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The
Sally Stevens Interview Part Two |
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In
this the second part of our interview with Sally Stevens we take a look at her
role in the motion picture and television industries and how she has impacted
the music that accompanies the scenes on the screen.
Sally Stevens recalls when she first started working on films, “The first film
that I worked on was How The West Was Won
(Released in
1962 - starring Debbie Reynolds, Henry
Fonda, Gregory Peck, James Stewart, Eli Wallach) and I was still pregnant
with my daughter. It was a rare experience, because it was the first time that I
was on a movie lot as an employee.
The vocal contractor who put that choir together was someone that my step-father
knew and they must have just been short a soprano or two or something.
I was referred to him and I got to be a part of that choir. In those days the process for recording was different.
We were there live with the orchestra and that didn’t begin to change until the
late seventies or early eighties maybe. (Often) when I worked on films we were
live with the orchestra. Then the
technology started to change and they would record the brass, the strings, the
rhythm and everybody separately and the choir would come in afterwards. We
didn’t get to work with all of the guys that we knew as often. That is still the
way it is now, it is rare that you get to work with the orchestra.
I did a solo for Lalo for a film called The Fox and I
did solo cues all through the film Klute
for a composer named Michael Small. I say that was my heavy breathing
period, but the sound was just a very breathy vocal sound. It was just in
fashion I guess at that moment.” For the first twenty years that Sally Stevens worked on
films she did so as a singer and she explains why she waited to get into the
contracting side of the business. “When I was working as a singer I pretty much came in
with blinders on. I thought, I am not supposed to speak to anybody and I am just
supposed to look at the music and sing. I never wanted to be a contractor,
because I figured if I was a contractor the other contractors wouldn’t like me
and there would be all of that political stuff, so they wouldn’t hire me. Now
when I look back at it, I was not as aware of what was going on around me as I
wish I had been. I didn’t know the names, I didn’t know the players,” she says. Good fortune smiled upon Sally Stevens in 1968 when she
started performing in concerts with Burt Bacharach, something that remained a
part of her career for the next decade. During
that time she also did some solo vocals for the
film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay when it debuted in
1969. Bacharach composed the score for the film.
She talks about her association with Burt Bacharach, “He (Bacharach) did his
first concert as an artist on the west coast in 1968. Jackie Ward
put the group together and The Carpenters were our opening act for that
concert in San Diego. He asked me
to go on the road with him after that, but I wasn’t able to that, because my dad
had a mini stroke and he was going to have surgery. I just had to be there. A
couple of years passed and I ran into Burt at the Grammy Awards and I said if
you ever need a replacement or you need to make a change I sure would love to
travel with you.
I did end up going on the road with him after he did
Lost Horizon (1973). It wasn’t
constant, but we would do two weeks in the spring in Vegas and two weeks in
Tahoe or we would do maybe a couple of weeks on the east coast.
At one point we did a show that was broadcast on television from Calgary,
Canada. We did a couple of weeks in South America, a couple of weeks in
Australia and in the Phillipines.
By that time I had gotten really lucky with my singing
and I was very busy doing jingles and record dates and all of that. The main
contractor at the time here in town was a man named Ron Hickland. He was
wonderful and he was doing everything, but he would get really annoyed with me
when I would go out of town with Burt, so he would kind of punish me for six
weeks when I came back and he wouldn’t call. Then things started getting a
little shakey and he found a couple of people that he liked who sang lead. By 1978 or ’79 things were really starting to slow down
for me up to 1980 or ’82. It was not so much that I was starting to hurt, but I
(became aware) that there were other people starting to work in the places where
I had worked. I have always thought that this is a very youth oriented business
and it would be all over when I was about forty-five. I was out shopping one day and I saw this big canvas
tote bag that was about two feet wide and a foot and one-half deep with a design
on the front of it. It was a great big rainbow and it had a bunch of little
stick figures walking under the rainbow. The inscription underneath said when
they are trying to run you out of town get in front of the crowd and make it
look like a parade.
