The Extras - Talking TV Music with Jon Burlingame

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Award-winning author Jon Burlingame joins the podcast for an entertaining review of the best in TV music, as told in his new book, "MUSIC FOR PRIME TIME."   Jon recounts wonderful stories of the earliest TV series and how their theme songs and scores were developed.  Some of the classic shows we revisit are Peter Gunn, Rawhide, The Man From Uncle, The Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy, The Flintstones, Roots, and  The Avengers.  We also discuss composers Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, John Williams,  Jerry Goldsmith, Quincy Jones, and Billy Goldenberg's early work with Steven Spielberg.  Jon also tells us the story of how "Friends" may have saved the TV Theme song.  And we share our admiration for current composers who are keeping TV music as popular as ever with their scores for HBO'S GAME OF THRONES & WESTWORLD, Disney's THE MANDALORIAN, and the Netflix hit STRANGER THINGS.  This is an entertaining and informative look back at the history of TV music that ends with a positive look at the bright future ahead.Jon Burlingame is the nation's foremost writer on music for TV and Film.  MUSIC FOR PRIME TIME is Jon's newest book, and it provides the most comprehensive review of TV music ever written.  Purchase MUSIC FOR PRIMETIME on AmazonPurchase The Music of James Bond on AmazonLink to Jon Burlingame's WEBSITELink to COMPOSER BILLY GOLDENBERG Podcast with Gary GeraniLink to Composer MAX STEINER podcast with Steven SmithThe Sitcom StudyWelcome to the Sitcom Study, where we contemplate the TV shows we grew up with and...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and their release on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host. As many of you know, I not only enjoy watching movies and talking about movies, but I also

love reading about movies and movie history. So I'm very excited about our guest today as he is the nation's leading writer on music for film and television. John Burlingame writes regularly for Variety, teaches film music history at the University of Southern California, hosts the Four Scores podcast, and is the author of five previous books, including the award-winning The Music of James Bond. He's joining us today to talk about his new book titled Music for Primetime, which has been a bestseller on Amazon since its release at the end of March. John, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.

It's a pleasure, Tim. Great to see you. Well, before we dive into your new book, I'm just curious, how does one become an authority on writing for music for film and television? That's a great question. And not one I get all that often. It's like every career has a somewhat circuitous path, I think. I started out as a reporter back in New York in the 1970s. But being a child of television, growing up in the 60s, and somewhat musically inclined, I was always curious about music that I was hearing in the background of my favorite TV shows and then later on the movies I was going to see. And so in the 1970s, I convinced my editor to allow me to start writing about movies on the side. And then in the 1980s, I started to do more television-oriented work as a journalist, writing about the shows themselves, but always finding a way to mention the music. And then when I moved to Los Angeles in 1986, I used every opportunity I could to find, meet, and interview my favorite composers, people that I had admired and who I listened to, and very quickly discovered that no one else was doing this. And so I kind of developed a niche of my own

interviewing composers for magazines and later primarily for the trades, you know, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. And that sort of developed into, in the mid-90s, a full-time career writing, lecturing, talking about music for movies and TV. And now you also teach at USC, correct? Yeah, that's right. I'm happy to be part of the scoring program at USC, where we introduce young would-be film and TV composers to the world of film and scoring. And it's my job to do the history lessons. So I get to talk about all of the film and TV music that I've loved and admired dating back to the 1930s. Well, let's dive into your new book,

Music for Primetime. I know this book means a lot to you personally, but why this book and why now? Well, it's true. This is perhaps the biggest project of my whole life and career. This is basically the end result of 35 years of interviews and research into the world of music for television, the themes, the scores, the hits, the early 1990s and did write a book about it in 1996, but it unfortunately had a terrible title. No promotion, didn't sell very well. And when I approached Oxford a couple of years ago about a possible update, rewrite, expansion of that, they were happy to sign on board. And the result is this sort of massive history of music in television. And you might think, well, why did Tim ask me that question? But it's because I'm a big fan of television myself. And as we were discussing, I worked on a lot on the television releases for Warner Home Video. So I have a real love for it. But this is a time of turmoil, I think,

for television with streaming and the broadcast television business model really being turned and twisted and shaped. And we don't really know where it's going. And that's kind of why I asked, because I actually thought, what a terrific time for this book to come out as a reader, because you deal with so much of an era of television. And then now it's changing and you do have a chapter about the streaming and all that, which is a smaller chapter because we're still figuring that out. But I think it's terrific for anybody who grew up, those of us who grew up with traditional broadcast television, to see a book like this and to kind of go to the shows before

we grew up and then the ones we grew up with and everything. So I thought the timing was terrific just from that perspective. And frankly, I think you're right. It's hard to read now whether we are reaching the end of the era of the broadcast network business model for television, because now all we talk about, it seems like most of the time, is shows on cable and streaming services. So, yeah, I mean, it is in many ways a celebration of the great era of the TV themes, which may be coming to a close in terms of broadcast television. But by the same token, it's an exciting new time because I find that cable and streaming producers seem to be paying even more attention to music than toward the end of the network heyday. Whereas you don't tend to find this on network shows, you do tend in streaming and cable to find cleverly created title sequences. And as much as a minute and three quarters or sometimes two minutes worth of opening music, which, you know, is now unheard of in the broadcast world. So it is a great time to sort of look back and look forward.

