Mr Magpie

(on Hollywood and Film Music and Jóhann Jóhannsson and Me, or, why you might reconsider a career in [Hollywood] film music.)

This is a long one, I’m afraid. If you want a quick-and-dirty rundown on the ‘why you should reconsider a career in Hollywood film music’ side of things you can jump here.¹ I have used endnotes throughout this piece in order to make it a more concise read.

“Midway upon the journey of our life
    I found myself within a forest dark,
    For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”
    – Dante, Inferno, Canto I²

When I was nineteen, I decided to become a film composer. This was not a reach towards a long-nurtured dream but instead a leap for purpose, direction, and hoped-for protection against forces that have felt always slightly out of my control. In a life composed so much of shifting moods and fragmentary identities it was a relief to feel as though I had found, somewhere out there in the dim future, the shade of the person I needed to be. A road had opened before me, at the end of which he waited, and all that was required of me was that I keep walking: no matter the danger, or the cost, what I might need to leave behind or what I might see, forgoing all misgivings or second thoughts. I would even have a guide: the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, whose work-especially his scores, for films like Arrival (probably still my favorite film, if I had to choose) and Sicario-had changed my life. His music and his too-young death moved me, onwards, no longer searching but following, certain of what I wanted, of everything I was willing to lose. I was, of course, utterly wrong. But as the song goes, everybody’s gotta learn some time. I’m just glad I changed my mind before mine.

I am not a film composer. Thankfully. I am lost, still, but differently, consciously and gratefully so,
free from the temptation of that one-way road through the dark woods and happy-genuinely, for the first time in almost as long as I can remember, happy-to be cutting, in haphazard and jigsaw fashion, my own. Every bit of hard-won joy I feel in doing this slow, arduous, and uncertain work is an embodiment of what I could have lost. I only know this because, for a little while, I took that road. While I don’t regret it, I feel some obligation to offer a word or two (or a few thousand) of caution to any would-be travelers. I can give no advice, only a story. It starts, more or less, on a plane flying across the country. Scott Hutchinson is singing, pleading: “Los Angeles, Be Kind“. I was going somewhere-somewhere new. I was going there to be someone-someone new.

I worked as an assistant for a very successful Hollywood film composer for about six months, mostly during summer breaks from university. The first summer I lived in a room, which they very generously offered to me, located near their studio in a sleepy beach town in L.A. Sometimes groups of birders gathered in the parking lot across the street, peering into the palm trees. One afternoon I heard pops and looked out of the window to see people running out of the lot; later, a shirtless man with blood running down his right side, sitting in cuffs on the sidewalk. Two people were wounded; no one died.

The next summer I rented a room for $1,300 a month (inclusive of the dirty wall-to-wall carpet, the window with its broken blinds and only semi-functional lock, and a solitary dresser) in an apartment with three roommates and three cats. The leasing corporation was so incompetent and so insistent on their need for all of my banking and social security information that eventually I just gave up and moved in without signing a lease, paying my roommates rent in cash. The neighborhood was mostly so quiet it felt deserted. Occasionally the college kids across the street threw parties which I could hear, faintly, but couldn’t see. I did not witness any shootings. Most days I spent ten to twelve hours, or more, in my little outbuilding workspace at the studio and returned to my room only to sleep, shower, and change my clothes. Sometimes my employers would offer me breakfast or lunch, and sometimes they wouldn’t, so I took to eating at the studio: mostly oatmeal and rice and beans. I lacked the energy to cook much else.

Sometimes I would sit on the beach near the studio for a little while while the sun set, people-watching. Occasionally, in the June gloom of the early mornings, I’d swim, setting my shoes and shirt down on the sand somewhere between the lifeguard tower and the sleeping setups of the unhoused people who survived by spending their nights on the beach. They were there every time I went, except in the week or so after each ‘beach cleaning’ carried out by LA Public Works.

One morning, flipped by a wave, I lost the necklace I had worn on and off since childhood: a small brass coin with a raised phoenix on one side and an owl on the other. I combed the beach several times looking for it. I never found it.

Eventually I started forcing myself to go out for Sunday breakfast at an overpriced little cafe where one of the counter guys knew me by sight and would make small talk while he took my order. Most weeks that would be the only time I socialized outside of the studio, unless I picked up food from the local Mexican place for dinner. In that case it would be one of two. I felt comforted there, surrounded by retirees reading the newspaper and the smell of coffee and pancakes, the warm glow of the worn tables.

Oh Los Angeles, be kind.

All this is to say that I was lonely and lost in Los Angeles, much as I had been in places that were not Los Angeles. Loneliness had made itself at home long ago, in a hole worn away with inexorable patience deep in the foundations of my self. I started making music, I think, out of a necessity that became manifest at the moment I realized, on some subconscious level, that loneliness would not just go away. It’s like rust: it never sleeps, and what it has eaten can’t be saved. The growing space, like a cavity in a tooth, began to ache. It hurt-it hurt like hell-but it was a gift. That space begged to be filled, and of all the possible ways-food, drink, drugs, sex, art-art alone seemed to offer the hope of a future, of permanence, some life beyond the moment-to-moment discomfort of sensory experience. So I made things to fill the space. Sometimes I even thought they were beautiful. I could never create enough to heal, but it helped.

Lostness was a gift too. Even as it foreordained the demise of almost every connection I made with people and places, it afforded me the freedom to be unattached, to wander in search of disparate pieces of art and experience that I could use, in a different way, to fill the space. Lostness also allowed me to run: to evade my self by propelling my physical body away. Whenever I moved to a new place, the old having grown heavy with history, I would enjoy a short, blissful period of lightness while my self struggled to catch up. While, like the physical act (which, not coincidentally, I also did a lot of around this time) running will eventually break you down it can offer, for a while, a sense of freedom.

