been ascribed an almost supernatural power to transcend the everyday world of his contemporaries; to improvise rather than work mechanically; and to fulfil that very role of the bourgeois artist that the mass-culture movement was supposed to critique. To investigate the reasons why this myth of Korngold as artist has taken hold over the image of Korngold the technologically savvy studio employee, despite the evidence to the contrary, would reveal much about the discourse surrounding film-music history and its relationship with musicology. In any case, what the archival materials provide is a more nuanced picture of Korngold as studio musician, one which suggests that for all his misgivings about the medium, he embraced the technological aspect of film in order better to achieve his artistic aims.

Conclusion

This chapter has sought to highlight the complexity of relationships involved in authoring a film score during the period of the Hollywood studio system, and in the case of Korngold to challenge the prevailing picture of the composer’s relationship with the technology of film-score production. As such, it has asked questions about the medium’s relationship with other forms of compositional activity. The haze of misinformation surrounding Korngold’s relationship with the technology of music recording and synchronization is a reminder that further archival work in this area is needed. The constantly shifting relationships between composer and other creative elements at a movie studio – or between composer and the technology of score production – are both complex and, in every case, unique; and while a study of these structures is clearly important to an understanding of the role of the composer within the movie-making process, we would do well to remember that Hollywood has never quite worked with the smooth precision of the assembly line to which it aspired. Powdermaker described it as operating in a constant atmosphere of crisis, reliant on accidental finds from radio and theatre and adapting to situations as they arose rather than planning ahead (Reference Powdermaker1951, 33). We also ought to remember, then, the warnings from film studies in over-stressing ideas of industrial practices in an attempt to redress a perceived imbalance:

All the same, musicology needs to acknowledge that the composer can be regarded as just one of many possible creative contributors to a film’s score, albeit a very important one; and that the score can be seen as the product of collaboration between film makers, musicians, technicians and the technical characteristics of the medium itself. Undoubtedly, the developing recording technologies of the early 1930s and the need to avoid competing with dialogue comprehension placed certain restrictions on composers; but only if one regards the film score as an idealized conception in the composer’s head that is realized imperfectly by its presentation in the cinema might we see the technologies and processes of production in terms of interference or artistic butchery, as used to be the case. Instead, if we see the film score as a multi-layered artefact that can manifest itself in a number of different ways – including the recorded version heard in the cinema – and in a manner that negotiates subtly between ideas of art and industry, then the authorial contributions of other musicians (including orchestrators), the restrictions or synchronization opportunities offered by the technology itself and even the comments of non-musicians (such as Wallis in the case of Casablanca) must be acknowledged. Human interaction between creative individuals may characterize the process as much as a conflict between the authorial artist and a faceless corporation. In the case of Korngold, the tendency of scholars to repeat myths about the composer’s engagement with the mechanisms of film-score production that emphasize the composer’s ‘high-art’ credentials is both a gentle warning to us about the constant need to question the assumptions we may make about the processes of composition and, simultaneously, a fascinating insight into the perceived status of film music as art.

Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard

For George Melly, ‘The rise of Tommy Steele in the middle 50s [was] the first British pop event’ (Reference Melly1972, 4). Equally, the first British pop-music film arrived on 30 May 1957 with the release of The Tommy Steele Story, produced by middle-ranking Anglo-Amalgamated and directed by middle-aged Gerard Bryant. Speed was clearly the essence since, with song-writing partners Lionel Bart and Mike Pratt, Steele penned fourteen new songs in seven days, while filming was completed in just three weeks – the swift editing and distribution ensuring that, at a total cost of just £15,000, the film opened two weeks ahead of the concurrent production by E. J. Fancey, Rock You Sinners. Such alacrity was not employed, however, to trump the jazz-inflected Tony Crombie and his Rockers, who starred in Fancey’s film, but rather to promote Steele’s imminent second major British tour. The Tommy Steele Story thus constituted just one further element in a lucrative cross-media marketing campaign that included UK Top Ten tie-in single hits with ‘Butterfingers’ and ‘Water Water’ and, as noted by Trevor Philpott, ‘Tommy Steele shoes, shirts, blouses, panties, skirts, ear-rings, bracelets, pullovers and sweaters’ (Picture Post, 25 February 1957). Extracted from this fashion and finance matrix, though, The Tommy Steele Story is generically interesting for its hesitant attempts to forge a cinematic correlation for its ‘new’ musical numbers. To a large extent the film grammar is conservative, relying on song-performance syntax derived from the classical Hollywood musical. As in the burgeoning Elvis Presley cycle, the new sub-genre’s musical sequences were predominantly based on lip-synced performances by the singer which, supported by minimal onscreen instrumentation (usually an unplugged guitar), sought to articulate the illusion of ‘real’ diegetic performance. Just occasionally the film attempts a more creative visualization, as in the presentation of ‘I Like’ which modifies the Hollywood bricolage number of dancing with adjacent props, as in the ‘Moses Supposes’ number from Singin’ in the Rain (1952). At other moments Steele’s debut offers a more original – and ambivalent – investigation of the new cultural form. The images accompanying ‘Elevator Rock’ are essentially a variant on the established rise-to-fame montage, but whereas the traditional version invariably celebrates mass distribution, Britain’s first pop-music film is (perhaps) less adamant that (inter)national dissemination beats a homely Bermondsey production. It is a scene of skilful compression that visualizes the commodification of Steele, taking us from the song’s studio recording to its successive pressing on 78 rpm discs and thence to a shop’s shelves replete with song sheets, each showing a guitar-wielding Tommy, before, over the closing bars, a self-referential Melody Maker headline proclaims the ‘Film Offer to Tommy Steele’. With its graphic and rhythmic editing, the scene economically conveys the speed of the pop star-making process, and while the admiration of volume (a pleasure-surge from the sheer weight of product) is probably the ostensible motivation for the display of Steele’s records and sheet music, an opposing response (the emotional disassociation resulting from this process of commodification) can also be identified.

The Tommy Steele Story proved itself the ‘sure-fire blockbusting bonanza’ its attendant posters had promised. Playing safe with its casting and conveying a positive image of fun-loving youth, within four months the film had made a clear £100,000 profit – a cultural phenomenon meriting not only a review in the august UK film journal Sight & Sound, but instigating a set of cinematic responses. First came the pastiche film The Golden Disc (1958), featuring the anaemic coffee-bar copy-cat Terry Dene, derided by Donald Zec as ‘dreary and fumbling’ (Daily Mirror, 14 March 1958), and decidedly not doing what it said on the label. It was followed by the parodic Expresso Bongo (1959), adapted from Wolf Mankowitz’s West End play and a coruscating debunking of the new pop-star phenomenon, featuring Cliff Richard as the eponymous teenage sensation. His Bongo Herbert is no Steele-like repository of new-generation optimism: boorish and opportunistic, he forms instead a bridge to concurrent troublesome youth paradigms, social-problem films given extra resonance – and adolescent audience appeal – with the addition of seditious rock’n’roll numbers, as in Beat Girl (1960), where Adam Faith evaded the censors by singing in adolescent argot of having ‘Made You’.

Expresso Bongo was another box-office and critical success, hailed effusively by William Whitebait as ‘easily, so far, our best musical’ (New Statesman, 5 December 1959). It also showcased the cinematic/commercial potential in promoting Cliff as the ‘British Elvis’. And swiftly, like Elvis, Cliff was – largely through his film depictions – ‘tamed’ for mainstream audience appeal. For the national media in the late 1950s, an interest in rock’n’roll primarily signified a proclivity for juvenile delinquency, as when Cliff’s leather-clad coffee-bar rocker snarled his up-tempo ‘Living Doll’ in Serious Charge (1959). Yet his trilogy of pop-music films in the early 1960s illustrates the acceptance of cardigan-wearing teenagers as ‘just good kids’, a social rapprochement that reinforces the absorption of rock’n’roll into more acceptable – and therefore profitable – strands of popular music. The Young Ones (1961), Summer Holiday (1963) and Wonderful Life (1964) are key to this merger of rock’n’roll with established modes of entertainment, both in sound (through the musical styles deployed) and in vision (through the images presented of the young). With six-figure budgets from the major studio ABPC (Associated British Picture Corporation), all three films are, for the first time in the sub-genre, prestigious productions employing colour and a widescreen format. They also announce that, while the 1950s had been a time of postwar negativity, the 1960s were going to be different.

