Born: Aug 28, 1900 in Czernowitz, Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died: Aug 24, 1983 in Santa Monica, California
Active: '40s
Major Genres: Drama, Crime
Career Highlights: Monsieur Verdoux, Gunfighters, Fear in the Night
First Major Screen Credit: Stanley and Livingstone (1939)
Biography
Rudy Schrager was one of a legion of émigré composers who came to American motion pictures in the years ahead of and during World War II, when Hollywood filled up with expatriate Europeans. Schrager never found a berth at a major studio's music department -- rather, like a lot of other talented but less fortunate composers who were stuck on Hollywood's second tier, he spent much of his early Hollywood career contributing principally to lower budgeted films, both from the major and various Poverty Row studio operations, and taking whatever work came along. Born Rudolph Noachim Schrager in 1900, in a section of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that has since become part of the Ukraine, he was trained as a musician in the teens and '20s. He subsequently emigrated to the United States and made his way to Hollywood, where his earliest known movie work consisted of an uncredited contribution to the score of Universal Pictures' My Man Godfrey (1936). Three years later, he was one of several hands (including Alfred Newman, David Buttolph, Robert Russell Bennett, and a young David Raksin) that contributed to the score of 20th Century-Fox's Stanley and Livingstone (1939). During the early '40s, Schrager wrote music for radio, and he saw his first lingering success in 1942, when he scored a Lux Radio Theatre version of "City for Conquest," one theme from which was later picked up as the permanent secondary opening theme for the program itself, which ran into 1957. He also wrote music for the detective series Box 13, starring Alan Ladd, and for a broadcast version of The Wizard of Oz. In 1942, Schrager returned to movies as the music director on Private Snuffy Smith, a low-budget Monogram Pictures release, and two years later he was also composing for films, making the rounds between the B-units of majors studios, such as Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox, with occasional forays to Poverty Row outfit Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), on Take It Big (1944), Career Girl (1944), Tokyo Rose (1945), Deadline for Murder (1946), and Swamp Fire (1946). Though he was trained classically, Schrager could also loosen up, as when he served as music director for the country music showcase Dixie Jamboree or the breezy musical Take It Big. After years of laboring on less-than-prominent (and, indeed, almost immediately forgotten) B-pictures, Schrager's career took a decided upward turn in 1947. He still worked on B-movies for the majors, including the delinquency drama Dangerous Years (1947) at Fox and the Westerns Gunfighters and Coroner Creek at Columbia Pictures; but some of the B's that he scored were decidedly more memorable, as exemplified by two brilliant examples of film noir adapted from the works of Cornell Woolrich: John Reinhardt's The Guilty, from Monogram, and Maxwell Shane's Fear in the Night, a Paramount Pictures release. Fear in the Night was the better and more widely seen of the two, but events would unfold over the next few years that would earn Schrager more money and musical exposure for some of his work on The Guilty, despite the fact that the latter had been produced by Monogram for a commensurately small fee. But Schrager's major breakthrough at the time was his work (credited as Rudolph Schrager) as music supervisor on Charles Chaplin's production of Monsieur Verdoux (1947). This was easily most prestigious picture with which he'd ever been involved, receiving the widest release and the greatest critical attention of any movie he'd ever worked on, though one must bear in mind, reading this a half-century later, that Monsieur Verdoux was not a success at the time -- Chaplin was more a living legend than a current star in 1947, and, indeed, had lost a lot of his popularity in America, owing to controversies over his personal life and his political beliefs. A year later, Schrager scored Sleep, My Love, directed by Douglas Sirk, a UA release of a Mary Pickford production. Like most film composers who didn't work full-time for a studio music department, Schrager was scrambling for work regularly during the late '40s, as film production slackened and budgets shrank. It was during this period that he first became associated with David Chudnow, a music director and producer who specialized in assembling scores for producers and directors. Their early collaborations were Sleep, My Love and The Green Promise; ultimately, Schrager was one of a handful of composers (among them Herschel Burke Gilbert and Joseph Mullendore) who fell in with Chudnow in a fascinating musical and business venture, in response to a unique creative and legal situation that prevailed at the time in American entertainment. The reason behind the retrenchment in the movie industry was the growth of television, which had been regarded as a major threat from the start of the first commercial broadcasts in 1946. Television's growth was initially stunted by a number of difficulties, most of them regulatory and technical, but also at least one of which was union-related. The American Federation of Musicians, led by James Caesar Petrillo, had periodically sparred over money and employment practices with the radio and recording industries during the early and mid-'40s, but late in the decade, Petrillo decided to draw a new line in the sand over television. He decreed that no pre-recorded music could be used on American television, and that none of the AFM's members could participate in the making of such music, as composers, arrangers, or performers. As most variety shows used live orchestras, they were unaffected, but dramatic and comedy series, especially those shot on film -- then a new innovation on television, which held a lot of promise for improving both the medium and its financial foundation -- were at a loss as to what to do. Conversely, dozens of composers, including Schrager, Gilbert, and Mullendore, saw their opportunities in movies fading away amid the growth of television, and were now prevented by their union from earning anything from the new medium to make up the loss. Yet they dared not defy Petrillo, who ruled the AFM with an iron hand (he was known in the press as "the Mussolini of Music") and had even defied President Franklin Roosevelt's efforts at averting a strike by musicians at the outset of World War II. David Chudnow provided the solution to their problem. He arranged for Schrager, Gilbert, and the others to provide him with music -- some of it new and some of it derived from scores that they had previously written and used -- which he then recorded in Europe, in new arrangements (many by Mullendore), by orchestras whose members were working almost literally for pennies an hour. Chudnow used pseudonyms for the actual composers to protect them from the wrath of the union and packaged this material -- which, so far as any documentation stated, was of European origin, by composers who were not AFM members or subject to its jurisdiction -- as a music library, and sold it to eager television producers (and even occasionally to under-budgeted movie producers). As a result of this deception, sections of Schrager's music for The Guilty (and portions of Gilbert's score for Open Secret, and a half-dozen other composers from as many movies) turned up in episodes from the first season of The Adventures of Superman; this and other music of his was made available to the producers of such series as Dick Tracy, Terry and the Pirates, Mr. and Mrs. North, Ramar of the Jungle, and others. Chudnow, who also controlled the publishing on this music and collected copyright fees on behalf of the non-existent credited authors, would quietly funnel the money paid for the use of the music to the actual composers. It's because of this activity, and the longevity of The Adventures of Superman, in particular, on broadcast television, cable, and home video, that some of his music for an obscure little B-thriller like The Guilty has remained familiar to three generations of television viewers, in the "Superman" underscore. Schrager closed the 1940s with work on the Westerns The Sundowners (1950) and High Lonesome for Eagle Lion Films, and through his association with Chudnow, he scored the Paramount-distributed historical adventure The Eagle and the Hawk. He turned his attention to television in the 1950s and, in collaboration with Herschel Burke Gilbert, wrote music for the series Wanted: Dead or Alive starring Steve McQueen, and also contributed to the scoring of Rawhide. Schrager returned to movies one last time in the biggest-budgeted project of his career, MGM's release of the Andrew Stone-directed disaster thriller The Last Voyage. During the mid-'60s, Schrager wrote the music for the series The Wackiest Ship in the Army, but by the 1970s he had retired. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