I carried that thing everywhere, because I had become very jaded and
I was wrong. I had become very blasé about the good fortune that I had
experienced and I realized oh my god I should have been paying more attention. It was about that time that I met my third husband who
did a lot of orchestrating for Bill Conti and Bill had just begun to work on the
Academy Awards. They needed singers that year, so he asked me to contact singers
for the Oscars (note: Sally Stevens has
been the choral director for twenty-two productions of the Academy Awards).” The film Who
Framed Roger Rabbit? opened on June 24 th, 1988 and it marked another
milestone in the career of Sally Stevens, because composer and conductor Alan
Silvestri brought her onboard to help with the music. It was the first film on
which Sally Stevens worked as the vocal contractor. It turned out to be a good
tandem, as the two of them worked on numerous films together afterwards and
Silvestri would collaborate with producer Robert Zemickis on numerous other
movies as well. A very small sampling of Silvestri and Zemickis films includes,
Romancing The Stone, the
Back to the Future triology,
Death Becomes Her,
Castaway and
Polar Express. The trio of Stevens,
Silvestri and Zemickis worked together on films such as,
Forrest Gump,
Contact,
The Polar Express and
The Abyss. As for the Who
Framed Roger Rabbit? experience Sally Stevens says, “It was a lot of fun. I
wasn’t involved with all of it. There was some solo work in there that I had
nothing to do with. It was fun working with Alan and he is the dearest soul. I
have been really blessed to work with some very special people. Alan is one of
them, John Williams is another one and Seth MacFarlane (television
show Family Guy) is one. There are some wonderful people in our business. It is always fun to watch the finished product (the
films). You always want to do that. I just went to see
Bridge of Spies a couple of weeks
ago, because I did the men’s choir for that film for Tom Newman and they sounded
gorgeous and I was glad to see that they sounded gorgeous. You want to find out
what they do with the final mix. As a contractor there is a great sense of pride
or accomplishment when you go and you see that it is a good job.” Stevens takes a moment to explain the roles of a vocal contractor and a musicians contractor, “A vocal contractor and a musician contractor are very similar in a general way in that a musicians contractor hires the orchestra, books the musicians and meets with the composer to see what his / her needs are and he / she works out the budget and presents it to the music department. They sit down and have the initial meeting with the composer and the music department and in most cases they book the studios and they setup the schedule. The vocal contractor and the musicians contractor do not have to be performing musicians (or singers). It is more of a business role, but most of them come from a musician (or singing) background or a composer background. A
vocal contractor is responsible for hiring a group and for coordinating with the
composer what the style of music will be and what the sound is that he wants or
she wants, (as well as) what the budget has to be. For me it is a step deeper
into the creative process, because you get to communicate more about the music.
It is not just a matter of showing up and singing the notes.
When John Williams did the score for the film
Amistad, about the slave ship that
came to America, the trial and about the slaves being able to return to West
Africa, the music was African of course. I had just done a film with Hans Zimmer
called The Power of One and it was
very authentic African music. We had a wonderful choir of L.A. singers, plus a
handful of singers who really were from Africa. I conducted the choir. It was
great fun.
Sandy DeCrescent knew that I had worked with Hans on that and she recommended me
to John, because of the African nature of the
Amistad score. I just did a talk at
the ASCAP luncheon a little while ago and I used those two scores as examples of
choir work that we had done. I played one of Hans’ choral cues and then one of
John’s and the difference was very obvious. There is something elegant about it
(the music from Amistad) and yet you
know it is African and you know it is about an African situation, but it has a
degree of class that is just different from Hans. It is not as earthy as Hans’
(music).
There was one scene (from Amistad)
when he (John Williams) wanted a soloist and I got to meet with him at his
offices and he showed me the scene on the slave ship of a young woman who is in
chains. She is sitting on the edge of the ship’s railing and you know she is
just not up for this ride. She is holding an infant baby in her hands and she
just slowly, slowly falls back over the side of the ship and into the sea with
all of these chains. He wanted a solo voice to express that feeling and it had
to have an African American quality to the voice, but it also needed to be just
a bit Classical. I got some demo tapes from people here and it wasn’t quite
right. I was at New York for some trustee
meetings and I thought well I will go to Juilliard and I will have some people
audition. I did that and I didn’t find anything quite right. Somebody told me
they knew the director who had just taken over at the San Francisco Opera, so I
called him to see if he had any people and he told me about a young African
American woman who they had just signed. She was at that moment on tour doing
concerts, so I called her and reached her in Birmingham. In just talking to her
on the phone there was something about the quality of her personhood that told
me she was the right person. She sent a demo to me and John loved it. She ended
up doing the cues and her name was Pamela Dillard. John Williams ended up
writing three cues for different spots for her in the film. It is a beautiful
quality and you know that it is an African American voice, but it is very
classcial, emotional and beautiful. You get to experience those kinds of things
(as a vocal contractor). We had a choir of forty-eight adults and then we had a
children’s choir of fifty-two. We rehearsed the children for a full day and then
we went into the studio. The choir was heavily balanced with African American
singers. It was an emotional score.”
