Elmer Bernstein

Biography

No relation to Leonard Bernstein, American film composer Elmer Bernstein was a graduate of the prestigious Juilliard School of Music. He dabbled in all aspects of the arts (including dance) before devoting himself to composing; his first major stint was for United Nations radio. In the early '50s, Bernstein was willing to take any job available just to establish himself -- which possibly explains why his name is on the credits of that "golden turkey" Robot Monster. The composer's big breakthrough came with his progressive jazz score for The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), after which he switched artistic gears with his Wagnerian orchestrations for DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). Bernstein's pulsating score for The Magnificent Seven (1960) has since become a classic -- so much so that Bernstein is often mistakenly credited for Jerome Moross' similar theme music for The Big Country (1958). As film tastes changed in the late '60s and early '70s, Bernstein's over-arranged compositions seemed a bit anachronistic, a fact that the composer himself apparently realized, as witnessed by his semi-satirical score for National Lampoon's Animal House (1978). Bernstein remained active throughout the '90s, rearranging Bernard Herrmann's original score for the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, underlining the innate romanticism of such films as Rambling Rose (1991), and earning Oscar nominations for his work on The Age of Innocence (1993) and Far From Heaven (2002). In 1967, Bernstein won his only Academy Award for Thoroughly Modern Millie, for which he wrote only the background music and none of the individual songs. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

View more Entertainment & Arts videos

Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann Buy this Movie	Billy Jack Goes to Washington Buy this Movie	From Noon Till Three Buy this Movie	Far From Heaven Buy this Movie
Keeping the Faith Buy this Movie	The Deep End of the Ocean Buy this Movie	Wild Wild West Buy this Movie	Introducing Dorothy Dandridge Buy this Movie

Show More Movies Show Fewer Movies

For The Record...

Born on April 4, 1922, in New York, NY; son of Edward (a high school teacher) and Selma (Feinstein) Bernstein; married Pearl Glusman, 1946; divorced; married Eve Adamson, 1965; children: (with Glusman) Peter Matthew, Gregory Eames, (with Adamson) Emily Adamson, Elizabeth Campbell. Education: Studied piano with Henrietta Michelson at Juilliard School of Music and composition with Israel Citowitz, Roger Sessions, and Stefan Wolpe; graduated from New York City’s Walden School, 1939; attended New York University, 1939-42. Began career as a concert pianist; worked as a musical arranger during military service in the Army Air Corps; scored radio program for the United Nations, which eventually brought offers from film companies, 1949; went to Hollywood to score Saturday’s Hero, 1951; first attracted serious attention with his score for The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955; composed scores for highly successful films The Magnificent Seven, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Thoroughly Modern Millie, 1960s; began composing for television, 1970s; continued composing for film, 1970s-; professor at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. Awards: Western Heritage Award for scores for The Magnificent Seven, 1960, and Hallelujah Trail, 1965; Golden Globe Award, Best Original Score for To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962, and Hawaii, 1966; Academy Award, Best Original Score for Thoroughly Modern Millie, 1967; Los Angeles Film Critic Association Career Achievement Award, 1991; star on Hollywood Walk of Fame, 1996; World Soundtrack Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, 2001; Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) Founders Award, 2001. Addresses: Agent—Sam Schwartz, Gorfaine Schwartz Agency, 13245 Riverside Dr., Suite 450, Sherman Oaks, CA 91423. Management— Robert Urband, 831 South Spaulding Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90036. Website—Elmer Bernstein Official Website: http://www.elmerbernstein.com.

Composer

One of the most influential—and prolific—composers for American films, Elmer Bernstein has created some of the most memorable movie scores of all time. It is hard to imagine such great films as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) without the distinctive musical backdrops woven by Bernstein. Somewhat ironically, the only Bernstein score to win an Academy Award was the one he wrote for Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), hardly his most innovative or memorable work. Over the half century that Bernstein has been composing for film and television, he has written the musical scores for more than 200 major motion pictures and television productions.

The son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Bernstein was born on April 4, 1922, in New York, New York. His father, Edward, a high school teacher, had emigrated from Austria-Hungary, while his mother, the former Selma Feinstein, had come to the United States from Ukraine. Raised in a family that valued the arts, Bernstein first showed his artistic talents as a painter, winning a number of prizes for his work. Encouraged by his parents, he also tried his hand at dancing and appeared in community theatrical productions. By the time he was 12, however, it was apparent to all that Bernstein’s first love was music.

