Classic Movie Hub Blog

Max Steiner, Fred Astaire, and the RKO Movie Musical
(Exclusive by Author Steven C. Smith)

In 1933 — the same year he recorded his landmark score for King Kong —Max Steiner achieved another ambition he’d sought since becoming RKO’s musical director: oversight of a sophisticated, successful movie musical.

Nine years earlier, Steiner — then a top Broadway conductor — first worked with Fred Astaire, on George and Ira Gershwin’s Lady, Be Good! The show would be a turning point in the American musical, thanks to jazzy standards like “Fascinating Rhythm” and the title song.

In 1933, Steiner was thrilled to re-team with Astaire at RKO, after the stage star was hired to play a supporting role in Flying Down to Rio. 21-year-old Ginger Rogers, a frequent RKO player, would be Fred’s dance partner during the film’s final number.

Rio marked the studio’s most ambitious return to a genre Hollywood had mostly abandoned. By 1930, moviegoers had tired of watching creaky musicals that seldom made use of cinematic techniques. Limited recording technology and locked-down cameras were partly to blame.

But by 1933, Warner Bros. dazzlers like 42^nd Street proved that a new kind of musical was possible — and Max was eager to build on Warners’ model.

Flying Down to Rio began as a vague concept in search of a story. RKO production chief Merian C. Cooper approved the project after producer Lou Brock pitched a flying scene–something he knew that Coop, a pilot, would love.

Dolores Del Rio signed on to star. Gus Kahn and Edward Eliscu were hired as lyricists; and for composer, Brock chose another of Max’s former Broadway collaborators, Vincent Youmans. Max was elated: he revered Youmans as a songwriter (“Tea for Two,” “I Want to Be Happy”), and their all-night sprees in 1920s Manhattan were among Max’s happiest memories.

At RKO, Youmans wrote melodies as fine as his Broadway work: “The Carioca,” “Orchids in the Moonlight,” and Rio’s title tune. Steiner’s orchestra sometimes played live on set; an upside of that approach was a spontaneity in playing.

On September 7^th, 1933, cameras rolled on Astaire’s first movie dance solo, “Music Makes Me.” Prior to the shoot, Astaire spent weeks developing each step in partnership with a rehearsal pianist, dance director Dave Gould, his assistant Hermes Pan, and Steiner.

Once the dance was set, the team “wrote out a score indicating all the important musical points for the arrangers and orchestrators,” observed Astaire scholar Todd Decker. At this point, Steiner became essential, as he assigned and critiqued the orchestrators’ work.

On September 21^st at 9 a.m., Astaire and Rogers reported to Stage #8 to rehearse their first screen dance together. The following day, filming of “The Carioca” — Fred and Ginger’s only dance in the movie — began. After four days of shooting, their two-minute segment was complete.

Max’s simpatico work with Astaire contrasted sharply with the helter-skelter shooting of Rio’s non-musical scenes. Producer Lou Brock was so obsessed with secrecy — or so unprepared — that according to co-star Gene Raymond, script pages were distributed on the day of shooting. “When we finished the picture we thought, ‘This is going to be the bomb of all bombs.’”

Two months later, Flying Down to Rio was previewed in Los Angeles. After Fred and Ginger’s dance, “The audience cheered,” Hermes Pan recalled. “Right away, the studio knew: we’ve got something big.”

RKO producer Pandro S. Berman was quick to capitalize on that success by pairing Astaire and Rogers in a movie of their own. On a trip to London, he had seen Fred onstage in Cole Porter’s The Gay Divorce, which Berman “thought would be an ideal vehicle.”

In 1934 the project moved ahead, now titled The Gay Divorcee — the extra “e” due to censors who would not condone the idea of a gay (happy) divorce. Berman assigned Mark Sandrich to direct, and commissioned songs from two teams — Con Conrad & Herb Magidson, and Mack Gordon & Harry Revel — retaining only “Night and Day” from Porter’s stage score.

Max was tasked with providing Astaire with musicians during rehearsals, composing underscore, supervising orchestration of songs and dances, and conducting recording sessions.

