Larry King on his love of smoking and ‘lucky’ heart attack

By Ray Bennett

Longtime TV interviewer Larry King, who was born  90 years ago today, almost didn’t make it to 60. He told me: “I got a lucky break. I had a heart attack.”

One dark February morning in 1987, King signed off his overnight national radio talk-show feeling uncommonly sluggish. Worried, he cancelled a date and drove home through the Washington, DC, snow. His doctor told him to take some Maalox and go to bed. Pain soon awakened him. Pain in his right arm and shoulder that fast became ferocious.

He went to the hospital where doctors told him that right then and there he was having a heart attack. King said,“I was lucky because it would have been unlucky not to have the pain because then you have no warning.”

In fact, he had plenty of warnings but he ignored them. He said: “I was 54. I ate what I wanted and I smoked heavily. I knew my father died of heart disease. I knew I had a heart problem. I just never thought I’d be going into an emergency room.”

King’s career was on a roll. His primetime CNN-TV talk-show was a hit; he had a newspaper column in USA today; his radio show was heard on 326 stations; he toured the nation giving speeches; and he was making a reported $1 million a year.

After the heart attack, King quit smoking and in 1988, he founded the Larry King Cardiac Foundation, a Washington-based national organisation to which he has donated all his extracurricular income from the several books he’s written. It remains a thriving organisation that helps people with heart disease who cannot afford treatment.

In an interview I did with him in 1989 for Inside Books Magazine, he said his biggest fear back then was that he would start smoking again. Then Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop was King’s guest on CNN the night before his heart attack and his last words to the host before he left that night were, “Boy, you oughta stop smoking.”

King stopped cold turkey the very next day out of fear: “I smoked from age 16 to age 54 and I never thought I could stop until that heart attack. I’ve never smoked since.”

He admitted that he still thought about it: “You know, people give me great credit. I won a Lung Association award as a celebrity non-smoker, but to tell you the truth, if I hadn’t had the heart attack, I would never have stopped. I liked the feel of it, the taste of it. I didn’t wake up in the morning coughing. I didn’t hack. I wasn’t one walking around saying, ‘Jeez, these terrible things.’ I loved every drag I ever took.”

He worried that the desire for cigarettes would return: “I saw the movie ‘The Accused’ with Jodie Foster, who is terrific and who smokes all through the movie. They had close-ups of her smoking and I kept saying to myself, ‘God, I used to smoke just like she does, inhaled, held the cigarette, just like she does. I used to do that.’ And I wondered, ‘What if I wanted one?’ God, I wouldn’t know what I would do.”

It didn’t help that many of his friends and acquaintances smoked: “You know who loves smoking? Judge Antonin Scalia. I was with him last election night. He’s a chain smoker. Now, you’d think, hey, he’s a judge on the Supreme Court. I said to him, ‘Why do you smoke?’ He said, ‘Why do smart people do dumb things? I’ll tell you why – it’s a terrific habit!”

Actor Martin Sheen smoked even after the massive multiple heart attacks he suffered making “Apocalypse Now”, King said: “He comes to visit me; he still smokes. Now, either he’s some kind of fatalist or there’s something in his emotional makeup that makes him willing to roll the kind of dice that I’m unwilling to roll.

“I smoked as much as Sheen. I liked it but apparently not that much. I could stop. What I’m scared of is that I’ll be like Frank Sinatra. He told me he had stopped smoking for two-and-a-half years and he just started one afternoon. He was in the house, he was alone, there was a pack of cigarettes. He smoked Camels, unfiltered. He said he just lit one up and said, ‘Fuck it.’”

By all accounts, King never went back to smoking and he died in January 2021.  Sinatra died aged 82 in 1998, Scalia died aged 87 in 2016 and Martin Sheen turned 84 in August.

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How a love of sports made Garry Marshall a comedy legend

Happy-Days_1876859b

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Garry Marshall, who was born 90 years ago today, said one of the reasons he became one of the most prolific and successful producers of TV sitcoms was because he was a sports nut.

“I’m into sports, you see, and so I approach everything from sports,” he told me. “The farm system has always fascinated me and I feel it should be applied to show business. With series, I was always putting together the farm teams that would come up and take over once the other guys moved on.”

garry marshall x325He also believed that it was important to ring the changes: “Life does not stand still and I think to do the same thing on a show for a long time is not creatively rewarding to anybody. You have to keep coming up fresh and new to sustain in this rather competitive business.”