Of course I had no idea, at the time, that loneliness and lostness were gifts: I thought they were killing me. I wanted them gone, and L.A. was where I planned to make my stand. I would finally find community there, and in working in film I would surely be writing so much music that the space could be filled, patched, and sealed once and for all. No more loneliness. I would move there, permanently, and finally commit to calling a place home. No more lostness. If all else failed, I would hide away and hole up in the studio where neither could find me. I would make it work because I needed it to work: failure was not an option. And yet.

Aware of the antipodal influence of lostness on my life, I nevertheless failed to realize that loneliness too played to some extent a practical, positive role in my life. Even as it shielded me somewhat from the agonies of feeling and the emotional damage people inevitably do to one another, it also caused me quiet, private pain which I was forced to tend to as one would an open wound. This taught me, slowly, how to care-for myself, for friends, and for family-and began to assuage the private guilt I felt about my presence in their lives. Eventually I started to understand that I needed to maintain some semblance of connection, of presence, of awareness of my own emotional gravity so that I wouldn’t float away altogether. So that I wouldn’t disappear.

In Los Angeles, the options for keeping my loneliness in check were extremely limited. I knew no one except my employer, and I wasn’t writing any music: I didn’t have time. Loneliness, though a constant companion, has no sense of loyalty. As soon as it began to starve it curled inwards, eating away at me. I could tell it was happening, I sensed the lack, but I didn’t really care. When loneliness takes over feelings are the first to go, and quickly; the tolls on the body and soul, however, play out in slow motion. I think about those rare people with congenital analgesia-the inability to feel pain-and the shock they must feel on waking, near dead and in the hospital, with broken bones they didn’t notice, or a burst appendix they didn’t feel. The things you might do, feeling nothing; the things you may be willing or able to do only because you feel nothing; suffering, all at once, the consequences.

I reasoned that all was going to plan: I was finally going somewhere, I had somehow found gainful employment as an artist, I would be working with and for good, kind people, I was-I almost convinced myself-living out my dreams. Somehow I had stumbled-like Dante, also somewhat inexplicably and unintentionally-out of the dark woods and onto a road. I had found a path I needn’t cut myself: I could forgo the arduousness and uncertainty of exploration and just run, as fast as my legs would carry me. Also, I could finally see: torches had been lit by those who’d gone ahead. It was a little too good to be true. It was also a little too good to refuse.

As soon as I stepped off the plane I could sense that something was missing. The part of me possessed of patience, consciousness, and enough love and care to spend all that time tending to and trying to understand the thing that could kill it, had paused. It lingered on the threshold, unwilling to go on. Meanwhile the rest of me-my mind, the body to which it was enchained-was growing hollow and hungry. It burned, yearning to run, certain that somewhere along the road it could find another self to host: one that wasn’t so burdensome, so lonely, so hesitant and weak.

Each incomplete without the other and neither willing to admit defeat, they parted ways. My self, paralyzed, laid where the body had left it; my body, a sleepwalker, was now free but unfeeling. In a moment’s hesitation:
So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward,
Turn itself back to re-behold the pass
Which never yet a living person left.
– Canto I

I didn’t know where the road would take me, only that it would be somewhere far from my self. So I walked on. I went to work.

And I was good at it. I could figure out most of the tasks in the studio with which I was entrusted fast enough to appear competent, and I had a knack for knowing when to pitch in with my helpful little opinion, when to sit down and shut up, and when to avoid the studio altogether. I did a bit of everything: I took notes in spotting sessions and meetings, I programmed synths and designed sounds, I conformed old cues to new picture, I took old and unused cues and ripped them apart to use on new and totally unrelated projects, I chopped up old material to sample and created new material to sample, I prepared Pro Tools sessions and checked scores for orchestral sessions, I did basic recording and engineering work, I fixed the wifi and failed to fix the AC, I organized the machine room and picked up in the live room, I helped to walk the dogs, I took broken gear to the shop, I kept the studio fridge stocked, and yes, sometimes I made coffee.

I progressed quite quickly to underwriting some cues, mostly the textural, drone-y ones nobody who’s been writing film music for thirty-five years particularly wants to do. Sometimes I’d get a ‘well done’, print the stems and move on, and sometimes I’d sit and watch my cue get picked apart, the composer rearranging and editing it at will. I was happy to watch my music get destroyed; mostly I felt their changes were warranted improvements, and I was learning. Sometimes a cue I wrote would just get tossed altogether; I didn’t mind. None of it was really mine anyway.

I feared the other assistants. Not because they were mean (they were, despite usually being a bit socially-and I don’t know how else to put this-‘off’, almost unfailingly nice) or because they represented competition, but because they were all at least ten years my senior. Ten years is a very long time when you’re twenty, and I was beginning to realize that the road onto which I had stumbled was not linear and in fact had the potential to telescope endlessly into purgatory. It is quite normal, in film music, to still be an understudy or assistant in your thirties. It is also quite normal to work for twenty plus years as a composer before achieving any kind of major ‘success’ (understand that the metric we are using for success is the budget and/or viewership of a film or series, and not its quality.)