Bernstein attended the King Coit Drama School for Children from 1932 to 1935 and began his piano studies with Henrietta Michelson at the Juilliard School of Music. Michelson, impressed with the 12-year-old’s gift for improvisation, introduced him to world famous composer Aaron Copland, who in turn arranged for Bernstein to study composition with Israel Citkowitz. He later studied composition with Roger Sessions and Stefan Wolpe as well. Bernstein graduated from New York City’s Walden School in 1939 and embarked on a career as a concert pianist. During this time, he also attended classes at New York University from the fall of 1939 until the spring of 1942.

The following year, with World War II raging, Bernstein enlisted in the Army Air Corps. It was while serving in the military that Bernstein first had an opportunity to put his lessons in composition to practical use. He arranged American folk music and wrote dramatic scores for Army Air Corps radio productions. He also scored arrangements for Glenn Miller’s Army Air Corps band.

After leaving the military, Bernstein returned briefly to his career as a concert pianist, but in 1949 was asked to provide the scores for two United Nations (UN) radio shows. This work caught the attention of Sidney Buchman, a vice president with Columbia Pictures. It was Buchman who first hired Bernstein to write for the movies, assigning him to score Saturday’s Hero (1950) and Boots Malone (1951). Bernstein’s music for films

first won wider attention in 1952, when he composed a distinctive score for Sudden Fear, a motion picture starring Joan Crawford and Jack Palance.

Bernstein’s left-leaning political sentiments all but put his career on hold in the early 1950s. Forced to take a lower profile during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous investigations into possible Communist infiltration, he was reduced to working on low-budget films until the political climate changed. Remarkably, two of the films he scored during this period—Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) and Robot Monster (1953)—became cult favorites.

No less a Hollywood giant than Cecil B. DeMille brought Bernstein back into the mainstream when he hired the composer to write the dance music for his screen epic, The Ten Commandments (1956). Bernstein had hardly begun work on this project when he was asked to score the entire film, a project that consumed almost a year. On the heels of that assignment, Otto Preminger sought out Bernstein to score The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) on the strength of a recommendation from the director’s brother, who had been impressed with Bernstein’s work on Sudden Fear.

To underscore Preminger’s film adaptation of Nelson Algren’s novel about a heroin-addicted drummer, Bernstein proposed something that had never been done before: an all-jazz score. He hired Shorty Rogers to put together a big band, featuring Shelly Manne on the drums. The result was electrifying, perfectly conveying in music the feelings of the film’s tortured hero, played by Frank Sinatra. Critic Jack Moffitt, writing in the Hollywood Reporter, said: "Elmer Bernstein’s historic contribution to the development of screen music should be emphasized. Until now jazz has been used as a specialty or a culmination of a plot point. It remained for Bernstein to prove that it can be used as a sustained and continuous story-telling element in underscoring the mood elements of an entire picture."

Bernstein’s success with the jazz-based score for The Man with the Golden Arm set off a wave of movie and television soundtracks built around jazz and earned Bernstein his first Academy Award nomination for an original score. Not surprisingly, the composer was in high demand for more jazz scores, the two most notable being The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and Walk on the Wild Side (1962). In an altogether different vein, however, was his work on the score of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), the motion picture adaptation of Harper Lee’s wildly popular first novel. The music he composed for the film brilliantly conveyed the sleepy wonder of a childhood in the rural South of the 1930s. The score begins with nothing but a piano and flute as the opening credits roll. This sparse orchestration marked a decided departure from the full, lush, European-style movie themes that dominated the late 1930s and 1940s.

Earlier in his career, Bernstein had broken new ground in scoring the popular western film The Magnificent Seven (1960), creating a heroic theme that became one of Hollywood’s first hit instrumentals and later, the musical foundation for a long-running Marlboro advertising campaign. So effective was his score for The Magnificent Seven that Bernstein was later tapped to score the movie’s sequel and to provide the music for John Wayne’s last seven films. These included the score for True Grit (1969), and an original song for the movie (cowritten by Don Black) that earned him an Academy Award nomination. Bernstein also scored Hallelujah Trail (1965), which earned him yet another Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, and The Shootist (1976), the last motion picture made by Wayne.