Well, let's go look at kind of the first chapter there of your book, where you're really talking about the beginning of that story. Tell us a little bit about how it evolved because of, you know, from film, the music was obviously scored by great composers, but then TV is starting to develop. How does the story kind of start? Well, it's really interesting, you know, for me, because it is true that the early days of television were a kind of, okay, we've got this new medium. We'll make half hour and hour shows that run every week, but we'll sort of model them on the movies, but also to an equal extent, modeling them on dramatic radio, which of course was

a very big deal and, you know, really the mass medium of choice of the 1930s, 40s, and slightly into the 1950s. So it's this fascinating confluence of media concepts that are coming together. So TV draws a little bit from both. In the early days, producers were finding their way, and all of these shows were like super low budget, and they didn't want to spend a lot of money on original music. So very often in the 1950s, our favorite shows did not have specific music written for each episode. And in many cases, at all, they were drawn from production music libraries, basically generic dramatic music that had been written, often recorded cheaply overseas, brought back, and then just tracked into the episode where it felt right. I recently watched the first episode of The Adventures of Superman from 1951. And I knew

that it had all been library music with the exception of the theme. And I don't want to say it sounded terrible, because it was all sort of symphonically conceived. But very often, it didn't match what was going on in the show itself. And you'd find this kind of a lot in 1950s television. Music is over the top, it's too dramatic, it's maybe moving us in the wrong direction emotionally. But again, this is the 50s and TV was finding its way in that era. Well, I know you do talk in the book about Warner Brothers specifically. I was just drawn to a section there where you talked about how there was some, I don't know if I have

the right term, was it live scoring? But then they moved away and went to that kind of library music. That was just a pure business save money kind of a thing, is what you're saying? Stay with us. We'll be right back. Look for the link in the podcast show notes. Well, I think it's hard to say for certain now all these years later, but you were quite right. And Warner Brothers was actually in the forefront of the composition of original music to accompany each show when they dove big time into television in 1955, I think was the first year of Warner's, and they were doing shows like Cheyenne in that era, and a couple of dramatic shows that are long lost and forgotten now. Warner Brothers Presents, for example. There was even a version of Casablanca for TV in that early period of time. And Warner's executives were, I think, time. And Warner's executives were, I think, to a certain degree, prescient in terms of what would eventually become a factor in all television production, which is, let's write original music

just as if this was a movie for television. And they stuck with that for a year or two, maybe three. I'd have to go back and check now. But what they found was they were spending a fortune, both on composers and on the performance by an orchestra on a weekly basis. And they finally said, you know, can we do this more cheaply? So that by the late 1950s, shows like Cheyenne and Sugarfoot and Maverick, that great Western period, and the Private Eye period of 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye and Bourbon Street Beat, they would tend to have libraries written for those shows, which would again be kind of generic, but focused on what the individual shows might need as opposed to a purely generic dramatic library, which is what the early 50s were all about. So yeah, Warner's really jumped on the bandwagon, but then stepped back a little bit, I think probably as you suggest, for financial reasons. And you also, did I get this right? You also kind of suggest that also the pace of television was part of that decision

making as well, because you could pick library music a little bit more quickly to fit in the pace of television. Because I mean, back in the early days, they were filming maybe twice as fast as they do nowadays in terms of some of those shows. Yeah, you're quite right. I mean, they would try to crank out an hour show in five or six days or less if they could. And a half hour show would be shot in as little as two and a half days if they could get away with it.

hour show would be shot in as little as two and a half days if they could get away with it. And it was about making entertainment quickly and as cheaply as possible in that era. And music coming at the end of post-production, as it did then and still does now, is often the loser in terms of, okay, well, what money do we have left? And how much can we afford to spend on music at this point? So then what brought them back to doing the live, you know, the more of the original music or the live scoring? It becomes a little complicated by the late 50s and early 60s. It's no longer just about what the studios want and feel they can afford. It's what the' Union demanded at that point. The Musicians' Union was less of a factor in the 1950s because the people running the union were very suspicious of this new medium of

television and whether or not it was the right thing for organized professional musicians to become a part of. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, it's a period of time, particularly in 1958, when Universal decided to do live, as you used the phrase, live scoring just a little bit ago, and that was what they called it, which is we have live musicians in a room playing music specifically designed for this show. So Universal starts it in 58. Peter Gunn comes along in 1958 and has a huge success with Henry Mancini's cool jazz approach to that Private Eye series. So the musicians union become involved and they go, okay, if you want our players in Los Angeles, then you will have to score X number of episodes per show per season. And so by the early 1960s, the so-called live scoring thing became a very big