When I interviewed Marshall (left) in 1982, he was busy with a spinoff from “Happy Days” (top picture) titled “Joanie Loves Chachi” starring Scott Baio and Erin Moran. It wasn’t unprecedented. He’d successfully spun off “Laverne & Shirley” and “Mork & Mindy” before.

That was largely because he had an aversion to pilots: “I’ve been very anti-pilot all my career. I think pilots are a waste of time. Most of my successes have come without pilots.”

With “Joanie Loves Chachi”, he did four episodes initially: “It’s to see what the reaction is, see if there’s a series there. Usually, the public will tell you and we’ll see. Everyone asks, ‘What if it doesn’t work?’ well, if it doesn’t work, they’ll go back to ‘Happy Days’.”

The show ran for just 17 episodes and they were back on “Happy Days”. But Marshall said the two leads had been happy to have their own show: “I have a policy in my organisation that nobody is made to do anything. Scott and Erin said they wanted to a show very much. People who want to something else, they have rights. I recall back in the old days, the network insisted that Henry Winkler do his own show. Henry said he didn’t want to do it so I refused to do it. There was quite a fight about it but there was no ‘Henry Winkler Show’.”

Odd couple x325He also paid attention when his stars wanted to quit, including Tony Randall and Jack Klugman (left): “I usually try to run my shows with a certain democracy. I recall on ‘The Odd Couple’, after five years I sat down with Tony and Jack and said, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ They said, ‘We did all that we were going to do, we both are ready to do our own shows so why don’t we pack it in?’ So we packed it in.”

Afterwards, Randall reportedly had second thoughts and Marshall said, “Sometimes you’re in a place and you’re going along pretty well and you think something’s wonderful out there but then you get out there there and it’s not quite what you thought. I think the atmosphere we created on that show, I don’t think Tony will ever find again, or Jack, or me for that matter, the kind of chemistry we had. It was a very easy show to do in the sense of making a product each week with every member interested in the product, not interested in their dressing room, what billing they get or how much money they make.”

He also was prepared to see “Happy Days” end: “My dream was to do 10 years on ‘Happy Days’ and the fact that we finally got 10 years has been very rewarding to me. I felt 10 years should be it. But again, I respect the feelings of all the people involved and after the 10th year, if it’s still there and in the ball game … I keep changing the characters and making new angles, they change jobs, change lifestyles … if people want to go on then I certainly won’t say no, I’ll go on with it. I talk like I go there every day and do every single thing. I don’t. But I do go in there and shake it up a lot so they’ll stay awake. They seem to fall into the doldrums and say, ‘Everything is fine, let’s just make the same kind of stuff, and nothing lasts like that.”

The series lasted for one more season and then Marshall took his finely honed comic sensibility to the big screen but aside from “The Flamingo Kid” (1984) and “Pretty Woman” (1990), it’s for his TV shows that Garry Marshall will be remembered. He died in July 2016.

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35 Years Ago: The Day the Los Angeles Herald Examiner Died

By Ray Bennett

As people came into work at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner newspaper on Nov, 1 1989, everyone appeared to be on edge. There was something in the air. We had a desultory budget meeting and all managing editor Andrea Herman would say was that brass from Hearst, owners of the paper, were in town. Alarming calls came in with various rumours that the paper been sold or was going to fold. At noon, a bunch of us went to Corky’s, our local watering hole next door, where there was a Times reporter making notes.

At 12.55, word came of a staff meeting at one o’clock. Everyone gathered in the newsroom. Hearst Corp. Vice President Robert J. Danzig got up on a chair, his head bent so as not to bump into the ceiling. He said there was no other way to tell us what was happening than to read a prepared statement he had given to Editor Max McCrohon earlier. After 86 years, the Herald Examiner was to cease publication the next day, November 2.

Some old-timers absorbed the news with no visible reaction; some wept. Most stood or sat stunned although it should not have been a surprise. The Herald Examiner had been dying slowly for twenty years after it made a pact that gave mornings to the Los Angeles Times and the HerEx became an afternoon paper. Not the best move in a city where all the commuters are behind the wheel of a car. Still, we’d all told ourselves we would have another year. Danzig said that he was sorry and Hearst did all they could and the paper had never looked better. I drifted away. It was not really about me as I had been the Entertainment Editor only since July.

