Hollywood’s “No Man” Leonid V. Raab (1900–1968)

Leonid Raab was one of Hollywood’s most prolific orchestrators of Golden Age film music. However, his profile is absent from standard reference works on the cinema. Raab’s career is examined using contempora- neous sources including a journal in Russian belonging to his friend Boris Artzybasheff, translated here for the first time. Emphasis is given to Raab’s alliances with fellow émigré studio musicians, artists, and expats in thewider community in Hollywood. Born in Tiraspol, Russia, Raab started his career in New York City as a copyist and arranger with the music publishers T.B. Harms, working under Robert Russell Bennett on musicals such as Show Boat (1927). He moved from Broadway to RKO Radio Pictures in 1929 and, following the Great Depression, was employed by MGM orchestrating Herbert Stothart’s scores for The Merry Widow, David Copperfield, and A Tale of Two Cities. From 1936 to 1967, Raab collaborated mainly with the composer Franz Waxman, orchestrating some 100 scores, including Rebecca, Edge of Darkness, Objective Burma, Sunset Boulevard, A Place in the Sun, and Taras Bulba. A comprehensive filmography (~400 scores) is presented, together with some rare family memorabilia and, among other things, an orchestral score which Raab arranged of the song “Glory to God” composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Representing the Authentic from Japanese American Perspectives

This chapter explores the career of Japanese American composer and arranger Tak Shindo (1922–2002). Shindo grew up nisei in Los Angeles. Japanese American musical life is discussed with a focus on the community’s 1933 production of Sakura composed by Claude Lapham in the Hollywood Bowl. Interned at Manzanar during World War II, Shindo began musical studies through the camp’s programs. Although devoted to Latin jazz, he repeatedly served during the Cold War as a Japanese musical advisor for such Hollywood composers as Franz Waxman and Max Steiner (Sayonara, Cry for happy, and A majority of one). Several of his 1950s and 60s albums—combining elements of Japanese music with the big band style—were successful in the exotica genre. Shindo’s self-Orientalism is compared with the musical exoticism of Martin Denny. A brief discussion of subsequent Japanese American jazz follows. The chapter concludes with a profile of the composer Paul Chihara.

“I Know Just What She’s Going Through”

Rebecca’s music offers the strongest argument for the style of musical collaboration Selznick fostered. Although earlier scholarship has focused on Hitchcock and Waxman, this chapter provides an alternative perspective informed by production records: how ideas and decisions flowed from producer, music director Forbes, and composer Franz Waxman to intermingle in one of the most compelling scores of the studio era. This chapter shows the extent to which Selznick and Forbes shaped the score’s formation and the degree to which non-original music from the preview score works in dialogue with Waxman’s associative themes, Robert Russell Bennett’s arrangements, and Leonid Raab’s orchestrations. Rebecca’s musical accompaniment epitomizes a delicate balance of collaborative tensions: the fruit of a system developed under Selznick and Forbes in the late 1930s.

Music Director Differences

In the productions leading up to Gone with the Wind, Selznick tried working with different composers to cultivate a sustainable partnership. These efforts included trial productions with Alfred Newman (The Prisoner of Zenda) and Oscar Levant (Nothing Sacred), and ultimately led to Selznick’s hiring Lou Forbes as a permanent music director in 1937. Forbes’s responsibilities included securing permissions to use preexistent music, assembling preview scores (known now as “temp tracks”), supervising final scores, serving as a liaison between Selznick and the composer, monitoring recording sessions, and watching the budget. This chapter surveys the films leading up to Forbes’s tenure and his initial productions, which involved coordinating the collective efforts of multiple composers, including Hugo Friedhofer, Max Steiner, Robert Russell Bennett, and Franz Waxman. Forbes’s thoughtful contributions to films like Intermezzo illuminate the otherwise neglected role of the Hollywood music director.

Making Music in Selznick's Hollywood

Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood explores the network of musicians and filmmakers whose work defined the sound of Hollywood’s golden age (c. 1920s–1950s). The book’s central character is producer David O. Selznick, who immersed himself in the music of his films, serving as manager, critic, and advocate. By demonstrating music’s value in film and encouraging its distribution through sheet music, concerts, radio broadcasts, and soundtrack albums, Selznick cultivated audiences’ relationship to movie music. But he did not do it alone. Selznick’s films depended upon the men and women who brought the music to life. This book shows how a range of specialists, including composers (Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, and others), orchestrators, music directors (Lou Forbes), editors (Audray Granville), writers, instrumentalists, singers, and publicists, helped make the music for Selznick’s films stand apart from competitors’. Drawing upon thousands of archival documents, this book offers a tour of American cinema through its music. By investigating Selznick’s efforts in the late silent era, his work at three major Hollywood studios, and his accomplishments as an independent producer (including his films with Alfred Hitchcock), this book reveals how the music was made for iconic films like King Kong (1933), A Star is Born (1937), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Gone with the Wind (1939), Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945), The Third Man (1948), and A Farewell to Arms (1957).