And so it proved as, in many ways, this new-decade Technicolor trilogy, rather than its ‘exploitative’ coffee-bar predecessors, revealed itself unflinchingly formulaic: each film’s narrative structure centres on a parent–child conflict; each film contains a set-piece confrontation where Cliff – spokesman for the younger generation – highlights their efficiency and responsibility; in each film’s harmonious conclusion, the adults concede that the kids are alright. Freed from the nefarious influences of Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis, these films found inspiration from the earlier wholesome trinity of Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. This strategy is clear from the first film, The Young Ones, which from the outset signals its provenance and purpose with the set-piece passed-along song-and-dance number, ‘Friday Night’. The generic role model is evident in the hiring of American choreographer Herbert Ross to work on the first two productions, while all three films are built around the songs written by Peter Myers and Ronald Cass in an idiom highlighting their mainstream musical intentionality. Each film apes the Hollywood tradition with energetic dances, choreographed songs and duet numbers between the male and female leads. Each film offers the de rigueur medley section and, eager to pull in all market sectors, finds room to include at least one rock’n’roll number. And hence a surprise: ‘We Say Yeah’, part of the climactic youth club-saving concert in The Young Ones, is arguably the most raunchy, transgressive song treatment in a British pop-music film thus far. Especially given its tame surrounding narrative and musical discourse, it is an audacious scene, providing an affective cinematic correlation as Cliff’s call to teenage rebellion – ‘momma says no, daddy says no / they all gotta go / coz we say yeah’ – is intercut with ecstatic female fans screaming back their affirmation, while a mid-song cut-back to their idol with a new low-level camera position provocatively provides what Rick Altman terms a ‘crotch shot’ (Reference Altman1987, 223). The pace of editing and juxtaposition of images accentuate the sexuality of the performance and the ‘danger’ of the rock performer, in a manner far more priapic than the chaste Steele and Dene. It is a brief moment when Cliff really rocked, a belated sign of the path not chosen.

That single number was sufficiently ‘contained’, however, for the film to be beaten only by The Guns of Navarone (1961) in the UK’s top grossing films for 1962, thereby establishing Cliff as the nation’s top box-office draw, surpassing even Elvis. The soundtrack album matched the film’s commercial success, selling over 100,000 copies as it topped the UK charts for six weeks in early 1962, and remaining in the Top Ten for ten months (Coryton and Murrells Reference Coryton and Murrells1990, 47). The critical response was, in large part, euphoric, Paul Dehn opining that ‘I pick my words as cautiously as I burn my boats: this is the best screen-musical ever to have been made in England’ (Daily Herald, 16 December 1961). Summer Holiday performed even better, breaking all box-office records for a British-financed film for 1963. Wonderful Life, though, coming in at a relatively disappointing number five in 1964’s top-grossing films, was to prove a bathetic and definitive conclusion of the first, ‘primitive’ phase of the British pop-music film. Others were ready to take up the mantle of positive rebellion, extending Cliff’s ‘We Say Yeah’ threefold.

The Beatles

Susan Hayward writes that ‘until the 1960s and 1970s the musical did not question itself – it indulged in narcissistic auto-satisfaction. Arguably, the rock musical of the 1960s started the questioning of the codes and conventions of the genre’ (Reference Hayward1996, 246). The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964), directed by Richard Lester, is the key film in this generic interrogation. Its genesis, though, was again baldly economic: on discovering that EMI had failed to cover film soundtracks in their contract with the Beatles, United Artists quickly offered the group a three-picture deal – solely in order to obtain three potentially lucrative soundtrack albums. Thus, in its conception, the acknowledged apogee of the British pop-music film was akin – pace Technicolor Cliff – to all its generic predecessors: a low-budget exploitation movie to milk to the maximum the latest ephemeral musical craze. But what a craze it became. The Beatles’ British success had been swift but incremental: in America, ‘Beatlemania’ was instant and enveloping, as evidenced by the response to the group’s debut film and its motivational music. The momentum created by radio previews led to advance orders of over two million soundtrack albums, making A Hard Day’s Night, while still at the presses, America’s biggest-selling album to date, guaranteeing its number one position in the charts and ensuring the film’s £200,000 budget had already been doubled in profits. This LP hysteria fed back into film demand, with America alone demanding 700 prints, and Britain 110, while globally a record 1500-plus prints were made, leading United Artists to announce proudly that A Hard Day’s Night would have a saturation exhibition, with ‘more prints in circulation than for any other pic in history’ (Carr Reference Carr1996, 47). The demand for product associated with the Beatles meant that A Hard Day’s Night became the first film in history to ensure a profit while shooting was still in progress.