This was not a pleasant revelation. I was sure that I would be, in the literal sense of the word, an exception, but so is everyone, until they aren’t. I needed to find a reason that I was different, some reassurance that I would not ‘fail’ in the same way (understand that the metric we are using for failure is extremely judgemental and absurd.) So I looked for one. I found that there were two kinds of assistants: the ones who were, like me, killing themselves working around the clock (usually people from the East Coast or elsewhere, i.e. not L.A.), and the ones who maintained some semblance of a ‘work-life balance’ (often from L.A.). The former kind showed up to the studio by seven or eight a.m. and left when the day was done, sometimes staying after to work on their own projects. The latter showed up to the studio when they were asked to be there, arriving more or less on time, and left when their work was done. They went on bike rides and attended concerts or gallery shows, and sometimes even managed to tan. (It may be worth mentioning here that the composer I worked for once told me that they considered the explicitly stated desire to maintain said work-life balance a key factor in determining who not to hire.) I felt, I’m ashamed to say, a certain disdain for and sense of superiority over the latter class of assistants. I knew that they wouldn’t succeed in Hollywood (and they didn’t, at least not as assistants) but I would, because I would outwork them. There was my reason. And I did. I felt genuine pride at being the last one out of the studio every day (night), and genuine anguish when for some reason I wasn’t. If I finished my work early I would invent tasks for myself, waiting everyone out and getting quietly annoyed when they seemed to dally. I would often delay eating dinner until everyone else left, pangs of hunger mixing with pangs of insecurity.

These kinds of what I can now admit to myself were power games were, of course, ridiculous. I had no power to play with. The composer’s studio is a fiefdom in the hinterlands of a vast empire, beholden to an inaccessible king (the head of production at whichever studio is funding the film). Assistants are people-at-arms, plucked from the serf class and in thrall to their lord or lady. Frankly, though, while the gulf in creative agency between assistant and composer is huge in the studio, it looks less and less significant the further up you get in the Hollywood hierarchy. It goes something like this:

As an assistant, you must be willing to sacrifice a great deal of your life, vitality, and creative work for the sake of someone else’s vision, itself beholden to someone else’s vision, which is inevitably beholden to some other someone’s vision itself beholden to the whimsy of some (almost inevitably white, male, and deeply egotistical) producer/director/executive whom you will probably never meet.

As a composer, you must be willing to sacrifice a great deal of your life, vitality, and creative work for the sake of someone else’s vision, itself beholden to someone else’s vision, which is inevitably beholden to some other someone’s vision itself beholden to the whimsy of some (almost inevitably white, male, and deeply egotistical) producer/director/executive whom you will, unfortunately, have to meet with all the time. You will probably have to do battle with them over every creative decision. You will probably also have to do battle with them over many decisions which, if we’re going to use the word honestly, cannot be considered ‘creative’ as such. But at least you have an assistant(s) who will listen when you complain about the above and then do what you ask them to do. Probably.

In this environment, the inherent stress amplified by the claustrophobia and chaos of a small studio with little space in which to hide and little margin for error, I became increasingly neurotic in my attempts to maintain my own sense of agency and control. When the composer left town for a week, leaving me more or less in charge of holding down the fort, I started to feel like the creature in Kafka’s story The Burrow: constantly checking that the doors were locked, that the dogs hadn’t run off, that the computers were running, that the AC in the machine room was running, that I hadn’t missed an important email, that the other assistant hadn’t screwed anything up, etc. It is literally impossible to track everything going on in such a complex and chaotically organized environment, and a bit terrifying: restarting the computer with the power button, rather than in the Apple menu, can kill it and lead to the loss of years of work; backing up incorrectly can wipe out an entire score; and there’s always a slight chance that the AC in the machine room will just turn itself off, simultaneously melting down most of the studio computers if no one notices in time. I was so anxious something would go wrong that I found it difficult to leave. When the lock on the studio door broke I slept over on the couch, afraid someone would break in. In The Burrow the creature, terrified of being killed by unknown, possibly imaginary, predators, never leaves its den. It is clearly insane, but at least able to justify its paranoia as a means of self-protection. Not I.

I think at this point I have probably succeeded in making the work sound utterly miserable. It was not. I had the incredible luck of working for people who genuinely cared about my wellbeing and tried, in their uniquely scattered way, to look out for me. They were generous with their knowledge, valued my work, and trusted me. That meant a lot to me and, for a time, I really felt like I was part of something. My fondest memories are made of mornings: the quiet ones, when things weren’t hectic, the gauzy grey light filtered through the fog, faintly the sound of the sea trickling in through the patio doors. We would have meetings then, make plans fated for collapse by mid-day. There was a ritual to it: coffee and the communal parceling out of tasks, receiving mine like a gift, the weight of it, promising purpose.

Another day of sun.

Hollywood is often painted as the place where dreams come true. While being a film composer had never been a dream of mine, once it became a real future possibility and a defining aspect of my identity it started, in a strange metamorphosis, to become one. Reality and unreality bloomed at the same time, one in my very limited physical reality and the other in the confined hothouse of my mind. I began to view my life both through the heavily gelled, wide-angle lens of my dream at the same time as I was seeing it, unfiltered, through my eyes. Many of us live with this double vision to some extent, which is a good thing – as long as there’s a balance. When one view begins to obfuscate the other, you begin to have problems.

T.S. Eliot writes in Burnt Norton that “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” As someone who tends to live too much in reality, I agree. I was glad to have a dream I could escape into; to some extent it made me a happier person. I think, though, that neither is it healthy to let yourself slip too far into dreams. Artistic people have the tendency to do so, sometimes to excess, and are often excused (and often excuse themselves) to varying extents from what we might call ‘behavioral and societal norms’. Fine, except that some people feel this also excuses them to varying extents from what we might call ‘being a decent human being’. Hollywood and L.A. are full of dreamers of both kinds; on a personal level, I continue to find this challenging.

