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Alan and Marilyn Bergman are a
lyric-writing team who have won three Academy Awards, two Grammys,
one Ace Award and three Emmy Awards. In 1995, Marilyn and Alan were
recipients of Honorary Doctorates from the Berklee College of Music,
and also received the National Academy of Songwriters Lifetime
Achievement Award. In 1980, they were inducted into the Songwriters
Hall of Fame, and in June of 1997 received the organization's Johnny
Mercer Award. Among many other accolades, Alan and Marilyn have been
nominated for sixteen Academy Awards, and in 1983, they became the
first songwriters ever to be nominated for three Academy Awards for
Best Song out of the five nominated songs.
In 1985, Marilyn became the first woman to be elected to the
Board of Directors of ASCAP, and in February of 1994, after serving
five terms, she was elected President and Chairman of the Board of
ASCAP. In September of 1996, she received France's highest cultural
honor, Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters Medal. Alan and
Marilyn both serve on the Executive Committee of the Music Branch of
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Alan is the
President of the Academy's (AMPAS) Foundation.
Some of Alan and Marilyn's credits include: "The Windmills of
Your Mind," "The Way We Were," "You Don't Bring Me Flowers," "Yellow
Bird," "Nice n' Easy," "How Do You Keep The Music Playing?," "What
Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life?," "Ordinary Miracles," the
score to the film Yentl, and "Moonlight," from the film
Sabrina. Their long list of television credits includes the
theme songs for Maude, Good Times, Alice, and Brooklyn
Bridge.
Alan and Marilyn were born in the same hospital, and were raised
in the same area of New York City. They met in Los Angeles and later
married while working independently with the same composer.
The following is excerpted from the Bergmans' guest spot at
the ASCAP Extended Songwriters' Workshop, held in November, 1996. It
appears in three installments.
What is your process? Do you write in the same
room, or...
Marilyn Bergman: When we're working on a film,
it's very different from writing a song out of context. We see the
film with the composer, and then we speak with the director to
discuss the song's reason for being and function in the film. Then
we meet with the composer and decide what style the song should be,
from whose point of view, and then sometimes we'll start the process
in the same room together, with one of us coming up with a line or a
phrase. But ultimately we find ourselves alone in a room with a
cassette.
And the melody can change with the flow of the
lyrics?
MB: Oh, absolutely. Although it rarely does with
Michel Legrand, a composer with whom we work a lot. Maybe it's
because of the way he writes. He writes sequential tunes, a sequence
that repeats and repeats, and if you take out one brick, it all
collapses. We might suggest small adjustments, to which he is always
receptive.
Do you and Alan work together?
MB: Always. We're thinking separately when we're
not together, so we'll bring something different into the room when
we get together to work.
How many projects are you working on at
one time?
MB: It depends. When you're working on a show,
you really have tunnel-vision and that's your whole world. As you
all know, you have to have a lot of balls in the air, because you
can't depend on any one piece of work landing where you hope it's
going to land. So unless you like to get your heart broken over and
over, it's a good idea to have a few things going. But if you're
working on an all-consuming project, it's different.
How quickly do you have to write?
Alan Bergman: When you write in a dramatic
context as much as we do, we've never had more than a week or two
weeks to write a song. Sometimes a weekend. If you've seen the
Barbra Streisand picture, A Star Is Born, the song that
makes her a star, "I Believe In Love," we wrote that overnight with
Kenny Loggins. One night. But, we don't like to do that.
MB: When you have to, you have to. The bad thing
about that is, you don't really have time to explore other
possibilities, or to let something sit. You have to go with the
first thrust.
Which do you think is better, the first
impulse, or when something has time to sink in?
AB: What really separates the amateurs from the
professionals is the ability to rewrite.
MB: I believe that's essential, not feeling that
anything you write is the only way to say something, particularly
when you're collaborating. One of the cornerstones of collaboration
is that you're both pleased, and sometimes I'll come up with
something, and Alan will indicate that he thinks there's something
better. I may make a case for it, but not a terribly strong one!
AB: Our collaboration is so long-standing, and
there's such trust and respect here, that I really believe there's a
reason why something doesn't hit her, and if it's right we'll come
back to it eventually. But in the meantime, her way might not be
right and mine might not be right, but there's a third or a fourth
way somewhere that's better.
