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As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again.

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Whether audiences notice it or not,

music is the invisible heartbeat of a movie.

It's in a pulse, the way to manipulate emotion.

This is the story of a key figure

who, more than anyone else,

shaped the art of scoring for motion pictures.

Who was he? This man who worked on over 300 film scores

and who literally became the sound of Hollywood

in its early years.

Maximilian Raoul Steiner has become recognized

as the person who not only captured the essence of his art

in every score that he wrote,

but who was the very first one to do it.

Steiner is the individual

who seemed to convince all of Hollywood

that films needed scoring.

Without realizing it,

Max Steiner was building an art form from the ground up.

Max Steiner was a maverick,

a true pioneer who gave Hollywood

one of its most enduring legacies.

To trace the origins of the Hollywood sound,

we have to travel back to another time and place--

Vienna.

This was once the capital of the Hapsburg Empire.

Aristocrats at the Imperial Court

created an environment in which the arts thrived.

Many composers lived or were attracted here.

Operas, operettas, and romantic music

filled concert halls.

The city was not only the home of the waltz,

but the undisputed center

of immortal European classical music.

No other place on earth was like Vienna.

It was against this background that a local family

by the name of Steiner would unknowingly influence

the genesis of film scoring in Hollywood in years to come.

You might call the Steiners as a show business family,

starting with grandfather Steiner,

who owned and ran the famous Theater an der Wien,

which was standing at the time of Mozart

where he performed "The Magic Flute."

It was grandfather Maximilian Steiner,

who persuaded the waltz King Johann Strauss Jr.

to bring his formidable talents to the theater

with the operetta "Die Fledermaus."

Steiner was decorated by many of the Royal Houses of Europe.

After a serious illness, he passed away in 1880.

He was laid to rest beside his beloved wife, Rosa,

in the central cemetery.

Eventually, his son Gabor,

took over the running of the Theater an der Wien

In 1882, he became engaged to actress Mari,

better known as Mitzi Holman, a Catholic.

She converted to Judaism and the couple was married

at the local synagogue.

On May 10, 1888, their son,

Maximilian Raoul Steiner, was born.

The family made their home in a suite in this hotel.

Here, the young Max spent his childhood.

His parents loved him dearly.

They gave him the finest education

and saw to his every need.

He grew up rubbing shoulders

with the best of Viennese society.

As a small boy, I loved Johann Strauss.

On my eighth birthday, he gave me a giraffe piano,

a sort of harpsichord with pedals.

I often improvised at the piano

with more modern music of my own.

Papa would always encourage me by saying write it down.

Despite a privileged lifestyle, Austrian Jews

experienced the scourge of anti-semitism.

It prevented many talented people

from holding public office.

Like other prominent members of the community,

Gabor Steiner had little option

but to renounce his faith and convert to Christianity.

Together with a 6-year-old Max,

father and son were baptized in the Gustav Adolf Church.

For the rest of his life,

Max Steiner would never discuss his Jewish roots.

From a very young age, his talents began to show.

He started to compose.

When he was 9, he had his first song published,

no doubt, through the influential contacts

of his father.

During his teens, he became a very capable musician.

He composed songs and matches for his school band.

In 1906, he accompanied his parents to London.

At the Imperial Royal Austrian Exhibition in Earls Court,

he conducted a waltz that he had composed.

At 16, he attended classes to further his musical studies.

I went to the Academy of Vienna.

I made the three years that were required for composition harmony

in choir work and choral work.

Won the gold medal.

He wrote his first operetta

"Die Schone Griechin," the beautiful Greek girl.

It premiered at one of his father's theaters

when he was 19.

That led to offers to conduct in Russia and later in England.

But while growing up, it was one man who,

more than any other,

would pave the way for him to explore his talents--

his very own father.

Gabor Steiner was a visionary.

His dream was to create a theme park similar

to a Disneyland of today.

He called it Venedig in Wien,

Venice in Vienna.

In 1894, Gabor Steiner leased what was known

as the English Garden in the city

and set about replicating the city of Venice on the property.

An arena for 2,000 people was booked

for staging operettas and concerts-- Franz Lehár,

John Philip Sousa, and even the great Richard Strauss

were among the celebrities who performed there.

He imported Thomas Edison's latest invention

from the United States.

It was called a kinetoscope parlor

where audiences could enjoy viewing moving images.

The park opened in May 1896 with huge crowds attending.

The Emperor Franz Josef also put in an appearance.

The place became Vienna's main summer attraction.

Every spectrum of Viennese society flocked to the park.

It was an extraordinary place.

Nowhere else in the world was there anything quite like it.

My father was a protégé of the Emperor Franz Josef,

who conferred upon him the Order of Franz Josef.

This was the highest honor possible

for a civilian to attain.

From his early childhood,

the young Max recognized what appealed to audiences.

He understood the public.

He conducted at the park, wrote songs,

and sought acts that would perform

nightly at its theaters.

He studied scores, observed conductors,

and arranged music all to considerable acclaim.

But Steiner's father, Gabor's good fortunes, were not to last.

By 1907, he had run into financial difficulties.

Days of adverse weather

caused visitors to avoid the Venedig in Wien.

It was not easy for me to find a job in Vienna

after my father's financial fiasco,

so I decided to go to England.

By 1909, Steiner moved to London.

There, he sought employment as a composer and conductor.

He found both success and romance

and married British variety artist Beatrice Tilt.

But in 1912, pressured by his father,

Steiner returned to Vienna to help run the Ronacher Theatre.

Difficulties mounted and unpaid bills led to bankruptcy.

Steiner gave up on Vienna and returned to London.

He found work in musical theater and vaudeville

as an orchestral conductor at West End venues.

I was one of the best known conductors

there was in Paris,

Shift Orchestra at the Alhambra,

and the Tivoli in Copenhagen,

...in Hamburg.

In South Africa, Joberg and Cape Town,

with the operetta company.

He was well-received everywhere.

But other forces were at play

that would forever change the course of his career.

With the outbreak of World War I

and fearful of arrest as an enemy alien

due to his Austrian background,

Steiner was forced to leave England.

With help from friends,

he obtained a passport and booked passage

on the SS Lackland from Liverpool to America.

He arrived in New York City on November 7, 1914.

He had $32 in his wallet.

Wandering along Broadway's great white way,

he was totally oblivious of the fact

that his real future lay far to the West.

After his arrival in 1914,

Max Steiner walked the streets of New York in search of work,

but finding gigs proved difficult.

He had few contacts and was not a union member.

After a few menial jobs,

he took work as a copyist in a music publishing house.

This led to assignments orchestrating stage music.

Steiner's talents quickly caught the attention

of theatrical entrepreneur Sam "Roxy" Rothafel.

He offered Steiner an opportunity to conduct

in a venue completely new to him-- a movie theater.

Film music began before the sound era

because silent films were never actually silent.

They were always accompanied by music, were always intended

to be accompanied by music.

These small cinemas, let's say 1910,

1911, would have been, a lot of them

would have been makeshift.

They call them shooting galleries.

They would have been storefronts such as in New York,

which would have been hollowed out and narrow and long.

And you put a screen at one end, usually have a hand-crank

projector in the middle or the back of the room.

There were no booths, really, then in those days,

and sometimes you had to play with the strength of Hercules

on a piano to get the sound to the back of the theater.

To drown out the noise of the projector and the fans,

people started using mechanical pianos,

orchestrions, just a hand-played piano,

small combination orchestras in combos as they could afford.

Well, the music was put there to serve the picture,

and the music was selected to serve the picture.

It was a burgeoning art form which attracted

a lot of composers.

Music cues were composed as an aid to musicians

accompanying films.

The music was generic.

Usually three to five minutes long,

but they served the need of the stories on the screen.

There was great demand for these cues.

By 1912, Sam Fox published the first folio of film music.

It contained a variety of moods

and themes intended to enhance the action in the movie.

As theaters grew in size, audiences grew in size.

The problem for the music was a simple piano

could not get the horses through the pass

at the back of the theater.

Wind...

Enter American Photo Player.

These were wonderful machines.

They were extremely popular,

and they were used primarily in Nickelodeon theaters

because they were inexpensive to run.

All you had to do was hire someone

that had an ear for music, a piano teacher.

Usually it was women that knew how to drop rolls

from the library.

You could go down to the music store

and buy a roll for 10, 25 cents.

Voilà. You had music. You had free, cheap music.

Theaters were growing, popularity was growing.

Beginning about 1914, 1915,

now we were getting the movie palaces

were starting to come in.

They're using orchestras.

These little theaters couldn't afford orchestras,

but they were still big enough so a pipe organ could be used,

and a Wurlitzer 1914, a Hope-John's console.

They came up with an ingenious design where you had one person

could play like a full orchestra on this magnificent pipe organ.

To play a Wurlitzer organ for a silent film

was almost as good as having a full orchestra

and if you were fortunate to live in a big city

where they had a big Wurlitzer organ,

you really got your money's worth.

The art of the music

and the science of photo players,

theater organs and mechanical machinery now reproducing

that beautiful music that gave silent film a new dimension,

a new voice.

