The Screengrab

We've discussed a few great pairings between director and composer in this space before:  the energetic, dynamic films of Sergio Leone, accompanied by the postmodernist, propulsive music of Ennio Morricone; the accomplished, thrilling work of Alfred Hitchcock, paired with the inventive, restless music of Bernard Herrmann; and others.  Today we're going to look at one of the great film partnerships at its very inception:  the mystefying, surreal films of David Lynch and the eerily gorgeous music of Angelo Badalamenti that frequently accompanies them.  Blue Velvet was the first of a creative partnership that would last for two decades (and arguably reach its zenith in the Twin Peaks soundtrack) but this is where it all began in 1986.

Like a lot of the best collaborations, the one between David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti (who, despite the florid name, hails from the Mediterranean clime of Brooklyn) almost didn't happen.  Mixing as it did a great deal of original score, all written by Badalamenti, and rights-managed classic rock and pop songs, the soundtrack to Blue Velvet was almost scuttled early on by clearance issues.  In particular, the title track, as sung by Bobby Vinton, proved costlier to license than the studio would allow, so Badalamenti recorded his own sound-alike version -- before getting news that Vinton himself was willing to re-record it (albeit two registers lower, thanks to age's effect on his pipes).  That didn't quite work out either, and they were faced with the legal and aesthetic problems of going with the copycat, until, finally, the studio decided to finally pony up for the original.  Roy Orbison likewise held out permissions for "In Dreams" until the last moment, and Lynch, who'd been trying for months to secure the rights to This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren", eventually had to give up when the band wouldn't budge on giving him the licence.  (Ironically, Balalamenti's replacement song turned out to be one of the most moving and effective pieces in the score.)

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Bernard Herrmann was one of the most legendary film composers of all time.  One of his first major compositions was the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which he showed both his innovative approach and his playfully subversive nature by by double-tracking a violin to play a jaw-droppingly complex rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel", and then claiming the solo was the work of a teenaged violin prodigy he'd discovered.  He composed a number of memorable movie scores over the years, from the towering, epic sweep of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (his very first project) to the moody, dark tension of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (his very last).  But it is with Alfred Hitchcock's name that Herrmann's will be foreever linked.

Hitchcock knew he was playing with dynamite when he made Psycho.  The movie that buried noir and ushered in the age of the maniacal slasher was a risky venture for him on many levels:  with its shocking violence, infamous mid-film twist, and horror plot, it was a massive deviation from the big-budget hit mysteries that had made so much money for his studio bosses in the late 1950s.  Fearing disaster, Hitch -- who was nothing if not determined -- tried as much as possible to make the film on the cheap, and he wasn't afraid to capitalize on personal relationships to do so.  Some stories have it that he strong-armed Herrmann, who had turned in incredibly monumental work for him before on such movies as The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Vertigo; but Herrmann wasn't one to be cowed so easily.  He agreed to work on the soundtrack for Psycho at less than his normal pay, but Herrmann -- a rarity amongst film composers insofar as he retained near-total creative control over the final product of his labors -- made it clear he was going to do things his way.  Most famously, he ignored Hitchcock's foremost prerogative when writing the score:  the director insisted that, for maximum shock value, there be total silence on the soundtrack during the murders, most especially the infamous shower scene.

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Freixenet champagne has put up a short Martin Scorsese piece, an homage to Alfred Hitchcock apparently based on fragments of a Hitchcock script. Scorsese claims this has has never been done before, but then, there's always A.I., Steven Spielberg's attempt to preserve Kubrick's last project, or the 1998 version of Ed Wood's I Woke Up Early The Day I Died, allegedly made in the style of the cheapo "auteur" himself. Anyway, The Key To Reserva isn't mentioned in the Hitchcock books I have (Hitchcock's Notebooks and the Spoto and McGilligan biographies) and what Scorsese has are just fragments of a scene. But what he accomplishes with it is good fun, paying homage to the Saul Bass titles, the blonde leading ladies, the Bernard Herrmann music and even the obviously faked blue screens. — Faisal A. Qureshi