Bernstein’s first Academy Award came in 1967 when he won an Oscar for Best Original Score for his work on Thoroughly Modem Millie. His score for that film also earned him a Golden Globe Award nomination in 1968. That same year, the composer was nominated for a Tony Award for best musical play for How Now, Dow Jones. A decade and a half later, Bernstein was nominated for another Tony for Best Musical Score for his work on Merlin (1982). Although work on films continued to occupy most of his time, Bernstein also managed to compose music for a number of television productions, including Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law (1971-1974) and Ellery Queen (September 1975-April 1976), and a handful of miniseries, including Captains and Kings (1976) and Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980).

During the late 1970s and 1980s, Bernstein supplied the musical scores for a number of blockbuster film comedies, including National Lampoon’s Animal House, Slap Shot, Meatballs, Airplane!, Stripes, Three Amigos, Ghostbusters, Funny Farm, and Trading Places, for which he earned his twelfth Academy Award nomination. Somewhat concerned that he might be getting stuck in a creative rut, Bernstein turned his focus away from comedy in the late 1980s, rejecting an offer to score Ghostbusters 2, seeking out instead more character- and message-oriented films. One of his first such projects was My Left Foot (1989). Other Bernstein projects from this period included Da!, The Field, and The Grifters, which marked a complete departure from his usual style. Of his work on The Grifters, Bernstein later said, in comments included at his official website: "To me, The Grifters was a quirky film, and that led to the quirkiness of the score, which contained colors different from any score I had previously composed."

In the early 1990s, Bernstein heard that Martin Scorsese was remaking Cape Fear. He called the director to ask if he could adapt the original film’s score for the remake. Scorsese agreed, and Bernstein went to work, rearranging the score by Bernard Herrmann—"one of my heroes"—to fit the much different version of the film envisioned by Scorsese. Although Bernstein composed about six minutes of original music for the film, the bulk of his work involved repackaging the original Herrmann score. The composer collaborated again with Scorsese on The Age of Innocence (1993), which earned Bernstein his thirteenth Oscar nomination, as well as Bringing Out the Dead (1999).

For more than half a century Elmer Bernstein has been charming motion picture audiences with his memorable movie scores. He continues to work, supplying the scores for Robert Benton’s Twilight (1998), HBO’s production of Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999), and actor/director Edward Norton’s Keeping the Faith (2000). Even with all his work for motion pictures and television, he manages to compose for the concert stage as well, having written two song cycles, three suites for symphony orchestra, compositions for viola and piano, and a number of compositions for solo piano. As if that were not enough, Bernstein is also a professor at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, where he teaches a course in scoring for motion pictures and television.

Selected discography
Sudden Fear, Choreo, 1952.
The Man with the Golden Arm, Capitol, 1956.
The Sweet Smell of Success, Decca, 1957.
Some Came Running, Capitol, 1958.
The Magnificent Seven, RCA Victor, 1960.
Summer and Smoke, RCA, 1961.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Ava, 1962.
Walk on the Wild Side, Mainstream, 1962.
The Hallelujah Trail, United Artists, 1965.
Hawaii, United Artists, 1966.
Thoroughly Modern Millie, Decca, 1967.
How Now, Dow Jones, RCA, 1968.
True Grit, Capitol, 1969.
Big Jake, Varese Sarabande, 1971.
Cahill: United States Marshall, Varese Sarabande, 1973.
Meatballs, RSO, 1979.
Ghostbusters, Arista, 1984.
Three Amigos!, Warner Bros., 1986.
My Left Foot/Da!, Varese Sarabande, 1989.
Cape Fear, MCA, 1991.
The Age of Innocence, Epic, 1993.
Devil in a Blue Dress, Columbia, 1995.
How the West Was Won/Classic Western Film Scores, Silva, 1996.
The Rainmaker, Hollywood, 1997.
Twilight, Edel-America, 1998.
Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, RCA Victor, 1999.
Keeping the Faith, Hollywood, 2000.
Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra, Angel, 2000.

Sources
Books
Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television, Volume 32, Gale Group, 2000.
International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 4: Writers and Production Artists, St. James Press, 1996.

Periodicals
Cineaste, January 1, 1995, p. 46.

Online
Elmer Bernstein Official Website, http://www.elmerbernstein.com (December 28, 2001).

• Genres: Soundtrack

Biography

If Elmer Bernstein had realized his childhood hopes, he might have been a successful concert pianist from the '40s through the '60s. Instead, thanks to his ability as a composer (manifested at an early age), and the timely intervention of World War II, he has for more than four decades been a major force in popular and film music, and a major influence on American popular culture.