In 1915, one man completely changed the movie

going experience.

He was David Wark Griffith.

The release of his "Birth of a Nation"

was a watershed in film history.

The score was a compilation of classical music,

folk songs, and music especially composed for the film.

And that was a major milestone for music

because that was a full symphony orchestra

and it had a dynamic sound,

and the film played for three hours.

"The Birth of a Nation" was promoted

as a spectacular road show.

In some of the advertising,

they call it the Eighth Wonder of the World.

After "The Birth of a Nation,"

everyone understood the importance of music

on a grand scale.

No one grasped this more astutely than legendary

New York showman "Roxy" Rothafel.

He introduced large live orchestras

to the cinematic experience.

Audiences often came to screenings to hear the music

just as much as they came to see the film.

It was really about rating the classics.

A little Tchaikovsky, a little Brahms,

a little Beethoven, a little Wagner.

This was the sort of compilation score time.

So there was very little original music.

It was not about this music,

particularly serving the needs of that picture.

It was simply the grand experience itself,

that of hearing a large symphony orchestra in a setting

like a fabulous movie palace.

And that's what thrilled people.

Movie theaters, which supported the use of an orchestra,

usually had the orchestra play for the premium showings,

which were in the evening, and the photo players

and pianist and organist played at all the other times.

Steiner became musical director in charge

of a 40-piece nonunion orchestra for Roxy Rothafel

in one of movie mogul Sam Fox's theaters.

He quickly adapted to the new environment.

In those silent days,

we played printed music and merely made

an attempt to fit it to the action as best we could.

But accompanying movies

was a mere novelty to Steiner.

His first love remained live theater.

Eventually, he found work on the Great White Way,

and in 1916, he became a conductor.

When I left my home in Austria as a very young man,

it was the Viennese operetta

that ruled the entertainment world.

Now, in the new world, I was to be in

on the formative years of the American musical comedy.

Between 1919 and 1930,

there was a sea change in American popular music.

We went from essentially operetta to jazz,

and the "George White's Scandals" of 1922

was probably the first show that he worked on,

in which there was real jazz in the score.

And Steiner conducted...

♪ I'll build a stairway to paradise ♪

which was one of the song hits that came

from the "George White's Scandals"

he orchestrated for the show "Lady Be Good,"

which included "Fascinating Rhythm"

and the title song "Lady Be Good,"

"The Man I Love."

He worked with many different composers,

including George Gershwin, Sigmund Romberg,

Vincent Youmans, Jerome Kern.

So he was top of the heap, as we say.

Steiner had to learn as the conductor of musicals

how to conduct a pit orchestra without overwhelming

the voices of singers in a pre microphone age.

You have in "Lady Be Good" a star like Fred Astaire,

who certainly had a very fine voice

and was a theatrical performer, but it wasn't a powerful voice.

And so, in supervising the orchestrations

and often creating the orchestrations himself,

he had to learn how to balance the colors of the orchestra,

not to mention simply the volume.

He was working alongside

all the most important musical luminaries of the time

who were the architects of the Broadway musical.

And so he had to orchestrate in every conceivable style.

And he also conducted, opening night only, "Blue Monday"

an operetta written by George Gershwin

that was the precursor to "Porgy and Bess."

The only show I did as a composer in those days

was a musical comedy entitled "Peaches."

The show was no good and never played New York at all.

But as soon as I was able, I brought my wife,

Beatrice, and her mother to America.

Unhappily, our marriage was not to last too many more years.

By the middle of the 1920s,

motion pictures had reached a new level of sophistication.

But many issues remained to be solved.

A constant challenge was how to synchronize the picture

with the sound to ensure consistency of playback

between one venue and another?

Major progress was eventually achieved when Warner Brothers

entered into an agreement with Western Electric

for the development of what was called the Vitaphone system.

Sound was recorded on a 16-inch disc,

played back on a turntable,

mechanically interlocked with a projector.

The intention was to maintain the synchronicity

between picture and sound.

In 1926, Warner Brothers releases "Don Juan"

starring John Barrymore.

And everybody goes to see it because

it's a Vitaphone film.

The actual feature was not dialog at all,

but it had this beautiful orchestral score

with sound effects.

A 1927, Warner Brothers released

another Vitaphone film

that would revolutionize motion pictures.

"The Jazz Singer" was the first time audiences

could hear the human voice synchronized to the picture.

It featured popular vaudeville star Al Jolson.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain't heard nothing yet.

The film was a sensation.

The so-called talkies had arrived.

But the sound was still recorded on discs.

It was a cumbersome process with severe limitations.

Something drastic had to be done.

Hollywood, said, time out, guys.

We've got to figure out what we're doing here.

Let's get our act together. Let's try and get sound on film.

Sound on film was always the elusive objective.

Many bright minds struggled with the challenge

of how to carry the soundtrack

on the same piece of film as the picture.

Many corporations and inventors devoted their efforts

to solving the issue.

Eventually, a combination

of photochemical and mechanical advances

resulted in creating an optically printed soundtrack

running alongside the picture frames on a roll of celluloid.

Sound on film had become a reality.

In 1929, thousands of people were put out of work instantly.

Actors, technicians, musicians were all out of work

because it was a different process.

By the time of the birth of sound,

the early talkie era,

Max Steiner had had such experience

and such vast and varied experience,

especially in Broadway shows.

He was a perfect candidate to come to Hollywood

and bring his Broadway knowhow.

William LeBaron was head of production

at RKO Radio Pictures in Hollywood.

On a visit to New York,

he went to the opening of a show called "Sons O' Guns,"

which Max Steiner had orchestrated.

Every one of my men played about

five different instruments.

When the show was over,

LeBaron came down to the pit and he said,

"You've got to come to Hollywood.

I've never heard such a performance in my life."

And I said, what's in it for me? He told me.

The Baron duly signed Steiner

to a contract as an orchestrator

for RKO in Hollywood.

He was 41 years old.

Now dramatic new challenges lay ahead for him.

Two weeks later, I came to Hollywood.

It took a couple of years of production in the late 1920s

and early 1930s for people to realize that actually music

could play an important role in heightening the drama

or providing a sense of emotion to a story.

And it was Max Steiner, more than anyone else

who pioneered that idea in the early 1930s.

My arrival in Hollywood occurred at Christmastime.

It was 1929, the year of the stock market crash.

This was the unpromising era

in which I started my Hollywood career in high spirits.

Some of the things that made RKO different from the other

major Hollywood studios

is it was founded in the late '20s,

specifically for sound film.

It was an extension of RCA, and they were interested

in using some of their sound and film technology,

and they realized that they needed to create a studio

in which to do that.

So it was a newer studio

and it was compared to those other studios, smaller.

Max Steiner's first responsibilities

were to orchestrate and arrange music

for RKO's busy schedule of musicals,

a genre very popular at the time.

But at the end of 1930, movie musicals

had lost their popularity with audiences,

and RKO was not doing well.

It laid off most of its musical staff,

retaining only a downsized music department.

William LeBaron was so impressed with Steiner's work,

he asked him to run the department

at a significant cut in salary.

Steiner agreed.

He began to think about using music in new ways,

perhaps even in dramatic productions.

But the studio was reluctant to try it.

The earliest sound films, the only time music is played,

is when it is source music.

You don't hear music played coming from nowhere.

And the producers said, well, that can't be.

We can't have music.

People will say, where's the music coming from?

Steiner saw things very differently.

He was one of the first to believe that music

could help the dramatization of a story.

He saw the potential

of supporting an actor's performance

with a musical underscore.

An opportunity for him to test

his theory came with a film called "Cimarron."

The front office said to me,

could you knock out something for this picture?

If we don't like it, we'll get someone else to redo it.

Just give us enough for the preview.

Steiner seized the opportunity,

but the front office was nervous.

He was only allowed to create music

for the opening and closing titles

and for the film's concluding scene.

Nevertheless, what he did exceeded all expectations.

Although he was not credited for his work,

his music was the catalyst

for what would become standard industry practice

for all motion pictures in the years to come.

The picture previewed at the Orpheum Theater downtown

and was a smash hit.

When the press notices came out,

reporters wanted to know who wrote the music

and why he didn't get credit on the main title.

This was my real beginning in Hollywood.

With the success of "Cimarron" and RKO's desire

to invigorate its sagging profits,

the studio decided to recruit new talent.

So they hired a promising young producer.

David O. Selznick came on board in the early '30s.

He was only 29 years old.

He was considered something of a wunderkind in the industry.

He began his career on the East Coast

and then worked at various studios in Hollywood

during the silent era.

He, like Steiner,

also believed that music could make a difference in movies.

The pairing of Selznick and Steiner

was the first meeting of two like-minded individuals

who would eventually become giants in the industry.

On a production called "Symphony of Six Million,"

Selznick asked Steiner

if he could write a dramatic underscore for the film.

Selznick conceived that film as one

that would have a great deal of music from the beginning

because the screenplay is something that

is highly unusual for the time,

says over and over there will be symphonic music

playing during the scene.

There will be dramatic music under this scene.

I'm sure that was Selznick dictating that idea.