At another budget meeting, Lifestyle Editor Ellis Conklin said he wanted to write a farewell column. I told Andrea Herman we should give over all the pages in the Style section to the critics and writers, ten inches for everyone who wanted to contribute. Theatre critic Charles Marowitz was on a plane to New York and art critic Christopher Knight was off in Mexico somewhere and could not be contacted. Lifestyle feature writer Deborah Hastings came in even though she was on vacation.

Andrea had some idea of running a ‘Best of Click’ page, our regular photo spread featuring notables in the city. ‘No, Andrea,’ I told her, ‘photographers have been taking pictures all day in the office. It’s the biggest story in town. We must run those pix.’ Ellis agreed and so did Max McCrohon.

It was the craziest, best and worst day I’ve ever spent in journalism. All afternoon, I edited the farewell columns. They were all good, funny and touching. We added two extra pages to the section so we could still run stories that had been written and edited earlier.

At four-o’clock, we all went out to the front of the building for a group shot to run on the front page. People were waving at the camera and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Pix were taken and we drifted back inside only to learn that security goons had locked the doors with Andrea, Max and News Editor Joe Eckdahl still inside so we all trooped back outside to do it over again.

We worked all through the evening, back and forth from Corky’s. There were TV crews in the bar and in the newspaper lobby there was a frenzy of media. Three recruiters from the Orange County Register came to Corky’s and calls were coming in from papers across the nation.

We closed the paper just before nine. Some of us went to the press room to see the final run. Corky’s was unbelievable. There must have been 200 people crowded into the place. Lots of former staffers joined us and it went on until three in the morning.

Next day, tired and more still inebriated than hungover, we had to sign in to enter the building. We were told we had that day and the next to remove our stuff.  No one appeared to have a job lined up yet although there was lots of activity and film writer Charles Fleming had already arranged two interviews. Several staffers did radio interviews and Charles called into a live chat show saying he was ‘Mac from Pacoima’ and he was ‘all busticated up inside’ about losing the paper. He was hilarious.

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We had lunch at Corky’s and went back and forth all day. People said copies of the final edition were going for fifty bucks and there was a run on tee-shirts. I made sure I had a stack of both to take with me. Lots of parties were planned so no one wanted to actually say goodbye to anyone.

In the Washington Post’s story about the closure, newspaper industry analyst John Morton said, ’It’s a shame. They were doing a good job. In the year of its death, it was probably the best it has ever been as a newspaper.’ 

That evening, a group of us from the paper including Charles Fleming, Mark Schwed, Deborah Hastings, Greg Krikorian and columnist Gordon Dillow went to Dan Tana’s, the fabled West Hollywood restaurant. As we waited just inside the door, somebody recognised Gordon from the photo on his column in the paper and Jimmy Cano, the city’s best maitre’d, asked if we were all from the Herald Examiner. 

When we said we were, everyone in the place applauded. Famous for not fussing over its starry clientele, that never happens. Legendary bartender Mike Gotovac poured Stoli as diners called in drinks for us. We weren’t allowed to pay for anything. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

I was very glad to be a part of it all and very sad that such a great enterprise with fine people had been cut so abruptly. I didn’t think I’d see its like again. My four-month stint at the Herald Examiner still ranks among the best times of my career and I made lifelong friends there. 

I will never forget watching the final press run of a great newspaper but it struck me that as we approached the twenty-first century, the one thing I was really good at was a nineteenth century trade.

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Film producer John Brabourne on working with David Lean

By Ray Bennett

Every year when I was at Ashford Boys Grammar School in Kent, England, there was an event known as Speech Day. All the masters donned their scholastic black robes adorned with the colours of their alma maters and degrees for a formal assembly with lots of speeches and the presentation of school awards. As that never involved me, my only interest in the affair was when school governor John Knatchbull showed up always driving a late-model and very expensive motor car. I knew he was posh with a title and vaguely that he was a descendant of Norton Knatchbull, who founded the school in the year 1610.

I didn’t know then that John Ulick Knatchbull, the 7th Baron Brabourne, was movie producer John Brabourne – born on this day 100 years ago – who had made two pictures I enjoyed. His first, in 1958, was ‘Harry Black’  starring Stewart Granger as a hunter of man-eating tigers in India followed in 1960 by the exciting war film ‘Sink the Bismarck!’. Had I known then, I would have paid more attention. Almost 25 years later, I finally met him to talk about his production of a film version of E.M. Forster’s ’A Passage to India’ directed by David Lean. 