Just as there are different kinds of dreamers, there are different kinds of dreams. The word is often associated with the future – with what is or may be possible and the pursuit thereof. But a dream can also be an altered experience of the present: “a state of mind marked by abstraction or release from reality.” Dreams can be both magical-a release from the burdens of the body, of agency, control, and the unbearable permanence of choice-and solipsistic; isolating. In a dream you are ultimately alone. Waking, with all its inevitability-to a life from which you cannot wake and in which you are burdened always with choosing not to leave-can be painful.

So wake me up when it’s all over.

Of course dreams, and the sleep that affords them life, come at a cost. I remember being a child, aged nine or so, and watching my mother drift off at the wheel. She woke up about a second later when the car impacted into a grassy ditch beyond the shoulder. The landing was, relatively speaking, soft. She was shocked and furious with herself, shaken by what could have happened. I understood her fear but I didn’t share it. I had been awake, watching the crash happen in real time; it was over so quickly that I hadn’t even had time to be scared. Fear, I realize now, is like loneliness: it lives in the gaps, the spaces where something is missing. A second’s worth of wakefulness, for instance. We were both alive at that moment: in the same car, at the same time. Yet we lived two utterly different seconds.

Hollywood exists in that second. Your experience of the place depends entirely on the extent to which you are awake.

The collective suspension of reality afforded by dreams is what allows Hollywood to function. ‘The collective suspension of reality’ could well describe the shared transcendence that can occur at a great play, film, or concert, and in and of itself is not a bad thing. Beauty can bloom in this collective suspension, and without it most films would never get off the ground. A truly great film is almost impossible to top: the moment your feet leave the ground you are liberated from nearly everything, almost free. It is this moment that Hollywood exists to create and capture, and sell. But gravity always wins, and the hands of the clock weigh little in Wonderland, and the longer you are airborne the greater the impact when you wake up, falling.

Films like Sunset Boulevard, for instance, with their reclusive, desperately delusional ex-stars, don’t spring from nowhere. Norma Desmond’s house on Sunset-with its neglected exterior, vintage cars, and darkened sitting room, in which framed glamour shots of young Norma encrust the shelves, tables, and walls like so many stalagmites in a sealed cave-is a relic of the present, and an apt representation of the way in which those who become the most fantastically successful in Hollywood often shield themselves in their gated compounds high up in the Hills. In an ideal career you could spend your life living the dream and never have to come down, remaining out of sight and out of touch but never out of mind. Norma tries-she entombs herself so as to remain immortal in her own eyes and shielded from those of others-but she fails. Ultimately, it is easier for her to commit murder than awake to the fact that Hollywood has moved on without her. As she descends the banister in the final scene, drifting through a surreal assemblage of human statues, her eyes are wide open and unblinking: a sleepwalker.

The ironic cynicism implicit in making a Hollywood movie about how corrupting Hollywood can be is the most characteristically Hollywood thing imaginable and an attitude which pervades every stratum of its society. I think of Nathanael West, one of a number of noted writers who migrated to Hollywood in the 30s. Like many of them, though fixated on the dream and mythos of the West (literally – born Nathan Weinstein, he legally renamed himself, sacrificing his identity in order to forge a new one that would be accepted in Hollywood) as well as the riches and fame they promised, he slept with one eye open, never fully buying in nor forgetting the dangers of the place. Perhaps he never bought in because his scripts never brought him much success: despite his talent, he scraped along for years in the dregs of Hollywood writing B-movies (not unlike Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard), an experience that underpinned his novel The Day of the Locust.

The book follows a talented painter from the East Coast who struggles in Hollywood, getting by painting backdrops and sets for studio films, as he drifts through a series of strange and fairly horrible human interactions on the way to the bloody ending, a riot caused by the beating of a child at a film premier. The titular locusts are the poor and hangers-on of Hollywood, the oddballs and failures, the rock bottom of a stratified society. They also represent, in a way, the broader cinema-going public: the fans. Satirized as insects-incapable of agency and fatally drawn to the bright light of the projector-they are, in Norma Desmond’s words, “those wonderful people out there in the dark.” Many of West’s locusts are piteous, unsympathetic, and in some cases downright awful people. But they are people and, ultimately, they pay the bills. West’s scorn is, I think, reserved most of all for the studio system and those who construct and enable it: the gods who not only would keep the locusts in the pit but also built it in the first place. He depicts Hollywood’s underlings as he believes them to be imagined by those perched so high they rarely have to see them.³

The dreams of the few depend upon the nightmares of many: Hollywood is a zero sum game in which few people end up winners. The rules are absurd, illogical, and exploitative, and would make no sense anywhere else: dream logic, in other words. You have to accept the artifice of it all if you really want to play, and it is easier to buy in fully than halfway. The cognitive dissonance that results from trying to square the lives that some people lead in Hollywood with the front page of the newspaper on any given day is genuinely agonizing if you stop and think about it for too long. The pain is doubled if you come from almost anywhere else in the country or world and/or were not raised in thrall to Hollywood’s cultural exports.

Unreal city that it is, unreality is its highest virtue and escapism the default way of life. Those who venture the furthest from what many people would call reality achieve celebrity, mythical status, and proportionate levels of power. The social fabric depends on an implicit, collective acceptance of the unreality of the place. Reality is not something you want to be reminded of when you have succeeded in reaching so far a remove from it, even if-in reality-you haven’t reached much of a remove at all. The fear of the ‘locusts’ is the fear that people with everything to lose feel of people who have nothing. It is the vertigo of Heaven’s denizens as they peer down past purgatory-those endless highways choked with those stuck halfway, still hopeful they can find a way in (see La La Land)⁴-and into the hell inhabited by those totally discarded by Hollywood but nevertheless invested in it, unable to let go or return from whence they came, tied in a death spiral.⁵ But for god’s grace you go. And we do remember who the gods are, right?