deal in Los Angeles and a real money earner for studio musicians at that point. One thing that your good friend and mine, Stephen Smith, mentioned when he was on talking about Max Steiner that I noticed in your book, as I'm going through the chapter on the cop and detective shows, is that Max Steiner actually wrote for television. Was it the late 50s or 60s? Tell us a little bit about that story. I think our listeners will find that interesting. It was one of the great triumphs of my research period in the 1990s, the University of Southern California has a great deal of Warner Brothers material, because the Warner archives are right there at USC. And I called for literally every cue sheet that is the formal legal document that accompanies every television

episode of every series that lists every piece of music and who the composer was, how long it is, and who the publisher is. I asked for every cue sheet from every Warner Brothers show from 1955 to 1965 and went through them one at a time and was astonished to see the name Max Steiner show up on Hawaiian IQ sheets, probably from around 1959, maybe 60 in that period of time, certainly 61. And I thought, what in the world? And they were all listed with odd titles like Romantic No. 5 and Dramatic No. 16. And I thought, what in the world? And then they would all be very, very short. And then not long after that, I discovered Max Steiner's unpublished autobiography, where he hinted at what had gone on.

Max, I guess, at the time, 1959, 1960, was less in demand for feature films. And probably somebody at Warner said, hey, Max, we've got this new show. Would you write a little music for us? hey, Max, we've got this new show. Would you write a little music for us? And what's funny about Max's unpublished autobiography is that he was kind of outraged by the notion of people demanding that he strike five moods in the space of 30 seconds, you know, and he clearly didn't enjoy the process. And his name is not on any episodes of Hawaiian Eye. It's all just sort of quietly in the background. So, but yes, the great Max Steiner, composer of King Kong, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, did in fact write a

little music for TV. One other thing that I remember Stephen mentioned that I wanted to bring up here was that Max Steiner, maybe more in the 60s or whatever, but even earlier had been fairly involved with trying to get more rights for the musicians in terms of ownership of their music, things of that nature. Do I have that right? all of the great composers of that film era were concerned about the fact that their music, which had been reaching millions of people every week through the cinema, was not being taken seriously by the performing rights societies, as well as the studios, I guess, to a lesser extent. And so there was a real effort made to not only have this music taken more seriously, but be paid better. The studios already paid, I think, fairly well in terms of their compositional fees

for movies. But in terms of what ASCAP and BMI was paying in terms of the sort of back end, if you will, the sort of royalties that would accrue was lackluster at best. So yes, this was a very big deal. And it's reached the point today where if you're a successful composer in television, you can actually make much more money than you would as a composer for feature films, particularly if your TV shows run for several years and go into reruns. Yeah. And of course, I recall Stephen mentioning in our conversation there that when Max Steiner was doing King Kong, when he was doing, you know, the scores for Gone with the

Wind or, you know, that whole era, the films would play in the theaters. And yes, maybe they would get another run sometime later, but there was no television. There was no idea of rerunning it on television every year. This developed much later. So having the rights, getting the royalties, these were things that developed later. And television was a real big game changer in terms of giving, as you say, composers that opportunity to say, wait a second, you're rerunning this movie for the 50th time, and I only got paid once. Right. That's exactly right. And television was a huge factor. And because when movies started to run on television and the Performing Rights Society stepped up and started to pay better,

it became a huge revenue stream for a lot of composers. You know, I think about David Braxton's music for Laura, for example, which was a Fox film from 1944. It had become a popular song. And so that was one revenue stream. But it was the endless reruns of Laura on television that ultimately, I think, kept David Braxton going in the later years of his life. And I think that, you know, why are we talking about this business part of it? Well, I think it's because when you think about for the music, and as I'm reading your book, and I'm just noting the great composers that you talk about for TV, I mean, there had to be the business justification to be able to get that talent to come and work on these projects and to, you know, create that environment of legitimacy, let's say, as the as the shows developed and TV developed in popularity.