The opening chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – a G7 with added ninth and suspended fourth – has, for Ian MacDonald, ‘a significance in Beatles lore matched only by the concluding E major of “A Day In The Life”, the two opening and closing the group’s middle period of peak creativity’ (Reference MacDonald1994, 102). It also heralds the opening of a middle phase in the British pop-music film, a phase that consistently problematizes the status of pop fame and the media machinery that promotes it. As part of such media, these ‘mature’ films are aware that they contribute to the mythologizing of its stars but simultaneously subject the process to a critical analysis. This doubleness, this refusal of decisiveness, is omnipresent in A Hard Day’s Night, beginning with its paradoxical title and embedded in its generic characteristics, both established musical comedy and cutting-edge (quasi-)documentary realism. Lyrically, songs like ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ explore ambivalent forms of emotional/economic exchange, echoing those between artist, audience and their exploitation film, while Lester’s knowing use of verbal and photographic clichés increasingly undermines any potential for cinematic realism. From the outset, the ostensible cinéma-vérité style is questioned, exposing the duality resultant from shooting in public spaces: are the Beatles just acting or actually fleeing their ubiquitous fans, or are such distinctions redundant given their effect on young extras? Granted coveted behind-the-scenes access, the film explores responses to this unprecedented pop cultural happening by the (for once) surprised media machine and charts the reactions of the fan-base furthering this mass hysteria. More particularly, this ‘process’ movie allows us to observe the effect of Beatlemania on the boys themselves – and reveals it to be far from an unalloyed pleasure. The film’s opening frames thus signal a generic distinction from standard rags-to-riches biopics like The Tommy Steele Story: here running towards the audience are identifiable celebrities, already bearing the burdens of stardom; here are Lester’s ‘revolutionaries in a goldfish bowl’ (Gelmis Reference Gelmis1971, 316).

Although for the most part conventionally motivated, A Hard Day’s Night’s cinematic correlation of the Beatles’ songs also advances the pop-music film genre to new levels of sophistication. The opening title track immediately signals how the film will repeatedly avoid imitative diegetic performance, while a break with conventional presentation models is underlined in the train-carriage rendition of ‘I Should Have Known Better’: as musical instruments suddenly, surreally replace the Beatles’ deck of cards, the song’s articulation both employs and evades the diegetic mode, removing any generic consistency and installing an alternative, duplicitous viewing strategy. Primarily, however, the filming to accompany ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ constitutes the breakthrough moment for the pop-music film (see Table 4.1 at the end of this chapter) and encapsulates its mid-cycle paradigm shift. Coming after half an hour of intensifying claustrophobia, structurally the song signifies an enormous release of energy; when Ringo Starr sees a door marked ‘Fire Escape’, the sign works like a signal, sending the group hurriedly down the external staircase to the field below (see Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 A Hard Day’s Night: ‘We’re out!’ The British pop-music film’s liberation from imitative diegetic performance.

