I Was A Composer for A Teenage Werewolf

By: Randall D. Larson
Date: Thursday, September 07, 2006

Paul Dunlap provided extremely effective musical scores for a fistful of low-budget horror and science fiction pictures of the '50s and '60s including a fruitful association with producer Herman Cohen, for whom he scored classics like I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF, I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN, BLOOD OF DRACULA, TARGET EARTH, BLACK ZOO, HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER, and others. Dunlap also composed films for director Sam Fuller, including the classic SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963) and 1964's provocative THE NAKED KISS. He scored the 1951 dinosaur classic, LOST CONTINENT (not the 1968 Hammer film), Boris Karloff's atomic-age FRANKENSTEIN 1970, the voyage-to-Mars classic, ANGRY RED PLANET, four of the feature-length THREE STOOGES (Moe-Larry-Joe DeRita) films of the '60s, not to mention fistfuls of Westerns, detective stories, and other programmers from the final days of the studio era.

Dunlap had originally trained to be a classical composer, studying briefly under Toch and Boulanger. His film career began when a recommendation brought him to the attention of director/producer Sam Fuller, who hired him to score several of his films.

LOST CONTINENT contained Dunlap's earliest notable fantasy score, featuring quite good music for Lippert's otherwise unremarkable dinosaur picture. The music benefited from an especially large orchestra for a low-budget film, with about 50 musicians, which helped breathe life into the film's interminable cardboard mountain-climbing scenes. In 1957 Dunlap's collaboration with producer Herman Cohen transformed into a long-running association after his score for I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF proved especially effective in this youth-oriented horror film. Dunlap provided unique faux-electronic effects for the 1966 undersea monster movie, DESTINATION: INNER SPACE, crafting a notable eerie apprehensively through the use of reverberating guitar and compelling echo effects in the music.


I interviewed Dunlap in 1983 for my book, Musique Fantastique, which explored the world of film music for fantasy, science fiction, and horror films. Aside from a few quotes which were included therein, the bulk of this interview has remained unpublished. With the effectiveness of his scores among the genre films of that era, some of which are finally finding release on DVD (BLOOD OF DRACULA, TARGET EARTH, HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER, for example), I felt it was a fine time to re-evaluate and re-appreciate the legacy of Paul Dunlap. Even though he discounts most of these films, the creativity with which he crafted their scores and enhanced their cinematic effectiveness remains potent and powerful, and they are easily among the best genre scores of the late 1950s and early 1960s.


A CONVERSATION WITH PAUL DUNLAP (1983)


Q: What first interested you in film music? How did you become involved in the field?

Dunlap: I had hoped to be a so-called serious or classical composer, and had studied very briefly with Schoenberg, and principally with his teaching assistant Gerald Strang [sp?]. I also studied with a very great composer, Ernst Toch. A friend of my wife's had married a man named Sam Fuller, the director, and she'd heard some of my music (up to that time I'd done arrangements and compositions on my own). She recommended me to Sam, and he let me do a picture called THE BARON OF ARIZONA [1950].

Q: What were some of the first scores you were called to do after this?

Dunlap: I did several more for Sam Fuller, and then the producer of his films, a man named Robert Lippert, had me do a number of other films. As a matter of fact, I worked just for them for some time. I did Sam Fuller's STEEL HELMET [1950], and then we did a picture called PARK ROW [1952], about publishing, for United Artists.

Q: Other than the need to musically supplement specific visuals, how would you describe your personal approach to scoring films?

Dunlap: It shouldn't just be sound effects. I think that's a mistake. That's a common tendency now, where you have, say, one chord per shot. There's no real melodic content, or an effort to write a melody. There are a number of phrases used to describe that, like wallpaper music, that sort of thing. Some directors and producers really prefer the music to do that; they feel that the message is implicit in the scene (incidentally, sometimes it isn't), and they don't want the music commenting. They prefer it to be neutral. I would say that music has gone in that direction, recently, but the music that I wrote was something where I tried to supplement the scene, writing music that was significant and somehow commented on, or deepened or enhanced, the emotional situation in the scene.

