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Christmas movie soundtracks are a rare commodity. Most are only in print for a very short span of time, to coincide with the movie's original release or tied to a DVD release, and some have never even made the transition to a digital format. Even rarer are those iconic films that never, ever see an official soundtrack released. Until last month, a soundtrack for A Christmas Story simply did not exist in the retail industry.
However, thanks to the persistence of the film's composers Carl Zittrer and Paul Zaza, in cooperation with Rhino Records and Turner Entertainment, a 20-song soundtrack to the late Bob Clark's holiday hallmark is now finally available for movie fans to enjoy for years to come.
Read on, as composer and soundtrack producer Carl Zittrer illuminates us all about the extraordinary journey that was to become A Christmas Story!
A Christmas Story came about, like most things Bob Clark did, through the use of temporary music. A lot of people do this with movies, but not as big as Bob did it. He would think of music that he thought applied. And usually this music would be announced to us by:
Bob: "Hey, I heard this piece on the radio last night and it would be perfect for such-and-such a scene!"
Me: "Okay, what's the name of the piece?"
Bob: "Well, I don't know, but I think it was on at about 9:00."
Me: "Okay, well, what station was it on?"
Bob: "I'm not really sure. It was either FM or AM."
Bob was not a technical person. So, sometimes I would actually look at playlists and figure out what he was looking for. Or we would bring in phonograph records and play them for him, and he would go, "No, that's no good," "that's in the wrong direction," or "that's almost perfect!" And I would choose these things. It wouldn't do any good to give him something to hear that we couldn't duplicate or emulate, like the 110-piece orchestra. If he liked that, there was no way we could do it. But we find music he liked and would work, and we argued vigorously about it. But it was always an argument where the movie was the client.
And then, when we would find things that worked, we would cut the records onto 35mm film. Then we would do something called a temporary mix to combine the music to dialogue. It was rough, but it was good enough to look at. Some of it we'd like, and some of it, we wouldn't like, and eventually we'd come up with a menu of music that worked for this scene or that scene.
In the case of A Christmas Story, Peter and the Wolf is in there, but we had to adapt it to fit the timing of the movie and the character of the movie…we did the same with Grand Canyon Suite. Those pieces are evidence of the Classical music that we tried and found that it worked well, even if people don't know the names of those pieces. But they have probably heard things like that before, and we hoped that it would help their involvement in the movie. And that's how that all came about. It was all a temp track that we smoothed and sanded off the rough edges, and recorded it. It took weeks to record it, because it was never exactly what Bob wanted, but because we had a deadline, it somehow became what he wanted. And never did we have an idea that people would be watching this movie decades later.
There's such a disparity of styles on this record that if you weren't previously familiar with the movie, the soundtrack on its own would not make a lot of musical sense.
You know, I think you're right. It won't make sense to people who haven't seen the movie. Like those little ‘chase' cues. We didn't know what to do with those things on the CD. It's one thing to have them in the movie, where these kids are running with silent-movie-style double speed. But to put it on a CD as a ten-second cue would make no sense. Yet, I didn't want to leave it off for two reasons; 1) because we felt it deserved to be on there, and 2) this is not a CD that is overly long. It's only 40-odd minutes long, and I didn't want to weed out those things. I wanted to use them like they were in the movie – suddenly interrupting the narrative. But you're quite right; it would make no sense if you didn't know what was going on in the picture.
And some of it needed some help, like the "Bumpus Hounds" cue – funny when you're watching the dogs tear the kitchen apart. When you're not watching the dogs tear the kitchen apart, it was just repetitive, and it didn't go anywhere. It was only two dimensions and there wasn't enough to keep it going as an object strictly for listening. And that's where we got the idea for using sound effects, which hopefully give it that third dimension. And that's also in response to what you're saying. You're not going to be watching the movie when you're listening to the CD.
But as an entire album, the way it is disjointed and over-the-top, it really reminds me of that classic Carl Stalling Looney Tunes music.