When we met in his office in London, the first thing I told him was that I was an Old Ashfordian, as students who attended the grammar school were called. He asked about my life and when I told him about my career and love of movies he said I should have gone to see him when I was younger. If only I’d known. His films included ‘H.M.S. Defiant’ and two adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays — Othello’ starring Laurence Olivier and Franco Zeffirelli’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ starring Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. He had great success with films starring Peter Ustinov as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot  – ‘Death On the Nile’ and ‘Evil Under the Sun’.

I was eager to hear about legendary director Lean. ‘A Passage to India’ marked his return to the big screen at seventy-six after a long absence since ‘Ryan’s Daughter’ in 1970. Lean entered the film business in 1927 and spent many years as an editor before co-directing ‘In Which We Serve’ with Noel Coward. From ‘Brief Encounter’, ‘Great Expectations’ and ‘Oliver Twist’ to ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and ‘Doctor Zhivago’, his films enthralled millions and won innumerable awards. 

Brabourne said he was the obvious choice to direct ‘A Passage to India’ because he was ‘simply the best movie storyteller who ever lived’. The producer told me he first read ‘A Passage to India’ in 1958 on a five-day journey to the location set of ‘Harry Black’ at the Bandipur Tiger Reserve in southwest India: ‘I thought it was the most wonderful book and I decided then that it would make a wonderful film.’ To his dismay, he discovered that Forster had always denied film rights to his novel in fear that his 1924 story of cultural clashes in British India would take sides and brand either the British or the Indians as villains.

Brabourne attempted to change the author’s mind over several years and finally won him over partly because Forster had enjoyed ‘Harry Black’ but mostly because of the producer’s impeccable Indian connections. His father, the 5th Baron Brabourne, had been Viceroy and acting Governor-General in the sub-continent in 1938. His older brother Norton, the 6th Baron, inherited the title when their father died, but he was executed by the SS after he escaped from a POW camp in Italy in 1943. Brabourne’s wife was Patricia, eldest daughter of Louis Mountbatten, the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who was the last Viceroy of India in 1947 and the first governor-general of independent India 1947–1948. Mountbatten, who had a long and often controversial career in the British armed forces and diplomatic corps, was an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II. Brabourne and Patricia were aboard a wooden boat named Shadow V off the coast of Sligo in Northern Ireland on Aug. 27, 1979, when a bomb placed by an IRA terrorist blew it to pieces. They both survived but Nicholas, 14, one of their twin sons and Lord Mountatten were among those killed.

Brabourne had not been to India before World War II when his parents served there but he visited in 1945 when he was 20 and he said the sub-continent had a profound impact on him. ‘Before the war, it was quite complicated to get to India but I was dying to see it. Of course, I was pre-sold on it by my parents. I absolutely loved it the moment I set foot there.’ Having won over E.M. Forster, Brabourne and his partner Richard Goodwin thought they were all set but unfortunately, the author had not put his permission in writing and when he died in 1970 his literary rights went to King’s College where the Master hated movies. ‘He was very nice about,’ Brabourne said, ‘but the answer was always no. I went on seeing him every year or so and then he died. The new Master loved films and perhaps because I had been trying for so long, he gave us the rights.’ 

There remained the problem of transferring a literary masterpiece to film. ‘David Lean was on top of our list,’ Brabourne said. ‘We had a first treatment down but it wasn’t any good. We took it to David and he told us that he also had tried to obtain the rights so he had been thinking about the book as a film for a long time. He wrote a completely new script and it was fantastic. The biggest achievement of all on this film was to have made that script because it’s a very difficult book.’ When the producers and Lean took the script to the the literary purists of King’s College, Cambridge, the Academy Award-winning director was ‘as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof’. Stated simply, Forster’s novel deals with a young Englishwoman – played by Judy Davis in the film – who arrives in India to marry her fiancé (Nigel Havers) but runs afoul of British and Indian conventions when she is introduced to an Indian doctor (Victor Banerjee, pictured above with Davis). An incident in the Mirabar Caves leads to a rape trial and a subtle and complex examination of the tensions of the period. Exactly what went on in the Mirabar caves is a topic of great literary debate and the ending of the movie differs from the novel. 