What follows was directly inspired by Lester’s earlier short The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film (1959), starring Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. As the Beatles caper in Goon-like abandon, suddenly freed from the burdens of nationwide touring, Lester employs diverse film speeds and camera angles to convey the quartet’s musical catharsis. When they jump over discarded props, the film momentarily accelerates to aid their rush-and-tumble into the open air. An aerial shot follows one of the boys up and down a long path but abjures a terminal ‘sight gag’ – the sense of achieved release signifies sufficiently. When filming joins the group dancing together, Paul McCartney dashes towards the camera, smiling at the audience as he breaks the ultimate actor’s taboo. Not all their movements are captured on the hoof, however: the slow-motion shot of a jumping John Lennon, McCartney and George Harrison references the group’s extant iconography, in particular Dezo Hoffmann’s Sefton Park photo of the leaping quartet. Their fun is abruptly ended, however, as a large middle-aged man appears, adorned with raincoat and wellingtons. The groundsman here replays the role of the policeman at the conclusion to Gene Kelly’s ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ routine: he represents an Apollonian authority that will not brook such Dionysian self-expression. His reprimand – ‘I suppose you know this is private property’ – has an extra resonance since the Beatles’ treatment as public property has occasioned their escape. The tension between public figures and private spaces artistically motivates the Beatles’ variant on Lester’s surreal short – and simultaneously confirms the group’s economic potential. Within A Hard Day’s Night the scene comprises the most complete example of Lester’s empathy with the music, a full visual correlative to the ambivalent sentiments contained in McCartney’s composition. More widely, just as the group escape their virtual imprisonment, so is the musical number liberated from its generic restrictions, with subsequent films legitimized to use pop songs in the manner that instrumental music had traditionally been employed, as mood enhancement.

The critics certainly caught the mood. At home, Michael Thornton expressed his relief that this was not ‘the usual kind of British pop musical in which a series of hit songs are linked loosely by an incredible plot and unspeakable dialogue’, and instead judged it as possessing ‘all the ingredients of good cinema – wonderful photography, imaginative direction, and excellent character performances’ (Sunday Express, 13 July 1964), while in the ultimate – and enduring – critical soundbite, American Andrew Sarris described the film as ‘the Citizen Kane [1941] of jukebox musicals’ (Village Voice, 27 August 1964). The linking with an American masterpiece is doubly apposite since it offers not only a qualitative evaluation but also (if indirectly) a quantitative assessment, since A Hard Day’s Night would become the first British pop-music film to succeed in the US market. There was a concomitant domination of the music charts as the ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ singles topped both UK and American charts, while the soundtrack album – the film’s sole reason for existing – achieved unparalleled results: it remained at number one in the British album charts for 21 weeks, selling 700,000 copies in the first year of its release, while European sales surpassed one million; in America advance orders of one million were soon doubled in sales as it headed the album chart for fourteen weeks. United Artists’ initiative proved an overwhelming success with global sales of the soundtrack to A Hard Day’s Night roughly totalling four million (Coryton and Murrells Reference Coryton and Murrells1990, 97).

This important commercial momentum was maintained with the box-office returns for Help! (1965), the Beatles’ spy-spoof sophomore feature with Lester, which totalled close to $6 million in the United States and $14 million worldwide. In the United Kingdom, the film was the second highest money-maker of 1965, bettered only by Mary Poppins (1964). Its economic performance was on a par with A Hard Day’s Night, though expectations had, in truth, been higher with a now-established global phenomenon to market. Contemporaneous critical reception echoed the overall sense of anti-climax, Thornton’s piece typical in noting how ‘this isn’t a nose-diving flop, that’s for sure. But there is nowhere in evidence the special exciting quality of A Hard Day’s Night’ (Sunday Express, 1 August 1965). For all its ‘Swinging London’ colour surface difference, Help! nonetheless furthers a key trope of A Hard Day’s Night: while earlier British pop-music films presented young men on the make – be they pop stars or juvenile delinquents – here they have made it, and again seem uncertain if the effort has been worthwhile. The effort certainly pays off in the musical numbers, notable for conveying much of the comedy’s melancholy. One of many musically upbeat but lyrically sad numbers, ‘Ticket To Ride’ is generally considered the most inventively filmed sequence in Help! and the cinematic sibling of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. Lester again employs the Beatles’ music as a nondiegetic accompaniment – here to Alpine action sequences – but now brings into play a radical rhythmic montage: completely fashioned post-production, its cutting for pace and rhythm obviates the need for pre-arranged choreography. Pauline Kael thought that Help! was Lester’s ‘best edited, though not necessarily best film’ (Reference Kael1994, 221), and this editing is most effectively employed in the skilful cinematic correlation for Lennon’s first ever heavy-metal track. Too skilful, perhaps? Extrapolating from Lester, John Boorman’s inventive Dave Clark Five debut feature Catch Us If You Can (1965), with its opening pop-art montage ceding to a picaresque flight from the media spotlight, would signal the sub-genre’s economic shift to a marginal status. Its rejection of narrative also signified the rejection of audiences – as even the Beatles discovered with the bewildered response to their television film Magical Mystery Tour (1967). And yet, aesthetically, after this radical mid-decade shift, pop-music films could not get back to the accessible narrative naiveties of The Golden Disc or Summer Holiday and retain any semblance of credibility. As Andy Medhurst noted, ‘The British pop film, in all its endearing awkwardness, was pretty much dead’ (Reference Medhurst, Romney and Wootton1995, 68–9).