So Selznick was making a very big point

of introducing music in this film.

And of course, he had the ideal collaborator in Steiner.

And I said, let me try it.

And he says, okay, you do one scene.

It was where the old man dies, but his own son operates on him.

And I wrote it.

And when Mr. Selznick heard it,

he said, this is just wonderful.

And it was probably the first score

that we really had almost complete music to a thing.

And they noticed-- they saw the effect it had on people.

The story centered on a protagonist

who was a doctor and the critical decisions

he had to face in life.

In an early scene, the central character is seen

playing chess with his father

while his sister plays a piece of music on the piano.

All right, move. Steiner took that melody

and then wove it into his own score,

bringing the theme back to highlight the thoughts

and feelings of the protagonist.

It was a brilliant

and innovative technique for its time.

Steiner was excited by the opportunity

to bring the Wagnerian approach of using leitmotifs

with different themes for different characters,

of carefully writing music under dialog to the medium of film,

which largely hadn't been done.

The million dollar hands of Dr. Felix Klauber.

And then another opportunity came along.

"Bird of Paradise"

benefited from the two men's productive symbiosis.

The film was scored with almost a wall to wall music.

It was a remarkable leap forward.

Steiner made full use of the Hawaiian setting of the story,

even introducing a full chorus of singers.

Selznick had big ideas for RKO.

In addition to a schedule of run of the mill productions,

he wanted to turn out a few prestigious high-budget films.

"Bird of Paradise" was one of them.

But although it was an expensive and ambitious project,

it did not make money at the box office.

What it did do was introduce audiences to a rich,

full-bodied musical score,

setting it apart from any other film of its day.

Steiner understood music used dramatically.

He was no less a writer of great leitmotifs than than Wagner.

And that may sound sacrilegious to some people,

but when you consider the hundreds and hundreds of themes

that he had to write for every conceivable

and inconceivable situation and character, it is dizzying.

And how he never ran out of inspiration.

And he was able to tailor it to every single style and project

from the very beginning.

David O. Selznick gave RKO in 1932 its first grade A

year of movie classics, beautifully produced,

and in the process,

Steiner and Selznick changed the history of film music.

Steiner's talents were equally at home

on a wide variety of films.

With his help, RKO returned to producing musicals.

Now they were more lush and spectacular than ever.

Steiner worked on all of them.

His Broadway experience paid off handsomely

on the stages of Hollywood as RKO

began to reap profits from these lavish spectacles.

Audiences loved them.

He also was the musical director of

Astaire and Rodgers' pictures, too,

with scores by Irving Berlin.

And so, he had no problem being a musical director

of a light musical film.

And these films are very sophisticated musically

and also problematic for any musical director

because there is chorus after chorus

after chorus of the given song

that is a song and dance by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers

and then the...

and whoever else does it.

And so, it was up to Steiner as musical director of the picture

to find ways to present multiple choruses of this piece of music

heard over and over again by changing the orchestration,

changing the key, creating the transitions,

and working with the rehearsal pianist.

Steiner still was able to draw on his Broadway experience.

Yet it must have been rather schizophrenic

going from an Astaire Rogers picture to "King Kong."

"King Kong,"

a film that would forever enshrine Steiner's name

in the annals of film history.

At the foot of the Rockies in Provo, Utah,

lies an unusual place, a repository of great milestones

in American motion picture history.

James D'Arc was curator at the Brigham Young University's

Division of Special Collections.

He acquired all the Max Steiner artifacts and memorabilia

from Steiner's late widow, Lee, in 1981.

Within these, air conditioned vaults

are stored priceless treasures.

Many of Steiner's original musical sketches

and first iterations of original scores

are preserved for the study and enjoyment of future generations.

Some are beyond value.

And there is the main title

to one of the most historic music scores

in motion picture history, "King Kong."

By Max Steiner.

This is probably the first film that audiences took notice

of what music could do in motion pictures.

Steiner's work was so powerful

that it turned an 18-inch

animated model of an ape into a 100 feet tall monster

that terrified millions.

D'Arc: This notation on the score refers

to what's up on the screen.

The picture fades in the harbor at night.

There was no music until the ship

The Venture leaves the New York Harbor

and approaches Skull Island.

So when the fantasy begins, the music begins.

There's the cue title, A Boat in the Fog

as they approach Skull Island.

That was a part of Max Steiner's philosophy.

It was not only when you have music,

but it was just as important to him when you don't have music.

The music had to be subservient to the motion picture,

to the story aspects.

He was sparing on the music

until they actually got to Skull Island,

where they meet Kong and all of the incredible events

go to the time they bring the ape back to New York City

and you have music for the rest of the film.

When the picture was completed,

they thought the big gorilla looked unreal

and too mechanical.

They didn't want to waste any more money on it

and told me to use old tracks.

Merian C. Cooper, the producer, then came to me

and asked me to score it to the best of my ability

and that he would pay the cost of the orchestra.

Steiner used 46 musicians,

but he had to play different instruments

to simulate a much larger orchestra.

He ran up a bill larger

than any previous studio recording session.

But it was worth every cent.

You really could get inside the characters.

And he wrote from the inside

so that whether it's the terror of the islanders in Kong

in trying to find King Kong or if it's the heart

and feeling of Kong himself for Ann Darrow,

he is taking us inside the movie through his music.

It's the Steiner score that gives Kong his soul.

He becomes sympathetic as a result of the music.

Steiner had the ability to capture the emotion

of what the characters were thinking and feeling,

and the evocation of the set and the style and the period,

all of that.

He could capture that very succinctly,

and that, aside from all of his other gifts,

is an extraordinary ability that suddenly came to life.

Max's score was so full and so rich and so evocative

and added so much to that incredible film

and its success that everyone took notice.

What he did was really rather extraordinary.

And as if by magic, a fever spread over Hollywood.

And everyone said, oh, I guess we should have music.

For "King Kong,"

Steiner found a professional partner to augment his work.

His name was Murray Spivack.

He was a sound engineer

who specialized in creating sound effects.

Already an employee at RKO,

Steiner took him under his wing to assist

with creating the soundtrack for the production.

The relationship paid off handsomely.

When it was recorded, Spivack was overseeing that

and he has notes to himself about what should be done

with the microphones, how they should be moved,

how certain instruments should be brought out of the texture.

And so he had a huge impact on on the sound of that music.

It was a really powerful and important partnership.

And I think when we think of Max Steiner's legacy

and sort of changing the art of film music,

we should also be thinking of Spivack

because he was right there sort of helping that happen.

But is really the first time that a composer

demonstrated conclusively the power of music

to make a film a hit.

One year after "King Kong,"

Max Steiner's versatility was applied

to a film of a very different nature.

D'Arc: So here is the score to his first Academy Award winner,

"The Informer."

1935 was the second year

of the music category

awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

And this was a much celebrated score.

And it's this score that Max said he really demonstrated

what movie music could do.

When this picture was being made,

our executive producer wasn't too sold on it.

Who wants to look at a picture that's always in the fog,

he asked.

Steiner was a master at creating recurring themes

to identify characters,

their actions, and also locations in the film.

The technique was first used in 19th century opera

by Richard Wagner.

Underscoring a film this way helped audiences to identify

with the story's emotional heart

and the beats of its narrative drive.

It was a huge leap forward in motion pictures.

All this information is about ideas.

Thinking and emotion is told by the music,

and the leitmotif is perfect because you establish a theme,

the audience remembers the theme.

And every time the audience should think

in a certain direction, they will bring up the theme

because of the strong melody, they still remember.

Maybe not consciously, but subconsciously.

Without question, Max Steiner was one of the great

melodists in Hollywood history.

His thought of melody seemingly was inexhaustible.

Not only was Steiner a master of the leitmotif

and melodic themes, but he had the ability

to musically catch the action on the screen.

He wrote scores to synchronize or match movements

or gestures by the cast.

It was a technique the industry called Mickey Mousing.

Max was not offended by the term Mickey Mousing.

He used it a couple of times himself,

saying, I'm using that term facetiously, of course,

because for him it was Wagnerian that in Wagner's operas

that when a character moved,

kneeled, turned, stood, did something,

the music matched.

So he saw it as a continuation of a very legitimate

kind of 19th century dramatic writing.

And I didn't know what I would say.

But now I remember.

There was a sequence in a cell

where the water is dripping.

The property man and I work for days

trying to regulate the water tanks

so it dripped in tempo and I could accompany it.

People were fascinated, trying to figure out

how we managed to catch every drop.

To achieve this exact synchronization,

Steiner employed the use of what was called a click track,

a series of audible clicks similar to a metronome.

The sound was fed to the conductor through headphones

to maintain the beat.

With this device we could match the movement on the screen

with complete accuracy.

It also saved a lot of time on the recording end

because without it, it would have been quite difficult

to catch the tempo and start and end at the exact time.

The film is extremely stylized.

It all takes place in a few hours

and it's bigger than life.

So Max wrote a score that is certainly operatic.

One cannot stress enough how bowled over audiences

were by this score.

They simply were not used to this degree of musical intensity

in a film.

