MRH : Stein had one amazing career, and I imagine he could've written one hell of an autobiography.

DS : I tried to get him to do that. I mean, he didn't think anybody would care to hear music from The Creature from the Black Lagoon because he didn't think anybody would remember the picture, so he certainly wouldn't have thought that anybody would care about his life. I tried to do that, but Herman had a difficult life for a number of reasons. Health was a major, major part of it, and kind of dredging up all those memories I think would've been very difficult for him to do.

MRH : The source materials for The Intruder came directly from Stein?

DS : Yes.

MRH : There are some composers who kept hardly any of their own recordings, and I wonder if Stein had more recordings of his work?

DS : He didn't have all of it, but he had a lot of it, and basically just had his cues, so when he was scoring for the Universal pictures, he wouldn't have the Mancini cues or the Heinz Roemheld cues; or of he had them at any point, he got rid of them because that wasn't of interest to him.

He was trying to use some of the archived material to sell songs, and he wrote some beautiful, beautiful pieces for films; some of them were recorded, and some of them became sheet music. He wrote some really nice stuff.

It's kind of bittersweet, but I've run into this with other composers as well from his era…. He would talk on the phone and say, ‘Hey, there's this wonderful piece of music I want you to listen to. I think it would be a great song. I'll give you fifty percent of all the royalties we make on it,' and he'd send me this wonderful song called “Who's Going to Sing My Love Song?” and you'd have to say ‘Herman, it's a great song, but people don't sing those anymore. There's no such thing. There's Tony Bennett and that's it. There's nobody else doing this music.'

A number of composers from that era had “tunes.” They could score forty-five minutes of picture, but if there was a two-minute tune they really liked, that was more important to them because that was where the money came in, the fame came in, the recognition came in, which led to other jobs. So a lot of times it was about getting the tune in the picture, and they kind of downplayed the orchestra music because nobody cared about orchestra music or thought about it or talked about it.

So there was a lot of demo recordings of songs he did, and certainly his scores, too, but the problem with putting out some of the other music, although I would like to, is that most of his work was done for Universal, and again, sometimes a film would be scored by Stein, Mancini, Roemheld and Hans Salter, and maybe a bit of William Lava in there, and you thrown in Frank Skinner and Walter Scharf. I mean, Universal had this unbelievable assortment of talent there.

For The Incredible Shrinking Man, Herman just did three cues in it, so [to release a complete score album] you need to have the other music too… That was one of the reasons he was really happy to know The Intruder was coming out because it's his music from beginning to end. Nobody has to guess who wrote it.

MRH : You mentioned that The Intruder was his last film. Score. Did he do any films scores afterwards?

DS : He did television work, he did cartoons, he did commercials, he did some classical works, but most of this work was in television. He worked for Fox and a number of other studios, because during the late fifties the film studios were not cranking out product anymore, and music departments let everyone go, and television was now the big source of composing needs. Leith Stevens, Hugo Friedhofer – all those people weren't getting films like they had in the past. They were all working on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968) and Lost in Space (1965-1968) and Wagon Train (1957-1965) and that kind of stuff.

There is more Stein music in the vaults of the studios from some of his television work. Some of it came out on the Lost in Space CDs - wonderful stuff - so I'm hoping there will be more down the line; whether we do it or somebody else does it, I don't care at all. I want him to be out there so he's not forgotten.

NOW ONLINE:

In Part 2 of our conversation with David Schecter, we discuss MMM's companion album, The Blob (and other creepy sounds), which features Ralph Carmichael's complete score, plus goodies from the Valentino Production Music Library. Click HERE to read more!

In Part 3 of our conversation, we discuss the premiere commercial release of rare cues from the Valentino Production Music Library. Click HERE to read more!