Best of FSM Book Elfman Memory

We are in the final proofreading stage of the Best of Film Score Monthly 35th Anniversary book. It’s come together well and I think everybody will enjoy it.

We are including the two-part Elfman interview I did circa 1995 but it reminded me of an incident at the time. I don’t know if I ever confessed this in the magazine or online?

The reason this interview was published as prose, instead of a Q and A, was because I made one of the all-time, hall-of-fame amateur blunders: I had old batteries in my tape recorder.

It had been a terrific and lengthy interview with Danny at his Topanga home—by the way, I remember (agent) Richard Kraft asking me not to mention his house was in Topanga. I asked, “Why not?” and he said something like, “You don’t have teenage girls stalking you.”

I got back to Amherst College after my L.A. trip—sat down in my senior year dorm room, and played back the tape to transcribe it...and was hit by the tell-tale “Mickey Mouse” speech that happens when you play back a tape recorded on a low battery. (The tape heads were moving slowly without enough power, so played back with a normal battery, they sounded fast.) That would have been workable, but there were places where the recording cut out entirely.

OMG. I was mortified and called Richard to explain/apologize. I said I would do the best I could to write the article from memory, quoting where I could and paraphrasing here and there, but could Danny maybe let me call him to fill in some missing pieces?

Richard called me back and I remember this vividly:

Me: “Did he think I was an idiot?”

Richard: [cheerfully] “Yes!”

However, Danny was, in fact, gracious enough to talk to me to add and clarify a few quotes, and I wrote the article—and now I’m proofreading it again, over 30 years later, for this book.

Fun!