With Beetlejuice Beetlejuice around the corner, the fam and I decided to check out the first film. We’re watching it in chunks so I don’t want to comment on the rewatch just yet, except to say, in general, how much I admire Tim Burton’s vision.
I have always loved Danny Elfman’s main title to the original, which was one of the first things I figured out how to play at the piano as a kid (bits of it, at least)—those octave oompah-oompahs are so much fun! Here’s the written score:
Here it is in the picture, with that fun, trick dissolve between the real town and the model:
And here’s an Erich Kunzel performance that sounds quite a bit different...
So about the Kunzel track...Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops did a long series of compilation albums of film themes. They were by and large really good, and two of them, Star Tracks II and Fantastic Journey, were albums I bought back in the day. I ended up discovering a host of great themes and composers through Kunzel’s choices.
But the conductor did tend to take some liberties with the tracks, and with Beetlejuice, it made me wonder about a story told of the actual score’s recording. This is well documented—here, for example—but initially, the great Lionel Newman was hired to conduct Beetlejuice. A Hollywood legend! They were so excited.
However, it’s also well documented that Lionel, despite deserving all of his accolades as a world-class composer, conductor and administrator, was also a massive, foul-mouthed prick. (I am not going out on a limb here.)
Lionel hated the score, hated Elfman, derisively called him “Beethoven” in front of the orchestra, and was instructing the orchestra diametrically opposed to what Elfman intended. So they fired him and replaced him with Bill Ross.
Anyway—Elfman and orchestrator Steve Bartek were still relatively new to film scoring in 1988 and it made me wonder if the Kunzel recording is kind of what you get without Danny being there to lead his vision the way he heard it in his head?
I know the Kunzel albums were occasionally interesting because changes made at the scoring session for the film itself were not reflected in Kunzel’s tracks—probably because they simply weren’t memorialized in the scores sent to the Cincinnati Pops to play.
“A Busy Man” from Star Trek V (on Fantastic Journey) comes to mind because it doesn’t have the Klingon theme for the view on the Enterprise bridge monitor warning of the Klingon bird of prey’s imminent attack—which was added by Goldsmith at the session.
And when we did the expanded Star Trek V CD, we found the original take Goldsmith conducted without the Klingon quote—matching what Kunzel recorded.
Fun trivia!
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