At the time, it was by far Steiner's most acclaimed score,

and for many years people would say,

Max Steiner of "The Informer."

Frank Capra sent him a telegram saying,

"This is the greatest film score ever written."

I like his definition. Music is a glove.

That fits to the scene and he's knitting this glove

that it fits perfectly to the scene.

One of the great gifts that Steiner had was the ability

not only to transport an audience

while watching a film,

but in many cases to create music so indelible

that they remembered it many years, even decades later.

Maggie! Maggie!

Your mother forgives me.

Max Steiner took things that other people had used,

and he combined them into what I would say

is the grammar of film music.

He synthesized it all and essentially created

the grammar of film music as we know it today.

D'Arc: So here we have

Max Steiner's first Academy Award.

See in these days the composer didn't get the Academy Award.

The head of the music department got the Academy Award.

That was changed later on.

Happily, though, the head of the music department

and the composer were the same person.

As musical director of RKO,

for nearly six years,

Steiner had set the bar on how films should be scored.

I remember Max saying that when you write a score,

you have to write for the musically intelligent people

in the audience, and I think he said

also the idiots meaning that you have to communicate

to everybody, even the music illiterate.

Good as he was,

Steiner was always under great pressure.

He found methods for tackling every challenge.

I never read a script

because I may form a wrong opinion.

I imagine the characters different, the story different,

and sometimes I'm terribly disappointed.

When the picture is finished, I run it.

I run it with the producers, sometimes a director,

sometimes without anybody.

And then I start my music.

In other words, I decide I play here, play here, play here.

Then I time it.

I mean, the time to the minute and seconds.

Sometimes I drive just

the very end...

And he had his music editor there,

and it was his job to note the frames

that they wanted to start a cue and then end the cue.

And he would make a script of the dialog of everything

happening on the screen.

Do a third of a second.

While these cue sheets are being made,

I began work on themes for the different characters and scenes.

I run the picture reel by reel again to refresh my memory.

Then I put my stopwatch on the piano

and I begin the actual and tedious work of composing

according to my cue sheets.

I know he used to have a glass of whiskey

on his piano when he worked, right? Yeah, yeah.

But he used to love having that cigar and his whiskey on it. Yeah.

And he would record all night.

He got up early and composed

and usually to call-- an orchestra loved him

because he always give them over time or do it at like 9:00

till three in the morning when they get double time.

And of course, they were happy about that.

Often he would write notes in the margin to his orchestrator

and his orchestrators, Hugo Fryhofer, Murray Cutter,

others would know his style well enough

that he could write in this shorthand.

Hugo, please compare cue sheet with this music.

So you know what I am unsuccessfully trying to do?

Maxi. Fin. Hurrah! Thank God. Schmaltz.

Because he had this great camaraderie

with the orchestrator, he would have them come over

when he could give them a sketch orchestra,

he would play it at the piano and tell them,

you know, I want trombones there or something.

And Max would use his sketches or a conductor book to conduct

because he'd get a lot more music on three lines

than he could on a full score pages.

You could have the greatest music that was ever written.

You could have Richard Wagner. I don't care who.

And if the picture stinks,

may I say that the score will fall down?

Music will help the picture, but it can never save it.

The most towering of all of Max Steiner's work

lies penciled on the pages stored within this container.

It is his most beloved score-- "Gone with the Wind."

The main title and the foreword to "Gone with the Wind."

Prior to that immense project,

Steiner's busy life at RKO was all-consuming.

He found little time for anything other than work.

But one day in 1932, while conducting,

he noticed a shapely young harpist in the orchestra--

Louise Klos.

I couldn't help noticing her not only

because she was attractive,

but also because she was a phenomenal harpist.

In 1927, Max had married Aubrey van Lieu.

She was a starlet who was performing

in ensembles on Broadway.

But that relationship came to an end in 1933.

His heart was now set on Mr. Klos.

They were married in October 1936.

They bought a piece of ground on Cove Way in Beverly Hills

and began building their dream home.

Their street ran into Summit Drive

where many celebrities owned houses,

including the likes of Mary Pickford, Fred Astaire,

Charlie Chaplin,

and Steiner's RKO colleague, producer David O. Selznick.

I learned that on Cove Way lived Max Steiner,

who had composed so many of my father's films.

I actually asked my father

if he could introduce me to Mr. Steiner.

So at one point, I guess when I was three or three and a half,

I was brought across the street to see this shy, balding man,

terribly sweet, soft spoken with a European accent.

He said, "Danny, would you like me to play for you?"

And I said, "Please do."

So suddenly, this incredibly sensitive human being

was playing this beautiful music.

And only as the years passed and I began to see all the films

that my father had produced in those early years at RKO,

did I realize how much they were enhanced by Max Steiner scores.

I think Mr. Steiner must have said to me very early on, Danny,

any time you feel like coming over here,

you don't even have to call in advance to just feel free

to knock on the front door and we'll be happy to have you.

So I would spend 30 or 45 minutes

or an hour just sitting

and watching Mr. Steiner play at the piano.

While working at RKO,

Selznick had always nurtured a dream

to establish his own studio.

In 1935,

he formed Selznick International Pictures in Culver City.

Steiner was still on RKO's payroll at the time,

but Selznick managed to gain access to his services

through a loan out arrangement.

The purpose was to have him write the music

for "Little Lord Fauntleroy"

the first film produced under the Selznick banner.

After this production,

Steiner became a full-time employee for Selznick.

The idea of hiring Max Steiner, who my father discovered

so early in their joint careers together at RKO

caused my father to keep using him again and again.

David had always liked me and appreciated my work.

He gave me so much a better contract than I had had at RKO

that I couldn't turn it down.

"The Garden of Allah" was Steiner's next project.

It was an exotic Technicolor spectacle

starring Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer.

But Steiner's relationship with Selznick

was not always an easy one.

David O. Selznick did not have formal musical training,

but he cared deeply about the music in his films

and wanted to be as involved as he could be.

But it also meant that he had ideas about what he imagined

the music would do once it was in the film.

And sometimes what Steiner wrote did not fulfill that.

And so he would say,

"Well, that's not what I had in mind. Can you redo it?"

Or "We're going to take your music out

and put some other music in."

Particularly in the later '30s,

he was concerned that Steiner was doing too much

so-called Mickey Mousing.

And so their relationship is peppered

with these alternating moments of sort of mutual admiration

and then sort of mutual annoyance.

The disagreements between Selznick and Steiner

came to a head in 1937 on "A Star Is Born."

Max wrote what he thought was a very fine score,

and when Selznick heard it, he was really unhappy.

For the first time,

just wrote a page of notes excoriating cue by cue

what Max had done and writing, NG, NG, NG,

no good, no good, no good.

And he basically made Max rewrite the score.

Many studios hankered for Steiner's talents.

Prior to his writing of "A Star is Born,"

Selznick had loaned him out to Warner Brothers

to work on "The Charge of the Light Brigade."

That studio had long been urging him

to join their permanent staff.

After completing the rewrite for "A Star is Born,"

Steiner sends Selznick a letter of resignation.

He did this reluctantly because he knew Selznick was about

to produce one of the most ambitious films of all time.

Selznick had optioned the bestselling novel

"Gone with the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell.

It was a story that had taken

the American reading public by storm.

Selznick kept waffling about who he wanted to score

the movie right up until, I believe it was March of 1939,

well into production.

Fortunately, Selznick,

after considering everyone else returned to Plan A

and asked Steiner to score "Gone with the Wind."

Even though he was now at Warner Brothers,

his heart was set on scoring the film.

Mr. Warner, I am perfectly willing to do

"Gone with the Wind,"

either on leave of absence or under my contract,

but it is as necessary for me, my pride,

my standing, and my future activity

to do "Gone with the Wind" as it is

as necessary for an actor to get a break once in a while.

Jack Warner agreed,

and it was to Warner's advantage to loan Steiner out

because Selznick would pay top dollar.

He would pay Jack Warner more than Jack Warner

was paying Max Steiner.

So Warner would make a profit.

And Max was indeed loaned out to score

"Gone with the Wind."

Almost until the film's premiere,

which was on December 15, 1939.

Max was jumping between film projects,

some of them at Warner Brothers,

then going back to Selznick to work a little

"Gone with the Wind."

Then to score a different movie

because Selznick needed help on "Intermezzo."

Max really didn't have time to start working on

"Gone with the Wind,"

nor was there a really locked cut

until late in October 1939

became creatively the most

fulfilling and nightmarish year of Max's life.

Nuremberg, Germany, September 12.

Apart from his hefty professional schedule

of scoring 11 films in 1939,

Steiner also had to deal with the trauma of the violence

sweeping across Europe.

Hitler was on the warpath.

And the old world that he had known in Vienna was crumbling.

His mother, Mitzi, had divorced his father, Gabor,

and had passed away in 1937.

Steiner was compelled to bring his father from Vienna

to live with him and Louise in their new home in Beverly Hills.

Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!

One of the scores for Warner Brothers that Steiner

had composed that year was "Confessions of a Nazi Spy."

It dealt with the break up of a German spy ring

in the United States.

Afraid of repercussions for any family members

still living in Nazi occupied Austria.