Psychedelia and Performance

Nonetheless, the sub-genre soldiered on, increasingly solipsistic – and chemically supported. If the ‘primitive’ pop-music film was fuelled by nothing more threatening than a frothy cappuccino and its ‘mature’ phase, most noticeably Help!, enjoyed the impetus of ‘speed’ amphetamines, the later 1960s saw a move to more serious experimentation with cannabis and LSD, drugs to elongate thought and amplify emotions. This was no era for the ingénu: instead, for the privileged few with their large and loyal following, record and film companies were happy to join the trip. They had no need to co-opt their contracted charges into exploitation quickies, and the creative longevity now accorded to the musical elite was meticulously/pedantically recorded in One Plus One (US title Sympathy For the Devil; 1968), Jean-Luc Godard’s diptych on the garlanded Rolling Stones and grassroots political action. Equally pop-polemical, Peter Watkins’s heavily mediated Privilege (1967), starring ex-Manfred Mann lead Paul Jones, critiqued the supposedly bottom-up rebellious nature of rock as it followed a state-manipulated pop star who, rather like Cliff, provides a hegemonic catharsis and channelling of teenage energies – and income – with his bad-boy persona yielding to religious evangelism. In Steve Shorter’s Leni Riefenstahl-inflected stadium rock performances of ‘Free Me’, we encounter a further shift in the sub-genre’s employment of musical performance. Removed from the flimsy storylines of Lester’s movies and relegated to an ambient soundtrack in Catch Us If You Can, here, as in other third-phase pop films, the musical numbers serve primarily to advance the narrative and its attendant, alternative ideological programme. This musical narration would return in George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine (1968), the ultimate in pop-art influence on the British pop-music film. The eclectic feature-length cartoon signifies sufficiently as a family fantasy on the forces of good overcoming evil, but can also be read as an allegorical play on late-1960s states of mind and statecraft: as Bob Neaverson describes it, ‘an underground parable of how the psychedelic Beatles (symbols of the peaceful and apolitical forces of hippy counter-culture) overcome the forces of state power to establish a new regime of karmic awareness and universal goodwill’ (Reference Neaverson1997, 88). Whether one saw the eponymous vessel as a pretext for the saturation marketing of ancillary product including alarm clocks, snow-domes, watches and ‘the world’s first ever full colour paperback’ (Buskin Reference Buskin1994, 84), or a coded reference to the hippy-favoured narcotic pill Nembutal, Yellow Submarine was indubitably a critical success: for Ian Christie it was ‘an absolute joy … the best film the Beatles never made’ (Daily Express, 17 July 1968). Whilst the film was also a great commercial success in the United States, bettered that year only by Funny Girl (1968), UK’s Rank got a whiff of drugs – understandably since the images accompanying ‘Only A Northern Song’, ‘It’s All Too Much’ and the exuberantly rotoscoped ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ are comprehensible only when experienced as audio-visual recreations of hallucinogenic states – and pulled the film from mainstream distribution. Equally unacceptably, Yellow Submarine’s soundtrack album, no longer the main motivation for a Beatles movie, only yielded (relatively) indifferent financial results worldwide.

