Hollywood’s “No Man” Leonid V. Raab (1900–1968)

Leonid Raab was one of Hollywood’s most prolific orchestrators of Golden Age film music. However, his profile is absent from standard reference works on the cinema. Raab’s career is examined using contempora- neous sources including a journal in Russian belonging to his friend Boris Artzybasheff, translated here for the first time. Emphasis is given to Raab’s alliances with fellow émigré studio musicians, artists, and expats in thewider community in Hollywood. Born in Tiraspol, Russia, Raab started his career in New York City as a copyist and arranger with the music publishers T.B. Harms, working under Robert Russell Bennett on musicals such as Show Boat (1927). He moved from Broadway to RKO Radio Pictures in 1929 and, following the Great Depression, was employed by MGM orchestrating Herbert Stothart’s scores for The Merry Widow, David Copperfield, and A Tale of Two Cities. From 1936 to 1967, Raab collaborated mainly with the composer Franz Waxman, orchestrating some 100 scores, including Rebecca, Edge of Darkness, Objective Burma, Sunset Boulevard, A Place in the Sun, and Taras Bulba. A comprehensive filmography (~400 scores) is presented, together with some rare family memorabilia and, among other things, an orchestral score which Raab arranged of the song “Glory to God” composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff.

“You befouled your own nest!”

This chapter argues that the relationship between the Hollywood novel and films about Hollywood underwent a reversal of sorts beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It begins by examining how Los Angeles film noir of the 1940s set the stage for mainstream films to take direct aim at Hollywood. By 1950, the release of In a Lonely Place and Sunset Boulevard demonstrated Hollywood’s capacity to befoul its own nest as a handful of screenwriters, directors, and stars responded directly and critically to the industry’s rusting machinery. If film adaptations of Hollywood novels in the 1920s and 1930s had largely defanged the novels’ treatment of the industry, studio films around this time developed their own bite, especially amid the gradual collapse of the studio system.

Retrospective Time and the Subdominant Past

This paper examines analytic possibilities afforded by understanding exceptional uses of the subdominant as a hermeneutic signal of the past tense in contemporary Broadway megamusicals. While an emerging consensus in studies of pop music holds that the subdominant chord can comprise a variety of functions beyond its traditional predominant role, to suggest as much already betrays an approach that is steeped in the long shadow of common-practice tonality and the expectations that it entails. Rather than trying to develop a separate syntax from its common-practice antecedents, it is more fruitful to engage with common-practice perspectives in the analysis of certain styles of pop music. Through analysis of examples from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard and Boublil and Schönberg's Miss Saigon, I argue that cases wherein the subdominant receives an unconventional (over-)emphasis might be better understood through the hermeneutics of tonal temporality, rather than through attempts to codify them as an entirely new syntax.

Ready for His Closeup? Pasolini’s San Paolo and Paul, Apostle of Christ (2018)

The article uses Sunset Boulevard (1950) and the cinematic Paul pattern to reflect on San Paolo, Pasolini’s script for an unrealized Paul film, and on Paul, Apostle of Christ (2018). Typical Paul films, including television and church-use productions, present Paul in terms of a repeated pattern including 1) a spectacularly conceived Acts, 2) his martyrdom, 3) hagiography, and 4) biopic film structure. Despite focusing on Luke’s writing of Acts, rather than the content of Acts, Paul, Apostle of Christ follows the cinematic pattern quite closely. Even though it follows Acts more closely, San Paolo deviates from the cinematic pattern extensively, primarily because it transposes Paul to modernity where Paul struggles weakly and apocalyptically, rather than spectacularly or hagiographically, against dominant institutions. Unlike most films about early Christianity, San Paolo is not about the triumph of Christianity. Sunset Boulevard makes a nice foil for Paul’s cinematic history and these two films specifically because of its story of a forgotten film star who fantasizes about a glorious cinematic return and because of its use of a dead, scriptwriter narrator to tell its story. Paul, too, still awaits cinematic celebrity. In San Paolo and Paul, Apostle of Christ, scripts, scriptwriters, and dead narrators dominate the tales.