So it's a big part of the story and why, you know, so many great composers came back to that medium. But also you talk about a lot of the great composers now that we think of for film who started in TV. And of course, John Williams is one that I wanted to be sure and mention there. But talk a little bit about his start in TV, and that was his kind of grounds for breaking into the industry. Yes, that's exactly right. And it's so interesting to me that, Yes, that's exactly right. And it's so interesting to me that, you know, for example, the young people that I teach down at USC, when I'm talking about this sort of history, they of course know John Williams from, and I think they think probably, that the scores for Jaws and Star Wars sort of are where big John Williams begins. But that's not true. That's not accurate. John Williams started in television in 1958, when, as I mentioned earlier, Universal, then called Review Studios, started to score every episode of every show. Things like Wagon Train, Bachelor Father, and M-Squad, the Lee Marvin cop show. And they needed composers. And John

Williams was put under contract, then known as Johnny Williams, and stayed there for seven years, slowly learning his craft and getting the occasional movie. But really not until he sort of leaves Universal in the mid-1960s does he sort of jump feet first into the film music arena. And then by the 1970s, he's one of the A-list composers. But he really learned his craft in television. Well, another person that I wanted to mention kind of along those lines is the other person that's often associated with John Williams, Steven Spielberg, the director who also began his career in television. And for listeners of the podcast, remember that we had Gary Garani

on to talk about his documentary on Billy Goldenberg, the composer, and the work that he did with Spielberg on Night Gallery. I'm so glad you brought that up because it's interesting that John Williams and Billy Goldenberg have someone in common in that era. There was a great visionary music director at Universal named Stanley Wilson. And I always make sure to tell people about Stanley because without Stanley Wilson's frankly brilliant operation of the music of Universal of the 1960s, we wouldn't have these guys who then made the leap to feature films. And so it was Stanley Wilson who first hired John Williams, and it was Stanley Wilson who hired Billy Goldenberg in the late 1960s.

Billy had come out from New York, where he had been active on the Broadway scene and doing some television that was based in New York at the time. He came out here to Los Angeles and was immediately put under contract and very quickly, from 1968 to 1970, just zoomed up to become so quickly one of television's very best composers. As you point out, he did the pilot for Night Gallery. And he worked with Steven Spielberg, not just on the pilot for Night Gallery, but also on shows like The Name of the Game, a sort of famous LA 2017 episode, for example, and a number of other shows at Universal in that era. Just last night, my wife and I were watching the second Columbo pilot, Ransom for a Dead Man,

which is just a piece of Billy Goldenberg genius. That music, which I think Gary Gerani correctly calls sort of romantic mysticism, is just brilliant. And I wish I had an album of it. It's so good. It would play just as well on its own as it did in the context of the movie. And Billy Goldenberg went on to do several episodes of Columbo in that early era. So yeah, he's another one of my favorites. And glad I got the opportunity to spend several hours with him. Yeah. And you're in that documentary. And it's a terrific one. And for listeners of the podcast, you can find the episode in our archive library there. It's a very good one as well. Well, I kind of skipped ahead a little bit because I did want to ask you

about how you format the book. I suppose you probably thought about how to do so. And we touched on the composers, or you could have done it by decade, I think, as well, probably. But you went by genres. Talk a little bit about how you thought about putting it together in that way. It was one of the great challenges, I think, to figure out how to present the material. Over the years, starting around in the mid-1980s, I would interview everybody who worked in every genre, you know, Vic Mizzi about The Addams Family and Green Acres and Earl Hagen about The Andy Griffith Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show and I Spy and Mike Post about The Rockford Files, you know, and L.A. Law. And I thought, well, how do you, you know, you could have

tried to do it chronologically. But ultimately, I came down to the idea that the most reader friendly approach would be by genre. So I'd write a sitcom chapter and a cop and detective show chapter and a fantasy and science fiction chapter and one devoted to action adventure. And then toward the back, I would write about animation for primetime and the approach of music for documentaries and news programs. So that felt like the most reader-friendly approach. And I think it's worked. Yeah, as I was going through the book, I really enjoyed it because part of me was thinking, well, why not talk about TV as it kind of naturally develops and evolves?

But I found it more reader-friendly in the sense of it could tell a story. Let's talk about the Western. I read that story about Rawhide, and I thought that was a pretty interesting one. Well, I do love the Rawhide story, and it speaks to me personally because it was one of my dad's favorite shows. I can't remember now if it was on Tuesday nights on CBS, but it certainly was on at 7.30. And dad would come home for work and we would watch Rawhide together in the early 1960s. Of course, it was about a cattle drive and Eric Fleming and Clint Eastwood were the bosses of the trail ride. And this was a situation that came about when CBS commissioned Dmitry Tyomkin, the great Russian composer who had done

scores for, and at the movies, Red River and High Noon and Gunfight at the OK Corral. So he seemed like sort of the obvious guy to contribute a theme. And so Tyomkin brought in his lyric writer from the High Noon days, Ned Washington, and they wrote this tune, which they got Frankie Lane to sing. And Frankie Lane had had a hit with By Noon seven years earlier. So it all sort of came together. But my favorite part about it is that this was so early in the television era that the people at the network may not have realized that they actually could make quite a lot of money if they owned the composition, which they didn't. T. Yonkin said, hope you don't mind if I own this myself.