Any optimistic ‘flower power’ overtones from the Fab Four’s collective cartoon politics would be crushed in the solo film venture from the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, a work that completed the British pop-music film’s synthesis of music and violence and was adjudged by Sarris ‘the most deliberately decadent movie I have ever seen’ (Village Voice, 30 July 1970). Performance (1970), directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, was bankrolled by Warner Bros. entirely on the promised participation of Jagger as star and soundtrack writer – the vague agreement that he would do eight numbers and act out a publicity-generating recreation of the Stones’ Redlands drugs bust sufficed for the immediate granting of a $1.5 million budget. And so, in a sub-genre predominantly known for the studio exploitation of audience and artist, the economic momentum finally moved into reverse as Warners unwittingly underwrote what was, in essence, a home movie for co-director Cammell and his – admittedly well-heeled and well-connected – Chelsea-set friends. That funding was the project’s high point: the troubled shooting, editing and shelving of the film for close on two years culminated in a mere fortnight’s American release in August 1970 and a similarly brief UK sortie the following January before it was consigned to the vaults. Jagger had only come up with a single composition, so no face- and finance-saving Stones-related soundtrack album was forthcoming either. Performance subsequently found its way into the cult pantheon and academic exegesis has largely focused on its echoes of the Krays and Richardsons and its dismantling of the gangster genre, but a major thrust is its self-conscious replaying of motifs from the British pop-music film. Performance is narratively rooted in the musical domain, a setting authenticated not only by the casting of Jagger but also by its location in Notting Hill, the cradle of UK rock’n’roll lifestyle as recorded in Colin MacInnes’s 1959 novel Absolute Beginners. Adjudged from a socio-musical perspective, Performance’s ‘merging’ of the pop-music film and gangster movie re-presents the late-1960s subsuming of a pastoral voice by an antiphonal violence; in so doing, it conclusively unites the opposing strands of the sub-genre’s ‘primitive’ phase, the pop-star vehicle and the social-problem film. References to the exotic legend of the Old Man of the Mountain in his Persian fortress bring together the ageing rock star and now senior delinquent in the common etymological root of drop-out and hit-man, the hashishin and assassin. A dozen years on, Performance reworks the fun-loving and troublesome youth figures in ‘real-time’ adult disillusionment.

For want of Jagger-filled compositions, Performance forges an assembled soundtrack by mixing in musical textures from various cultures: Ry Cooder’s slide guitar alternating with synthesizers and Indian santoor music adds an aural eclecticism that matches the Powis Square décor created by Christopher Gibbs. Nonetheless, Jagger’s sole solo number, ‘Memo from Turner’, remains the film’s centrepiece and a generic valediction as, initially dressed like a 1950s Ted with mutton-chop sideburns and slicked-back hair, he leads Performance less into a gangster’s interrogation than a compendium of the British pop-music film in its ‘primitive’, ‘mature’ and ‘decadent’ phases. ‘I remember you in Hemlock Road in 1956’ dates the sub-genre’s beginnings, while Turner’s reminder that ‘you were a faggy little leather boy / with a smaller piece of stick’ succinctly depicts the cinema-seat slashing rock’n’roller of the era. The second verse offers a resumé of the corporate and mediated middle period: ‘Weren’t you at the Coke convention / Back in 1965 / And you’re the misbred greying executive / I’ve seen so heavily advertised.’ Finally, Turner’s ironic plea for understanding – ‘come now, gentlemen, your love is all I crave’ – deflates the Summer of Love, the Beatles and the cartoon karma of Yellow Submarine. Performance so polarized critical opinion that the New York Times ran contrasting reviews on consecutive weeks, with Peter Schjeldahl’s piece entitled ‘The Most Beautiful Film of All?’ (16 August 1970) countered by John Simon’s less interrogative ‘The Most Loathsome Film of All’ (23 August 1970). Despite such diversity in reception, the film possessed a singular finality: for John Walker, ‘Performance put a hole through the head of the 1960s’ (Reference Walker1985, 95). It did the same for the British pop-music film, its Borgesian maze of intertextuality incorporating a closing summation of the whole, now moribund, sub-genre.

