'E.T.' music live at the Bowl; Telluride Film Fest lineup; EDM festival problems

I actually played violin on "E.T.," I used to be a violinist. So I remember that vividly. I remember standing in line at the Cinerama Dome on opening night to watch it, but I had played on the score. It was done at what is now Sony, but it was the old MGM scoring stage. I remember the first cue that he did was the flying cue near the end of the movie, where they're flying to get away from the bad guys before E.T. goes home. It was an absolutely thrilling experience. Though all the images of "E.T." were blacked out. That was when they started to get really paranoid, they didn't want anyone to see what things were going to look like. 

Like all of John's work in that genre, it has a couple of really big beautiful heroic themes, you have a director that really understands what music can do to a story, emotionally as well as, in some ways, narratively. I think John Williams, him and his team, have been incredible orchestrators. By that I mean how he chooses which instrument plays which note. Actually when you're sitting in a scoring session everything sounds good really quickly, because there's such craft in it. Everyone knew when we were playing that that it was going to be a big deal. 

Over and over and over and over. You cannot prepare enough. I have this whole system. It's better for me if I have it for six weeks or eight weeks, I try to get it as early as possible. I go through the whole score and mark what I need marked. Then I do it with the music playing, then most importantly I turn the music off, and just practice and practice...you learn your proclivities. Then you go and do it with the orchestra and that brings this other organic entity into it. It's like pushing a truck up hill. They're very hard to move, then you have to re-adjust what you're doing. You thought you might be going too fast, maybe now isn't fast enough. 

Two. Maybe three. Very rarely there's just one, maybe if they've played it before. The thing that's hard is you need to synchronize and you need to make music. You can't do one or the other. If you synchronize then you're conducting like a robot. and if you make music and you're not synchronized, you can feel the audience. They don't know everywhere that's not synchronized but there are certain places where it's absolutely obvious that you've missed a sync point. 

I had no interest or intention of ever writing music. I was a professional violinist in my 20s, I was obsessed with conducting and I was conducting as much as I could, and I was studying as much as I could. I went to USC, I got an undergrad degree in violin and a masters degree in conducting.



But this was absolutely not on my radar, because my dad wasn't a very self-aggrandizing person. He was a very shy person. I think there's a famous clip of him accepting an Academy Award and immediately getting off the stage.

It was probably the shortest acceptance speech in Academy history, and my dad was a huge opera and classical music fan. That's what was talked about in my family, not films. He was always denigrating film music, and it was only when I got older, after he had passed away and I was listening to his music in school, that I discovered what film music really is.



I think they were so ambivalent about it, these guys — Franz Waxman, Steiner, my father, the pioneers of this — because it wasn't concert music, so they thought it was less than that. But that's changing now, and in a lot of universities now there's more film music being taught. I mean, ballet's a functional medium, so is opera to a certain degree, even though music is more hegemonic in both of those than it is in film music. But it doesn't negate the possibility that certain film scores work splendidly well, as well as any other concert music, as concert music.

I think there has never ever been a career like John Williams'. That whole "Jaws" phenomenon — there's nobody that knows how to use music like Spielberg, and John is just the perfect analog to Spielberg.



There's never been a populist composer like that, that's so well-trained and has such great craft and loves making beautiful music, beautiful melodies, and yet there's a lot of Modernist music in "E.T." I know we all remember the big themes, but the first two acts are comprised of this weird, Modernist music. E.T.'s in the house with the Reese's Pieces, and all that stuff is very delicate and weird, and I think John should be applauded. [laughs] He's really brought this to a larger public and has shown that this music can work in concert. 

Well, it's precisely because we lost two young women that were under the age of 21, and this isn't the first time. Before I took office last year, there was the death of another young woman at Whittier Narrows, another county facility in the first district. There have been other casualties — back in 2010, there was an issue that was brought before the County Board of Supervisors to look at raves because of a death at the Coliseum.



So the Board took action and put together a strategic plan to go about enforcing more security and safety at these events, and my understanding is that the State Assembly passed statewide legislation to also provide enforcement of measures to protect the public. Now, what's occurred to me is that, for some reason, at the Fairplex there may have been more lax enforcement of safety precautions, so obviously we wanted to take a look at what actually happened on the ground.