Brabourne insisted that it was entirely in the Forster spirit: ‘I expect we’ll get some stick from one or two critics but on the whole I don’t think there will be much controversy because of that trip we took to King’s College. It was a fascinating experience because David was so nervous and, of course, you cannot be more expert than the professors there. But David was brilliant. He told the story the way he had written it and they all sat there and listened and they were enthralled. They all said he was right to make the alterations he did for the film. I don’t say they’ve endorsed it or anything like that but it was a great relief to know that these real experts saw the point of what he’d done.’ 

The film earned eleven Academy Award nominations including best picture for Brabourne and Goodwin [they lost to ‘Amadeus’] and best director and best adapted screenplay for Lean [who lost to ‘Amadeus’ director Milos Forman and writer Peter Shaffer]. Peggy Ashcroft was named best actress in a supporting role and composer Maurice Jarre won the second of his three Oscars for best original score.

Brabourne died on Sept. 23 2005 aged 80.

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When Maggie Smith called me a horrible man


Maggie-Smith x650

By Ray Bennett

To meet a movie actor you admire can sometimes be a disappointment but Maggie Smith, who has died aged 89, was exactly how I hoped she would be. She told me off and swept away.

It was at a black-tie Bafta party in London in 2001. I had invited former “Dallas” star Linda Gray as my guest. She was starring in the West End in “The Graduate” and I have known her since her earliest Southfork days but she had to cancel at the last minute.

So I took my old mucker Pete Cook – we went to the same school and were trainee newspapermen on the Gravesend Reporter in Kent in our youth – and he told everyone we met that he was Sue-Ellen. It being a showbiz affair, no one questioned that.

There were many big names there plus other assorted celebrities. Billy Connolly recalled me from early Saturday mornings watching live English premier league football games at the Fox & Hounds Pub on Vineland in Studio City in the 1990s. The three of us strolled about as Connolly puffed on a big cigar and made effortlessly funny comments.

Then I spotted Maggie Smith. Pete and I went over and I introduced myself. I’d always loved her film performances (and I finally saw her onstage in Edward Albee’s “The Lady from Dubuque” at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2007). I said, as I usually do, “May I say hello?” and introduced myself.

Dame Maggie sipped on what possibly was not her first glass of champagne. “Ask your question!” she said. I explained that I was not working and had no question. I wished merely to thank her for all her great work over the years. “I know you have a question,” she said. “What is your question?”

I was completely unprepared so I said the first thing that came to mind: “Do you think you’ll be up for another Oscar for ‘Gosford Park’ this year?” Dame Maggie gifted me with her sternest Jean Brodie (or now Countess of Grantham) stare: “Really! Is that the best you can do?”

She swept away behind the ropes of a nearby VIP area and when she was asked if something were the matter, she said loudly: “Some horrible man from the Hollywood Reporter just asked me the most stupid question.”

She was right, of course, and I loved it. I like to think that perhaps it’s similar to the way Picasso used to scribble something on a napkin knowing that it would be valuable. Dame Maggie couldn’t give me something I could sell but she gave me a bit of her art that I can treasure. Magnificent woman!

My review of ‘The Lady from Dubuque’ is elsewhere on The Cliff Edge

There’s a good list of her top films at the BFI website

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When I mixed up Frankie Avalon with another former teen idol

By Ray Bennett

‘It wasn’t exactly Elvis in Las Vegas’. That was the lede in our story after my colleague Ron Base and I interviewed Frankie Avalon, who turns 84 today,  when he performed in cabaret at a seedy nightclub in Windsor, Ontario, in 1970.

A teen idol opposite Annette Funicello in a series of  ‘Beach Party’ movies in the early Sixties, Avalon’s headline days were behind him but his hit song ‘Venus’ left him with devoted fans. The Commodore Club (later to become a popular striptease venue named Jason’s) in downtown Windsor attracted clientele from across the river in Detroit and women of a certain age flocked to see their dreamboat. He didn’t disappoint them,  giving a polished and entertaining show.

Club manager Mike Drakich, who also owned the city’s better appointed Top Hat Supper Club, knew Ron and me and was aware that our story would appear in the Toronto Telegram under the byline Victor Gordon (our middle names). We were treated to a fine meal and plenty of wine and vodka as we watched Frankie please his fans. 

After the show, he joined us at our secluded table and appeared delighted still to be of interest to the press. We chatted away merrily until I asked him about a big western movie in which I said he had co-starred. You know, I said, set in mining country with John Wayne, Stewart Granger and Ernie Kovacs. Ron stared at me quizzically but Avalon was at a loss. 

