THE MUSIC OF DALLAS:
BRUCE BROUGHTON
BRUCE HAROLD BROUGHTON was born on March 8th, 1945, in L.A., California. He has been nominated 23 times by the Academy of TV Sciences and Arts Sciences, and won the EMMY Award 10 times, two of them for the DALLAS´s episodes THE EWING BLUES and THE LETTER. Of all the composers who worked for the Lorimar series, he probably was the one who got the closest to the Western feel which, after all, was the permanent background in the DALLAS melodrama.
Bruce has worked for every medium: TV, movies, computer games and so on. His concert music includes works for orchestra and chamber groups and has taught music and film composition in UCLA and USC. The following interviews and stories are authored by Jeff Bond and published in the magazine FILM SCORE MONTHLY in 1998 and 2000. All the copyrights belong to him and we reproduce the texts with respect and admiration to both of them.
During a recent discussion with composer Bruce Broughton on his LOST IN SPACE score (...), we stumbled upon the topic of his early days toiling as a “cue picker” for the CBS TV network. Things went something like this...
“I started at CBS and my title was Assistant Music Supervisor, which was basically a cue-picker,” Broughton recalled. “We used to select cues for the shows that CBS produced. I worked on things like WILD WILD WEST, HAWAII 5-0, GUNSMOKE, HE AND SHE, old comedies and so forth. And then from that I was able to start writing cues. The first episode I had entirely to myself was HAWAII 5-0, because I had worked on the show as an assistant cue selector. (...) I had done cues for lots of other shows like GUNSMOKE and HAWAII 5-0 and then eventually got to do my own episodes.”
Broughton wrote music for several episodes at CBS while he was a music supervisor, then eventually became manager of the music department. He was in line to be director of music, but by that time had grown tired of his administrative duties and left to freelance purely as a composer.
“The first recording I ever did for a series was for a show called MEN AT LAW, also known as STOREFRONT LAWYERS, that lasted only for a season in 1979 or 1971,” Broughton points out. “I wrote two cues for that, then I did a few cues for HAWAII 5-0”, then I did a partial score for a GUNSMOKE, and over several years I was doing just these little partial cues.” One of Broughton´s fellow composers at that time was Jerrold Immel, who went on to write the theme and many episode scores to DALLAS.
“Jerry was the copyist and I was the music supervisor / manager. Jerry left copying to become a composer; he went freelance before I did. He was the hero on GUNSMOKE for a long time and then followed all those people into DALLAS and HOW THE WEST WAS WON. By the time I left, I started working on those shows as well, because we all knew the same guys.” Broughton´s predecessors in the CBS music department had been people like Jerry Goldsmith, Fred Steiner, Lalo Schifrin and Bernard Herrmann.
One of the shows for which Broughton wrote consistently edgy, suspenseful orchestral scores was Jack Klugman´s medical drama QUINCY, as well as several Quinn Martin productions. Like many veteran TV composers, Broughton suffers the curse of rarely being able to remember what he wrote for so many TV series. “It´s funny, a couple of years ago I was working on something in the afternoon and I turned on the TV just to give my brain a rest,” Broughton remembers. “And there was an episode of BARNABY JONES on. And I thought, “Oh, I did a couple of these.” I think I write exactly two episodes. So I was watching this show and listening to the music and after about five or ten minutes I thought, I think I did this show. But I couldn´t remember, and there was nothing in the music that gave me away because I don´t write like that anymore. And finally I realized, this is my show! So I started listening to it and I thought hey, this is a pretty good score! It was like someone else had done it.”
With his tenure on several western series including GUNSMOKE, HOW THE... and THE BLUE AND THE GRAY, Broughton was fully prepared to do a western feature score when he won the assignment of scoring Lawrence Kasdan´s SILVERADO in 1985. “The only thing I can say about GUNSMOKE is that between HOW THE...” and that- I did a lot of HOW THE...” – and then I did THE BLUE...”, so by the time I got to SILVERADO, it was like, oh, I´ve been there, done that. It wasn´t like, “Oh my God, I´ve never done a western before.” That 19th century stuff I´ve got down.”