Hollywood is a dark room with bright lights and beautiful people on a screen. Each film, each life is someone else’s dream, actualized by the dreams, and/or feverishly hard labor, of many other someones. Everyone lucky enough to make it into that room will find they have two options: to sit there silently and enjoy the film, or leave. As uncomfortable or claustrophobic as you may feel, sitting out there in the windowless dark, you understand its necessity: everything depends on that mysterious darkness, the power of illusion, the way the theater deprives-or relieves-you of your senses. In that room, the fabric of the screen is the fabric of reality, and the dreams flickering upon it are real. They have to be, or everything will have been in vain.

In a funny bit of irony, I discovered, digging through old papers from college, a paper I had written on The Day of the Locust years before I ever set foot in Hollywood. It starts like this:

“About two thirds of the way through Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust, Tod Hackett is wandering through the wasteland-like lots and semi-deserted sets of the studio plant in which his office is located when he stumbles upon what he calls “the final dumping ground.” He has found the place where dreams go to die. This scene is in some ways the novel’s thesis. For all of the characters’ striving towards their wild and fearful dreams, those same far-away idylls which they so desperately chase will all end up in the dump. As the narrator puts it, “there wasn’t a dream afloat somewhere which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up [in] it.” The novel seems to also suggest that, by extension, every character will themselves end up in some liminal, human version of this dream dump, for who among them–Faye, Tod, Homer, even Miguel or Earle–is not depicted as fully in thrall to their own, often basest, desires and dreams? What would we call such a place? It seems to me that we need not search far and wide for a name, because The Day of the Locust seems to further suggest that maybe all of the members of the novel’s cast are already there, in that dream dump, and that it is called Hollywood.”

To L.A. then I came, clutching my own little dream like Linus with his blanket, walking right into it. Thinking, like everyone else, that I was special. Or maybe, in hindsight, not thinking at all.

Dreaming.

And then I woke up.

I stirred when I tagged along to press events: with the conspicuously young and beautiful attendees, successful or successfully pretending to be and starting every sentence with I, where the art being promoted is often mediocre and everyone claps and everything is wonderful, beautiful, and fantastic.

I stirred when I went to art school and found out that people who willingly, wholeheartedly, and publicly pursue absurd, ridiculous paths in art that virtually guarantee that they will both make no money and be rejected by polite society actually exist. I also found that I did not feel disdain for these ridiculous people but instead found them brilliant and brave, much more than me with my hourly wage and anonymity, holed up in the cocoon of the studio.

I really stirred when a major television series I had poured myself into for months, doing quite a bit of underwriting and temp copy and loads of programming and admin work on, came out and I found I had received no official credit, anywhere. The possibility of my even receiving cue sheet credit-meaning royalties and registration with a PRO, a big deal for an assistant-had even been floated, at least while the work was being done, but apparently it can be hard to get a studio to approve that in television, or to add a name and title to a list somewhere. I am no longer angry about this, and I have directed all lingering resentment towards a company whose five-letter name rhymes with Snapple. At the time, though, it was an unpleasant surprise.

Still, it took something more than the garish pageantry, a burgeoning awareness that other artistic lives were possible, and going uncredited to jolt me out of the Hollywood dream. That something more was a pleasant conversation.

I sat down with a teacher to discuss some minor scheduling items, and, having addressed those, he asked about me: my music, my work, etc. I told him a bit about my trajectory and journey. Naturally, we got to talking about film music, and my teacher, who I’ll call ‘A’, told me a few things.

He had recently finished doing some of the string arrangements for a massive film and discovered, only after the film came out, that he had not received proper credit. In his case this also meant that he was owed a substantial check which the company (Warner Brothers) tried to avoid writing (they did pay, eventually). He had also been working on an album with a longtime friend who had started out as a recording artist and then switched mainly to scoring films. He told me that, while he had enjoyed the experience and the music, he could tell that their work was being stunted, at least structurally, by the pressure of years spent working in film. The pieces were shorter, and didn’t develop: they sounded like cues.

He asked me about the film music I was interested in, and I mentioned Jóhann Jóhannsson. As it turned out, they had known each other and worked together. ‘A’ had played on some of his scores, they had mutual friends, and were both involved in the Icelandic music scene. They weren’t close, exactly, but they were friendly. He talked about Jóhann’s career: how it had suddenly exploded, throwing him from European art cinema and into Hollywood, the way the gigs kept coming and he kept taking them, partially, I assume, because he wanted to and partially because of the pervasive (and not unfounded) fear that if you say no one too many times in this industry you will never be asked again. I had seen first hand the way that one job can roll into the next: things pile up, overlap, make standing waves that leave you either drowning in work or stranded in the doldrums, waiting. All it takes is a film’s schedule being pushed back to go from consistent twelve-hour days to nothing. And doing nothing after doing everything all at once is a tough adjustment.

All of this takes a toll and the body keeps the score. According to ‘A’, the last time he saw Jóhann he was pale and shaking, clearly unwell. They had a friendly conversation about a studio session ‘A’ had done and never been paid for; Jóhann apologized and promised that a check was on the way. It never came. Probably because, not so long after that, he passed away.

While my first encounter with Jóhannsson’s work was in a darkened theater at around the age of twelve, I only started to understand his influence on me when I was asked, in applications to master’s programs, to write about my journey to film scoring. In those essays, I wrote that his music was a sort of predeterministic point of artistic origin for me, painting his work as a kind of polestar. I was not lying, nor was I telling the whole truth. In fact, the artistic influence of his work meant less to me than the emotional influence of the life and death with which they were inextricably intertwined.