I've spoken with the ones out near Fairplex and I had my staff go into detail with them about the occurrences. The advice I'm getting from the County Council is because there was already a contractual agreement with Live Nation that we had to work this out, at least for the time that the contract provides coverage for — these two events that are coming up on October 31 and November 1.

Yes, for those two events. We'll see what happens after those events, and that's why we've asked for this task force. Once you see that our health facilities are inundated as a result of these events, for me that was a cause for concern.



And finding out why we didn't have more precautions made available for more strict enforcement of what was being brought into the Fairplex facility, more security, the availability for more parking, or for water to be provided freely for people.



I heard from some of the eventgoers that they were told to dispose of their water bottles before they got into the Fairplex, because they wanted them to purchase water at the event. We thought, Well, that doesn't make sense, it's so hot. And if these kinds of circumstances evolve, we need to provide safety and protection.



I'm glad that we were able to work something out with Live Nation, but that doesn't mean that we'll remove the possibility a moratorium on these events. As we move forward, we're going to be looking at what they're doing to help abide by our agreements, our memorandum of understanding. I do want to say that one thing that was pretty clear to me was that most of the people that have died at these raves were usually under the age of 21.

I don't know. That's why we're going through this memorandum of understanding, to try to come at an agreement so it's more manageable. We've also asked for more security, so we want our LA County sheriffs involved. We also want to see more information given to those concertgoers regarding the effects of misusing alcohol or drugs before they enter into the venue.

It really kicks off the fall film season. There are a couple film festivals bundled around it: Venice [Film Festival] is starting right around the same time and it’s followed by the Toronto International Film Festival. So Telluride, among the American festivals outside of Sundance, is probably the most important in the nation, and it really is a showcase for movies that are going to come out late in the year and typically are going to do very well around Oscar time.

I’ll start by talking about a film called “Carol,” which played at the Cannes Film Festival. This is a film directed by Todd Haynes, it stars Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett. It based on a Patricia Highsmith novel about two women who fall in love in the 1950s when it was very much a forbidden topic. So that’s high on the list.

There’s a documentary called “Amazing Grace” that was shot in 1972 and has never been released. Sydney Pollack, the great filmmaker, directed it. They had some sound issues and apparently they fixed some of them so they’re going to show that for the very first time.

I think some of it was just technical. According to the press kit for the film, the filmmakers didn’t use a clapper or a slate, so none of the sound was synchronized to the film. The tape recorder they were using was running at a slower speed than the film camera, so it was an analog film that had a lot of digitally solvable problems. So now that technology has come along, they’ve been able to clear the rights and fix the sound. And apparently it turned out great because the Telluride programmers think it’s good enough to show.  

Yes, Rooney Mara won the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s a movie that’s going to do very well with critics. It’s going to play some other festivals and it’s the kind of movie that should ride its critical wave all the way through the Oscars. I think a lot of people think it’s a favorite, not just for best picture, but for some acting nominations for Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett.

“Beasts Of No Nation” is a very interesting movie because it’s the first feature film made by Netflix, which is generally in the streaming service or running other people’s movies. Cary Fukunaga is the filmmaker. He is probably best known for directing the first season of “True Detective.” It’s a movie that is a fictionalized version of an African war in which a warlord enlists young boys to fight in a civil war. It’s obviously historically very reminiscent of some battles that are going on right now in Africa. It’s a very dark, depressing, violent film. It’s an important movie. Again, I think it’s going to get a lot of critical attention. But for Netflix, for their first feature film to play at the Telluride Film Festival, that’s quite a coup.

Yeah and I think one of the highest profile documentaries is a film called “He Named Me Malala.” If people have paid attention to civil rights in Pakistan, Malala was an 11-year-old girl that the Taliban targeted for encouraging girls to go to school. She was shot and almost killed, but survived. She’s gone on to be not only a human rights advocate, but somebody who was encouraging girls to get an education. It’s having its world premiere at the film festival. It is being distributed by Fox Searchlight. It’s a very important movie and Fox Searchlight has been here before. They brought “12 Years A Slave” here, they brought “Slumdog Millionaire” here. So Telluride has been very important for the studio and I think it’s going to be a great launching pad for this new documentary.