Sound Tracks by the El Tracks
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Like an opera, Alan Rudolph’s film The Secret Lives of Dentists has a musical theme for each of its major characters. “When you see David Hurst [played by Campbell Scott], for example, you’ll often hear nonlyricized vocal pieces,” says composer Gary DeMichele. The voice in those pieces–lilting above strings, piano, and percussion–belongs to DeMichele, who wrote the character themes and all the other original music for the film in the cluttered dining room of his north-side apartment, a graystone backing up to the el. It’s the fifth film he’s scored since he and actor-director Scott teamed up in the mid-90s. “I did the first three in here,” DeMichele says, pointing through the doorway of an even more claustrophobic bedroom. The graystone, owned by one of his brothers and shared with another, in a neighborhood where their family has lived and worked for three generations, has been fertile ground for DeMichele, even if he has to record between trains. But he’s getting ready to leave it. As a percussionist and pianist, he’s been scratching out a living in Chicago since he graduated from Wisconsin’s Lawrence University 20 years ago. Now, prodded by his brother’s decision to sell the building and hoping to do more film, he’s planning a move. He’ll decide within the next two months either to go to New York, where Scott is based, or Los Angeles, where the weather would be kinder.
The film was Big Night. “They sent me a script,” DeMichele says. “It was great–lean and well written, an honest representation of brothers in business together. My grandfather is Italian; it resonated.” In what has become his routine (and in contrast to the “locked reel” method of Hollywood composers who start work when the film is finished), he began working on it right away, trying “to write pieces that extract the essence of the script” and to come up with something that might work for the opening. He visits the set for each film because it “puts a fire under you.” Later, as rough cuts come in, he composes for specific scenes. Thanks to the advent of MIDI technology, he’s able to flood the director with musical ideas, which are then combined with “source music”–previously existing songs–to make up the film’s sound track. The dicey part, the thing “you never say,” is the worry that “on certain aspects of the score, you just might not deliver.” But when things are going right, the score becomes subtly, “inextricably linked with the scene” and “the scene becomes something greater than its parts.”