And it wound up making an absolute fortune for the songwriters. And I think the theme for Rawhide may have made more money for Dmitry Tiomkin than anything he ever did in the movies. Wow. Well, the other thing I remember about reading in your book was the story that CBS wanted a single released as well. Is that right? And so we start to see that not only is there the importance of the music with the show, but in the promotion. Was that one of the earliest examples of them wanting an actual

song that could be released? It is an early example of that. Prior to the success of Peter Gunn, which actually had an album that. Prior to the success of Peter Gunn, which actually had an album that came out during the middle of the first season, around January of 59, that was around the time CBS was putting Rawhide together. And I think the early success of that Peter Gunn album, which went to number one on the charts, reminded everybody else in television that there was money to be made and promotion to be had. Let's face it, we're talking about even perhaps more than the money making aspect was the idea that you could promote your show on the radio. It was one more opportunity to market your product. And so this was true with Rawhide. They got a single out and it was

successful. It was a hit for Frankie Lane. Prior to that period, there really had only been a couple of hits on the radio that came out of television. Ray Anthony had a hit on the Dragnet theme in the early 1950s and Walt Disney, quite famously, had a hit with the theme from Davy Crockett, which was on the Disney show in 54, 55. Although that was a song and not an instrumental theme like the Dragnet tune was. Well, there's just so much to talk about there in the Western that that chapter alone is just, I mean, there's just so many great ones to talk about there. But I did want to skip back to the fantasy and science fiction chapter and ask you about the impact of the Twilight Zone with Rod Serling.

You know, Twilight Zone is an example I like to cite of, as you having read this, you know, there are actually two themes for the Twilight Zone. There's Greg Bernard Herman, which our friend Stephen Smith wrote about in the Herman biography of the 1980s, A Heart at Fire Center. Bernard Herman was recruited to write the original Twilight Zone theme, which was very moody and atmospheric and kind of dark and mysterious. But for the second season, they dumped it because they thought, well, we need something that's a little bit more up. And so, and by the way, I talked to the people who were there at the time in 1960 to discuss, you know, why did they dump, you know, season one? And that was the story, which was that, well, we were redoing the main title and

we wanted something that was a little more energetic. So the head of CBS Music went into the library and found these two unrelated pieces of very short music by an obscure French ballet composer named Marius Constant. And they put them together and that famous do-do-do-do-do-do-do on electric guitar, which we all now know, and which really now has become American musical code, if you will, for something weird is happening here. And so it's just remarkable to me how some of these things came about. And Constant, the composer, knew nothing about this, was never credited on screen, and really only discovered that his music had become a famous TV theme in the 1980s, some 25 years later. So many great stories like that, that you put in the book. And I think that one thing that I was thinking about the book is that, okay, I'm of a certain era, but I loved reading these stories about the shows that came before me because there's just some, I mean, like that story, like how could a person not be aware? And yet that's the way it was. How could they not be aware that they had such a cultural influence?

Yeah, it's absolutely true. Well, we have to talk about Jerry Goldsmith. And I thought that The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was probably the one I should ask you about. That was obviously a time when James Bond was so influential and Ian Fleming was a part of that show, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. The Man From U.N.C The Man from Uncle, to this day, perhaps my favorite show as a kid growing up, was a very popular spy show on NBC in the mid-1960s. And as you correctly point out, Ian Fleming was briefly involved in the creation of the show. Producer Roman Felton met with Fleming, and this was right after the first two movies, but before Goldfinger.

So Fleming was very much in vogue at that point. And the idea was, you know, could Fleming contribute some ideas and maybe even be considered the creator of the show? That didn't last very long. Fleming did create the name Napoleon Solo as the character that Robert Vaughn played, the sort of globetrotting secret agent for a world enforcement agency. So what happened was that Bond producers were terrified that their prize writer was going to go over to television and give away all their spy secrets. So they

pressured Fleming to walk away and get out. And so the show actually does not mention Fleming, if you actually watch the show. does not mention Fleming if you actually watch the show. But be that as it may, Jerry Goldsmith had long been associated with producer Norman Felton. They had done Dr. Kildare together a few years earlier. And that, in fact, had become a song sung by Richard Chamberlain, which also became quite popular, called Three Stars Will Shine Tonight. And Goldsmith had a loyalty to Felton and always came back from the movies, even after Jerry had become a big successful film composer. He always came back when Norman Felton called and wanted a television project done,

to his great credit. The man from UNCLE, curiously, did not emulate the Bond music formula that John Barry had started. Jerry Goldsmith was a very original composer, and I think a kind of genius. And he came up with this fascinating theme that combined jazzy, brassy flourishes with a kind of martial underpinning, which both suggested the UNCLE that both Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryak had worked for, but also some of the wild sort of tongue-in-cheek aspect of the spy genre that Uncle was really good at displaying. So, you know, Jerry was just, I wish he had done more than three episodes in terms of original scores. I wish he had done five or six as he had done on Kildare. But he was becoming very famous