Astaire often came to those sessions to discuss tempos and other details. Harpist Louise Klos recalled with delight days when Fred and Ginger visited the orchestra, to compare dance steps with the music being recorded. During an arrangement, Astaire and Steiner often stopped the orchestra to showcase the taps, a percussive instrument of their own.

By now, Steiner was using a “soft piano” recording as a guide track for a song’s filming. The full orchestra would be added later.

One exception was Astaire’s tap dance to Divorcee’s first song, “Don’t Let it Bother You.” The use of live orchestra on set, Steiner wrote, was “a very difficult procedure…because of the camera set-ups my orchestra and I were sometimes as far as a hundred feet away from [Astaire]. On a big stage where sound might have traveled at a rate of ¾ [of a] second, I had to be a little ahead of Mr. Astaire’s taps…to offset this sound lag.”

No such challenge occurred during the filming of Divorcee’s most famous sequence: Astaire and Rogers’s “courtship” dance to “Night and Day.” By then, excitement about the movie was spreading at the studio; and as expectations climbed, Divorcee’s dance finale “The Continental” expanded to a record 17-1/2 minutes.

Max and team were under the gun, and Steiner grew defensive. His attitude wasn’t helped by the scant amount of sleep he’d had since joining RKO in 1929.

Music costs nearly doubled. Overage reports exude passive-aggressive frustration. “It was necessary to remake guide track for the CONTINENTAL Number due to the metronome being inaccurate.” “This overage is due to the extreme difficulty in scoring the CONTINENTAL and the inadequate time we had to prepare same.”

Handed one such report for his signature, Max exploded. In oversized handwriting, he wrote, “I resent this as a slur on my unimpeachable integrity for the last five years. We can easily offset this overage by cutting ‘The Continental’ number out entirely.” His suggestion was sarcastic, but his anger was genuine.

Max’s burst of temperament may have had another cause. His mother Mitzi remained in Austria, a country now described by its chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, as a “German state.” Annexation with Nazi Germany would follow four years later.

Mitzi also needed money, leading Max to borrow heavily from his bosses. That amount was subtracted from his weekly salary, leaving him with a few hundred dollars. His resentment festered; and after three draining months on The Gay Divorcee, with some recording sessions lasting until 3:30 a.m., Steiner snapped.

On Saturday, September 29^th, RKO vice president B.B. Kahane received a telegram. He probably expected it to confirm the shipping of Divorcee’s final negative. Instead, he read the following.

From: Max Steiner

Subject: Office Hours

TO ALL LOVERS OF NIGHT SHIFTS!

Effective Monday morning, October First, I can be found at the Studio during the hours: 9:00 am to 12:30 pm; and from 1:30 pm to 6:00 pm, every day except Sundays and Holidays. However, I WILL NOT be found, any longer, during the hours from 6:00pm to 9:00am next morning, as in the past.

Should this not be satisfactory to anyone, I shall be only too happy to cancel my contract.

Furthermore, I just received an offer from the President of the May Company, Eighth at Broadway, Los Angeles, California, who wants to obtain my services, on a long term contract, as a “BED-TRYER” and that looks awfully good to me.

By the time his memo was delivered, Max was en route to Mexico for a weekend of gambling at Agua Caliente, Hollywood’s favorite south-of-the-border resort. If he meant his note to inspire a sympathetic chuckle from the boss, he grossly miscalculated. Kahane wanted Steiner’s head–and after that, a new musical director.

With Max away, the telegram was read first by his secretary, then Murray Spivack, the brilliant sound engineer who co-managed the music department.

According to Spivack, Kahane “said, ‘I did not like your letter, and it only remains for you to set the date that your resignation becomes effective.’ I didn’t know what the devil to do. I wanted to save Max’s job, because he was a very fine composer and a good conductor.”

Fast forward to the following Thursday, and another memo:

Dear Mr. Kahane,

Forgive me for not answering your note before this, but I have been away from the studio for three days sick and exhausted..

If my note has offended you, I am sincerely sorry. Believe me, it was not intended to be offensive and should never have been sent to you personally at all…

Please set the date as soon as you see fit for my resignation to become effective, as I have no intention whatsoever of embarrassing the company in any way.

Thanking you for your kindness and good-will in the past, I remain,            

Respectfully yours,

Max Steiner

The memo saved his job. But according to Spivack, Max had not written it. He had.

