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This chapter presents American composer and pianist Oscar Levant's comments on the music of George Gershwin. According to Levant, Gershwin began to impinge on his life even before he met or even heard of him. He recalled his first meeting with Gershwin in a show titled Ladies First starring Nora Bayes and his recording of his version of Gershwin's compositions including Rhapsody in Blue and Rialto Ripples. This chapter is based on an original article published in the November 1939 issue of Town and Country magazine.

Concurrent with his later theoretical studies, Gershwin further investigated the classical repertoire. He especially admired Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Wagner, Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov, Richard Strauss, Debussy, and Stravinsky. Gershwin not only went to concerts but studied the great classics at home, including the Bach keyboard toccatas, and also took an interest in current developments and in meeting other composers both at home and abroad, including England. He made additional discoveries in his later years, and in 1929 acquired the score to Alfredo Casella's Serenata for five instruments. Meanwhile, Gershwin knew more about his own country's composers than he generally made known. His greatest affinity and loyalty were always to Broadway's composers, including those, such as Vernon Duke and Oscar Levant, who were, like himself, active in more serious realms as well.

In the productions leading up to Gone with the Wind, Selznick tried working with different composers to cultivate a sustainable partnership. These efforts included trial productions with Alfred Newman (The Prisoner of Zenda) and Oscar Levant (Nothing Sacred), and ultimately led to Selznick’s hiring Lou Forbes as a permanent music director in 1937. Forbes’s responsibilities included securing permissions to use preexistent music, assembling preview scores (known now as “temp tracks”), supervising final scores, serving as a liaison between Selznick and the composer, monitoring recording sessions, and watching the budget. This chapter surveys the films leading up to Forbes’s tenure and his initial productions, which involved coordinating the collective efforts of multiple composers, including Hugo Friedhofer, Max Steiner, Robert Russell Bennett, and Franz Waxman. Forbes’s thoughtful contributions to films like Intermezzo illuminate the otherwise neglected role of the Hollywood music director.

This chapter begins with Walters and John Darrow building a house in Malibu Beach, and concisely discusses the development of Malibu Colony. Most of this chapter is devoted to the making of The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), which reunited Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on-screen (after a ten year hiatus) when Judy Garland was removed from the picture. The film co-stars Oscar Levant, with choreography by Hermes Pan and Robert Alton.

This chapter provides a critical discussion on Copland’s writings about film music, particularly the lecture he delivered at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) but also in his other publications, such as his book What to Listen for in Music and his articles in the popular press. In the MoMA lecture, a reflection of Copland’s initial experiences in Hollywood composing the score for Lewis Milestone’s film Of Mice and Men, he provides a critical assessment of Hollywood’s industrial enterprise and contemporary film composers such as Max Steiner, George Antheil, Ernst Toch, Warner Jansen, and Alfred Newman. Copland’s later writings present a synthesized and theoretic approach to the varied functions of music in film that became influential in subsequent film music scholarship.

In November 1914, Max Steiner arrived in New York City, with little money and few prospects. This chapter details another formative time in Steiner’s life: his ascent from a struggling Tin Pan Alley music copyist to successful Broadway conductor. It also details his first professional experience with cinema (then silent), as musical supervisor and composer for a chain of New York theaters owned by William Fox. Steiner’s gregariousness and his gift for quick problem-solving led to work with celebrated composer Victor Herbert. Steiner also formed friendships with rising talents like Jerome Kern, Oscar Levant, and George Gershwin. Stage hits like the Gershwin-scored George White’s Scandals expanded Steiner’s musical language, which was fundamentally European, to include American jazz. However, his own attempt to write a Broadway show—1923’s Peaches—was a failure, discouraging him for a time from further composition.