Q: One of your earliest scores was for LOST CONTINENT in 1951. Do you recall your musical approach to that film?

Dunlap: Yes. It was a very static film, and several people have commented on it. There's a Film Appreciation Society here, and they've commented on those scenes, with the fakey mountains, of course. A set consisting of those stood on the Fox lot, I don't believe the Lippert gang built them, but they had to kill time in the movie climbing them. What is interesting is that, to at least some people, the mountain climbing music is some of the most interesting music in the film! It was sort of a pretend game musically pretending that something really existed there. They were funny little six or eight foot paper Mache hills, as I recall, and they went up and down them endlessly!

Q: How much input did the filmmakers have on the music they asked you to write?

Dunlap: I don't think I ever got into anything like that with people at Lippert. They were interested in turning out a picture as quickly as possible, and being expeditious.

Q: Did they have a certain kind of music in mind for you to write?

Dunlap: Just something that would fit the primitive or prehistoric animals and would be exciting and interesting, and sustain some interest. They had some difficulty with the little models of the animals, and as you know music can help a situation like that. A lot of the score is based on 4th chords, and I've been wondering lately what it was about it that seemed to impress people. For instance, some years ago I was in London doing a recording and I met Elmer Bernstein, a very fine composer, and he made a point of telling me how very much he liked that score. It was odd, it was something that you'd already forgotten about and thought everyone else has forgotten too!

Q: Did you use any unusual instrumentation in that score?

Dunlap: No, that was a pretty standard orchestration. I've done quite a few things where I have used unusual things, from necessity. I did a picture once, called OPERATION C.I.A. [1965], with Burt Reynolds, and it had two flutes, two bassoons, and I believe two percussion players. It turned out to be an interesting score with only six players!

Q: You scored many films for producer Herman Cohen I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF, TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN, BLOOD OF DRACULA, BLACK ZOO. How closely did he involve himself in the music for his films?

Dunlap: Enormously. He's the most concerned-with-music of all the producers I've ever worked with. His films would be classed as medium budget or low budget, and I don't know of another producer in the business more intimately involved in the writing and the directing. Sam Fuller was more difficult than that he was more demanding but didn't know quite what he wanted, whereas Herman Cohen knew exactly what he wanted in a score. It was very interesting, he shifted his base of operations to England and made a lot of films there, and his English pictures, using composers that no one knows here at all, invariably always had marvelous scores. He's very much involved with the music.

Q: What kind of music did he ask you to write for some of his 'teenage' horror films?

Dunlap: He always wanted something original. That was the time before electronic instruments. It's quite easy now to provide a film with the right atmosphere because all the electronic gear is at hand. In those days, we had to do those sounds with a small orchestra. In the score for I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF, with that 20-man band or whatever it was, I was trying assiduously to create new sounds in the orchestra, and that's very difficult when you're limited that way.

Q: A lot of these films were directed towards a youth audience. Did this fact affect the music you were asked to write?

Dunlap: Yes. Some of them have rock and roll in them, like a party scene where the kids dance. Most of them did at least have one scene like that.

Q: Was there ever a temptation or a request for that musical style shift over into your dramatic scoring?

Dunlap: No. You can't create any tension with that you'd defeat the whole purpose. The minute you go to a foot-tapping rhythm you've destroyed the bizarre or odd or fascinating or horrifying aspect of the music. I did a couple hundred films for a company called Family Films, and one of the producers was a man who loved what he called foot-tapping music, and I once said to him, "you know, if you filmed the crucifixion of Christ, you'd really want it to have rhythm in, wouldn't you?" and he said yes, he would. That was the way he felt of reaching the masses. But, of course, it's just not appropriate.

Q: You scored a number of Three Stooges films in the early 1960s...?

