How To Disappear Completely

Listen to the Music

From Music for Film and Television:
(Paraphrased from the professor's lecture, although extremely true to his style of delivery)

During the transition from silence to sound, there was a great emphasis on keeping sound realistic. So we see an abundance of musicals about musicals, since the plot provided opportunity for song and dance to occur within the structure of the film world. However, after the novelty of sound wore off by the early 30s, filmmakers were returning to dramatic narratives that kept music to a minimum. If music was included, it arose from diegetic sources, even if it meant having a couple on a hillside enjoy a romantic moment to the strain of a violin that, as the camera pans back, we see in the hands of a Gypsy who just so happens to be wandering around the countryside at that moment.

The concern was for realism. We just don't hear ominous, "something's-going-to-happen" music just before someone rear-ends us on the highway. Wouldn't it be nice if we did? We're driving along and hear Dragnet's "dum-de-de-dum-da" and think, "Oh, no. I'd better change lanes." Whoosh! "Thank goodness for the music!" Or think of a woman who meets this nice guy in a bar, and he's smiling with his nice teeth, and charming in his manner, and she hears "screech, screech, screech," on the violins in the background. "Don't leave your drink alone. Don't leave your drink alone," she thinks for the rest of the evening.

So, while having music accompany our lives would be nice, it just doesn't happen. And so music was dying in the film industry.

.....And then, in rode Max Steiner on his white horse...Raised and trained in Vienna, a conductor and composer of operettas, he brought some of the techniques of story accompaniment to the screen. He persuaded a studio to let him try composing an original score for two films that ended up being a huge success, despite the fact that no one could tell from whence the music came.

Then a group of filmmakers conceive of a film in which a 12-inch gorilla trundles via stop-action through forests and cities. And yet, somehow the idea seems ludicrous without something behind it to make it more believable. They approach Max Steiner and ask him to throw together some pre-composed music, because the budget was pretty much shot by that time. No Wagner for this film, Steiner vowed. And he composed the original score himself.

Enter King Kong (1933).