Afterlife

Nonetheless, the British pop-music film has shown brief spasms of resuscitation, an intermittent afterlife that repeatedly investigates its previous generic incarnations. This can be categorized as a fourth ‘historical’ or ‘revisionist’ phase, largely equivalent to ‘alternative’ or ‘youth heritage’ cinema (Glynn Reference Glynn2013, 6). It is first evident in That’ll Be The Day (1973), the debut feature of teen idol David Essex, which, as well as revisiting the early days of British rock’n’roll, returned fully to the sub-genre’s blatantly commercial roots with co-producer David Puttnam striking a deal with America’s Ronco record company whereby, in return for funding, the film would feature rock classics exploitable via an extensively advertised tie-in soundtrack album. The deal struck, Puttnam and writer Ray Connolly copiously revised the script, adding regular radios or record players to scenes, thereby creating Britain’s first ‘retro’ rock movie, a music film not frantically chasing present trends but employing a pop-heritage soundtrack to fabricate a period setting and facilitate a commercially synergistic compilation LP, which reached number one in a two-month chart stay. It would prove, aesthetically and economically, a lasting template. The sequel, Stardust (1974), offered a raunchy riposte to the lifestyle portrayed by Lester in A Hard Day’s Night, its cod-Beatles biography revealing a grubby rock decadence in situ from the beginning. Its backstage model of the unscrupulous management exploitation of Steve Shorter-style innocents would continue through the glam of Slade in Flame (1974) and the (post-)punk of Hazel O’Connor in Breaking Glass (1980). These commercially limited exposés of corporate cynicism and the more remunerative Who rock operas Tommy (1975) and Quadrophenia (1979) would synthesize in Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982), lauded in the United States – Roger Ebert adjudged it ‘without question the best of all serious fiction films devoted to rock’ (Chicago Sun-Times, 24 Februry 2010) – but derided in Britain. For example, Paul Taylor warned, with a wit sadly absent from the film, of the problems with generic inbreeding: ‘Crossing Privilege with Tommy couldn’t result in anything shallower. All in all, it’s just another flick to appal’ (Time Out, 29 July 1982).

The afterlife of the pop-music film would next take a postmodern turn, beginning with the absolute financial disaster of Absolute Beginners (1986), a historicized ‘primitive’ coffee-bar musical that revisited the décor and dirty tricks of Expresso Bongo, but effectively ruined Goldcrest Films, its bloated £8.4 million budget clawing back just £1.8 million from UK cinemas and less than $1 million in the United States. Far more successful was the ‘mature’ postmodernism of the Spice Girls’ movie Spice World (1997), a backstage musical from a group matching the Beatles for popularity that replicated the getting-to-the-concert-on-time plot line of A Hard Day’s Night – with a Summer Holiday London double-decker bus thrown in for good measure. The film’s rampant self-reflexivity permitted the ‘straight’ showcasing of the Spice Girls and their songs in modes ranging from nondiegetic to full performance while simultaneously parodying the make-up of the pop-music marketing and media discourses that founded and followed their celebrity; it also saw PolyGram’s modest $25 million budget (mostly spent on ‘star’ appearances enjoying pop-music film ‘baggage’) bring back over £11 million at the UK box-office, $30 million in the United States and $75 million worldwide. To that must be added Spice World the album, which broke existing records in shifting over seven million copies in its first two weeks, with final sales topping ten million. The first major studio pop-group exploitation music film since the sub-genre’s halcyon days in the 1960s, Spice World’s commercial success – and critical plaudits, Matthew Sweet unironically commending ‘an uproarious pantomime of ironies’ that fused ‘the recursively self-referential qualities of Fellini’s 8½ [1963] with the disposable peppiness of Help!’ (Independent on Sunday, 28 December 1997) – prompted the inevitable epigonic Seeing Double (2003), ‘starring’ the similarly constructed S Club 7. There was no space, though, for an Expresso Bongo-style parodic response, since Spice World itself so knowingly displayed its ironic attitude towards its cinematic and musical heritage. A distaff variant on Lester’s pop-music films, it proved an increasingly rare generic convergence of economic imperatives and artistic achievement. Apart from geriatric rockers Status Quo’s disastrous Bula Quo! (2013), for Trevor Johnston ‘[n]ot so much a movie, more a pub chat that got way out of hand’ (Time Out, 3 July 2013), the new century, caring too much for money, has fought shy of trying to replicate the formula.