Dunlap: They were absolutely delightful, really the most pleasant experience of my film scoring career. They were very nice men, especially Moe Howard. They were great heroes in their time, they were as big as The Beatles. They were the exact opposite of what they were on screen, they were sweet and gentle. I don't think people realized in general that quite apart from being the burlesque ruffians they were on the screen, they weren't ruffians at all, especially Moe. He was the quietest, sweetest man, and a very considerate man. You know you don't always find that in the film business. Moe's hobby was horticulture, and he had a nice house in Brentwood, and he loved to go walking through the yard and tell me what each plant was, and where it came from. They gave you absolute carte blanche I remember asking Moe once, "what would you like the score to me like?" "Oh, I don't know," he would say. "You know exactly what's best. Do whatever you want." He had complete confidence. It was a pleasure working with him.

Q: Do you recall the musical approach you took on those films?

Dunlap: One of them, I don't know which one it is now, but one is quite charming, it's like a little concertino. It's a concerto for one trumpet and strings. It's all very light. I think it's one of the nicest scores I've ever done, but I don't remember which one of them it was. I did one called THE THREE STOOGES GO AROUND THE WORLD IN A DAZE, and that had a little of everything, because they went back to Roman times; and it was such fun working on those. Moe would come to the recording sessions, incidentally, just to hear the music, but he would also bring with him his own stuff, coconuts and funny little drums and things, and when we were finished with the orchestra he would then record those. He loved to furnish the sound effects, when they bopped one another on the head, you know that sound. He had a marvelous ear for those damn things. He would bring funny-shaped gourds and things to the recording.

Q: Scoring the Stooges' style of comedy, did that require a bit of mickey-mousing where you had to sync your music to specific comic visuals?

Dunlap: I think you had to, in their style, where their heads bounced on the wall and that sort of thing. You would try to hit each of those impacts. Those would be put on a click track and you'd try to match them up as closely as possible. In that idiom I think you have to. There isn't much opportunity for playing against it as there might be in a more serious film.

Q: On some of these early films, how long were you generally given to provide the score?

Dunlap: Almost always about two weeks. I think I've written more music in a shorter length of time than almost any other composer in the business! I never had more than two weeks. A few times I had to have a couple days extension because I did all my own orchestration. There usually wasn't a fee for an orchestrator, whereas today it's almost unheard of' for a composer to do his own orchestration

Q: How large of an orchestra were you given back then?

Dunlap: On LOST CONTINENT, that was a fairly good-sized orchestra, maybe forty-five, fifty men. Usually there's some kind of union minimum. If a picture crossed over a certain amount you had to use a certain number of men, I think twenty or twenty one, so that became a figure that you were stuck with. Some of the films I did for Allied Artists, like films I did for a producer named Lindsley Parsons, used quite bigger orchestras. There was a picture called DRAGOON WELLS MASSACRE [1957], it's not a bad picture and it has an interesting score. We used part of the Roger Wagner Chorus.

Q: Your score for DESTINATION INNER SPACE [1966] was especially memorable. You used a lot of reverberating electronic guitarlike plucks for the underwater scenes.

Dunlap: That was the beginning of electronic music for me. There was a man named Jack Cookerly, a pioneer who developed his own instruments. He manufactured one and used tape loops on it, and that's what those pings and pongs are. That was recorded at Capitol Records, where they had a series of echo chambers under the parking lot, arranged so you could hook them up in series, so that you could get a maximum delay. In the studio they only have a one-second delay, or something like that they didn't have the marvelous digital delay machines they have today. So you could hook up, say, two of the echo chambers and have a marvelous delay effect. That's he first time we were ever able to use that. I think there were four French horns and this fantastic instrument of Jack Cookerly's, which was light years ahead. That film was produced by Earle Lyon I went to school with him. We had a band years ago in Long Beach (CA) and I wrote arrangements for him.

Q: You've written music for a variety of film genres. Do you have any preferences for scoring films of one type over another?

Dunlap: The horror pictures are tough to do. You've got to write ugly or threatening or fearful or suspenseful music ninety percent of the time. There' s very little if anything that is beautiful or, let us say, "soft" in texture in such a film. It's difficult, at least for me, to maintain that kind of approach. I did a film called THE CROWNING EXPERIENCE [1960], financed a group called M.R.A., which was about Mary McLeod Bethune, a very great black woman, an educator, who founded her own university and who was consulted by President Roosevelt. This picture, the story of her life was a very beautiful and inspiring movie, and it was very marvelous to work on a picture of that sort. You seem to feel at least for a moment that you were not injuring society or inciting riot or murder, but you were perhaps inspiring them.