MB: You can't fall in love with anything
thinking it's the only way -- there are always other possibilities.
Compromises. People say that writers never really finish -- you
abandon things or they are dragged from you. You always think later
that you could have made it better.
AB: So make it as good as you can --
MB: Or it comes back to haunt you!
Do you find that most of your
inspiration comes in flashes?
MB: You live for those flashes! You can't count
on them all the time -- if you need something by a particular time,
you can't wait for the flash. You do it and you hope it's there, but
if it's not, you have to have enough craft so that you can do it by
sheer carpentry. That's painful and it's terrible -- when you know
that what you're doing is really journeyman carpentry. It'll work
and it'll be okay, there won't be any terrible mistakes in it and it
will sing and it will be fine, but it'll be just another song, and
what the world doesn't need is just another song!. But yes, you live
for that inspiration, and you don't know where it comes from, and
you don't want to know!
When you're writing a lyric, do you come
up with the title first, or a verse, or...
AB: Well, our process has changed over the
years. Sometimes you'll get a line and build a whole song around it.
But we never know where we're going to end up -- we used to need to
know. Irving Berlin is a perfect example of someone who knew exactly
where he was going in every song. He had an idea like, "I got lost
in his arms," and he knew that the last line in the song was going
to be, "But look what I found." And he went from A to Z, and he knew
every step. If you analyze his songs, he did that over and over
again. We find it more fun just to follow wherever the song takes
us. MB: We figure if there's a way in, there's
usually a way out, and if there's not, we start over again.
What if someone gives you a melody and
you can't fit anything to it? Do you ask them to change the melody?
MB: That did happen once!
AB: Melodies are interesting things. For
instance, Michel came to us one day, and he had just finished
scoring a picture called Picasso Summer. He played a melody
to us [hums staccato melody] as a march, and we said, "What if you
played that as a ballad?" He came back with [hums same melody slower
and easier], and we said, "Okay, we can work with that."
MB: There's a funny story about "Little Boy
Lost," which we also wrote with Michel. It had a metric pattern that
-- if you were writing the lyric in French with feminine endings, it
would have been simpler. [hums melody] Everything that we put on
that last note was like a thump. So we sat in the room -- he stayed
with us when he came to America to write -- and every time he would
walk by, he said he could see us getting greener and greener. Two or
three days went by, and he finally said, "You're having so much
trouble, what can I do to help you?" So we told him, and he said,
how about [hums melody with different meter], and that changed
everything. So sometimes there are musical phrases that either don't
sing or don't want to be sung.
I want to ask about "You Don't Bring Me
Flowers." It seems like a very contemporary thing to say, you know,
divorces were becoming very common at the time. It was topical, but
very classic at the same time, and I was wondering how it came
about.
MB: That's a very funny story. Neil Diamond --
this sounds like a real Hollywood story, but it's the truth -- was
at a dinner party with Norman Lear, the television producer, and he
asked if Norman had any great television series coming up, because
he'd like to write the theme song. And Norman said, "Yes, I've got a
show that we're getting ready to do a pilot on called All That
Glitters, and I don't have main title for it. Neil offered to
write it, and Norman asked that he write it with us. So we wrote
this 45-second (because that's all the time we had for a theme) song
called "You Don't Bring Me Flowers." The show was about the reversal
of roles; a woman-dominated society was the premise of the show.
Now, between the time that the song was written and the pilot was
filmed, the premise of the show changed, and the song didn't fit
anymore. So we scrapped it, and about six or eight months later we
ran into Neil, and he said that he was doing the song on the road
and that everybody liked it. We said, "What song? It's 45 seconds
long!" He said, "Well, I do a little instrumental part, then I come
back," and we decided to finish the song, and he recorded it. And I
guess Barbra heard it and liked it. She recorded it, and she and
Neil had unknowingly recorded it in the same key, and a disc jockey
in... Tulsa? Someplace like that... intercut the two versions --
AB: He was getting divorced, and he made it as a
present for his wife. The station started getting calls asking where
they could get the record, and of course there was no record, but
Neil and Barbra went in and recorded it. Anyway, the show died a
very quick death, and perhaps the song would have gone with it if it
had been used. |