Broughton´s TV experience has given him a unique perspective on scoring for both TV and film, and he downplays the idea that standards have dropped in either medium. “It´s a pendulum; it goes back and forth,” he explains. “At the time I was at CBS there were times when movie music became so dull, and people like Jerry Goldsmith couldn´t get arrested. That´s when he went back into TV and did TV movies like THE WALTONS, and he did those with 15 players, and he would do them great because he was still J. Goldsmith. There was no work for him in features. Then the features opened up and he goes back into features. Next thing you know, features are sort of like they were 5 years before except there´s a twist: now they´re using synths or now they´re using rock bands or they´re using artists or something. Now they´re big, now they´re small, whatever – it always goes back and forth because they always get tired of whatever the fad is at the moment.”
Broughton feels that each successive phase of music simply incorporates toned down versions of the popular fads of their predecessors. “It´s kind of like the evolution of music: we´re into a period right now of big orchestra scoring, and what we´ve brought to it this time is a bunch of synth stuff and digital processing that wasn´t possible 5 years ago. I would expect that after a while all this stuff will go away and then it will come back with some new twist on it. It´s like evolution – you have life but it doesn´t always exist as dinosaurs. You have to watch out for that little ferret underneath the dinosaurs´ teeth because after the big dinosaur´s done the ferret´s going to be able to take over.” (...)
DALLAS
The TV phenomenon of the early ´80´s now serves as a source of nostalgia for social conservatives hooked on the Nashville Network. While J. Immel provided the show´s Copland-by-way-of-Saturday-Night-Fever theme, Broughton scored many of the episodes and garnered several Emmy awards in the process, establishing a winning western style that led to his first theatrical score, SILVERADO.
BRUCE´S WORLD
Raised with a heavy involvement in the Salvation Army, Broughton got his first musical training at summer camp, learning to play trumpet and piano. He thus found himself well ahead of the game by the time he began studying composition at USC. “My first semester in college when I was learning harmony, it actually pissed me off that I had to go to class because I´d already learned this stuff and taught it to kids.
“I had a good, solid B-flat background in music. I was a good classical pianist and a terrific sight-reader but I was losing interest in that and getting more interested in writing. I studied orchestration on my own. I thought if I took piano that would be really boring and I took composition thinking I could study that until I figured out what I really wanted to do – and I never did. So I graduated as a composer. Right after that I got a job at CBS as an assistant music supervisor.
“At USC I realized my last year that I was going to be a composer,” Broughton explains. “So I had figured out that I wanted to go into films. I was listening to a song one day while I was driving on La Brea, and the song was getting me really worked up. And I thought that´s what I´d like to do, I´d like to write music that really affects people and makes them feel things. I thought songwriting was too short a form – I like to write longer pieces, and I wanted a big audience, so I thought immediately of movies. It´s not like I was one of those people who went to movies and listened to the score. But I started paying attention to it and I started to pay attention to the names on the movies.
“I started noticing Jerry Goldsmith´s stuff right away. At CBS I would listen to his scores and read them and get B. Herrmann´s scores and Fred Steiner´s scores. When CBS started doing movies, guys like Mancini and Lalo and Larry Rosenthal and Michel Legrand would come in, and I´d be sitting there in the booth with my jaw on the floor. When Jerry came that was always the biggest deal because his was the music I liked the best. He seemed to be the most inventive, the most orchestrally creative, he was wonderful with picture, and it was always a real treat musically to hear what he´d come up with.
“BILLY GOLDENBERG was coming up in the 70´s and he had an entirely different way of writing. He didn´t have the literate background that someone like Jerry did, but I never saw anyone get so close to a picture emotionally as Billy. He would do these off-the-wall things and it would have this huge emotional effect. Veteran composer MORTON STEVENS, who wrote the famous and hugely popular theme for HAWAII 5-0 as well as many of its scores, was a seminal influence on the young Broughton. (...) At CBS they had a long tradition of having the best composers for their series, and when they went to movies they always got the best.”
Despite seeing Stevens as a composer to look up, Broughton recalls that his relationship with Stevens metamorphosed into something quite different before it was finished. “It became a competitive thing because as Mort did things, I wanted to learn to write like that, and we got other guys like JERROLD IMMEL, who later went on to do the DALLAS theme. He was the copyist and I was the assistant, so we were the working guys.
Jerrold left and became a composer on GUNSMOKE and was doing lots of sessions and we all started to compete with each other because we were all trying to outdo Mort. And we eventually realized that Mort was looking at us and was trying to compete with us too – because we were doing things that caught his attention. And then if somebody came to town, like if Jerry was working at CBS, we´d all go in and watch Jerry, or H. Mancini or anybody else. It was a great time, and I feel like one of the old guys talking about how the old days were, but it was a spectacular time.”
According to Broughton, a hallmark of the period when he worked at CBS was the flexibility of most of the working composers. “All the guys had this huge range. Nowadays guys tend to write in the same style or they get pigeonholed, but in those days you were expected to be able to do a lot. There was a lot of variety.”
Looking at today´s film music from his perspective, Broughton is able to see the changes that have worked their way into his and other composer´s scores. “The music is less specific. Emotionally it´s cold – “cold” meaning they don´t want any sense of the music´s own emotion being part of the mix. A couple of years ago I was doing a TV movie and I was doing what I though was a really cool cue. It had all these long crescendos and decrescendos and the pianist kept saying “I don´t know, I don´t know...” And eventually the director came over and said: “Can you do it without it getting louder or softer?” I said: “You mean take all the emotional stuff out of it?” and the director said: “Just take the loud and soft stuff out.” And the pianist was laughing afterwards, and he said: “I knew it was going to go – you can´t have that emotion in a cue.” So when I go see movies now I always notice the music being pretty cold. It may be driven by rhythm but there isn´t any passion.”
Broughton maintains that moving between the concert and film worlds is still the best possible situation for a composer because of the tremendous audience that is still the province of the film composer. And to him, it all relates back to that drive on La Brea. “I´ve never understood why somebody would want to write music that no one wants to hear,” the composer says. “What I´m looking for, whether in film or other media, are opportunities for music to make an impact.”
Here is a list of some of BRUCE BROUGHTON´s NOMINATED works:
- KILLJOY (81), Emmy-nominated soundtrack for TV-movie.
- THE BLUE AND THE GRAY (82), Emmy-nominated soundtrack for TV-miniseries.
- SILVERADO (85), Oscar-nominated soundtrack for big-screen movie.
- YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES (85), Grammy-nominated soundtrack for big-screen movie.
- THE MONSTER SQUAD (87), Saturn-nominated soundtrack for TV-movie.
- THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (90), Emmy-nominated soundtrack for TV-movie.
- JAG (95), Emmy-nominated theme for TV series.
- TRUE WOMEN (97), Emmy-nominated soundtrack for TV-miniseries.
- FIRST MONDAY (02), Emmy-nominated theme for TV series.
- THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN´S PIER (05), Emmy-nominated soundtrack for TV-movie.
And also EMMY-nominated soundtracks for the DALLAS episodes THE LOST CHILD, THE SEARCH and THE LETTER (all the scenes pictured here belong to episodes musicalized by BRUCE).
And his AWARDED works:
- BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY (79), Emmy-awarded soundtrack for TV series (ep. The Satyr)
- QUINCY M.E. (76), Emmy-awarded song for TV series (ep. Quincy´s Wedding, part 2) (music)
- TWO MARRIAGES (83), Emmy-awarded song for TV series.
- THE FIRST OLYMPICS: ATHENS 1896 (84), Emmy-awarded music for TV miniseries (part 1).
- YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES (85), Saturn-awarded soundtrack for big-screen movie.
- TINY TOON ADVENTURES (91), Daytime Emmy-awarded song for animated series (music).
- O PIONEERS! (92), Emmy-awarded soundtrack for TV-movie.
- GLORY & HONOR (98), Emmy-awarded soundtrack for TV TV-movie.
- LOST IN SPACE (98), ASCAP-awarded soundtrack for top box office movie.
- JAG (2000, 2003-4), ASCAP-awarded soundtrack for TV series.
- ELOISE AT THE PLAZA (03), Emmy-awarded soundtrack for TV-movie.
- ELOISE AT CHRISTMASTIME (03), Emmy-awarded soundtrack for TV-movie.
- WARM SPRINGS (05), Emmy-awarded soundtrack for TV-movie.
For further information about this passionate and uncommon artist of our time, please see the Featurette THE MUSIC OF DALLAS in the Season 7 dvd pack. You can also visit his official website:
brucebroughton.com
INDEX
Soon, a listing of BROUGHTON´s best DALLAS scores and Specials for other composers like JOHN PARKER, JERROLD IMMEL and LANCE RUBIN.