He took no screen credit

and simply signed the score as staff.

1939 would also bring a set of challenges

for the Selznick family.

In my childhood,

my mother and father seem to be madly love with each other.

There were certainly fabulous parents.

I don't say for a moment that I was not very much aware

that I was privileged.

David O. Selznick's wife, Irene,

was a daughter of Louis B. Mayer.

He was the legendary head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

As a result, the young Selznick had grown up with celebrities

all around him from his youth.

He was exposed to stories of the trials and tribulations

of the film industry.

In 1939,

his mother, Irene, was deeply concerned about the pressure

making "Gone with the Wind" was having on her husband.

My mother said years later she wondered

whether he could survive it

because it was like a nine-month shoot.

It's almost unimaginable for any picture.

And he'd gone to his doctors, apparently before it started,

said, I need 20 or 21 hours a day.

Are there any medicines on the market that you could give me?

Well, so he took benzedrine, dexedrine for the nine months

shooting "Gone with the Wind,"

and then he could not get off them.

So he was-- his entire stability was destroyed

from that point on.

And I think it's one of the things

that finally ended my parents' marriage,

because my mother said he was no longer the man

that she'd married,

which is really heartbreaking to me.

Nevertheless, Selznick would leave

an incomparable legacy of films

with musical themes by Steiner that would live on for all time.

But my favorite theme is...

...I love that.

But he wrote themes for every character.

But that main theme...

Steiner always played his themes on the piano

for Selznick's approval before scoring them.

Timeless.

Themes from "Gone with the Wind" they had to be pieces of music

that would endure through the film

where you could hear something repeated over and over again

and you wouldn't get tired of it.

And so, he was writing themes that sometimes are very simple.

And I think, my God, that's so simple.

But that is another sign of genius.

The film is said to have this big splashy we can't move

it premiere in Atlanta on December 15.

So the pressure was really on and Selznick began to panic

and Max began to panic.

And it was a very tense atmosphere.

And Max assembled an enormous team of people to help him.

Anyone would have needed a large team to help him write

over three and a half hours of music

for a nearly four-hour movie.

His collaborators were all composers

in their own right.

They were more than capable of executing

Steiner's musical ideas and themes,

but it was an enormous undertaking for all concerned.

Because he had at least eight other composers

working with him on it because of the tight deadlines.

He signed it. Steiner and company.

So in the score, you're not only see the music

in Max Steiner's hand, but you see it in the hand

of many other composers who helped him.

He sent the melodies and they did the fill in,

fleshing out the entire score.

Despite the additional help,

Steiner was in trouble.

The movie's opening date was fast approaching.

Time was of the essence.

Finally, in early November, Steiner said, I can't do it.

I can't finish the score on time.

Producer Selznick privately contacted

Herbert Stothart, who was the longtime chief composer at MGM.

He was a born and bred Southerner

and dearly wanted the job.

But then, as now, gossip spread fast in Hollywood.

Word got back to Steiner and he said, absolutely not.

No one is going to score this movie except for me.

And he basically worked for the next month without sleep.

He would get a benzedrine shot each morning

after a couple of hours of sleep to get him alert again.

And he would just work nonstop on the film.

Exhausted,

Steiner and the other composers met the deadline.

The score was completed in time

for the film's much publicized release in December.

Where shall I go, what should I do?

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

The finished production

ran 3 hours and 40 minutes.

It was a record for its time.

Leonard Bernstein says something

to the effect of all you need

for a wonderful project is a great idea

and not quite enough time.

And I think there's a lot of truth to that.

And I think actually to some extent,

the pressure cooker of the situation,

the fact that they had to work quickly

and yet give their very best work

did allow tremendous results.

I wasn't even allowed to see "Gone With the Wind"

until I was nine years old.

I kept campaigning every year.

Can I see-- no, no, you're not old enough.

And of course, as everybody knows who see

"Gone with the Wind" even once, what do they remember?

They remember Vivien Leigh

and they remember Max Steiner's score.

I'll think of some way to get him back

after all, tomorrow is another day.

I think that Max responded to

"Gone with the Wind" on a level that many people don't realize.

It sounds funny to say,

but it was really his story as well.

Max was someone who grew up

in Vienna at the turn of the century,

this magical world in his own version of a mansion,

a plantation, this wonderful fantasy world that his father,

Gabor, had created.

And then Gabor lost everything.

He lost his money. His marriage ended.

All the theaters that he operated

went to other people.

Steiner was a beggar at that point.

And by 1939, Hitler had annexed Austria.

So really, the story of a lost land of beauty

and also the desire to rebuild and restore the family name

was something that meant a great deal to Steiner,

something he wanted to do.

He wanted to rehabilitate his father.

He wanted to rehabilitate the legacy of the Steiners.

So I think that he responded to "Gone with the Wind"

on a very deep and personal level.

Steiner eventually sold his house

on Cove Way to Glenn Ford and his wife, Eleanor Powell.

Mr. and Mrs. Ford would sometimes invite me

into their living room, and there was a piano there.

Mr. Ford said, does this bring back memories?

And I'd say, Mr. Ford,

it brings back memories of Max Steiner and...

I can't begin to tell you

just standing in this room brings him back to me.

And I hope from time to time

you stop and realize whose home you're in.

Prior to the advent of the "Star Wars" franchise

in the 1970s,

if anyone was stopped in the street

and asked to name a film score,

they would have invariably said "Gone with the Wind."

It had monumental power and had become woven

into the very fabric of American cultural history.

It's the incredible music that provided the feeling

and the emotion of the old South.

Its triumphs, its tragedies, the love affairs,

the broken love affairs,

and most of all, the famous Tara's Theme.

All that one needs to do is come a bar or two of Tara's Theme

and just like "The Wizard of Oz" or "Star Wars,"

people will recognize instantly the tune that you're humming

because it's just musical shorthand for the story

of the grand old south that was "Gone with the Wind."

"Gone With the Wind" won a record 10 Academy Awards

and is now enshrined for posterity

as an American treasure.

But for Max Steiner, he's best was far from over.

When Hollywood was at the apex of its golden age

in the '30s,

the sprawling production complex that was established

by the Warner Brothers was thriving.

The studio was headed by Jack Warner,

a notoriously tough taskmaster,

but he was very partial to the music of Max Steiner.

When Max wrote that resignation letter to Selznick,

he knew that there was going to be another job offer

on the table because he knew that Jack Warner

loved his scores.

So sure enough, within days,

Max had signed a contract with Warner Brothers

and became a staff composer.

And there he found

what he called in a letter the right place to be.

I once asked Jack Warner,

how much music do you want in the picture?

He answered, for my money,

you can start on the first frame and finish on the list.

At Warner Brothers,

Max could be purely a composer at a studio

that had tremendous appreciation for his ability.

As I see it, the most important thing about

screen composing is the judgment involved in knowing

when and where to start and stop the music.

Underscoring helps the action sometimes.

Jack Warner loved Steiner's music.

By 1939, Jack Warner was telling Leo Forbstein,

head of the music department,

I want everyone to do what Max Steiner's doing.

You know, show them what Max's latest movie is.

That's what I want.

If anything, Max was loved too much at Warner Brothers

because they worked him nearly to death.

Truly, the workload he had at

Warner Brothers would have killed many people.

When I scored two films in six weeks,

the session producer came to me and said, Max,

how could you write all that music for two pictures

with such different moods in such a short time?

I answer them, I have an electric pencil sharpener.

This story went all over Hollywood.

Because he came from a family of workhorses

because he was very proud of his craft

and his ability to deliver

because he wanted to prove to the world

that the name of Steiner still meant something,

Steiner worked himself night and day, day after day,

with very little sleep,

doing what would be impossible for most people.

The only thing that made him more upset

about having to work day and night

was hearing that someone else had been assigned to a movie.

And then he would write and say, why wasn't I assigned to that?

In 1937, the famous Warner Brothers fanfare was used

for the first time in a film called "Tovarich."

Composed by Steiner,

it was featured again in "Gold Is Where You Find It."

Then it became the musical signature,

heralding every Warner Brothers production for almost 20 years.

Now, this is one of Max's

many scores for the year 1939.

This score is important because Max Steiner

was really the founder and innovator of expansive

Western themes for Western movies.

Both music to define Indians and Indian attacks,

as well as the wide open plains.

The film is about the founding of Dodge City

and the role of the railroad in doing it.

It's Max's music that gives this film its incredible sense

of vastness, wonderment,

the settling of the American West,

which he would carry it on in Westerns

such as "They Died with Their Boots On,"

"The Oklahoma Kid."

Steiner was a master at this kind of thing.

What's this? "My Life with General Custer."

Oh, darling, that's my diary.

D'Arc: With Max Steiner having had the classic European musical

training that he did,

claiming to have been instructed by Gustav Mahler and others,

he brought this tradition of lush,

full scores to the United States.

And this time period in the 1930s

and '40s with Erich Wolfgang Korngold

and Alfred Newman was the great time for the lush

middle European type of film scoring.

