Paul Rossen
Screenwriter
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2004
- Messages
- 1,126
Didn't Richard Rogers also take a 'stab' at Lawrence?AdrianTurner said:The story of the music in Lawrence is fairly well documented and I apologise if it's already been done in this epic thread. Briefly, it goes like this. Spiegel wanted music and he also wanted musical presitige: if Beethoven was alive he would have been offered the job. The offer went initially to Sir Malcolm Arnold who had scored Kwai. Sir Malcolm showed up at a screening room with Sir William Walton who had scored Hamlet and Richard III. Apparently both men were slightly drunk and laughed at the endless procession of camels crossing the desert. Ann Coates told me that were 'laughing and nudging each other like schoolboys.'
Spiegel then went global: Khachaturian could write the exotic Oriental music and Benjamin Britten could write stuff for the limeys. Apparently Khactaturian wasn't able to leave Mother Russia and Britten was too expensive.
Thus Maurice Jarre entered the frame and wrote his stuff in a considerable rush. Apart from the fairly conventional symphonic main theme, the score was contemporary, tonal, experimental, more in tune with his work for directors such as Alain Resnais and Georges Franju.
Still insisting that someone with a knighthood should get his name on the movie, Spiegel employed the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, thus giving the film the seal of Royal approval. The band's principal conductor was Sir Adrian Boult who really couldn't conduct and watch a screen and hit precise timings with any skill. So Jarre waved the baton throughout the show but Boult's illustrious name survived.
Movies really are all about happy accidents as well as bad crashes.