His life and death were private affairs, although owing to his renown his passing became something of a public event. The facts are these: at the height of his artistic powers, he died at the age of forty-eight in his Berlin apartment, alone, of heart failure induced by a mixture of flu medication and cocaine. Although his was a sad, lonely, and needless death of despair, I constructed for myself an alternate narrative in which it had been a noble martyrdom for art. His life became a saint’s life, one which I could follow to the end.

There were many similarities in our journeys: the early musical education and its abandonment for literature, which we both studied at university. The drifting out of the academic world and back into music on our own terms. Our shared inability to conceive of music as ‘pure’, thinking instead in narratives, images, stories; the way this lead us both into film music. That despite coming from far away places we both ended up in Hollywood, though of course at very different levels and despite the fact that he never physically moved there. The way in which neither of our seemingly similar outward personalities-quiet, serious, and introspective-were particularly suited to the place. That we both seemed to be running from something.⁶

Perhaps he too was tempted by the idea of leaving himself behind. He kept on along that narrowing road, his star burning ever brighter, until, at some indefinite moment, he just winked out of sight. Disappeared. Whatever was eating at him-whatever his internal struggles had been-disappeared along with him, transmuted into his beautiful, melancholic music; his body ceased, in a tragic metamorphosis, to be the one of flesh and bone found alone by the Polizei and became instead the body of work he had sacrificed himself to make: a body millions of people hold close. Like many artists he created his own epitaph.

Some believe that to follow the life of a saint is to ensure salvation or life everlasting. Tempting, of course, but I think the real draw is the hope of relief from the burden of choice and the fear of living the wrong life: a relief not dissimilar to that offered by dreams, and equally unreal. Ultimately saints’ lives are stories, and their storied deaths are no different from those we have seen unfold untold times on the silver screen. Death-and our urge to know and understand it in advance of its arrival-is the driving force behind all great art.⁷ It will never cease to be, because we will never know and we will never understand and while we are aware of this we will never be able to accept it. And so we need stories. Stories-mere stories-of deaths we have not seen, deaths either invented or remote and therefore already at a remove from us, removed further by the screen or the page or the ceremony, are all we can know. It is impossible to understand those deaths to which we bear witness. The moment when someone passes from this world into death is asymptotic and unknowable. Two utterly different seconds. One is eternity.

I had made Jóhann Jóhannsson’s life and death into a story. It was a story that reduced life to a mere prelude to that infinite moment; a script: to be followed, closely, trusting, until the curtains swing closed. When you are young, lost, and wishing dearly to be someone else, heroic narratives about lives hewn close to death and emboldened by its imminence can be appealing. Death becomes true north, a profound and symbolic destination that can be navigated towards, a marked end to the wasted world and its ceaseless spinning. It seemed to me that if I knew where I had to end I would know where I had to begin and so discover, in a backwards and impersonal way, how best to live. This logic was absurd, of course, and I knew it, but its crookedness seemed fitting for a path out of a crooked maze, and so I decided my life would be a short one, and that I would work my way at a breakneck pace to the grave. This story existed, of course, entirely in my head. But that does not mean it was not real.

Real as it may have been to me, my story had nothing to do with reality. In order to work, it required that Jóhannsson be reduced to a two dimensional character: not a person but an abstraction; light playing on a screen. This was not only unfair and problematic but also impossible to reconcile with the physical fact of sitting in front of ‘A’, a person for whom Jóhann had once been just as physically real as I was. Here was living proof that he had been, had once taken up space in this world, had lived. The projection in my head of him as my Virgilian guide vanished. Ultimately the choice between reality and abstraction, between being guided towards death or going it alone in life, was anticlimactic. I chose life.

I was now without a guide but still on the road and, as became immediately clear to me, without any reason for or desire in staying there. Suddenly I felt more lost and in more danger than I had ever been in the woods. The road stretched into eternity, its dangers were real and present, and I no longer had the shield of self-sacrifice for protection. I started to see everything I had been willfully ignoring; in other words, what happens offscreen. I started to see myself more clearly, too-the image of a man I had never met and whose life I would never lead no longer obfuscating my vision-and realized that I lacked both the selfish ruthlessness and the specific kind of churning, industrial artistry which Hollywood to some extent requires. I saw that there I would be doomed to a solitary life, my most deeply rooted and self-destructive tendencies not only amplified but actively encouraged in aid of the work. I saw my loneliness for what it was, finally, and embraced it, but I could see that in Hollywood it would fester and thrive, growing larger and hungrier, while the sunlight and the sea kept me healthy enough to support it, until it consumed me altogether.

Already vulnerable to myself, I saw that, as an impressionable person who tries to see the best in people and has a hard time saying no, I would also be vulnerable to others. I recalled the moments when Dante is nearly set upon by fiends in the Inferno, only for Virgil to save him by assuring them that he is living, merely passing through, and must not be harmed. No one would or could protect me in that way, not forever. In an environment where everyone is fixated on their own survival everyone is potential prey. You must either allow yourself to become to some extent a predator yourself, accept that you can just about hope to get by as a scavenger, or settle for a lifetime of being prey.

So:
“are you hungry? are you sick? are you begging for a break? are you sweet? are you fresh? are you strung up by the wrists? we want the young blood / are you fracturing? are you torn at the seams? would you do anything?” ⁸

I used to think that my answer-to all of the above, especially the last-was yes, but now I know. No.