“I dictated a letter to [Max’s secretary] stating, ‘I’m sorry that you read my joking letter of a serious nature, and since you apparently are dissatisfied with my work, it now remains for you to set the date that my resignation is to become effective.’ So in other words, I passed the buck to him.”

Steiner returned from Mexico a chastened employee.

The Gay Divorcee was the triumph its struggling studio prayed for, earning $584,000 in profit. It received five Academy Award nominations, taking home one for “The Continental”–the first Best Song winner. Hollywood Reporter swooned over cast, songs, and “the excellent arrangements of all the music as conceived by Max Steiner.”

The makers of The Gay Divorcee had cracked a musical code that, for a time, would generate RKO’s most reliable money-earners.

The movie also planted the seeds for Steiner’s departure. Two years later he would leave RKO, and find even greater success working for two of the industry’s most demanding taskmasters: Jack L. Warner and David O. Selznick.

…..

–Steven C. Smith for Classic Movie Hub

You can read more CMH articles by Steven C. Smith about Max Steiner here.

Steven C. Smith is an Emmy-nominated documentary producer and the author of Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer (Oxford University Press). His previous book, A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann (UC  Press), received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award.

Steven has produced over 200 documentaries for television and other media. They include The Sound of a City: Julie Andrews Returns to Salzburg; A Place for Us: West Side Story’s Legacy; and Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood. He can be reached at www.mediasteven.com

You can purchase Steven’s book on amazon by clicking on the below images:

               

Max Steiner and The Birth of Modern Movie Music
Exclusive Guest Post by Author Steven C. Smith

An international crisis triggers record unemployment.

Hollywood executives panic, as movie theaters shut their doors.

And one studio faces likely closure, putting all its hopes on a would-be blockbuster.

The year is 1933. The studio is RKO. And the movie is King Kong.

Then as now, audiences made anxious by global upheaval hungered for escapist entertainment; and in March 1933, King Kong delivered the financial rescue its studio prayed for. But the movie might have failed, depriving us of later RKO classics, if not for the ninth-inning involvement of one man: RKO’s 44-year-old music director, Max Steiner.

More than any other composer, the Vienna-born Steiner (1888-1971) established the ground rules of movie music in the sound era. Before Max, orchestral underscore was rare in Hollywood talkies, which officially replaced silent films in 1929.

As Kong neared completion in 1933, nervous RKO brass told Steiner not to waste additional dollars writing music for the movie, after some executives found the ape’s stop-motion movement unconvincing.

But Kong’s visionary producer, Merian C. Cooper, knew better.

As Steiner would recall, “Cooper said to me, ‘Maxie, go ahead and score the picture to the best of your ability. And don’t worry about the cost because I will pay for the orchestra.’”

Steiner’s epic score—a thrilling blend of Stravinsky-like dissonance, Wagnerian opera, and Viennese lyricism—convinced moviegoers that Kong was both terrifying and ultimately tragic. The music’s DNA is still found in the sweeping scores of John Williams and countless others. (Star Wars’ original “temp track” of music, used during editing before its score was written, included music by Steiner.)

By the mid-1930s, Max’s trademarks were widely imitated, if seldom equaled: separate, distinctive musical themes for characters, which he developed throughout a score to reflect the characters’ changing emotions; subtle use of orchestral color to create atmosphere; and a gift for soaring melody that lifted dramas like Now, Voyager and Gone with the Wind into the realm of myth.

Best known for his work at Warner Bros. from 1936 to 1965, Steiner’s 300-plus credits include Casablanca, The Searchers, Mildred Pierce, The Big Sleep, White Heat, Jezebel, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He was nominated for 24 Academy Awards and won three.

His life had the jolting plot twists typical of the biopics he often scored. During a pampered youth in late 19^th century Vienna, Max was the presumed inheritor of a theatrical empire. Grandfather Maximilian launched the craze for Viennese operetta in the 1870s, after convincing waltz king Johann Strauss, Jr., composer of “The Blue Danube,” to write for the theater. Die Fledermaus, the world’s most performed operetta, was one of the triumphant results.

Max’s father Gabor was also a showman, fascinated by new technology. His productions ranged from symphony concerts to DeMille-like stage spectacles.

