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Collaboration, an integral and inevitable part of filmmaking, is either a dream or a nightmare. You put yourself in the hands of someone else and discover the pitfalls of language as a means of communication. If you are lucky and have chosen well, your collaborator--be he (or she) set-designer, actor, co-writer or cameraman--will bring to your film ideas and meaning and execution you never dreamt of, but which miraculously enhance your vision. If you are lucky, your collaborator's contribution hits you with the force of revelation.
If you are unlucky, the impulse to commit murder may be hard to resist. There are few things more enraging in this life than being misunderstood. Especially when it costs money.
Nowhere are the perils of collaboration more pronounced than when it comes to the music for the film. Here the filmmakers are typically at the mercy of someone and something about which they are likely to know little, and what little vocabulary the normally have at their disposal to express their needs and desires, has shrunk to an even less perfect form of communication. It is a nightmare indeed to find yourself on the scoring stage with the meter ticking, only to discover that the "voice" of your film (which is the utmost function that music plays in relation to it) is grotesquely wrong.
On the other hand, few experiences are more exhilarating than listening on the scoring stage to music that not merely captures what you as a filmmaker were trying to achieve, but actually defines it. It is impossible to imagine The Third Man without Anton Karas' haunting zither theme.
Such was my fortunate experience with Cliff Eidelman when we scored Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
When my first notion—that of adapting Holst's The Planets—proved economically unfeasible, I found myself listening to demo tapes submitted from near and far, many of which bore bewildering resemblance to another. Like modern automobiles, recent film music seemed prey to a distressing sameness. It was Eidelman's tape which jumped out at Ronald Roose, my editor, and myself. Conversations with Eidelman followed.
In talking with Eidelman, I mentioned that since the marches which always accompanied the main titles for the other Star Trek movies were so familiar and so good, I had no desire to compete with them by attempting any bombast in our opening. In any event, our film was rather darker than its predecessor's and seemed to demand something appropriately different. (Having worked on three previous Star Trek features, I had discovered the secret is not to repeat yourself). I had mentioned the opening of Stravinsky's Firebird as the sort of foreboding sounds I had in mind.
Two days later Eidelman brought in a tape he made of a main title, played on a synthesizer. I was stunned, not only by the speed with which he had worked (he had not even been hired!) but by the degree to which I had been understood. Notwithstanding his caveats about how much better the thing would sound once it was performed by an orchestra, I played the tape for producers Nimoy, Jaffe and Winter. Eidelman had the job.
There is not space (nor interest, I suspect) for a blow-by-blow description of the happy union which ensued. Suffice to say that since our film was basically an opera, we asked for (and got) an operatic score. Eidelman is quite specific in his orchestrations and fond of strange, non-western instruments, ideal for the depiction of an alien culture, the heart of our film. Like Puccini, he turns out to have an essentially theatrical sensibility. Although we "spotted" (i.e. chose where to use the music in the film) in what I took to be thoughtful detail, I later discovered my collaborator to be considerably more imaginative and more subtle in his ultimate choices. He did not insist on his ideas, but merely submitted them as possible alternatives. It did not take much to convince me of their merits.
This is all by the way. For those who see the film, Eidelman's work must speak for itself. For those who are beguiled by that work, this recording will serve to recapture and preserve it.--Nicholas Meyer, co-writer/director
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