So influential that it was carried on

into the last part of the 20th century

and the first part of the 21st century

by the great John Williams,

whose legendary association with Steven Spielberg

and his films have shown that that kind of composition

has not gone out of style at all,

even though many of the films of that kind are considered passé.

People love the rich, full scores,

and many composers acknowledge

that this came from this classic era of film composition

in which Max Steiner led the way.

Warner Brothers had one of the best music

departments in town.

It used only the top talent available.

Steiner wrote quickly,

but was given all the time he needed to rehearse.

His tenure at the studio lasted for almost 30 years.

During that period, he composed the scores for 150 films.

He set the gold standard and adapted to changing times.

Most of all, he was beloved by everyone he worked with.

Max was not a Toscanini by a long shot.

He'd make mistakes, you know, conducting.

And we never said anything to him because of why.

And of course, with that huge cigar all the time

that the ashes would fall all over the music,

all over the stand, and all over everything.

That cigar was always in his mouth.

He had a fantastic sense of humor.

Absolutely fantastic.

And if things got tense and tight

and he felt it in the orchestra,

he would then either tell a story or a dirty joke

or something to break the tension.

I mean, there wasn't anybody in the orchestra

who didn't adore him.

I mean, there was a great love for him.

And it showed in the performance that the orchestra gave him.

He was a very warm and a very funny man.

Musicians loved him. Hollywood executives loved him.

It was just a joy to be around.

He was funny, he was enthusiastic,

and he loved his work.

And when you look at his scores, you can just tell the energy

and passion that he brought to it all.

Steiner's humor is borne out by his notes

in the margins of all his scores,

particularly to his orchestrator, Hugo Friedhofer.

Hugo, I don't think there should have been music

over this scene, but they want it.

This is awful. I think.

Lieber Hugo! Dahke fur alles.

Viele kuesse. Shostakov Steiner.

Music unfortunately by Max Steiner.

My only contact with Max was through telephone calls.

Generally around two or three in the morning and through notes

that he would scribble on the side of the orchestral sketch.

To orchestrate for Max,

you had to be clairvoyant about what he really wanted to hear.

Naturally, working with him for upwards of eight years,

I knew actually what was kicking inside.

At the end of "Dark Victory,"

as Bette Davis is dying and Max

is writing this gorgeous music, he will write an instruction

to his orchestrator Hugo Friedhofer,

saying, Hugo, please make this heaven so beautiful

that no studio supervisor will ever be able to get inside.

He was an inveterate manufacturer

of simply horrible puns.

It was so bad, that they were good,

particularly in our early morning

or late night telephone calls.

We used to do an awful lot of kidding.

I'd be down in my study working

and the phone would ring and they would pick it up

and do a simulated Japanese houseboy type accent.

You know, I'd raise my voice about an hour it would be,

hello, hello, who are calling, please.

And Max found that for some reason

tremendously amusing.

And there's got to be a sort of a trademark between us.

One of the most famous stories about Steiner

is when he was working on the Warner Brothers lot

and he ran into the other giant of film music,

Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

And Korngold humorously said to Max, Max,

why is it that is, as years go by,

my scores get better and better and yours get worse and worse.

And without missing a beat, Max said,

that's because I've been stealing from you

and you've been stealing from me.

He had an innate shyness and sweetness that no matter

how important he'd become throughout the world,

he still was the same, simple, sweet Max Steiner.

Played once, Sam, for old times sake.

I don't know what you mean, Miss Elsa.

Play it, Sam. Play "As Time Goes By."

Well, I can't remember it, Miss Elsa.

I'm a little rusty on it.

I'll hum it for you.

In 1942,

Steiner produced another perennial score.

It was for a film that has become recognized

as one of the greatest of all time.

Based on an unproduced play called

"Everyone Comes to Rick's,"

the film was "Casablanca."

Here's looking at you, kid.

But the famous song "As Time Goes By"

was originally written in 1931 by Herman Hupfeld.

Max Steiner had to use somebody else's theme

as the leitmotif of Rick and Elsa.

He told his wife,

they have the lousiest tune you could imagine,

and I have to write my music about.

And Herman Hupfeld wrote in his autobiography,

that he had ongoing arguments with Max Steiner

and he hated the song and so on.

But of course, the producer prevailed and Max Steiner

had to write this music about the song "As Time Goes By."

Max grumbled and screamed and yelled

until he finally got down to work.

And then from that time on,

I heard no more about his objection to the tune.

The segments of this theme are very easy to be used

in all kinds of leitmotif work and the harmonic part.

This is the more interesting part in music.

That's the part that the audience rather feels and hears.

But this is mostly the part of the music

that the composers used to manipulate the audience.

Steiner brilliantly used the different colors

of his orchestra,

like a painter, uses colors on a palette to evoke emotions.

I think it's very fair to say

that it is the melody that we hear

and it is the harmony and the construction of the music

around that melody that makes us feel.

And no one did that better than Steiner. No one.

The score incorporates many popular

and standard songs of that period.

But Max's score is the through line.

It's the through line that takes us from one scene

to the next in a seamless way.

He used "As Time Goes By,"

ultimately as one of the motifs of his score.

Every time we hear the motif "As Time Goes By,"

it's a kind of remembrance of their common history in Paris.

And without "Casablanca,"

nobody today would know the song "As Time Goes By."

In typical humorous style,

he signed the last page of the "Casablanca" score.

Dear Hugo. Thanks for everything.

I am very pleased with you. Yours, Herman Hupfeld.

While Steiner was nominated for an Oscar

for "Casablanca,"

he didn't win, but the film itself

won the Oscar for best picture of 1944.

It's his ability to be one with the audience,

to not only be inside the story,

but to love the glamor of those actresses

and also to imagine himself to be Clark Gable

and to identify with Rick Blaine in Casablanca

and to feel the loneliness of those characters.

And for a man who was successful

and and seldom without female companionship,

I think there was a great longing with him.

There was a period where he and his third wife

were separated for a number of years,

and it was excruciating for him.

I think it's not coincidental

that he wrote some of his most beautiful and romantic scores,

like "Casablanca" during that period of their separation.

When that plane leaves the ground

and you're not with him, you'll regret it.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

And for the rest of your life.

But what about us?

We'll always have Paris.

We didn't have we--

we'd lost it until you came to Casablanca.

We got it back last night.

When I said I would never leave you.

And you never will.

At the end of the film when they split up,

it's Max's music that provides so much emotional heart

to that story.

Max really responded to beauty. He loved romance.

He loved falling in love.

He loved falling in love with the actresses in his films,

the way that we do when we see them.

He was entranced by Vivien Leigh.

He was enraptured by Ingrid Bergman.

And I think when you hear that music,

it's the music of someone who,

in a very appropriate way at a distance,

is falling in love with those characters

and also the actresses who embody them.

When I think of Max Steiner, I think he taught us

how to care about characters on screen through music.

And I think that is perhaps his most lasting contribution.

Not only how do you depict a character's subjectivity

or their point of view through music,

but how do you shape an audience's relationship

with a character through melody and through musical sound?

I think that's the reason why he was Bette Davis's

favorite composer as well,

is that in films like "Now, Voyager" and so many others,

he is really giving us insight into a character

that we would not necessarily have without the music.

Bette Davis famously commented that Max Steiner was possibly

over anticipating the dramatic pinnacle of a scene

she was doing in "Dark Victory"

and that he was going to reach the top of the stairs

before she did.

It's a funny remark, but it may also have been true.

She knew the value of that music,

the effectiveness of her performance in that

and many other films.

I don't think any actor appreciated him

more than Bette Davis.

She wanted him to score his films

when she produced her one film

at Warner Brothers "A Stolen Life,"

she asked for Max to score it.

And years later, she once said, Max Steiner was my composer.

Well, I'm not going to struggle with you.

That's right.

No telling what sort of primitive instincts

you might arouse.

Isn't it beautiful?

Max was very much a creature of late

19th century romantic music.

But that music,

that style really fit those movies in that time.

What's amazing is how much fabulous music,

the grand melodies, the great themes that we still remember.

He could be both inspired and practical at the same time.

In 1943, Steiner won his second Academy Award.

It was for "Now Voyager."

There's 12 notes on the piano.

There's 12 notes in the scale.

How is it that people right and right

and right and right with this limited number of notes,

and especially for one composer as prolific as Max.

How did he do it?

Yes, there were borrowings at times,

but for the most part it's fresh and it's fresh for the period.

And he kept up with the times because he just,

I think, organically absorbed everything.

He could make it fresh by altering the rhythm,

changing the style, the harmony.

He knew all of the tricks of the trade

to adapt something to make it sound appropriate.

Steiner understood how to do that,

and he had to do it because of the amount of work

that he was engaged in.

Because he wrote so quickly, he just did it.

And he trusted his ability and it came out a certain way.

I don't think that he slaved over much of anything.

He wrote inspirationally.

And that was in spite of the fact

that he really had to write perspirationally.

Because you'll never be anything but a common frump

whose father lived over a grocery store

and whose mother took in washing.

With this money, I can get away from every rotten,

stinking thing that makes me think of this place or you.

Veda!

In the 1940s,

the style and content of moviemaking

was broadened to include a new genre

that historians later called film noir.