as a film composer at that point. And, you know, he set up the musical framework, the musical foundation of the show, and then went, you know, went off to do other things. Well, you can't talk about TV without talking about the sitcom. And I think that one that maybe we could briefly talk about is that I Love Lucy theme song. I mean, anybody who grew up on television has watched in reruns, I Love Lucy, so iconic. How did that develop? Because now we're talking about kind of a different style. Yeah, that's right. And I have to say, one of the joys of having started these interviews as far back as I did, I counted them up once, there's more than 450 interviews

excerpted in the book as I talked to composers of every genre. So I was lucky enough to get to Elliot Daniel in the 1990s. And of course, he, like so many of these composers, have passed away now. But he was the composer of the I Love Lucy theme. And to him, in 1951, he got a call from Jess Oppenheimer, who had been producing, you know, Lucy and Desi's radio work. And he thought, well, you know, it's a pilot for a show. Maybe it'll go, maybe it won't. And he dashed it off in an afternoon. And kind of forgot about it. And then, of course, it becomes one of the great hits of the 1950s. Combined with, and this is another aspect of the 1950s in television that I love talking about, which is that really, when we talk about most of the 1950s being library music and generic,

dramatic production music that filled most shows. Two shows departed from that. And one was Dragnet because Jack Webb had had original music on the radio version and wanted to keep that in TV. And the other was I Love Lucy. Desi Arnaz was, of course, a band leader on the show. So they were going to have to have some kind of music whenever we, you know, we saw the band or we saw Desi and his nightclub atmosphere. But that was an opportunity to also use original music on the show itself. So I Love Lucy had original music all through the 1950s as a result, again, of visionary producers like Desi Arnaz. And of course, we're glad he did. And it's one of the reasons that that show

has stayed in our minds all these years. You can't think of that main title of I Love Lucy and see that heart and those names without hearing that tune in your head. So much of what I was reading the book and I was thinking about, of course, growing up and watching these shows and reruns. And I was thinking of my own mother, you know, like that's a show I would watch with my mother when I was a kid. She just loved I Love Lucy. And we would also watch the Flintstones, another great song. And you talked about that, you know, the cartoons and that whole section. But I mean, we're talking about the Flintstones as a primetime evening show. You don't write about the Saturday morning,

you write about the primetime cartoons. How did that develop? You know, ABC was the low-rated network back in the late 50s and the early 60s. So they were the most willing to take chances, to try new things, to take risks in terms of programming. So Hanna Barbera, a phrase that maybe doesn't mean much to today's young people, but certainly speaks to us as the makers of classic TV cartoons. Of course, in the late 50s, that would be things like Pixie and Dixie and Rough and Ready and Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear. But they really jumped into the primetime world with the Flintstones, which dates back to, I think, 1960 or so. And Hanna-Barbera's

resident composer was a guy named Hoyt Curtin, who loved jazz, who was very quick to write a melody, great with melodies, and also very smart about the ability to make a musical point quickly. And in cartoons, you're hitting a lot of things, and most of your cues are 10, 20, 30 seconds long, but also lively, energetic, often jazzy. And so the Flintstones, the Jetsons, Top Cat, and their one big action-adventure show, also in primetime, Johnny Quest,

that period of time from 1960 to about 1965 is like a golden age for music and animation. And Hoyt Curtin is responsible for a lot of it. We have a lot of listeners of this show who live in the UK or Australia, and you also have a chapter on British shows aired in America. And I don't know that we have time to go into that too much, but I thought that was terrific. And of course, the one I did kind of want to pull out maybe briefly is to talk about the Avengers. That's probably one of the most memorable ones from that. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I have to say that writing the British chapter for me was one

of the great joys of the whole book as a whole, because it was an opportunity to write about the great action-adventure shows that came over here in the mid to late 1960s, most of which were made by the British company ITC. That would be things like Secret Agent and The Prisoner and Man in a Suitcase and The Baron and The Champions and The Persuaders, all of which had great music. And then if you think about Masterpiece Theater and Mystery, which were almost entirely British imports, it gave me a chance to write about Upstairs, Downstairs and I, Claudius, right up to Downton Abbey, you know. So that chapter was lots of fun for me. And The Adventures, as you point out, had one of the most memorable themes. I mean, you can just see Patrick McNee and Diana

Rigg coming together in that main title scene and Laurie Johnson's theme blossoming as we see the two of them. And you just think about what great chemistry those guys had and just a joy to think about and to listen to. Yeah, I was really happy to see that. And I know that many listeners of this show will find that to be an interesting chapter. One other chapter that you have was this made for TV movies and miniseries. And I was going through that and I saw the story about Roots and Quincy Jones. And recently we had a podcast where we talked about the original Italian job. And so we talked a lot about Quincy and his work there on that film. My understanding is that Quincy wasn't really writing any more film music. How did he get brought on for the Roots miniseries?