“That was John Williams’ suggestion. We did a concert at
the Hollywood Bowl with John and he needed a choir and I think the first time
that we did it we performed music from Amistad. The Hollywood Bowl office called
and they wanted to know the name of the choir. I had just booked the session
singers. We didn’t have a choir, so I thought about it and I thought what about
the Hollywood Film Chorale? I called John and I asked him if that name would be
okay and he said yes that would be fine. He also said we could use that name for
recording. I thought okay we will use that for the program and then I got to
thinking about it and thought it is a very good idea and I trademarked the
name,” she says.
Sally Stevens’ musical influences are also on television, most notably on
Family Guy and
The Simpsons, both of which are shows
produced by Fox. Danny Elfman was hired by Fox to score the music for a pilot
what would eventually become the now legendary animated television series
The Simpsons. Stevens had
collaborated with Elfman on the music for several films including,
Edward Scissorhands,
Batman and
Batman Returns. “Danny called me to come in and to do the main title
(for The Simpsons pilot) and so Danny, my daughter Susie and I sang the main
title and that has been on the air for twenty-five or twenty-six years now.
Danny didn’t want to have to score the show weekly, so they had another composer
for the first few episodes and then Alf Clausen was asked to come in. At frist
Alf didn’t want to do cartoons, but they explained to him that they wanted to
treat this as a dramatic show. He watched a couple of episodes and he has been
scoring it brilliantly ever since,” she says. When Fox later developed the shows
Family Guy and
American Dad the head of the music
department asked the composer to call Sally Stevens to work on the music as
well. Sally Stevens has had a career that has spanned a half
of a century and her work is evidenced in Academy Award winning films, her voice
is heard on the recordings of music icons, her choirs are heard on major feature
films and at the Academy Awards. She is a lyricst and her vocals are heard on
film and television. She has shared the camera with legends such as Danny Kaye
and she has shared the stage with some of the biggest names in the music
industry over the years. Through all of the changes in the film, television and
music industries Sally Stevens has remained both brilliant and relevant. “I am very, very grateful. I have a hard time thinking
of myself as relevant. That is not a word that comes to mind when I think about
myself. I realize that I have been so lucky and so blessed. I have been so
involved in a business that I love all of these years and I know it is pretty
remarkable to have lasted this long. When I was young what I thought I wanted to
do was to be an artist. I write songs and I still write lyrics. I had a song
recorded by James Taylor. I think about if I had been lucky and I had succeeded
with that first record maybe I would have had a five year career and I have
instead had a fifty year career, so I am grateful for the path that I ended up
on, whether it was the one that I wanted to be on or not. Along the way I have
had these little moments of just sheer luck, just freaky, amazing things. I had
a chance to write for this or that and it ended up in some special way to be
another little gift along the road,” says Sally Stevens. You can read part one of
this interview here.
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In the 1960s, I worked on
The Sound of Music and
Doctor Zhivago. Lalo Schifrin started
doing a lot of film scoring around that time during the late sixties and into
the seventies (note: In addition to his
work in films Lalo Schifrin also composed the musical scores for the following
television programs, Mission Impossible, Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Big Valley and
Mannix). I don’t remember how it happened, but I must have been on a session
or something and the contractor had me do a solo and Lalo liked the sound. I did
solo work on the score for Dirty Harry
(score written by Lalo Schifrin). It
was just a breathy kind of vocal that you worked in with the instruments. I did
vocal work on several more of Clint’s films,
The High Plains Drifter and several
of his early films. 
It was at the suggestion of John Williams that Sally
Stevens founded the Hollywood Film Chorale.