Suddenly, I realised that the booze had clouded my memory and I’d made an embarrassing mistake. The film I was thinking of was ‘North to Alaska’ with another young co-star, a rival in the teen-idol stakes.

Sheepishly, I confessed, ‘Ah, no, that was Fabian’. 

Fortunately, Avalon just laughed.

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That time when Lauren Bacall gave me a smacker

By Ray Bennett

‘You know how to whistle, don’t ya? Just put your lips together and blow.’ Whenever I watch the movie ‘To Have and Have Not’, that provocative line Lauren Bacall (photo below) says to Humphrey Bogart always gives me a frisson. I have a good reason.

Lauren Bacall, who was born 100 years ago today,  was wrapping up the pre-Broadway run of ‘Applause’, the stage musical based on the feature film ‘All About Eve’, at Detroit’s Fisher Theatre in February 1970.

After the final curtain in a nearby club rented for the night, my Windsor Star colleague Ron Base and I sat in a booth enjoying the free food and booze waiting for our promised interview with Bacall. 

Cast and crew, including Len Cariou and Bonnie Franklin,  were having a lot of fun because they knew they were in a hit. The show was great and we were treated generously but time was running out.

Just then, the glamorous star came dancing toward us in a very gay mood. She didn’t spot Ron’s long legs stretching out from the booth. I was standing up to greet her when she tripped over. I stepped into her path and caught her like Errol Flynn in a perfect movie catch.

Back on her feet, Bacall threw her arms around me and gave me a kiss on the mouth. Talk about frisson!

We explained who we were and she said, ‘Oh, you’re the Canadian boys!’ She had a bad reputation with the press but Ron mentioned that he knew Len Cariou (later a regular on TV’s ‘Blue Bloods’) and she relaxed. She sat with us and chatted breezily in response to our questions about the show, her career and even  Humphrey Bogart.

‘Applause’, with music by Charles Strauss, lyrics by Lee Adams and book by Bette Comden and Adolph Green, ran on Broadway for 896 performances earning 10 Tony Award nominations with four wins including best musical and best actress in a musical for Bacall. She died aged 89 in 2014.

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Composer Maurice Jarre’s ups and downs scoring films


By Ray Bennett

French film composer Maurice Jarre, who was born 100 years ago yesterday, is invariably linked with director David Lean but there were other filmmakers he worked with more than once and he had interesting anecdotes about them.

Australian director Peter Weir invited Jarre to Australia in 1982 to score ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’ starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver (pictured below). The Frenchman was impressed when a giant limousine awaited him in Sydney and when Weir told him how much he admired his work as director of the Theatre National Populaire based near Lyon in France.

More important was that Weir said he could do whatever he wished with the music. ‘I wanted to write something totally electronically but in the U.S. producers insisted on a full orchestra,’ Jarre told me when I interviewed him at the World Soundtrack Awards in Gent in 2003. ‘I discovered there was no one in Sydney with synthesiser experience sophisticated enough so I decided to do it myself with an engineer. It was a very long process as I had to get a sample of each instrument. It took me about three months working from nine in the mornng to 2 a.m. Peter gave me freedom and in the end he was very happy.’

Two years later came Weir’s ‘Witness’, starring Harrison Ford, with its much-admired barn-building scene (pictured). ‘The music for that scene was one of Peter’s favourites,’ Jarre told me, ‘although at first he told me not to spend any time on it as he already had music in place. I studied very thoroughly to know how he edited the film; analysed it very carefully. I thought music for the scene should start slowly – a bass line, a counterpoint and then, like the barn, the music starts to build. As I was almost finished, I heard Peter outside the studio sayiing, “What’s that? What is that?” He came in and I explained and he said, “Oh, that’s fantastic!” He said it was a piece I could play in concert. I transcribed it for an orchestra and we recorded it in Los Angeles. It was very well received.’ It won the BAFTA for best score and earned an Oscar nomination.

Jarre’s experience on Weir’s next picture ‘The Mosquito Coast’ in 1986 was not so pleasant. The director gave him the script before he started to shoot in Belize and asked him to write music for seven or eight sequences so he could play them for the actors. Jarre obliged and when the shoot began, Weir told him, ‘I am so happy. The actors are working with the music.’


Then Weir put together a rough cut and they tried to put the music to the film. ‘It didn’t work at all,’ said Jarre. ‘He said he didn’t understand why it didn’t work but it meant I had to write new music completely. That was an interesting experience.’