Q: How would you describe the music you wrote for that film?

Dunlap: It was uplifting and positive. I worked with a Scottish songwriter on that film, and working with his material was fabulously interesting. I don't usually like to do that that's being an arranger, working with somebody else's music and orchestrating it, but he wrote some of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard.

Q: What do you consider to be among your other favorites of the film scores you have written?

Dunlap: I liked that little score I did for the Three Stooges. As I said, it's mostly trumpet and strings, a very odd combination for a burlesque comedy. One of my best scores, curiously, is a film that hasn't been on television very much, with Joel McCrea, called STRANGER ON HORSEBACK [1955]. I did a lot of Westerns for a while that's all I did! I did another one like that, with Edward G. Robinson, called BLACK TUESDAY [1954]. That's a very good film, directed by a very fine Argentinean director named Hugo Fregonese who, amazingly enough, gave up on Hollywood after that film and went back to Argentina. No one's ever seen him since! I remember how desperate he was about the cutting; he was an absolute perfectionist and wanted a certain cut in one scene. It's funny they do it today all the time, it's called a French cut, where the sound effects or music are cut before the scene itself cuts to the next scene. That is, you hear a laugh, but it's the laugh that's going to occur in the next scene. Hugo wanted that, and I remember the editor fighting him on that. Hugo said "no no! I want it to be six frames up from the end of the cut!" He wanted the cut to be actually six frames! He did a couple of pictures here that had marvelous credits, but he didn't like he atmosphere and just went home.

Q: You mentioned that a horror film would call for a particular type of scoring requirement. What type of music did the Westerns need?

Dunlap: That's quite a different atmosphere, of course, where you don't need that kind of bizarre or odd sound that goes with a monster picture. Usually, like the Joel McRae picture, they had a lot of horse run-bys or chases, that sort of thing, and that's rather more pleasant and interesting to do, musically. I haven't any idea what the score was like I don't recall any of the melodies or anything. As you can see, I've written so much music, it's impossible to recall them all in detail. I did 180 films on my own, but I also worked on a lot of other films with other people, and then I did over 300 television shows. For instance, I worked, anonymously, on a re-write of a John Wayne picture called HONDO [1953; composed by Hugo Friedhofer]. That was a very big film and a marvelous experience with the Warner Bros, orchestra. These men, like the Fox orchestra, were superb musicians and they developed a great ability to sight-read. In fact, I did a picture called COMBAT SQUAD [1953] with the Fox orchestra. We came in with the score for this picture at about 10:00 in the morning, and they had another film to do at 1:00, so they did the whole score in the morning before their other picture. Some of the cues we didn't ever rehearse!

Q: What exactly were you called in to do on HONDO, in terms of rewriting?

Dunlap: I rewrote some of Hugo Friedhofer's material and re-orchestrated some of it, which was like asking someone to rewrite Beethoven! Hugo was a very great master, and it was difficult to keep up with him. He had been an orchestrator for 20 years, for all the big composers at Warner Bros., men like Max Steiner, and then he branched out as a composer. He was a very marvelous composer and one of the greatest orchestrators. I worked with Hugo on a couple of pictures, but principally on HONDO. Strangely enough, my name doesn't appear anywhere on this film or in the records or anything!

Q: While many of the low budget films you scores, especially Westerns and horror pictures, seemed to call for traditional types of film scoring. What did you try to do to invest a something routine production with music of value?

Dunlap: I did try, yes. I know that musicians in general seem to agree that I tried. What is your impression? Did they seem to have any character apart from the unusual?

Q: Absolutely. Many of the scores I've asked about really have stood out to me. I was particularly struck with DESTINATION INNER SPACE, LOST CONTINENT, TEENAGE WEREWOLF...