It's one of my favorite stories in the book, really. And of course, Roots is such a landmark in the history of television. David L. Wolper had bought Alex Haley's already bestselling book, which sort of traced his own lineage back to Africa. And it was such an important book to, I think, the African-American community that there was concern about getting it right. And so David L. Wolper, to his credit, talked to Quincy, who was a friend of Alex Haley's and who felt that this was an obligation that he needed to perform. So yes, he had left movies behind by that time, but came back to do Roots. And I talked to Quincy at length about this, and he was very candid about how he felt about it.

And the fact that he was so determined to create an authentic African sound in those first two hours where we're introduced to Kunta Kinte and his family, that he actually started missing deadlines. He had brought in many, many people around him that understood how to sort of create choral material and African percussion and combine it into something that would be an authentic and credible musical approach to the opening hours of the show. But unfortunately, he started missing deadlines and ABC already had a January 1977 air date planned. So to their, I think, regret, but as a scheduling necessity, Wolper and his people had to let Quincy go. So Quincy's music actually only is heard in the first two hours, and they hired Gerald Freed,

who was, you know, interestingly enough, a white New York Jewish guy who had come out and done quite a lot of television at that point and was known to the Wolper people as somebody who could meet deadlines and hit the necessary moments emotionally and dramatically. So it wound up being Gerald Freed who scored hours three through 12 of Roots. But it's all great music, I must say. And of course, Jerry Freed and Quincy Jones both won the Emmy for that show. Well, one of the things that I saw when you were doing promotion for your book was this headline. And it said, how the Friends theme song helped save TV's main title tunes from going extinct. And that was a Variety article about the day your book came out.

So I clicked on it. And of course, it was talking about the fact that your book was being released. What was that Friends story there that the article and that headline is referencing? Well, it's true. And it was such an interesting, again, we're talking about great timing for so many reasons. In 1994, I distinctly remember, at the time I was writing a nationally syndicated television review column. And I was at the summer press tour, where the head of programming at ABC was talking to us and answering our questions. I had been tipped off by a composer that ABC was going to do away with main title sequences.

And so I actually raised my hand and asked the question. And Ted Harbert, then head of ABC programming at the time, admitted that he thought that spending a minute on imagery and music that people see every week was an excuse for people to change the channel and go away and maybe find something else that wasn't boring to them. And so he felt felt there was no real purpose and that maybe just showing the title and jumping straight into the narrative of the evening was a better way to go. Well, most of the TV critics in that room were outraged. And I thought, what? Is this the end of the TV theme? What are you talking about?

This is crazy. the TV theme? What are you talking about? This is crazy. That fall, NBC premiered Friends, which did have a one-minute theme, and not just a theme, but a song, a catchy song, I'll Be There For You, written by Michael Scoff and Allie Willis, which captured, I think, a sense of the upbeat sort of energy of that group of young 20-somethings trying to make it in Manhattan, all close friends, their lives, their relationships, their friendship, and it hit. And of course, it was one of those things where the show became an instant hit. People loved the theme, then wanted to buy the theme. It's released as a single, becomes a hit, and reminds network executives that, hmm, maybe there's something

to this TV theme thing after all, and maybe we can still promote our shows with a main title theme. So they backed off that notion, although not entirely. As we talked about at the very beginning, it's very hard now to find a one-minute theme in network television. Well, one of the shows I worked on at Warner Brothers was The Big Bang Theory. And similar to Friends, I think it had a song, though it was a song that had already been written by the Barenaked Ladies, but it really encapsulated what you wanted people who were coming to the show to feel about the show. And that's where I think I'll be there for you. I mean, you just, the words, the lyrics, the tone, everything just really brings you right into that sitcom.

So a couple of other shows that are more current that I really enjoyed the music for are Game of Thrones and one that I worked on, Westworld. I was wondering if you could talk a little about the composer of those and that kind of modern sound. I mean, who skips through the Game of Thrones open? I mean, maybe you do for the sake of time, but it's just part of getting you into that world. That's exactly right. And that's one of the things that I bring up the most often when I talk about this in terms of modern shows. And it's absolutely true with Game of Thrones. I don't skip through that main title. I want to hear that theme again. It helps to bring me, as you just said, into that world. That's the joy and the brilliance of some of these really dramatically astute composers. They create a sound world for you. And that was certainly the

case with Brahmin Javadi's Game of Thrones theme. It put us in that world, that sort of ancient world. There's a sort of a vaguely European feel, an ancient feel. And it sort of reminded us that we were being hurled back into another time and place far away from where we are now. And Ramin Djawadi is one of our most creative and original of the current crop of composers working in television. And he did an entirely different approach for Westworld. And both of those were either Emmy winning or Emmy nominated scores. And he's really made a career now, particularly with Game of Thrones. He's gone all around the world with a twohour Game of Thrones concert performance with, you know, large symphony orchestra. Wow. Yeah. And it's just amazing to me and a reminder, I think, of how powerful this music can be and how much it communicates to fans of those shows. And I couldn't be happier for Javadi. Well, a couple other of my favorites. I'm a big fan of The

