Elf Esteem
by Alyssa Katz
The Village Voice [early 90's?]
With his tousled 'red thatch and bright eyes committing themselves
to perkiness even when he doesn't want them to, Danny Elfman could
easily be described as, well, elfin. Though he's quick to assure that
he's of Russian-Polish Jewish descent, with a name of inexplicably
Germanic origin, it's still tempting to think of him as part sprite,
particularly judging from the film scores he's composed in the past
eight years.
Elfman's soundtrack music might be most associated with its
plucky, percussive Barnum and Bailey face; the Nino Rota inspired
calliope of Pee-wee's Big Adventure, or the Jetsons redux theme from
The Simpsons. But the frontster for the synth-rock hand Oingo Boingo
wouldn't be writing music for films if he felt compelled to do his
same old song and dance. "It's a motivating force to keep going,
because I don't want that written on my tombstone: 'Here ties Danny
Elliman, 1953 to 19...,' let's give me till '96. 'He wrote The
Simpsons.' The best/worst obituary I ever read was for Herve
Villechaize, whom I actually knew. 'His most famous line was pointing
at the sky while jumping up and down excitedly and going, The plane,
the plane.' Now that's nasty."
Tim Burton offered Elfman the opportunity to do his first
orchestral soundtrack, for Pee-wee, solely based on his admiration
for Oingo Boingo. Since then, the man-child director has had Elfman
do the music for each of his features. Elfiman's darker side hasn't
always been his most attractive; his Batman scores for Burton were
turgid and oppressive. But The Nightmare Before Christmas is a
lighter shade of dark. Burton signed on Elfiman to do the songs,
lyrics, and score plus vocals for Jack Skellington, the
megalomaniacal town dandy of Halloweenland. The meticulously twisted
stop-motion animated fairy tale perfectly mirrors Elfman's shadowy
pep.
A couple of flattish numbers in Nightmare testify that Elfman had
never written songs for a musical before; they flail around,
struggling gratingly toward a classic Disney merriness, But his
stylistic gambles largely pay off, emerging in a score that
reassuringly ladles on the homages even while it forges new
territory, reviving devices like operatic recitative in the context
of a very modern movie musical that refutes the reigning Aladdin
paradigm. No Peabo Bryson ballad here. "I'm in an awkward position,"
Elfman concedes. "I'm trying to redefine something that's very
popular at the moment. I knew that I'd catch a lot of heat from
people saying, 'Where's the hit?' I'm trying to explain, that's not
the idea. Songs should be glued to their musical and have no life
outside of it."
Burton had serendipitously picked himself a music man who grokked
the intimate interplay between the cinematic aural and visual. got my
entire musical and I film education as I know it at the Baldwin Hills
movie theater in a suburb of Los Angeles." Most every film music fan
can remember that magic moment when they figure out that a score
isn't just wallpaper behind the action; Elfman it turns out, had that
revelation during a Ray Harryhausen flick with music by Bernard
Herrmann. (Harrryhausen, of course, was the old master of
Nightmare-ish stopmotion animation.) Finding a haven in Burton's
mock-expressionist Halloweenland, Elfman lets loose with his
long-evident Kurt Weill fixation. Halloween is distinguished from
many Western rites by its near lack of musical tradition; working
with what there is, it's a tough trick to wrap minor scales,
dissonance, and witchy vocals into a child-accessible package, but
Elfman fills in the blanks with the horror-movie soundtracks running
through his cluttered head. His passion for grue even preceded any
musical aspirations. "When I was a kid I wanted to do makeup.
Horrible prosthetic makeup was my goal in life."
If anything, he may be burdened by too many influences, most often
self-confessed: Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, Gilbert and Sullivan, Dr.
Seuss, Stravinsky, Saint-Saens, Cab Calloway...Elfman's post-pomo
stretegy has its limits. As even he says of his film work, " I've
actually become bored with it lately and have started to pull out. I
only do two films a year, and I've been getting discouraged, not
finding projects that challenge me."
The Calloway tribute in Nightmare has raised some eyebrows,
performed as it is by a Santa-torturing, bug-stuffed burlap sack
named Oogie Boogie. "It's something I brought up once or twice: are
YOU sure YOU want to use this name, that sort of thing, and Tim would
go, I don't understand, what?" Elfman recalls. "And I realized that
it was completely coming from the innocence of Max Fleischer
cartoons", which showcased a rotoscoped Calloway. We both agreed it'd
be fun if the opportunity arrived to do an homage. The problem is
that in almost any musical you have a single specialty number that's
going to be a delicious little bit. It's always the bad guy."
Making his screen singing debut, Elfman found a romper room for
his own peripatetic vocal theatrics, a dress rehearsal of sorts for
the new Oingo Boingo album he's now recording. He also has a couple
of his own scripts under his arm-one of them, Little Demons, is
slated to be a liquefaction musical for Disney. "It's about child
murderers," he explains with dark cheeriness.
If there's one project Elfman won't be working on, it's Burton's
upcoming biopic of angoraphilic Z-movie-director Ed Wood. Variety
reported that the two aren't even speaking. (While not mentioning a
rift, Elfman says that the notoriously nonverbal Burton usually
limited their collaborative discussions to "a 30-minute dinner or
lunch conversation" anyway.) He'll have no name on his tombstone
except his own.