Born in New York City, Bernstein as a boy showed a consuming interest in music, especially on the piano. He was a natural prodigy and early on, his teacher recognized a tendency on his part to improvise on the piece he was playing, an ability that he was encouraged to develop. Bernstein also had a serious interest in folk music, which was to serve him in good stead in the decades that followed. When Bernstein was 13, his music teacher arranged for the boy to audition for Aaron Copland, who was sufficiently impressed to arrange for him to study with one of his own students. He subsequently enrolled at the Juilliard School in New York, where he continued as a piano student and also took up composition. His composition teachers in the late '30s included Stefan Wolpe and Roger Sessions.

World War II interrupted any plans that Bernstein might have had to pursue a career in the concert hall. Luckily, he was assigned to an entertainment unit after being drafted and it was while serving in uniform that he got his first formal opportunity to write music. He was assigned as an arranger of traditional American songs for Glenn Miller and the United States Army Air Force Band, which led to his being assigned to write the music for Armed Forces Radio programs. By the time he returned to civilian life, Bernstein had written the music for more than 80 broadcasts and wanted to pursue a career as a composer. The post-war era offered ever-decreasing opportunities for composers, as entertainment and music were changing (and no one was sure how, or into what).

In 1949, he got a new chance to write music when he was commissioned to write the score for a United Nation radio program on the founding of the State of Israel. Radio was still a huge medium in those days and the dominant home entertainment medium, and the broadcast was also carried by NBC. One network executive who heard it was impressed with Bernstein's music and offered him the chance to compose the music for a network program. That program, in turn, led to an offer -- increasingly rare in that time of ever-tightening budgets and personnel lists -- to come out to Hollywood and work in movies. Bernstein arrived in Hollywood just as the studio system was entering a period of decline (and ultimate collapse), in the wake of the birth of commercial television and the consent decree signed by the studios that forced them to give up their theater chains. Still, there was work available and he spent the early '50s moving between the smaller major studios like RKO and Columbia and independent companies such as Astor Films. It was at Astor that Bernstein scored two of his stranger film vehicles, the notoriously bad (though campily funny) Robot Monster and Cat Women of the Moon.

He gradually moved up to doing films at the majors, including MGM and 20th Century Fox, where he got to write the music for some of their smaller-scale films. Bernstein's professional breakthrough took place in 1955 with Otto Preminger's film The Man With the Golden Arm. The movie itself was a breakthrough in terms of subject matter (drug addiction) and the fact that the lead character (played by Frank Sinatra) was a jazz musician, and it opened up possibilities that weren't often found in Hollywood features. Bernstein used jazz as the basis of his score for the film, and the result was a groundbreaking soundtrack that became the first of Bernstein's film music to get a commercial release -- it also received an Oscar nomination, the first of many for the composer.

His score for the Preminger film made a noise among musicians and the somewhat more adventurous portion of the audience for popular music, but that same year, Bernstein was assigned to a film with far wider, more mainstream, appeal: Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. A religious epic that pulled whole families into theaters and found a major audience in every corner of the country and almost every social stratum, the movie was a monumental hit. Bernstein's big orchestral score achieved great popularity and the composer's name was suddenly known and recognized among casual filmgoers in the same manner as his much older contemporaries Max Steiner and Franz Waxman.

In 1958, Bernstein moved into a new and booming field of music composition -- television -- signing with Revue Productions, the television arm of Universal Pictures. For the next few years, he turned up as the composer of the main title music of series such as the detective thriller Johnny Staccato (which was a Top Five hit in England) and Riverboat, among other shows. He also cut a pair of light pop-jazz albums, one for Decca and the other for Capitol, in 1956 and 1960, respectively.

The next major milestone in Bernstein's career came in 1960 when he was engaged to score John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven. A Western adapted from Akira Kurosawa's medieval Japanese epic The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven proved phenomenally popular, not only in the year of its release but perennially so. It had enough action and richness of characterization that audiences loved to come back to it year after year on television. It was with the score of The Magnificent Seven that Bernstein got to put his early love of folk music into play. In a manner not far removed from Aaron Copland (or, for that matter, film composer Alfred Newman), he utilized the melodic characteristics of folk and Western music in a sweeping orchestral canvas that gave the action on the screen the veneer of folk-legend and the urgency of a great symphony in performance.

