May 29 - Danny Elfman

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On this day, in 1953, Daniel Robert Elfman was born in Los Angeles, California. As the child of teachers, Danny spent much of his childhood hanging around the local movie theater (not surprisingly admiring the scores of movies more than the actors in them) and hanging out with the band geeks. While in high school, he started a ska band, dropped out of school and followed his older brother Richard to France for a while. Upon his return to the States, he sort of sat in on a few classes at CalArts (not having a high school diploma prevented him from actually enrolling). Then, when he was nineteen, a formal education ceased to matter all that much. 

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In 1972, Richard formed a band/performance art troupe he called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.  Danny was off in Africa at the time studying the violin and percussion instruments, but joined the group when he got back to America. The Mystic Knights played a variety of genres of music, mostly wearing clown makeup, with original performance bits thrown in. Needless to say, they didn’t make any recordings of their shows, in spite of their growing popularity. In late 1975, Richard’s interests began to drift towards filmmaking and he passed the mantel of leadership of the group on to Danny. The Mystic Knights really began to gain a following in Los Angeles and even appeared on the Gong Show in 1976, winning their episode. Over the next few years, they began appearing in independent films and the group’s style began to lean toward pop artists. In 1980, Richard released a film called Forbidden Zone, which was supposed to represent the surrealism of one of the Mystic Knights’ stage performances. It was the first time that Danny would write the score of a movie. Despite receiving poor reviews, the film has become a cult classic and provided a boost to Richard’s film career and Danny’s music career. 

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Following the release of Forbidden Zone, The Mystic Knights shortened their name to Oingo Boingo, dropped most of the theatricality from their performances and became a pop octet with Danny as lead singer, rhythm guitarist and songwriter. Oingo Boingo was frequently called a new wave band but in reality, their use of a horn section and continuously surreal imagery put them pretty much outside of that, or any, rock classification. The group would play together for fifteen more years, releasing several  albums, appearing in several films (including Weird Science and Back to School) and influencing future groups like Nirvana and Fishbone. What seemed like an abrupt retirement in 1995, later turned out to be a move of pure self-preservation by Danny. His hearing was shot after all those years in a rock band, and rather than damage it more, he walked away, the group dissolving with his departure. Thankfully, Danny’s second career was well established by that point. 

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In 1985, Tim Burton and Paul Reubens asked Danny to write the score for Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Tim’s debut as a feature director. Danny was reluctant to take the project on because of his lack of formal musical composition training, but he got orchestration help from Steve Bartek, Oingo Boingo’s arranger, and pulled it off. Danny has called the moment he first heard a full orchestra playing something he wrote the best moment of his life. Tim was more than thrilled with his work. Danny has written the score for all but three of Tim’s movies in a collaboration that is still happening today. His distinctive style melds well with Tim’s and can be heard in classic films like Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Batman, Batman Returns, Corpse Bride (for which he also provided the voice of Bonejangles) and Sleepy Hollow. 

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Danny became part of Disneyana way back in 1990 when he wrote the score for the Warren Beatty blockbuster Dick Tracy. Three years later, he played an integral part in one of my favorite films, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Not only did he write the music for the film but he provided the singing voice for the lead, Jack Skellington, and the voices for Barrel, one of Oogie Boogie’s henchmen, and the Clown with the Tear Away Face. His other Disney film scores include Flubber, Meet the Robinsons, Good Will Hunting, 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, 2012’s Frankenweenie, Oz the Great and Powerful, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Alice Through the Looking Glass and this year’s Dumbo. In 2015, for all of the delightful music he’s contributed to the company (and will most likely continue to bring us), Danny was declared an official Disney Legend.

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Outside of Disney, Danny has had all kinds of success. Over the course of his career he's earned 24 BMI Awards, two Emmy Awards, a Grammy, an Annie Award, six Saturn Awards, a Sierra Award and a Satellite Award (he's also gotten an additional 39 nominations outside of those 36 wins). Highlights from the dozens of film scores he’s done include the Men in Black series, the first Mission: Impossible, two of Sam Raimi’s Spiderman films and the Fifty Shades of Grey series. He’s written multiple theme songs for television shows like Tales from the Crypt, Batman: The Animated Series, Desperate Housewives and, maybe his most famous composition of all time, The Simpsons. Danny has also been commissioned to compose several classical pieces, not associated with any film or show. So far he’s written a serenade, an overture (to a non-existent musical as he put it), a concerto and a piano quartet. Later this year, we’ll be able to enjoy his work in the fourth MIB movie and he’s already logged in a Doctor Dolittle film that’s slated for next year. We wish Danny a happy birthday and can’t wait to hear where his music will take us next.

October 29 - The Nightmare Before Christmas

On this day, in 1993, one of my favorite films of all time, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, opened in theaters. In 1982, when Tim was an animator with Disney, he wrote a three page poem about a Halloween skeleton who discovers Christmas, takes it over and the chaos that ensues. He'd had some success with his delightful little short Vincent earlier that year and thought maybe his poem could be developed into a half hour special or something. The studio, however, didn't think it (or Tim, for that matter) fit in with the Disney aesthetic and fired him instead. The poem decided that it wouldn't let Tim forget about it.

After the major successes of Beetlejuice and Batman, Tim's thoughts kept returning to Halloween Town and its Pumpkin King. It turned out that Disney still owned the production rights to his poem, but now that he was a big time movie director, suddenly the studio thought that a deal could be made. Tim teamed up with another former Disney animator, Henry Selick, to flesh things out. While Tim would produce the movie, he wasn't interested in the long process of stop motion animation, so the directing chore fell to Henry.

As work on the story progressed, Tim became convinced that it should be a musical and knew that Danny Elfman, who has done most of the scores for Tim's films, would be able to make that happen. Danny once said that writing the eleven songs for Nightmare was one of the easiest gigs he ever had. And he got to be the singing voice for Jack Skellington.

Filming began in July 1991 in San Francisco, California. A crew of over 120 toiled away, using 20 sound stages simultaneously. 227 figures were created for all the characters and Jack Skellington alone had over 400 heads that could be swapped out to represent any emotion or facial expression. By contrast, Sally only had around 110 heads.

When Nightmare opened, it was the first feature length stop motion animated film by a major US studio. And even though some Disney executives felt it would showcase the fact that the studio could think outside the box when it came to kinds of entertainment, they still didn't know what to do with it. They even released it under the Touchstone Pictures name because they thought it would be too scary for kids. Without a whole lot of support from the studio, Nightmare would still earn 50 million dollars on an 18 million dollar budget. The initial reviews were positive and, since then have basically recognized the brilliance of the film. It was nominated for a Best Visual Effects Oscar, a Best Musical Score Golden Globe and won the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film.

Since its initial release, Nightmare has grown almost exponentially for Disney. It's been re-released several times in theaters and is the only stop motion feature to be converted into 3-D.  It is both a bona fide cult classic (I count myself among the people who have loved it since day one and just smile knowingly at more recent fans, especially if they're old enough to have seen its debut) and a commercial success. The only question that remains about Nightmare: is it a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie?

Also on this day, in American history: Black Tuesday