Mandalorian. And of course, there are terrific Star Wars series on nowadays. Talk a little bit about that and the impact. It seems to be a fan favorite. Yeah, no question about it. The composer there is Ludwig Goranson. And he is, again, one of our biggest and most successful current composers of film and television. He won the Oscar for scoring the Black Panther movie in the Marvel world. And at the same time, he was, I think, being wooed to come over to the Star Wars world by those producers, Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. And I think they were looking for somebody who could bring a new sound to the world of Star Wars. And the Mandalorian, I think, was the perfect vehicle for that, because on the one hand, it needed a specific sound that would be unique to that character. recorder, which is sort of eerie and exotic and atmospheric. And by the same token, it's still Star Wars. So you do need an orchestra. And Ludwig does bring that in at the appropriate points.

But there's also some electronics, some modern music production techniques. And again, this is not the same world as John Williams was scoring with Star Wars in 1977. This is a new world, but yet one linked to all of that old stuff with the Jedi and, you know, the Empire and all that stuff. So it's the perfect, I think, blend of old and new and fresh. Yeah, and I don't want to skip it. It helps get me in the mood of the show. And the only time that I might is if I'm doing a binge, you know, and I've got two or three episodes and I'm just wanting, I'm already in the mood. I'm already in the show. I'm already in that frame of mind. And I, I just can't help myself, but watch the next episode, even though it's 1130 and I'm trying to shave off maybe a minute or two, but it's such a good one. The last one that I kind of wanted to

ask you about is also, I think, extremely popular. And I read comments online on YouTube and people say, I never skipped this. And that's the theme for Stranger Things on Netflix. this. And that's the theme for Stranger Things on Netflix. Talk a little bit about that one. I love the idea that the creators of Stranger Things wanted a kind of 1980s retro synth sound. And they discovered these two guys from Texas who were playing around with this stuff, who really were not known, I think, at all in the media world. And they were recruited to come on board and provide a kind of, not just an 80s soundscape, but a kind of sense of mystery that I think is enhanced by that very specific sound they came up with. And it was fascinating to me that they put out two albums that first year.

And it was fascinating to me that they put out two albums that first year. And I can't remember if one or both was Grammy nominated, but it just sort of zoomed up in the atmosphere. And it's interesting, Stranger Things is not just about that sort of retro analog synth score, but also the music supervisors of Stranger Things are incorporating 80 songs in such an effective way that it's a reminder of how important music supervision has become in our day and age. That is the application of pre-existing songs in a dramatic way that sort of works for the viewers. So Stranger Things is like sort of the perfect show of its time. Yeah, and I think those three examples that we just talked about from Stranger Things,

Mandalorian, Game of Thrones, I think they just go to show that, okay, in an age of streaming, things are going to continue. That streaming is not the end of having themes and scores for shows. As a matter of fact, these three we've talked about are some of the most popular. And I understand that, you know, Game of Thrones started on cable, on HBO. But Mandalorian and Stranger Things were specifically for streaming shows when they were developed. So I think the future is bright. What are your thoughts? Oh, I do, too. You know, I think it's important to stay upbeat and positive and optimistic.

Maybe the older I get, maybe I'm finding that that's an appropriate way to think. And I feel that way about music and television. Yes, things are changing and maybe a little too fast for some of us. And streaming seems to be the way to go. But cable is not dead and network isn't dead. Maybe they are on their way out. Who's to say? Maybe they'll find new ways to remain relevant as we sort of explore this new media world that we're all in and probably spending too much money on. But I find that the newer shows,

the producers that I've spoken with, people like the producers of Succession and Andor and The Mandalorian, all these guys are really very, very aware of the power of music and the power of a great theme and how important that can be, not just in attracting an audience, but in reminding us where we are in terms of that particular world. So yeah, I do think the future is bright. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This was a lot of fun. Great. Thanks, Tim. It's been a joy. Well, I hope you enjoyed the conversation with John Burlingame as much as I did.

Music for Primetime is a terrific book, just full of great history and stories about the TV music we all grew up with. There are links in the podcast show notes for those who would like to purchase the book and on our website at www.theextras.tv. So be sure and check those out. If this is the first episode of The Extras you've listened to and you enjoyed it, please think about following the show at your favorite podcast provider. to and you enjoyed it, please think about following the show at your favorite podcast provider. And if you're on social media, be sure and follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at The Extras TV or Instagram at The Extras.TV to stay up to date on our upcoming guests and to be a part of our community. And you're invited to our Facebook group for fans of Warner Brothers films called the Warner Archive and Warner Brothers Catalog Group. So look for that link

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