Since I began attending art school in L.A. I have had the fortune to meet artists of all kinds who have traveled a long way seeking to break into Hollywood. They too came here to be someone. They visit the Stars on the Walk of Fame, see the stars walk past on the street, see the stars on the screen and know that this is what they want to, have to, will be. They understand, as well as any of us in our twenties can, what it means and what it costs to devote your life to something: to achieve greatness in an art form, to acquire real craft, to create something true. What they do not yet know is that this place exacts hidden fees in excess of what most people are aware they are willing to or even capable of paying. Hollywood is not an altar where a god, demanding a sacrifice, asks what you have to give and rewards you if you have given what it already knows you can. It is a phantom tollbooth: you enter through it and, if you are very lucky, may never need exit. At some point most will be thrown back into the world and it is then that the toll, which you have already paid, in part with time, becomes apparent.

So:
What price agency? What price dignity? What price selfhood? What price fame? What price fortune? What price time? What price life?

There are other calculations to make, too, depending on your métier. In my case, what price music? (As I found out, I cannot accept the idea of, as one of my employers put it, ‘music by the pound’.) All of these questions must be asked, not only before you enter Hollywood but also, I have found, before you re-enter life itself after some time away.

As for me:

I cannot accept anything less than complete creative control, at least as far as my own work is concerned. Perhaps this will change-it may well have to, out of necessity-and perhaps not.

I will not be made to debase or embarrass myself or my work, or to place myself or my work in situations where that is a possibility.

I will never again allow myself to sublimate my self and identity into that of another, no matter how much easier it may sometimes seem.

I would not pay one dollar for fame.

I do not want to be rich but I do need enough to get by, and getting by means being able, one way or another, to buy time.

I can accept the loss and waste but not the theft of my time.

What price life? Indeed. I cannot answer this question in the positive, but I will offer one of many answers in the negative:

Art cannot have as its cost life. Art is not a thing that you can will or allow yourself to die for, it is a physical embodiment of what you are willing to live for. It is a life’s work, a practice of devotion. Living itself is an art; ideally, you get a little better at it the more you do it. Ideally, you get to do it for a while. Living life well takes the same kind of hard work and practice and there is always the same inherent risk of failure. As Don Pietro says in Rossellini’s Open City, just before he dies: “It isn’t hard to die a good death. What’s hard is to live a good life.”

“I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
    So full was I of slumber at the moment
    In which I had abandoned the true way.”
    – Inferno, Canto I

Neither can I, but I have tried my best. I don’t know if any of this makes sense; it is dream logic, after all. All I can well repeat is how I exited. As I walked out of ‘A’s office after our conversation, I found that I could see clearly again; the dream was over. The lights had gone on in the theater and I realized that I had been alone in there, all that time. The unreal future on the screen was fading away like all beautiful Hollywood dreams must. All those stars suspended, leaping, reaching for immortality, projected for us against a dark curtain, their light, seen from so far away it seems almost like they are still, falling out of the sky.

I can’t help but return to Arrival, and that line that makes me cry every single time: “If you could see your whole life, from start to finish, would you change things?”

I always thought my answer was no. I don’t think so anymore. I know.

I am happier now, I think, than ever in my life. It is a different happiness than that of a child’s in innocence or a mountaineer’s after a close call because, while I know I have not cheated death-it hovers, omnipresent, more than ever these days-I do feel as though I have cheated a kind of death in life, and that feels like it has to count for something. In saying no to Hollywood I feel I have said yes to everything else. The future exists, now, alive with what I cannot see, and the ghost has lost its hold on me. The gateway to the road that leads to Hollywood is also, of course, the gateway to everywhere and everything else. You only have to turn.

Oh Los Angeles,
“I ain’t saying you treated me unkind
You could’ve done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time.”⁹

Soon I’ll be leaving, without a backwards glance, and I won’t think twice. It’s alright.

“The Guide and I into that hidden road
   Now entered, to return to the bright world;
   And without care of having any rest
We mounted up, he first and I the second,
    Till I beheld through a round aperture
    Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear;
    Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.”
    – Inferno, Canto XXXIV

ENDNOTES

The title of this piece comes from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It is the first line of the text set by Jóhann Jóhannsson in the last piece from his final solo record Orphée, “Orphic Hymn:“. It translates, roughly, to “His soul descends beneath the earth”.

1. Some asides concerning certain aspects of working in commercial music (in Hollywood, specifically: indie film is different but most of these things will still apply, to lesser extremes) that don’t tend to come up in interviews with very successful, public-facing people.
   
   On originality and temp copy:
   Every score I worked on was at some level a temp copy. This means you listen to music written by someone else, taken completely out of context and sourced by a music editor and/or director who may or may not know anything about music (or about what they want), and then figure out based on experience how closely your music should hew to what is already there. This may mean matching the general vibe and tempo of a cue, or you may get a note back on your ambient drone cue asking you to ‘please replicate that bell sound at 1:56’, or, ‘make the music sound like it’s being made by the train’. Or worse. And I quote. In some cases you will need to copy almost literally note for note, but carefully, so no one gets sued. This work is fairly easy and very demoralizing. Often I got the order to copy the temp not because of laziness on behalf of the composer, but because they knew from experience that delivering anything else (read: anything original) would be futile.
   
   On the studio system:
   When I first started working I thought of the film composer’s studio as a Renaissance workshop, where the Great Artist has their stable of understudies who take on the drudge work, hoping that in being there they will either learn enough through osmosis or make enough connections (also through osmosis) to break out, starting studios of their own if they get really lucky. Think Michelangelo, toiling in the studio of Ghirlandaio. By the time I stopped working I realized my metaphor had been completely apt. I also realized I had conveniently forgotten one tiny detail: no one has heard of any of Ghirlandaio’s apprentices except Michelangelo. I for one am not Michelangelo. Most of the young artists in those studios probably went on to work at something else altogether, maybe a vaguely related occupation like sign-painting if they were lucky, and if they stuck it out-working their way up, uncredited, scrabbling over the others-they maybe, finally, with a little luck, got to be the guy who paints the ornamental flora and backgrounds of the fresco, and maybe some of the minor figures in the corners. That is what you can reasonably expect to do as an assistant in the industry if you too are lucky, and talented, and extremely hard-working. The background. I hate to say it, but AI is going to get really good at doing the background.
    
