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DAVID SCHECTER/ MONSTROUS MOVIE MUSIC (2008):

HERMAN STEIN'S THE INTRUDER - Page 2

 
 
   

Mark R. Hasan : You've been doing very faithful re-recordings of original score cues for some time now. What made you decide to start releasing original score recordings?

David Schecter : There are a number of factors. One factor, which I won't go into too much, had to do with health. I've had some health problems, and I needed a break. If you have never tried to put together a re-recording project that is going to be recorded in Eastern Europe, then you have no idea how incredibly stressful and time-consuming and energy intensive such a project like that is, and it took a lot out of me.

Because I needed a break, I was looking into some other projects, and I had been talking to Herman Stein for a number of years about wanting to put out an album of only his music, so this kind of was an opportunity to say, ‘Hey Herman, this is a good time for me to do The Intruder,' and The Blob was something I had been tossing around for a long time.

I had a window where I wasn't going to be doing a re-recording, and that's kind of what fueled them.

 

MRH : In the case of The Intruder, I knew of the book because I was a huge Twilight Zone fan, and in my mid-teens I tracked down as many works by the show's main authors, which more or less revolved around Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, and Charles Beaumont, and I was surprised to find Beaumont's Intruder to be an atypical, non-fantasy work.

With Stein's music, it's equally different from his monster and sci-fi movie scores.

DS : Herman scored this picture very differently, and more economically. I don't know how much of that had to do with the budget, but…he almost scored the picture like a radio show in some cases, where he was scoring transitions.

He did have a few set-pieces he was scoring, but it's a very dialogue-heavy movie… His music is based on shorter motifs, and he goes into variations of that, kind of like Bernard Herrmann did. I never really talked to Herman about why he took that approach [but] what he probably would've told me is ‘because it was the right approach' [laughing].

There's a few cues in there where you listen to them and you go, ‘Oh yeah, this would work great in Tarantula and The Mole People,' but for the most part, it's very different music. To me, because I'm so steeped in Herman's music, it sounds like Herman to me, but it's still a different type of score.

I'm such a fan of the movie, and it's kind of sad that so few people know about it, and the nice things is I've heard from a lot of people who bought our CD and said, ‘Hey, I'm going to get the DVD,' and the they've gotten back and said, ‘Boy, I really like this picture.'

Herman really enjoyed the movie and the experience of it for a number of reasons. First, he got to do it all by himself, unlike his Universal days where he's part of this big committee of composers; he got to write all the music, he also got a credit on the picture which I'm sure was good for him, he got to choose some of the musicians, he got to conduct the score as opposed to Joseph Gershenson at Universal, and he got to take part in the mixing of the music.

I think he liked the fact that he was scoring what he felt at the time was an important picture, and a lot of people who worked on it though it was an important picture, but it was in the theatres one week, and gone the next.

Apparently [director Roger Corman and producer Gene Corman] did not get behind the film. It was like, ‘Okay, we're done with this, we're moving on to the next one,' and nobody got a chance to see it, even though reviews for it were really favourable. But it's too bad it kind of lapsed into obscurity

And as I said, the other reason Herman liked it is that Chuck Beaumont, who wrote the novel and the screenplay, was a very good friend of Herman's, so I think this was kind of like a dream project of his, and it always bothered Herman that nobody heard of the film.

 

MRH : I think Roger Corman, in interviews and in his autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, always branded The Intruder as the one message picture that he made, and because it earned no money, he vowed never to attempt a serious picture again, which is a shame, because it was one of his best-directed works.

1962 was when he shifted from making juvenile bug-eyed monster movies to something serious, and it demonstrated that he actually could direct, but I think because he was such a no-nonsense businessman, he probably just thought, ‘Okay, it didn't work. Let's move on to the next and go back to a familiar project that actually makes money and keeps the career going.'

DS : He was definitely talented, but money was a big part of it, as it was for anybody. And he was producing as well as directing these pictures, so he wasn't a director for hire; these films really had to turn a profit, and it's too bad; but in another sense, I don't know if maybe it could've done better if it had gotten [more support]. Knowing Corman, maybe their advertising budget was maybe $1.40? I don't know.

In all the reviews I saw – and there were pretty major reviews in the New York Times and Playboy – they loved the picture, but it just wasn't showing anywhere.

I think what they claim at the time was that it wasn't a good time to show a film [on racism and segregation]. Well you know, To Kill a Mockingbird had no trouble; granted that's a whole different story and it's a famous novel and everything, but certainly people were going to see movies like this.

Read the CD review!

Original book art

Author Charles Beaumont

Roger Corman's autobiography

   
 
   
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