Yes, yes, yes, yes! Thank you very much! Anytime we can be compared to Carl Stalling, even in one note, that's good enough.
Even those parts where you use the oboe introductions in the Grand Canyon Suite remind me of vintage Laurel and Hardy bits.
Bob really liked that, too. It was sort of from the point of view as a kid would hear it. Part of that was because our orchestra was a lot smaller than the traditional 100-piece orchestra that would normally play it. If we had the big orchestra, the music would come across as too serious. It might be better played, but the seriousness of it would overtake the humor, and it would not be from the perspective of this little kid.
And that's one of the things I tried to figure about for a long time – why is this movie so successful? I think it is because it is honestly seen and heard from the point of view of this little kid. And that's one thing Bob was good at; because in a sense, he was a little kid…I'm not saying he was an immature person, but he never lost the ability to look at things from a kid's perspective – not an adult's idea of a kid's perspective, which is patronizing, but a real kid's perspective. And that's why he got along with these kids so well, why they responded to his direction so well, and why that music works. But he knew when it worked. At times Paul and I were concerned when someone would play a wrong note, and we wanted to go back and fix it, but Bob didn't want anything changed. And I think that was because he could see it from a kid's perspective.
So, was A Christmas Story some kind of penance for the negative reaction and theme of Black Christmas?
Oh no. First of all, if someone said that Black Christmas was evil or profane or blasphemous, he would never have said, "Let's make A Christmas Story to apologize for that." In fact, he'd been trying to make that movie for some time. He was always a fan of Jean Shepherd and wanted to make the movie for years. I don't think it went as far back as Black Christmas, but for 5-6 years he was trying to get this movie made. And finally, someone at MGM said, "Let's just let him make this movie." It didn't cost them very much, even by the standards of that day – I think it was $3 million dollars or something along those lines. I think he partly got through to them, because he had this talent for getting into a studio right before they changed regimes. Right at the trouble spot, he'd get in there, and sometimes that would result in the movie not getting properly promoted, which unfortunately happened to A Christmas Story. It took years for it to get traction.
But no, A Christmas Story was not made because of Black Christmas. Bob would never apologize for anything! In fact, people actually claimed that Porky's (and Bob) was anti-Semitic. There was a subplot about this Jewish kid, and it was a little stereotype. But there was this bad kid, and one of his lines was "He's a jerk, and a Jew jerk at that!" And from that one line, someone wrote that Bob Clark was anti-Semitic and needed to apologize for his anti-Semitism. I pleaded with him to get him to respond to it. And he said, "No, it's a comment that will speak for itself." He would never apologize for anything, let alone make a movie as an apology.
I was just wondering, because they were both holiday films, and both were at opposite ends of the film-making spectrum. I'm just trying to understand how someone goes from making bleak, shocking horror movies, to inventing the teen sex comedy, and then making a holiday movie that would ultimately replace It's A Wonderful Life as "THE Christmas movie."
First of all, back when he made Black Christmas, horror films were fashionable. Bob pointed this out to me. He said that you could always get the investment. Let's say it comes out awful; at least you're going to have at least 3 minutes of good footage to make a trailer and it will look like its decent, with magical, supernatural effects. He said, "if you do a sitcom, and it comes out bad, all you've got is awful. There's nothing there to salvage." His theory was that horror was easier to make and easier to get the money for. And in those days, it was!
It wasn't by design that he started out in horror. That was just what you could do easily without a lot of money. You could get away with not having a highly paid, highly recognized cast, because you could hide behind the supernatural elements or the horror effects. Now, when he made the teen comedy, I think he just wanted to get away from the horror business. He felt he was becoming typecast. There were lot of offers to do more horror, and I tried to get him to take them, because it was more work for me, but he just didn't want to do them anymore. So he made the teen sex comedy, and he was able to sell it to investors by saying that it was going to be edgier than what you normally see. He said, "We are going to push the envelope go farther than anyone has ever gone, but all with good humor." And PT Barnum said that no one ever went broke underestimating the tastes of the American public.