Jarre said he threw the original music away. ‘I thought it was a beautiful film although critics thought Ford was miscast. I worked with a synth player but in the end the musical concept from the script was wrong.’

The Frenchman said it taught him something: ‘Many of my colleagues say they like to write from a script but for me it didn’t work. For me, the inspiration is when you see the film even if it’s a rough cut. When I saw the first cut of “Lawrence of Arabia” (top picture) … I saw 40 hours of film. The beauty of the locations, the actors … neither Peter O’Toole nor Omar Sharif were known then but they were fantastic. The first lttle theme I wrote became the theme of Lawrence. I had a home on Half Moon Street in London. Producer Sam Spiegel asked me to come to London for one month. I did not know much about Lawrence so I read about his life and his time. It was a very interesting experience. I realised that the inspiration definitely comes when you see the film.’

Jarre later provided scores for Weir’s ‘Dead Poets Society[ and ‘Fearless’ and he worked twice with British filmmaker Adrian Lyne, on ‘Fatal Attraction’, starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close (pictured below) and Anne Archer, and ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ with Tim Robbins. The first really put him to the test. ‘This crazy film, “Fatal Attraction”, did not have too much music,’ Jarre said, ‘and Adrian told me he did not want scary music. He wanted something discreet and he was happy.’ 

One week before the release of the film, the studio held a preview. Jarre told me, ‘The notes were very good but the studio said something was wrong with the ending. It was crazy, the writer would rewrite the last seven or eight minutes of the fim. They said the actors wanted to do it but they really did not. The studio said either they did it or they would put the film on the shelf. Adrian showed me new scenes and said he neeed eight or 10 minutes of new music. That was Friday and we would record on Monday morning. I spent two days and nights writing. We recorded the music on Monday and by Monday night it was ready for release. The studio people were very happy. They said, “You saved the film.”’

Jarre, who died in 2009, is inextricably linked with David Lean as his three Academy Award wins from nine nominations were for scores to the British director’s pictures starting with ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ in 1962 and followed by ‘Dr. Zhivago’ and ‘A Passage to India’. He worked with a great many other top directors including Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Zinnemannm, William Wyler, Rene Clement, Richard Brooks, John Frankenheimer and John Huston.

He also worked with Clint Eastwood and, given that filmmaker’s preference for his own music, I was curious about his experience working on the 1982 action picture ‘Firefox’. 

‘Clint Eastwood is an interesting man, very nice, very charming but he does not understand too much about music in film,’ Jarre said. ‘He’s a fan of jazz … on his latest picture, he does his own music. It sounds like putting him down but it’s not that. He likes sound effects but not music. It was not one of his best pictures, not a good film, I liked the man, absolutely adorable, no temper. I enjoyed very much working with him but the film was not interesting from the music point of view.’

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Alfred Hitchcock had a wicked way with film music

By Ray Bennett

The films of Alfred Hitchcock, who was born on this day 125 years ago, are noted for their exceptional scores and it was no accident.  Composer John Williams told me that the master of suspense had a wide interest in music.

Among his vast number of accomplishments, the multi-Oscar-winning American composer has the distinction of scoring Hitchcock’s final picture, ‘Family Plot’ and the first feature by one Steven Spielberg, ‘Sugarland Express’.

‘We could have another whole conversation on my relationship with Hitch because my time with him was filled with wonderful stories,’ Williams said when I interviewed him in 2000. ‘I used to have lunch with him alone and we’d talk about the film for about five minutes and then he would speak to me, knowledgeably about the state of British music. He was enormously interested in British music from between the wars … by Vaughn Williams, Benjamin Britton, William Walton and others. He knew their work and knew what was happening in British music and was greatly interested in it.

‘He was a man full of marvellous stories and history. It was a great experience being in his presence. He was a lover of Edward Elgar, I think, more than anything. He talked about Elgar and Gustav Holtz all the time and was very interested in Walton. Of course, he had a long relationship with Bernard Herrmann, who was a great friend of mine.’ 

Herrman had an extraordinary collaboration with the director on eight movies including ‘Vertigo’, ‘North By Northwest’ and ‘Psycho’ with its famous stabbing violin sequences. Their last film together was ‘Marnie’ in 1964 and Hitchcock hired composer John Addison for ‘Torn Curtain’ (1966), Maurice Jarre for ‘Topaz’ (1969) and Ron Goodwin for ‘Frenzy’ (1972).