Subjects dealt with the duality of the human psyche.

Embracing good and evil, light and dark.

After World War II,

audiences were ready to explore the darker side of human nature.

It became a very popular form of entertainment.

Steiner rapidly adapted to the style.

He wrote 40 scores for films like "Mildred Pierce"

and "The Big Sleep."

During Steiner's years on the Warner Brothers lot,

he wrote scores for many of their major films.

Those were movie factories then,

both at RKO and then at Warner Brothers,

where even a celebrated composer like Steiner had to turn it out

almost like on a factory assembly line basis.

But he tried very hard not to treat his scores

like just so much fodder.

He always delivered the goods, you could say.

If my numbers are correct,

Max scored 19 Bette Davis films and 14 with Humphrey Bogart

and at least a dozen, I think, with Errol Flynn.

So when you think about these great actors,

all of whom were at Warner Brothers

for a long period of time in the 1930s

and '40s and beyond,

it's hard to separate those performances from that music

that's helping us feel something.

And all of these films, you can't think of them

without remembering the Max Steiner score.

These are all classic films, and in every case,

Max's music elevates their performances

and elevates the storytelling.

Another Oscar winner.

Here are all three of Max Steiner's Academy Awards.

The Academy Award for "Since You Went Away"

was a score done very hastily for David O. Selznick

for this 1944 film of America,

The Home Front during World War II

while the men were off to war.

Bye, darling. Oh, Bill, I'll keep it!

I'll keep it with me all the time.

So long, darling. Bye!

D'Arc: Steiner quoted generously from his earlier

David O. Selznick score the 1937 film

"A Star is Born."

It's a peculiar thing on "Gone with the Wind"

everybody won an Academy Award except me.

And in "Since You Went Away," nobody won.

And I was the only one who did win for music.

So we got even.

With the pressure of his workload

and the many accolades he received

life was Steiner during this busy period was bittersweet.

On the 2nd of March 1940, my son Ronald was born.

This was probably the most joyous event in my whole life.

As things turned out, he was to be my only child.

I adored him and indulged him

perhaps too much while I had him.

Steiner was 51 when Ronald was born.

He loved his son dearly

and gave him the nickname Ronnie.

But there was drama at home.

After bringing his father,

Gabor, from Austria to live with him in Hollywood,

his presence made things difficult.

The two men, father and son, spoke only German to each other.

Steiner's wife, Louise, could not speak the language

and began to feel left out.

With personal friction,

aggravating things in the marriage,

in 1941, she left husband and son

to pursue a career as an opera singer.

This took her to Italy and New York.

Steiner was heartbroken.

In September 1944, at the age of 86,

Gabor took ill and passed away.

His many earlier accomplishments in Europe

were remembered in the national press.

One event stands out in my memory in 1945,

the divorce from my wife, Louise.

She wanted to remain in New York

and refused to live in California.

I had a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers

and I had made my career here.

It was agreed that Ronald would stay with me for a while,

then with her, then back to me.

This is exactly what happened with unhappy results.

With the finalization of his divorce,

Steiner bought a smaller house.

At the same time, he renewed a friendship with a woman

he had known for a while.

Her name was Leonette Blair.

That was the start of the romance.

In 1947, we were married in Las Vegas.

She is probably the kindest person I have ever met.

She has a great sense of theater and a terrific memory for music

and was always a wonderful stepmother to my son Ronnie.

Although she did not sanction my overindulgence of him.

Steiner's dream was to see

Ronnie become his successor.

I had hoped Ronnie would take some interest in music.

I had him take piano lessons

from the age of 6 until he was 12.

I had to pay him for practicing,

but he simply wouldn't keep at it.

So we finally gave up.

As Ronnie grew into his teenage years,

he became moody and difficult.

He was notoriously disobedient at school.

Yet Steiner tried to give his son everything he could.

Except for two things his attention and his time.

He was just too busy working.

My dearest boy. Many, many happy returns of the day.

Love and kisses.

Then, my dear Ronnie, I was very unhappy

and extremely disappointed to hear from your mother

that you've been such a bad boy.

I also feel very much ashamed that my little boy,

whom I love so much,

spends most of his time sitting up the hall

being punished.

My dearest boy, you are now 15 years old,

and that means you're almost a man.

So try and change your ways. Be nice to your mother.

Ronnie and his father always remained in close contact

with one another,

but by the time he was 22, he had become a lost young man.

On the 29th of April, at 7:00 in the morning,

Associated Press called me up and told me my son was dead.

He had committed suicide at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel

in Honolulu.

Ronnie had suffered from emotional disturbances

for quite a while

and had been under the care of various specialists.

I was absolutely devastated at the news.

I loved my child very dearly.

He was a wonderful boy, 6-foot-2 inches,

very handsome and a fine gentleman.

And I don't think I shall ever fully recover

from the grief and shock.

I was very ill for many months.

Max Steiner was a workaholic,

but his dedication to his craft came at a price.

His eyesight began to fail.

The solution was to have large scoring sheets

specially made so that musical notations

could be large enough for him to see when he conducted.

Lee helps me with my cue sheets and my timing

and is actually my musical secretary.

She is without doubt the best thing

that ever happened to me in my life.

When Steiner got the assignment

to write the score for "Don Juan,"

a Warner Brothers swashbuckler starring Errol Flynn,

he was especially inspired.

Lee Steiner told me how the famous main title theme

for this motion picture came about.

He wasn't getting much inspiration,

and yet he was under tremendous pressure.

They decided to drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas

to do some gambling that Max Steiner just loved.

And it was during one of the games in a casino

that he got the inspiration for the main title,

and yet no scoring paper to notate.

He hummed it to his wife, Lee.

She would hum it back to him, and as she told it to me,

we were humming it all the way back from Las Vegas in the car

until we finally got home.

We got the music paper

and he was finally able to write it down.

And what a beautiful score it is.

It's considered to be one of his best scores

and certainly one of his most colorful.

In the early '50s, a serious decline

began to erode the condition of the film industry.

Despite years of popularity,

the movies were losing their audience.

The culprit was a device placed

in the living room of most American homes.

Television was luring people away from the big screen.

Hollywood had to come up with a solution.

The result was the development of new motion

picture presentation systems

for making the movies bigger and more lifelike than ever.

One of the first of these new widescreen systems relied

on projecting three separate strips of film

alongside one another on a giant curved screen.

The resulting picture virtually wrapped itself

around the audience.

Not only that,

but the new miracle of what was called Cinerama

brought multiple channel stereophonic sound

into the theater.

The effect was breathtaking.

A 1951, Steiner's old friend, Merian C. Cooper,

was developing the first Cinerama production.

Steiner had worked with Cooper

in the '30s when he produced "King Kong."

To introduce Cinerama to the audiences of the world,

a full-length travel documentary feature went into production.

It was simply called This Is Cinerama.

One day, Merian sent for me.

Max, he said, I want you to write the best music

you've ever written in your life for this first Cinerama film.

Warner Brothers would not release Steiner

from his contract or from the film

he was scoring for them.

But he agreed to write the music without Warner's knowledge.

His good friend and colleague, musical director Louis Forbes,

viewed the film for him and created cue sheets

that he could use to secretly compose the score.

Needless to say, I was half dead by the time

the Cinerama and the Warner picture was finished.

But This is Cinerama was such a smash success

as everybody knows.

I got no screen credit and no remuneration.

But Mr. Cooper sent both Lou Forbes

and me a beautiful wristwatch which I still wear and treasure.

In 1955, Steiner teamed up again

with Merian C. Cooper, this time to score a film

that has become a classic Western.

It was called "The Searchers."

Directed by John Ford,

it was epic in scale, but it preserved the integrity

of its very human drama.

Shot in Technicolor and VistaVision with scenes

set against the panorama of the West,

it gave Steiner the opportunity

to deliver one of his most memorable scores.

But the strain of the work was beginning to show.

It's often said that our strengths

are also our greatest weaknesses,

and that's probably true in the case of Max,

and that his passion was both what fed his his imagination

and was to some extent, his undoing.

He loved to gamble. He loved to buy things for his wives.

There were four. He paid a lot of alimony,

even beyond the point where he really needed to

if he ever met a friend from old Broadway days

that needed money, he would hand it to them.

And not surprisingly, he was always in debt

as a result.

Steiner never discussed his Jewish roots or identity.

Nevertheless, he had the payroll office

at Warner Brothers deduct funds from his weekly paycheck

for contributions to needy Jewish charities.

With his abundant generosity and alimony payments,

he was often unable to keep his head above water.

And then in 1959, his fortunes changed with the royalties

he received from his latest project.

His financial struggles finally came to an end.

"A Summer Place" is Steiner's most or most popular song.

It has lyrics, but even though there are lyrics, you don't--

you don't hear the words very often.

The arrangement. The arrangement by Percy Faith

sounded so characteristic of the time.

It sounds like a '50s almost doo wop thing

with that 12/8 thing going.

And it's characteristic of how Steiner,

even late in his career,

could capture a sense of popular styles, the popular sounds.

It is like many great popular songs, deceptively simple.