So, when you guys were making A Christmas Story, did you have any inkling that you were onto something special, or was it just another job?
Well, these things are never "just a job." I can only speak for what I thought. I felt it was a good breakthrough and a nice departure from horror. It was warm and funny, but I thought it was a little too warm. I thought it was like a daytime soap opera, but then I hadn't seen the whole thing assembled. After we finished it and watched it in one piece, it felt really good; it felt great. I was glad that we finally made a movie that I could let my kids see, who were young at the time. It wasn't until many years later that I realized how good it felt to people other than me.
Have you ever attended any of the fan conventions?
Yes, I have attended some of them. I've attended the one in Cleveland and the one in Hammond, IN (where Jean Shepherd was originally from). It's a very illuminating experience. People of all ages come up to me loving the movie. A couple once came up to me with tears in their eyes saying that they met at the first screening of A Christmas Story, and now they have children and showed their kids the movie. People were out there in line, on the banks of Lake Michigan where the wind really cuts. And I was set up near the door to the convention hall with a sign "Meet the composer of A Christmas Story." And people would want their photograph taken with me. Then they would get the photos printed and mail them to me asking for me to sign them and send them back. Of course, I had no problem doing it.
And once in a while, I'd get questions like, "Why does the music start there and not a second earlier?" Sometimes I would give them a creative answer, like, "it just felt good that way," or "it felt more real that way." But, of course, the honest answer was that the piece was too short and I had to average it out by starting it later. A lot of times things happen, because you are limited in certain ways, and that becomes gospel. And people are captivated by the mythology of the movie.
So, what can you tell me about the "Ming the Merciless" sequence?
I think the reason that scene was cut was because the shortened length would allow for an extra screening per night of the film in theaters. That scene, as wonderful as it was, it didn't interrupt anything by cutting it. What I can tell you about it was that it was a science fiction Flash Gordon sequence from the old serials. Flash Gordon was captured and tied up to a cactus plant on Planet Mongo, and Ralphie rescues Flash and saves the Earth with a well-placed shot from his bb-gun. And what you can hear in that score piece on the CD is the only place there is a synthesizer on the soundtrack, and it's very crude. When Ralphie shoots the big balloon that Ming is trying to escape in, the deflation of the balloon is represented by the synth. It was just another Ralphie fantasy scene, like the Black Bart scenes.
So how did the music survive if the scene was never released?
I have had the tapes from it from years before. When they threw out the negatives, the original pieces were never compromised. Paul and I had safety copies of the score.
What took so long in getting the soundtrack released?
For years, I'd been writing and emailing Warner Bros. trying to push it through. Once I got on the phone and made it a project to get someone on the phone, eventually I got through to someone. And whoever it was didn't see it as valid, because they felt they weren't going to be able to sell any huge number of copies. They were more concerned with Batman and the other current blockbusters.
Paul and I got fed up and said, "Screw this, we're just going to do it." And then they might try to sue us or they might not. The rights to this were in very murky territory.
But it was 25 years after the movie's release, we weren't getting anywhere with the studio, so we just did it. What was the worst that could happen? We made it ourselves, and we didn't use any of the Warner Bros.-owned artwork. We commissioned a new painting for the cover and the label, and we just started selling them at the conventions.
Then Warner Bros. sent us a "cease and desist" letter. And at that point, I sent copies of the soundtrack to the whole executive board at Warner and Rhino. I also sent them a letter saying, "yes, you could sue us and you could do whatever you like, but nothing will be accomplished by doing this. So why don't we just release it like we should have done years ago?" And once they saw the product, they agreed. But until then, it really didn't have any value to them. Had we not made that (they call it "the bootleg album", and we call it "the experiment") and shown it to them, I don't think it would be out yet.
This is not a product for film score buffs and scholars. This is not a piece for collectors of soundtracks. This is a soundtrack for people who buy Christmas tree ornaments and have fallen in love with the movie.
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