In fact, the main title theme proved so rousing that it quickly took on a life of its own. Starting in the early '60s, The Magnificent Seven theme was licensed by the makers of Marlboro cigarettes for use in a series of Western-themed commercials (replacing a much more non-descript working man image previously used in their television ads) that ran for the remainder of the decade and right up until the end of legal cigarette advertising on television. In the end, it may have become the most widely heard piece of movie music in history, allowing for the hundreds of thousands of airings of dozens of commercials for the cigarettes, all of which used at least a fragment of Bernstein's music.

Ironically, the company that released the movie never capitalized on the music's popularity, and until 1999, there was no original soundtrack album for The Magnificent Seven. At the time of the film's release, Bernstein wasn't well-known for his Western theme music. That soon changed, but not in time for United Artists Records to do much about it. Additionally, United Artists Records was a new operation, only a couple of years old, and had not done particularly well with the Western soundtracks it had released up to that point, some of it very good and attached to even higher profile productions than The Magnificent Seven. By the time the music's popularity was achieved and recognized a year or so after the release of the movie, the assumption was that it was too late to capitalize on it by belatedly issuing an album, especially since one hadn't been prepared from the original film recordings.

After The Magnificent Seven, Bernstein's career was made, although he took great pains to see to it that he got other projects besides more Westerns. Bernstein's work during the '60s ranged from delicate, sensitive dramas like To Kill a Mockingbird, to such rousing adventure yarns as The Great Escape. The latter project was not surprising since it was an action-adventure film by the same director and featuring three of the same stars as The Magnificent Seven and resembled his score to the earlier Sturges movie and this time there was an album. His music for The Sons of Katie Elder featured a title theme very similar to his forgotten main title theme from the series Riverboat, but also a background accompaniment to an elegiac reading about the title character by John Wayne, and included a song by Johnny Cash. And his work as music director on Thoroughly Modern Millie, a musical and spoof starring Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore, won Bernstein his only Oscar to date.

Having come up during the tail end of the studio system, Bernstein had come to know many of his older musical colleagues, both personally and through their work, and such was his success that he was able to do something on their behalf at the beginning of the '70s. He formed his own record label, Filmusic Collection, and used it to release a series of self-financed recordings of scores that weren't otherwise available, including Miklos Rozsa's music for The Thief of Baghdad, Bernard Herrmann's unused score for Torn Curtain, and a more complete version of his own To Kill a Mockingbird score than had ever been available. The '70s also saw a decline in the kind of big-budget film within which Bernstein's music seemed to work best. He did some television work, including the title music for the series The Rookies.

In 1977, he was thrust into composing for a wholly new idiom of filmmaking when he was asked by director John Landis to score the comedy Animal House. Bernstein had written the music for every kind of movie, from Westerns to science fiction, but had never scored a comedy. He hesitated, but Landis said that he wanted Bernstein to do exactly what he always did in scoring and, in fact, wanted the kind of big-theme, big-sound scoring that he was known for. As it turned out, the mix of his dignified music underscoring the film's physical comedy lent a deeper veneer of humor to the movie, making it seem even more satirical. Animal House was a huge success and opened up a whole new class and variety of film to Bernstein's talents. Over the next few years, he wrote the music for such comedies as Airplane, Stripes, Ghostbusters, and Three Amigos!

At the same time, his status as the dean of living soundtrack composers opened up serious dramas and the works of major filmmakers to him in ways that they hadn't been since the '60s; there weren't too many serious, big-budget movies being made, but any producer or director who wanted a score that matched the opulence of what they saw on the screen had to look to Elmer Bernstein. He was chosen by Martin Scorsese to score his remake of the 1960 thriller Cape Fear, for which he did a rescoring of Bernard Herrmann's original music; he also wrote new music for Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. Bernstein also wrote the music to such high-profile films as Jim Sheridan's The Field and Stephen Frears' ,The Grifters.

At the outset of the 21st century, Elmer Bernstein remained very busy as a composer, conductor and arranger, and he continued to devote his energy to the restoration of old film scores, making new commercial recordings of his own early works and those of other composers. He was also busy as a conductor and arranger on various commercial recordings that required his skills at coaxing a lush yet exciting sound from an orchestra. Bernstein died in his sleep on August 18, 2004 at the age of 82. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)