Simon Napier-Bell on Burt / What's New Pussycat

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nowmedical
Posts: 333
Joined: Thu Dec 07, 2006 4:51 pm
Location: london

Simon Napier-Bell on Burt / What's New Pussycat

Post by nowmedical »

Interesting snippet in the Sunday Telegraph today in an article about "Music Manager" Simon Napier-Bell (who he?) who said:

One of my best paid jobs was working on the score for "What's New Pussycat" with Burt Bacharach. We were amazed we'd got him, but he didn't know anything about writing film music. Instead of writing a score, he wrote 47 different tunes for the 47 music sections, recorded them and flew home.

The next day the producers said "It's a disaster. Our contract says we have to use his music. Can you turn this into a score?"

Being a precocious little 25-year-old, I said "Of course". I took the two main songs, threw everything else away and worked on them for four weeks without stopping. I ended up being paid double-double-double time, the most I've made in my life...
Blair N. Cummings
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Joined: Fri Jun 11, 2004 4:14 pm

Re: Simon Napier-Bell on Burt / What's New Pussycat

Post by Blair N. Cummings »

So, Burt didn`t compose his score for the allotted times in the movie, as he did for `Butch Cassidy...`? He just dumped pieces of music and went home, leaving Napier-Bell to do what, exactly? Edit Burt`s compositions? Re-configure them? And Burt was okay with this?
The story is interesting but partial.
A real biography would treat minutiae like this, as well as the rest of his studio work. But (as with the case of JW), the "memoirs" were barely glosses in one case and a load of sad myth-making in the other. And everyone else who could have borne witness to a proper writer is now gone.
Maybe no one in the future will care anyway.
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