   On receiving credit for your work:
   You might. You might not. It’s going to be a toss-up, depending on the studio and the composer you’re working for and what both of them think about the word ‘fair’. The studio will always win.
   
   On how Hollywood defines success:
   Just getting work is a success. Because of how hard it is to get work, finishing a project-even if the whole thing sucks-is a success. If it paid well, major success. If you get some recognition for it, even more success. ‘Success’ tends to be measured in success in Hollywood – quality isn’t unimportant, but it seemed to me to be important mainly insofar as it pertained to improving one’s odds of attaining ‘success’. Also, group ‘success’ isn’t much of a thing. Twenty names won’t fit on an Oscar. Speaking of which.
   
   On awards (the most highest level of ‘success’):
   The unreal, zero sum games of Hollywood pervade film music just as much as they do anything else. The awards race is not a meritocracy and your odds within it depend as much upon your reputation, power, and likability within the Academy, the amount of weight your film’s studio is willing throw behind it, and whether or not you are willing to invest your own money into advertising for your campaign, as upon the quality of your work. The award will probably go to a darling anyway: your Göranssons, Zimmers, and Williams’.
   
   On film music as an art form:
   First of all, most film scores wither and die very quickly when plucked from the sustaining vine of the film. Only the best will hold weight away from the screen. Scores tend not to work as albums or ‘pure’ music unless the film is really good and people become attached to it, or you take the time to rework your 1’17” cues into proper pieces of music. You need to ask yourself whether you are most interested in and moved by cinema or music. If the answer is definitively ‘music’, you may end up unhappy in this line of work. You are not there to stand out, you are there to support. Your music will be mixed more quietly than you want it to be, actors will be chattering and emoting all over it, and you will probably be repeatedly kneecapped creatively. It is an achievement if your score ends up fulfilling half of what you felt its (musical) potential could have been. You have to be able to accept this. Second of all, while there are some film music fans, basically no one cares. You will not be famous, you will not get rich-rich, and if you are doing your job you will largely be under-appreciated. Despite that, you will be working under a great deal of tension and stress because without you, the film may not work, and everybody knows this, and it worries them greatly. Especially the director. Thirdly, you know what it feels like when the music is really good in a film and your limbic system is firing and your tear ducts are having to work hard because you want to do this, and you want to make other people feel that way. That is a noble and worthwhile goal but you need to understand that that feeling rarely happens when you’re the one making it happen. That’s not to say it can’t, but usually there are too many external stresses and distractions in the way and your focus is on getting the job done competently, not emoting to the film. I think this is a shame, but it is reality.
   
   In short:
   “If you’re in it for the money, there’s none there
   If you’re in it for the truth, well, no one cares
   Power and glory
   Best you’ll get is a story” (Holy Hive, “Story of My Life”)
   
   You will certainly end up with a story. Happy endings are not guaranteed. ↩︎
2. Citations from Dante’s Inferno were taken from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation via Project Gutenberg. ↩︎
3. Long after its initial publication, The Day of the Locust was of course made into a feature film, by Paramount. It flopped. Nathanael West was long dead by then, along with his Hollywood dreams, but perhaps that was for the best: he didn’t have to watch. The film’s promo poster reads: “By train, by car, by bus, they came to Hollywood… in search of a dream.” How’s that for ironic cynicism? ↩︎
4. I oscillate between reading this film as either the most total embodiment of ironic Hollywood cynicism I have ever laid eyes upon or a product of willful, starry-eyed naïveté. It baffles me. I will say no more for fear of persecution. ↩︎
5. I spent a lot of time working in a little garage-cum-studio outside the main studio building and would often hear people walking by, going through the trash and recycling looking for food scraps and cans to exchange while I went through scores-to be recorded by a string orchestra in a beautiful studio in Vienna-looking for errors. The Grammy museum is about a mile from Skid Row. I still can’t make up my mind as to whether L.A’s massive drug and housing crisis is an awfully ironic coincidence or an inevitable, natural consequence, or both; what it definitely is is an unnecessary and appalling societal failure. ↩︎
6. Various rumors and accounts of people claiming to be former associates, or people who know people who worked with him, are tucked away in quiet corners of the internet. They suggest extreme workaholism and sleep deprivation and drug use that stemmed from and enabled both, as well as some kind of horrible accident/trauma and a history of depression that led him to compensate in this way. I don’t know how much of this is true, and I don’t want or need to: knowing would not negate the fact of his passing. ↩︎
7. Morton Feldman writes, in his essay “Lost Times and Future Hopes”, that “Death seems the only metaphor distant enough to truly measure our existence.” Indeed. ↩︎
8. So go the lyrics to the Radiohead song We Suck Young Blood, recorded during a brief stint in Hollywood for the album Hail to the Thief.
   Thom Yorke on the song:
   “Very L.A., as far as I’m concerned. I mean, I think that was the reason we went to L.A., ’cause ‘We Suck Young Blood’ was.. that was our take on Hollywood, really, basically.”
   
   “I mean, I think that’s funny. That track to me is funny. I mean, sort of…”
   
   Yeah. Sort of. It is funny, in its hammed-up way, and it is also real. A fitting satire of the ironic cynicism which pervades Hollywood.
   ↩︎
9. Thank you Bob. ↩︎