The music for "A Summer Place" turned out to be one

that the biggest successes that they have known

at Warners in 20 years.

The record sales were fantastic.

Over 30 versions of them were made,

the best of which was Percy Faith's.

He was 71 when he wrote that.

It turned out to be a pop hit.

It seemed that he was actually still in touch with his notions

of what music for young lovers would be like.

That's an extraordinary accomplishment.

Even though Max was not a pop songwriter,

when they prepared popular songs taken from his movie themes,

he often would write a verse or an introductory theme

for the pop song.

So it's clear that even though writing popular songs

was not his main focus,

he still was very much hands on with these songs because he then

saw the potential for success on the hit parade.

Here is "It Can't Be Wrong" from "Now Voyager."

♪ Wrong, would it be wrong to kiss ♪

♪ Seeing I feel like this ♪

♪ Would it be wrong to try ♪

♪ Wrong, would it be wrong to stay ♪

For the sheet music, he turned it into a song

with an ending that slightly changes

the theme from the movie.

♪ So when I need you so much ♪

♪ And I have waited so long ♪

♪ It must be right ♪

♪ It can't be wrong ♪

♪ It can't be wrong ♪

He could have been a great songwriter.

Sheet music was another way

of selling film music apart from the film.

Max Steiner had contracts with different music publishers

to sell both individual themes from films.

He also had a couple of occasions

where themes would be bundled together and sold.

A good example of that would be 10 piano miniatures

from a "Gone with the Wind."

Selznick became very interested in this idea of music tie

ins during the silent era, and then when he started

working with Steiner at RKO in the early '30s,

he was very excited about the possibilities

of selling film music outside of film.

They would take Max's music and they would broadcast it.

It would be part of a radio show

where they would talk about the film.

They'd have some of the cast members speak,

and then Max Steiner would conduct

some of his music from the film.

Now, these are the original lacquer discs.

Created by the studio

as they record the film score

right on the set.

For the sound recording

for synchronized sound motion pictures,

they would record

on the recording stage with a movie screen,

Max, as the conductor would look out

as he conducted the orchestra.

Microphones would pick it up

and it would be recorded optically on film.

At the same time they were recording optically on film,

they were cutting a sound disc like this so that they could

instantaneously hear all of the cues,

all of the takes afterwards and choose

which take to print optically.

Max wanted copies of all of his scores.

So he would order acetate reference recordings

from the lab that he could take home and own himself.

The studio long ago threw away most of the optical tracks

that were used to make these copies

for Max for the most part,

these are the only copies that still exist.

A lot of them sound great today. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's great guy Ray Fiola back in New York.

He's gone through and cataloged these things,

put them together digitally, getting rid of all the clicks

and pops from all the wax disks.

What a legacy we have because of these discs.

Although film music is written to accompany action

on the screen,

the best of it can sometimes stand alone and be enjoyed

without the picture.

For "Since You Went Away,"

radio publicist for Selznick said

if we had a way of promoting

some of this music away from the film,

particularly on radio, I think that might be very compelling.

And Selznick says, okay, yeah, go ahead.

And so Lou Forbes, who's again the music director

for that film, recorded about 10 minutes or so,

and they sent out about a thousand

copies to radio stations around the country.

And they got such a response to that that they started

releasing soundtrack albums of music from Selznick's films.

This is a 16-inch transcription disc

of a portion of Steiner's score for

"Since You Went Away," for which he won an Oscar.

But it shows how important he was not only to Hollywood,

but also to the exploitation and the success of a motion picture.

This is a set of production discs for the Steiner score

for "She" and it says on the label Mood Music from RKO

picture "She" composed by Max Steiner.

Also in this book is a set of discs for his Oscar

winning score for "The Informer."

It's lovely to have this recorded document

of Max's earlier music.

John Morgan and William Stromberg hold

Max Steiner in very high esteem.

To cement a special connection with the man they admire so much

they are sometimes able to work at Steiner's personal piano.

It is one of the treasures

in the collection at Brigham Young University.

Can you imagine all the great scores

that have been written on this piano?

Just imagine Max using that baton.

They study his sketches and listen

to the original studio recordings

on the surviving acetate discs,

working tirelessly to replicate his music.

Since the early 1990s, Morgan and Stromberg

have rerecorded 16 Steiner scores.

Recordings were great at Warner Brothers

had the best recording system

and the '40s music period had so

when you get dialog and sound effects,

you miss a lot of the music

and by recording it by modern standards and stereo

or surround sound, you can really hear the detail

that you never really get from looking at it with the film.

So we're able to breathe new life into it.

Morgan and Stromberg rerecorded Steiner's

"Charge of the Light Brigade,"

"They Died with Their Boots On,"

and the "Adventures of Don Juan"

with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.

The superb Russian musicians were enthusiastic

to play the music of Hollywood.

This was our dream come true.

We're able to realize these great scores of Max Steiner

in full symphonic form so you could hear every note of it.

We'd be working with the orchestra and a viola player

would come up to me and go, I saw it last night.

They were playing "Adventures of Don Juan" on TV.

I can't believe we just played it.

It was very fascinating.

It was fun. The orchestra really got to like us.

And they enjoy playing Max Steiner

music immensely.

His music will always be in my soul. And I just.

I can't think of another composer

that means as much to me.

By the 1960s,

Steiner had just about lost his eyesight.

Recognition of his work is encapsulated

in the many awards he received during his lifetime.

I have three Academy Awards Oscars,

had 26 nominations.

I also won the World Award in the festival in Venice

in 1948 for "Treasure of Sierra Madre."

I got decorated by the French government,

by the King of Belgium and my fan mail

it's mostly teenagers.

I get them from all over the world.

I get the letters from Japan and even from behind

the Iron Curtain sometimes. Is it right?

Steiner had a huge fan base.

The Max Steiner Music Society was formed in 1965 by Al Bender.

It had chapters all over the world.

Newsletters and journals, shared views,

and the celebrated the great scores

so admired by his followers.

On his 80th birthday in 1968,

his life was celebrated by friends and colleagues

from the American Society of Composers,

authors and publishers who sang tributes to him.

♪ Max, you're the master ♪

♪ We are all in your debt ♪

♪ And we salute all the music you composed ♪

♪ Music the world won't forget ♪

♪ Slower or faster ♪

♪ What you write takes the cake ♪

♪ And you are blessed with the talent to ♪

♪ Conduct your lovely music ♪

♪ And all of your music is so much better ♪

♪ Than the puns your make ♪

I may buy a plot now near

where some of my dear friends are buried

and have a sign placed there coming attraction,

Max Steiner.

When his health finally fell from

a congestive heart condition,

Maximilian Raoul Steiner

passed away on December 28, 1971.

He was 83 years old.

His death severed the link

not only with the golden age of Hollywood,

but with the last glorious years of the Vienna of Emperor

Franz Josef.

Today, it is a city proud to celebrate his legacy.

Every year in the Vienna Concert Hall,

the prestigious Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award

is presented to a motion picture composer

who has achieved exemplary status for his or her work.

In 2018,

it was the famed German-American to be accorded the honor.

And the Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award

of the City of Vienna goes to...

Hans Zimmer.

♪ Maxie, dear ♪

♪ Listen here ♪

♪ There's a summer place ♪

♪ Where you and I ♪

♪ 'Neath the sky ♪

♪ In the air ♪

♪ Years ago ♪

♪ Oh, how I wept that day ♪

♪ When you crept away ♪

♪ To the old ♪

♪ USA ♪

Steiner's lifetime of achievements was celebrated

when his name was enshrined in a star

on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in December 1975.

Accepting the honors this morning is his widow,

Mrs. Max Steiner,

and representatives of the Max Steiner Music Society.

Well, I am very honored and very happy,

and excited you could all be here.

I think they've found a beautiful day

for it, again,

I want to thank you for your presence.

And I love seeing all of you.

With his personal metronome

and baton finally at rest,

the maestro's work will forever be enshrined

in the history of film scoring.

Steiner had such an incredible mastery of the orchestra.

It's why he's really stands out

among all the great film composers.

There are many.

But I think he's still the giant among all of them.

The music itself will always find new devotees.

The films will survive

and people will always be moved by that music,

and therefore it will always be a part of our lives.

I think that a lot of what we do today in film

owes a great debt

to how Max Steiner really designed

and almost invented the art form of film scoring.

I don't think we would have "Star Wars."

I don't think we would have the scores

for the big action blockbusters

that we have today without Max Steiner.

He really set the bar.

He created the template

and he scored many of the greatest films of all time.

When you look at the range that goes from "King Kong"

to "Casablanca" from "Now Voyager"

to "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"

from "White Heat" to "The Searchers,"

it's an extraordinary filmography.

And he was an extraordinary man.

If you're tracking the history of American film,

Max Steiner's name has to be included,

along with the great directors, the great writers,

the great cinematographers, the great actors.

He is on that same pedestal.

But because he worked on these incredible movies

that are still shown and loved around the globe,

he will never be forgotten.

♪ As long as I live ♪

♪ You'll always be part of me ♪

♪ You'll live in the heart of me ♪

♪ As long as I live ♪