The Jerry Goldsmith Companion
Interview with author Jeff Bond
Welcome to Star Trekking — random intersections in the final frontier.
You know his work from such classic movie scores as Alien, Patton, The Omen, Planet of the Apes, Gremlins, Rambo, Logan’s Run, and many more.
Oh, and he also wrote the music for Star Trek - The Motion Picture. And Star Trek V. And First Contact. And the theme for Voyager. And many more.
Around these parts, we take our Jerry Goldsmith music very seriously, and that’s why we’re very excited about a new biography of the composer, penned by the great Jeff Bond. Bond is no stranger to film music or Star Trek, having written (or co-written) such books as Star Trek-The Motion Picture: Inside the Art and Visual Effects, The Art of the Kelvin Timeline, and The Music of Star Trek. (He also starred as Dr. McCoy in several episodes of the Star Trek Phase II fan film series.)
Jeff’s latest book, for CF Publishing, is THE JERRY GOLDSMITH COMPANION, a “two-volume examination of the maestro's career and a comprehensive account of his unforgettable music.” Last week saw the launch of the book’s Kickstarter campaign to provide early discounted copies of the book. The Kickstarter was fully funded in the first few hours and as of this writing has more than tripled its goal. You can bet your sweet bippy that your humble correspondent became a backer that first day, and we love the project so much we wanted to make sure as many people knew about it as possible.
And so, we asked Jeff Bond to answer a few questions about the project and what surprises the book might offer for Trek fans in particular.
INTERVIEW WITH JEFF BOND
First off, what was the genesis of the book? I mean in a way it feels like your whole career has been leading up to this, but what made it actually happen now?
Well, "now" is a strong word. :) I more or less finished the manuscript a year ago but have been updating it over the past year. It's an idea I've thought about for a long time and has always been in discussion since I first started working with Taylor White and particularly after I'd done The Music of Star Trek and the book on Danny Elfman and Tim Burton. I know Goldsmith's agent Richard Kraft and Taylor and I discussed this idea with him quite a few years ago, at least 10-15 if not more. At some point when we were working on our giant book on Irwin Allen which was a success we settled on the Jerry Goldsmith book would be next. I started working for real in December 2019 with some visits to the Motion Picture Academy Library in Beverly Hills where I was able to gather a lot of research material and look at around a dozen of Goldsmith's written scores which are stored there which was an amazing experience. Then I spent the bulk of the pandemic shutdown from early 2020 to 2021 writing and doing interviews for the project, and then augmenting it with additional material on and off through 2022 while I was working on another book project for Taylor. But to your point, I do feel I've been writing this book in my head almost since my days in college--in fact I wrote two papers on Goldsmith and John Williams in college for a film class and a music class and both were very well received, and I remember my music teacher writing on the paper, "You could write a book on this stuff!" So decades later I proved her right.
You previously wrote THE book about Star Trek music. How much did that experience inform this new project?
It was definitely formative. That was my first attempt at doing interviews and research specifically for a book project and I was very lucky to have enthusiastic support from the composers involved, especially Fred Steiner who was wonderfully helpful and supportive.
I recall reading somewhere that Jerry Goldsmith said he didn't ever really understand Star Trek movies. And while that may have been true on a cerebral level for him, from an emotional standpoint he was really able to capture the spirit of each film he did. Do you think he connected with the franchise over and above his usual gift of being able to capture a film's emotional essence?
Well one of the things I loved about doing the book was finding the kinds of personal throughlines in Goldsmith's career, and there's a huge chapter on Goldsmith working on Star Trek - The Motion Picture, and considering his reputation for reticence in his interviews, there's actually quite a lot of discussion from Goldsmith about that project in particular as well as his other Trek movies. Interestingly he had just come off of Alien where he was very frustrated, they messed around with his music a lot and he could not relate to the characters. Goldsmith did a lot of dark, violent projects, and he was probably better at them than anyone else, but they weren't necessarily what he was drawn to, and I think after Alien doing Star Trek sparked something because despite the movie's flaws, here were likable characters and a story that was optimistic but with a lot of ideas he could express in his music. And while it was a hugely challenging, exhausting project Goldsmith was treated very, very well--he was the first major talent apart from the cast signed for the picture, even before there was a director, and Paramount brass were very onboard with the idea of music playing a major, major role in the production, so he was able to write a lavish score and apart from some early cues, all of it went into the picture. And I almost think his comments later about "not understanding" Star Trek are facetious--his comments about TMP and Trek in general show a very clear understanding of the Star Trek ethos. I think the "not understanding" idea derived from his experience on Insurrection, where they had an idea for the action climax for dispatching the villain that was not very clear to anyone, and that became obvious when Goldsmith scored it, and that whole sequence wound up being reedited and redone.
The latest season of Picard contained practically a whole musical appreciation course about Goldsmith's Trek music. How do you think he would view the use of so many of his themes in this new context?
That's hard to say. Clearly he was very happy that his music was being played and heard all over the world and he appreciated his connection to Star Trek. But I'm not sure he ever commented on, say, Ron Jones using his material in TNG for example. He may not have ever been aware of it.
Can you tease any especially good Trek-related anecdotes that appear in the book?
Well there's a great one I just plugged in about how Goldsmith told George Miller he got himself in the mood to write the music for John Lithgow in "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" in the Twilight Zone movie. But I'm not going to ruin it!
What did you learn about Goldsmith the man over the course of researching and writing this book?
Well as I hinted at above, I think Goldsmith looked for some specific things when he went after or was offered work, particularly after Alien and Outland where he got tired of the violence and hardware. I think Poltergeist for him may have been the perfect project, where he was dealing with likable, even lovable characters and could write music about the love between members of a family but still had the opportunity to write complex, exciting, scary, awe-inspiring music. Another thing I realized working on this was that people think that Goldsmith wrote "sex music" for the first time in Basic Instinct, but if you look at his career, he was tackling sexual issues and themes as far back as The Blue Max and The Detective and scoring insane, perverse sex scenes in Reincarnation of Peter Proud, and even in Alien and Star Trek TMP he was either asked to or thought about expressing sexual ideas in his music ("V'ger kind of just wanted to get laid," he says at one point).
Thanks, Jeff!
Check out the Kickstarter here.
Look, even if you somehow haven’t seen the classic movies, you know Goldsmith’s music.
And you know you want to hear a trombone cover version of the Picard theme (in which Goldsmith’s theme makes a cameo appearance at the end).
Of course there was a lot of Jerry in season three.
Finally, if you’re still on Facebook, join us at The Cult of Jerry, a Goldsmith-focused group I started a dozen years ago.
Now the best thing to do is go order some Romulan Ale to help distract yourself while you impatiently wait for the book to arrive. Or is that just me…
Until next time, assuming I don’t get picked up by Starfleet security for transporting illegal beverages, remember -
The human adventure is just beginning.
Cool interview, thanks for sharing.
I remember Jerry saying he didn't understand Star Trek back in 1993 at a live concert. So clearly long before Insurrection.