In 1976, he turned to Williams for ‘Family Plot’ starring William Devane, Karen Black, Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern (pictured with the director top).

‘The first conversation I had with Hitchcock, it was a bit sheepish on my part because of my closeness to  Herrmann,’ Williams told me. ‘I didn’t feel I could accept the assignment without either talking to Herrmann or understanding why it was that Hitchcock had broken off with him, which was one of those relationships in film that we all were hoping would continue. Hitch said to me, “No, no need to be sensitive about that because Mr. Herrmann and I have agreed not to work together again. I’m sure he’ll be very happy if it’s you if it’s not going to be him.” I did ring up Herrmann and he said about the same thing. He said, “No, no, Hitch and I will not work together any longer but I am delighted that you will be doing this.”’

They got along famously. ’He was full of this kind of whimsy and wit with an ironic edge to things,’ Williams said. ‘At one of our lunches, Hitch was describing a composer he’d hired to write a score for a film about a murder. He said he went to a scoring session and the composer had every double bassoon and timpani that was capable of making an ominous sound for the score. I said that sounded as if it was close to the mark and Hitch said, “No, you don’t understand, murder can be fun.”’

John Williams, 92, earned his 54th Academy Award nomination in 2024 for ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’. He has won five Oscars. .Alfred Hitchcock, who died on April 29, 1980, had five Oscar nominations but no wins.

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Richard Lester on making ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

By Ray Bennett

Sixty years ago today, a little rock’n’roll movie titled ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ starring the Beatles was released in the U.K. Their first album had come out less than eighteen months earlier, their singles were topping the charts and their first trip to America created a storm when they appeared on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’. United Artists, their record label, decided to cash in with a feature film.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr happened to love an eleven-minute short film titled ‘The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film’ starring Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. It was directed by American filmmaker Richard Lester, who had worked with Sellers on TV versions of the radio classic ‘Goon Show’ and directed a feature titled ‘It’s Trad, Dad’, so they were pleased when he agreed to make their film.

When I interviewed him many years later, Lester told me that United Artists just hoped to make a fast buck. ‘Make it as quickly as possible so it can get into cinemas before they vanish,’ he was told.

Shooting began in March 1964 and the film had to be in cinemas by July. ‘No arguments,’ Lester said. ‘It didn’t matter whether we’d finished or not, that was the deal and we stuck with that.’ 

John Lennon points at Richard Lester

Director and writer Alun Owen went to Paris with the Beatles for their first concert at the Olympia. They stayed on the same floor with them at the Hotel George V. 

‘In essence, the film was writing itself,’ Lester said. ‘We literally came back from there and said we’re just going to do that and we were left alone to do it. It didn’t really matter. Nobody bothered us or got in the way. There was only one man from United Artists, if memory serves me, who read the script and said it was good and to go ahead. We were working in such a rush that we’d completed the film before anybody saw any of it. We finally had a screening and everybody liked it.’

‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was a massive hit so a sequel was inevitable so ‘Help!’ followed one year later and was another hit. ‘Having made a film where we showed everything about their work,’ Lester said, ‘here comes the second film and we don’t have the opportunity to show what these people do in their spare time. It would terrify the audience if you showed what they did with girls or with strange substances they smoked or whatever.’

He was faced with making a documentary film in which the Beatles could not be shown at work or at play. ‘What in god’s name can you do?’ Lester said. ‘What was left was to make these real people victims of a fantasy. All these years later, I still don’t know what else we could have attempted even though it meant surrounding the boys with characters. John Lennon said, “We’re extras in our own fucking movie.’ 

Lester went on to make many terrific films including ‘Petulia’,  ‘The Three Musketeers’, ‘Superman II’, ‘Juggernaut’ and my personal favourite, ‘Robin and Marian’. He was coming to the end of his career when I spoke to him in 1984 and he had fond memories of working with the Beatles.

‘The moment you met the Beatles,’ he said, ‘you knew they were quite extraordinary. John Lennon was probably one of the four most interesting people I’ve ever met … one of the most incisive brains. A deeply troubled man but a man who had an enormous impact on my life.’

The other three? ‘I’d put Spike Milligan as one of them and Buster Keaton as another,’ Lester said. ‘I worked with Buster on “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and his work affected mine over the years. He’s the one great teacher for me as a film director. I was very moved and fascinated to work with Richard Pryor on “Superman III”. Again, a man who has seen his share of troubles but a man of enormous charm, ability and sensitivity.’ 

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