Dunlap: I'm very grateful to hear that, because I definitely tried to give them something unique. For one thing, my background was quite a bit different from the usual arranger-composer. I had studied with marvelous teachers and I had a rather extensive knowledge of the classical repertoire. Some of these men who write big film scores were musical ignoramuses I can think of a couple of guys who, if you asked them about the Prokofiev C Major Piano Concerto they would never have heard of it. They wouldn't know what you were talking about.

Q: Ho would you describe the music you've written for television?

Dunlap: I had to stay within certain limits. You can't avant-garde on television. I did GUNSMOKE episodes and I did LEAVE IT TO BEAVER, which both had very straightforward and prosaic music.

Q: You stopped scoring films in the late 1960s. What led to this?

Dunlap: I'm not quite certain! You know how Hollywood is, there have been some great stars who've made fabulous pictures and then just didn't ever work again. In my case, it was something like that. Some of my friends, the composers my age, also don't write. Harry Sukman, for instance, he's a very fine composer [GENESIS II, SALEM'S LOT, AROUND THE WORLD UNDER THE SEA], and I must write more than he does nowadays! And what about my favorite, David Raksin, one of the great American composers? His music for THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL is a fabulous score with one of the best film tunes ever written. FORCE OF EVIL was a masterpiece, one of the best scores ever written, full of dynamic and very modern sounds. I've always felt that Raksin was the spiritual inheritor of Gershwyn one hears it just superficially, but there's something very Gershwynesque about his music, and therefore very beautiful.

But we've somehow passed out of fashion and new composers have come in. Some of them are not really composers they fit into this thing where the producer does not want the music to come in and out, he wants it to be like wallpaper, and they got into lot of the electronic stuff. Some of it was very effective, like in MIDNIGHT EXPRESS [Giorgio Moroder]. I don't think you can really call Giorgio Moroder a composer in the sense that David Raksin is a trained composer, but that score was extremely effective for that picture. It's interesting that he hasn't been able to duplicate it. But mostly these are what I cal sound effects scores.

Q: What are your current [1983] musical activities?

Dunlap: I've returned, sort of, to the things I started out with, that is, trying to write so-called serious music. In the last couple of years I've written an opera, I've written a piano concerto, and a lot of things that I've not been able to get performed. One thing is, you suffer from the illness of being "a film composer." Especially in Europe, if you say "I'm the composer of I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF" they all seem to fall back from you, as if you were a musical embodiment of the werewolf! They look down on film music in general, and it's so amazing to discover people here who appreciate it.

Q: Are there any other comments or recollections you'd care to share concerning your career?

Dunlap: I must say I was very grateful to have been able to write a helluva lot of music and to learn a great deal about my trade, and I hope to utilize that knowledge now and write something that I hope will be a little more significant. There's something about a film score, it really doesn't exist, except in a very few cases, without the film. You only have a few Prokofieffs who write the score to ALEXANDER NEVSKY or a couple of Copland scores that were recorded separately, or WATERFRONT by Leonard Bernstein, but once you get beyond that do you know of any that you could mention?

Q: The main phenomenon in orchestral film music these days is all about STAR WARS and the like.

Dunlap: That's right. That's the biggest success of all, isn't it?

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Former editor/publisher of CinemaScore magazine, Randall Larson was for many years senior editor for Soundtrack Magazine and a film music columnist for Cinefantastique magazine. He is the author of Musique Fantastique: A Survey of Film Music in the Fantastic Cinema (Scarecrow, 1984) and Music from the House of Hammer (Scarecrow, 1995). In addition to Soundtrax and Music News for Cinescape.com, Randall reviews soundtracks Music from the Movies, writes for Film Music Magazine, and in many other fields.

Recommended Soundtrack sources:

www.buysoundtrax.com
www.intrada.com
www.screenarchives.com
www.footlight.com
www.arksquare.com/index_main.html (Japan)
www.intermezzomedia.com/ (Italy)
www.moviegrooves.com
www.moviemusic.com

For questions or comments, contact the author at Soundtrax@cinescape.com