MRH: In putting together the CD, were they any unique issues, such as music rights, the restoration, or even the distribution?

Jim Cirronella: Pretty much everything was a unique issue!

The problem with the music rights was that at the time they were making the movie, you could just go to Capitol Hi-Q and you could license all this stuff from one source… It was pretty much a simple thing: you’re going to put this background music to a new work, and you were basically buying synchronization rights for broadcast and theatrical, and that was a done deal, and nobody realized that later there’s going to be a demand for this - that a completely different kind of market would spring up.

Even in terms of exhibition, the filmmakers or distributors weren’t thinking that these movies would have the type of following they would have 40 years later; that wasn’t planned for, even 5 or 10 years later. Romero & Co. have even said ‘The movie went out there and did business for a couple of years,’ which they thought was great, and they figured that was the end of it. It wasn’t until the mid-seventies that there was this revival of NOTLD, and then it turned out it had more legs. They never anticipated anything like that would happen, and that it would become a classic on the midnight movie circuit, which didn’t exist back then.

When the movie was first made, it was just ‘get your movie out however you can,’ get it into drive-ins, get it into the small theater chains; they didn’t anticipate anything like this, so that created trouble with the rights.

Now, there is no Capitol Hi-Q; there is no one place you can go to license everything, so you have to track down who owns what… There have been lawsuits over ownership. There were partnerships between various composers [but] I don’t now if they were actually writing together as much as just forming a partnership to make a package of music available; and again, there was no thought to the future that 40 years from now people would even find this to be interesting. Most of the time whenever I contacted someone or a publishing company they would say ‘What are you talking about? What do you want to do?’

I don’t think until I looked into it anybody actually knew which music was used in the movie. There was an idea of the cues, but just overall; the publishers that were aware of it just knew that while a package of music was used, they owned maybe 20% of the music used in this film, but they really didn’t keep track of which cue and where it was used, and how much of the cue was used and so forth. The cue sheet for the movie was not correct. I didn’t do all this myself; I had to bring in other people who have much more expertise in this area than I do.

In terms of the restoration, I definitely didn’t have the best materials that you would want to work with, and a lot of that was frustrating, more than anything. In some cases I had both an LP and a reel, and I was able to compare the two; in some cases the LP was much better-sounding than the reel, but there was a frustration in that you don’t get that with every cue that you’re working with... Sometimes all these things have been used multiple times, and sometimes you have to try and work around irreparable damage, so having more than one copy of the LP helped, but it led to frustration in other areas because you only had one thing to work with, and you had to make do with it.

MRH: Ad in terms if distributing the CD, this is the first soundtrack album you’ve produced?

Jim Cirronella: Yes. I don’t consider myself a record label or a soundtrack producer, this was a means to an end. This needed to be done.

ALSO AVAILABLE :

In Part 1 of our lengthy interview with producer Jim Cirronella and director Jeff Carney, the filmmakers discuss the production of Autopsy of the Dead (2009), their documenary on the making of George Romero's zombie classic.

Further info on the composers who contributed to the Capitol Hi-Q library can be found via these message board posts at Film Score Monthly, Soundtrackcollector.com, and this Google search.