Mark R. Hasan: How big of a gamble is the FMC set for Film Score Monthly [FSM]?
 

Lukas Kendall: It was a gamble in that it's the most expensive thing we've ever done, and just the manufacturing costs alone were very expensive -- many, many times more expensive than a single disc release. Simply tying up any amount of cash in one project is a large gamble, but I was confident that it would sell.

 
MRH : When I spoke with Bernstein in 2000, he mentioned that he actually had six albums that were being cleaned up for release on his Amber label. How did FSM become involved with the project?
 

LK : I've been in touch with Elmer's manager, Robert Urband, as well as Pat Russ, a great guy who orchestrated for Elmer, and while it was obviously very sad when Elmer passed away, after an appropriate period of time I contacted Robert and asked what was happening with the FMC materials. It was one of those things where they were weighing their options.

 
MRH : Was it their intention to release the albums one at a time, or did they have plans to assemble a boxed set?

 
LK : I don't know. I think that Elmer certainly had some plans for the collection, but he was hampered by the same things that we came across, which was the fact that he was missing most of the masters.

 
The first five albums were recorded at one facility, but then they switched over to Olympic Sound Studios (except the North album, which was recorded at Anvil), and all of the masters for the later albums had gone missing, because Olympic had closed its doors at some point and told their artists, 'Come and pick up your tapes,' but people didn't get word in time, so they threw out a great deal of the history of rock music -- something that enrages many people to this day. A lot of Elmer's masters were thrown out, and we had to make some of the discs from vinyl.

 
[Fortunately] there were three that we found from Warner Bros. Records for reissues, but I'm sure it was the same problem that Elmer was facing, so I don't know if they had attempted to do at one time a boxed set; I always thought that a boxed set was something that made sense.

 
MRH : A couple of years ago I spoke with sound engineer Eric Tomlinson regarding William Walton's  Battle of Britain score. He found the master tapes at Anvil Studios, in Denham, sitting on the shelves before the studio was going to close and submit to the wrecker's ball, and he was stunned at some of the extant material, such as Alex North's rejected 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a temporary score that another composer had written for the same film.

 
LK : That must have been the Frank Cordell material. Well, it's very sad. I'm not surprised, because I've sort of known about that. You hear about these things sometimes. In filmmaking, that happens.

 
MRH :  The vinyl grade used for the FMC albums weren't always the best. Was it a major challenge in bringing the LPs up to modern digital standards, and was it a costly endeavor?

 
LK : It is more costly. It's one of the most frustrating things that happen when you're working with vinyl, because not only is the quality not as good, but it's more expensive too... We heard that the reputation for the FMC vinyl was quite bad, but we had the advantage of going through sealed copies of many LPs that Elmer still had in a house/studio in Santa Monica, where the tapes and records were stored, and I thought the [LP to CD] transfers were terrific.