City of Nets by Otto Friedrich

ideas of what they wanted done. Their idea of a truly distinguished musician was Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who had been earnestly composing since the age of six. While still an adolescent, he saw his operas performed at the Vienna State Opera and praised by Mahler, Strauss, and Puccini. In Hollywood, where he arrived in 1934, his first assignment from Warner Bros. was to doctor Mendelssohn’s music for Max Reinhardt’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. From there, it was only a short move to Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood.
    Korngold’s scores were lush and melodious imitations of Brahms, not to say Rachmaninoff. So were those of his most successful colleagues, like Max Steiner, another Viennese, whose works extended from King Kong to Gone With the Wind to Casablanca, or Franz Waxman, a Pole, who orchestrated Friedrich Holländer’s songs for The Blue Angel, achieved his first Hollywood success with The Bride of Frankenstein, and eventually composed the theme performed on each of the five hundred-odd television installments of Peyton Place.
    These were the stars, who succeeded from time to time in having their background music performed and recorded as symphonic suites, but when the M-G-M factory reached its height in the mid-1940’s, it had about fifteen films in production on any given day. Its music department, Hollywood’s largest, boasted twenty full-time composers on the payroll, as well as twenty-five arranger-orchestrators and forty copyists. “The music department,” said André Previn, “was no more nor less important than the Department of Fake Lawns.” Previn’s first success for M-G-M had been to write some jazzy variations on “Three Blind Mice” for José Iturbi to “improvise” in a film called Holiday in Mexico, to demonstrate, as was generally required in such films, that classical musicians were not snobs. M-G-M’s hired composers couldn’t afford to be snobs either. “We shaped up at the Music Department each day like truckers waiting to see who had tomatoes to be driven to Chicago or furniture for Delaware,” Previn recalled. “We never knew who might need what. If some composer was in trouble with a prize-fight film that had to be finished immediately, we might all be rushed over to that set to pitch in for a few days.”
    For the true professionals—and Hollywood had the standard proportion of experts, mediocrities, and incompetents—writing for film was an extremely exacting craft. Each piece of music had to accompany not just a specific scene but a specific piece of film. Hence the click track. The standard film moved through a projector at a rate of 24 frames per second, or 1,440 frames per minute. A click track consisted of holes punched into the sound track that ran along the edge of the film. A composer could either write for a click track or somebody else would have to do it for him. So in Max Steiner’s score for Since You Went Away, for example, at the point marked “The Kiss,” where the violins played a series of sweet high quarter-note chords while an arpeggio swept up from below, the score was marked not only “measure 44” but “5/53” on the click track. The conductor listening through earphones knew exactly what was expected of him.
    When these musicians went home at the end of a day’s work, they wanted very much to play a different kind of music. Leonard Slatkin, the conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, grew up in Hollywood and recalled that his father, Felix Slatkin, a violinist who worked at 20th Century–Fox, and his mother, Eleanor Aller, a cellist who worked at Warner Bros., met at the Hollywood Bowl and eventually founded the Hollywood Quartet. “They would come home at 5 o’clock and play music all night,” said Slatkin. “They knew everybody, and you never could tell who might drop in, anybody from