Papa Steiner’s most ambitious creation was the amusement park “Venice in Vienna.” Sixty years before Disneyland, this multi-acre venue offered a recreation of the Italian city, complete with canals and gondolas. Patrons could also ride rollercoasters, listen to gramophone records (then a novelty), and watch silent movies just months after cinema’s invention. Gabor also commissioned the park’s Ferris wheel, which remains one of Venna’s most iconic attractions. (It’s often appeared onscreen, in movies like The Third Man.)

 The park’s astonishing blend of “high” and “low” culture proved a perfect training ground for Max, who would spend his life writing sophisticated but accessible music for the masses.

But in 1908, his promising composing career was dealt a blow, when Gabor—whose grand visions were topped only by his spending–declared bankruptcy. Max was forced to reinvent himself twice: first as a wandering conductor of musical revues in London and Paris; then, in the wake of World War One, a new life in America, where Austrians were not considered the enemy.

Europe’s loss was Broadway’s gain. During the 1920s, the tireless, gregarious Max thrived as a conductor of shows by Gershwin, Kern, Hammerstein, and Ziegfeld. Conducting theater orchestras in a time before microphones, Steiner learned how to make sure music didn’t overwhelm a performer’s speech. It was invaluable training for what came next.

In December 1929, Steiner accepted an invite to head west from recently-formed RKO, to join its fledgling music department. By mid-1930, as its films flopped and staff shrank, Max was RKO’s musical director. But his bold attempts to blend underscoring and onscreen dialogue were usually thwarted, by literal-minded producers who asked: where is the music coming from?

Watch almost any Hollywood feature made in 1930 or 1931 and you’ll hear the result: movies whose soundtracks are filled with dead pauses, interrupted only by the hiss and crackle of early film emulsion.

Enter 29-year-old David O. Selznick, RKO’s new production chief, who in 1932 encouraged Max to write full orchestral scores supporting the dialogue and action. Within months, thanks to hits like Symphony of Six Million and The Most Dangerous Game, Steiner proved that audiences would accept the unreality of an unseen orchestra accompanying the drama.

Max’s hastily written score pages ran into the hundreds for a single film. Above his musical notes are handwritten quotes of the screen dialogue being spoken at that moment (“It was beauty killed the beast!”). Despite constantly looming deadlines, Max also found time to scribble notes in the margins sharing studio gossip, lamentations about his love life (he married four times), and sardonic comments on less-than-thrilling screen action.

His audience for those notations was a private one: the orchestrators who, like Steiner, slogged through days with little sleep to turn his pencil scores into final instrumental parts—with the result due in days or even hours.

His jokes in these pages often served a serious purpose: to keep his cohorts alert, and to communicate his dramatic intention. A favorite shorthand was to compare what he wanted to the style of a beloved concert work: “A la Ravel’s Bolero—only better!”

Among the many astonishments of Steiner’s career is his ability to compose full orchestral scores in as little as a week if necessary, while indulging in a life of romantic pursuit, all-night gambling, and alcohol-fueled revelry (W.C. Fields was a drinking pal since 1902, when Max was 14).

That passion for life was reflected in Steiner’s scores–music of intense emotion, reflecting decades of study. (Mahler and Richard Strauss were among his mentors in Vienna.) His music did not simply illustrate what audiences saw: it often reached deep inside the psychology of characters, making their suffering and joys our own.

Scores like King Kong, and its successors at RKO like Little Women, Of Human Bondage and The Informer, heralded an exciting new era in film music. But for Steiner, it was only the beginning.

He would soon achieve even greater success, at the studio whose sound he would define for three decades: Warner Bros.

…..

— Steven C. Smith for Classic Movie Hub

Steven C. Smith is an Emmy-nominated documentary producer, writer, and speaker who specializes in Hollywood history. He is the author of two biographies: Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer (Oxford University Press), and A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann (University of California Press; winner, ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award).

Steven has produced over 200 documentaries for television and other media. They include The Sound of a City: Julie Andrews Returns to Salzburg; A Place for Us: West Side Story’s Legacy; and Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood. He can be reached at www.mediasteven.com

Images courtesy of Steven C. Smith.

You can purchase Steven’s book on amazon by clicking on the below images: