Take 5 Extended Interviews

TAKE 5, POV BOX: SCORE COORDINATOR

FULL INTERVIEW: CHARLENE HUANG

 

 

After the orchestrator has finished setting the composer’s score, it is time to make some film music!  One of the people involved in the process of preparing a finished score for performance by an orchestra is the individual known as the score coordinator or score supervisor.  The score supervisor’s duties can vary widely, as the case of Charlene Huang illustrates well.  At one point in the interview below, she identifies herself as “score wrangler”! 

Huang began her career in the music end of the film industry as production assistant at Remote Control Studios (2004-6), where she worked closely with Hans Zimmer during his years composing scores for films like Madagascar (2005) and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006).  After her time at Remote Control, Huang embarked on a decade-long career at DreamWorks Animation, rising through the ranks from music coordinator (2006-2007), music manager (2008-2010), music consultant (2011-2013) and, last but not least, director of music (2014-2017). 

Huang’s tenure at DreamWorks provides us with a fascinating snapshot into the rise and fall of a prestige studio in Hollywood, one more victim of the twenty-first-century mergers that we’ll study in this book’s last two chapters.  In 2016, DreamWorks was purchased by Universal Studios, owned by Comcast, and a year later, the DreamWorks music division folded.  During her time at DreamWorks, Huang had helped create some of the biggest blockbusters of the early twenty-first century, films like War Horse (2011) and Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016).  One of the other interviewees in this book, a prominent person in Hollywood film music, referred to Huang as “one of the best” in the industry, “a godsend who completely understands” every aspect of score supervision.  Currently an independent music consultant, Huang has worked with such composers as Germaine Franco, the 2018 winner of the ASCAP Shirley Walker Award.  I spoke to Huang from her home in the Los Angeles area.

 

The Interview

 

JH: You started out in music performance, right?

CH: Right.  I’m actually a violinist by trade.  I’ve been playing since I was four.  As I was thinking about what I wanted to study in college, I remembered the one thing I’d been doing as long as I’d been playing violin was watching movies.  And, over the years, I’d been really getting acquainted with film soundtracks and learning that repertoire alongside all of the popular music I was listening to.  When I finally got into music school (Manhattan School of Music), there was nothing that seemed to fit what I really wanted to do with my violin.  The closest thing to film music that appealed to me was new music or twentieth-century music.  So, I started playing weird things, where the instructions say, “turn your sheet music upside down.”  For me that was the closest thing, because it was a little out of the box.

JH: Interesting.

CH: Then, during my last semester of music school in New York City, I heard from my sister who was working for Hans Zimmer as a creative film executive.  She was working for him, but it didn’t have to do with music, since for a time, Zimmer wanted to make movies as well as make music in them.

JH: Fascinating; I did not know that.

CH: Yeah, so he and his business partner at the time had one final venture together, which was a film production company called Media Ventures Pictures, and my sister was one of three people who worked for it as a creative executive, since her background is in film production.  And, as I was struggling near the end of my Bachelor’s degree in violin performance about how I was going to apply that degree and make a living for myself, my sister said, “Well, why don’t I try to get you an internship with Hans for the summer?” This was the summer of 2003.  I said, “Why not?” 

JH: Who wouldn’t want to work for Hans Zimmer?

CH: Right.  By that time, he was one of my all-time favorite film composers, an icon even.  I pretty much knew all of his scores.  It was almost like a lightbulb went off.  I didn’t really know that people could work in this field.  I figured the music just magically appears in movies.  It still wasn’t clear what that would look like.  Does that mean I’m going to be a session player?  Will I be playing in these scores?  What am I actually going to do for Hans Zimmer? 

JH: Right.

CH: I went out to L.A., got a sublet in West Hollywood.  The internship was all arranged for me through my sister.  I arrived during the first Pirates of the Caribbean.

JH: The first Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)?

CH: Yeah, exactly.  And that was a very intense project, only because, as happens often, one composer is hired initially, and for some reason it doesn’t work out, and somebody else gets hired.  (This is known as a re-score; see T10, §5.)  That was the case here, and Hans had to come in and save the day.  Only, there’s was limited time, and so he had his whole team of people, half a dozen composers who were writing additional music. 

JH: Who was the original composer, if I can ask?

CH: Actually, the original composer was Klaus Badelt.  He’s done Cat Woman (2004), K-19: The Widow Maker (2002).  Klaus is a well-known film composer who started with Hans Zimmer, as many composers have.  But Hans did write the theme for that first Pirates movie.  Over the course of the franchise, he was the music producer on subsequent films. 

JH: So, at that point your title was production assistant, or music production assistant?

CH: Right, production assistant in the recording studio.  Nowadays, all composers including Hans Zimmer will have a technical assistant for writing music.  I did everything from serving coffee to de-noising samples.  One thing I love about Hans is that he really does give everybody who comes through his doors an opportunity to try out everything that they want.  So long as they know what they want to do and know what their ultimate goal is, they’re free to try out anything they want.  But, at some point you've tried everything out and you still haven't found what’s your thing.  And that’s likely what happened to me. There was no bad blood or anything.

JH: What happened next?

CH: So now I was actually ready for my real career path.  At that point, the person I reported to during my internship was a woman named Alison Clark, who was basically a score wrangler.  She knew Sunny Park at DreamWorks, the former general manager of Media Ventures, who was looking for a new, like music coordinator slash executive assistant.  So, I interviewed with Sunny in the lobby of DreamWorks. 

JH: Wow.

CH: I had no administrative experience. When I went in there, in my mind it was like, “I know how to use a stapler.”  I did have some computer experience from working with Hans taking inventory serial numbers.  But in terms of being an assistant, an executive assistant, I had no idea. Again, I was out of my league.  Going into de-noising at Remote Control, I had no idea either.  Like, why would Hans would ever take me to be a de-noising technician?  Now being up for this music coordinator, administrative job at DreamWorks Animation, and I’m not even interested in animation!

JH: That’s fate for you!

CH: I’m an accidental success!  For Sunny, who had worked for Hans for a really long time, all that she really needed to hear was that I was working for him and I had been with him for two and a half years and it’s almost like as if nothing else mattered, like we had the same sort of acumen and knowledge of the business simply because of who we knew.

JH: To your credit, it sounds like you were a quick study and practically everything that was presented to you, so you learned quickly.

CH: Yeah.  And you know, it really helped that I was in music this whole time.  That’s the other thing.  I think I was pretty much hired on the spot, and I think I actually took half a day off.  I went back to Remote Control and let Hans's assistant know.  I gave everybody the news that day and Hans was actually really happy for me, because I think he did see that I was starting to struggle to sort of see my place at Remote Control.  And I think if I kept going, I might be the studio manager there, but that wasn't really something that was important to me.  Ironically, the studio manager there is one of my best friends and she initially was hired on to manage Hans Zimmer’s sampling project.  And she had come from real estate!  You know, Hans tends to give people a leg up.  Sometimes it’s sort of like, “all right, you don’t know what you’re signing up for, but you're going to find out.”

JH: As music coordinator at DreamWorks, what did you do?

CH: Well, I started during the end of a movie called Flushed Away (2006) and at the beginning of Shrek the Third (2007).  I was basically executive assistant to Sunny Park.  Sunny had been the head of music of DreamWorks for about fourteen years and had a long-time relationship with Hans before she even landed there.  I came in to DreamWorks during a transitional period.  Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks Animation were a separate entity now from Steven Spielberg’s original outfit.  At that point DreamWorks was being distributed by Paramount Pictures.  So, when I was hired on, I was actually at Paramount, which is very bizarre that whole story.  In the ten years that I worked for DreamWorks Animation, only four years were my paychecks actually from DreamWorks.

JH: Interesting.

CH: Yeah.  As a public company, they needed the support of a bigger umbrella power house studio like Paramount or Fox and now Universal.  So, what I did was I scheduled meetings to start with and I wrote calls. I was a personal assistant at times and I think when I first started, because it was at the end of Flushed Away and I was actually being trained by the former music coordinator we weren't working on the sound back by then, so it was just so foreign, all of these deadlines and the art work that needed to be approved and going line by line through all the copy editing and just that I didn’t know what was going on. I really had to learn very quickly now.  But then Shrek The Third (2007) was very song heavy production.

JH: Yes, there are all sorts of songs in that one.  “Barracuda” (1977), “On the Good Ship Lollipop” (1934)—it’s all over the map.

CH: Right.  So, we actually did not have any music supervisors on that film.  We had used a consultant who submitted a lot of different music at the time by up-and-coming artists.  And Shrek the Third really became more of like a classic rock album film. There’s, you know, “Barracuda,” like you said, or things like Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” (1970), a lot of songs by classic bands from a time when they were about to hit it big but not yet really well known.  It helped make an original sound within the body of the film.

JH: In the same way that Smashmouth’s “All Star” worked in the first Shrek (2001).  They weren’t well known at the time.

CH: Right, or like the Eels, “My Beloved Monster” in that same film.  The Eels were not a band people knew at the time.  Again, I was learning on the fly, even about the history of the company.  It was a lot of information!  A lot of the files that I was looking at were old live action pictures, and there were some employees who were with DreamWorks Animation who had serviced all of the live action films, but they were kind of intertwined.  I just made certain to know that history as well.  One of the things coming in to be an executive assistant is that it's a different set of politics now.  Or even email etiquette, cc’ing every single person, or not making your language too verbose.  It just became at told me schooling and administrative etiquette.  I went to being nervous about bringing coffee to the guys at Remote Control to being nervous about how my emails sounded at DreamWorks!  I got a promotion from score coordinator to music manager during Kung Fu Panda (2008) and Madagascar 2 (2008).  Sunny Park was starting to allow me to handle smaller sort of negotiations with mostly artists, musicians and just figuring out recording sessions and starting to sort of oversee the budget a little bit more and keep tabs on it.

JH: But eventually you returned to your performance career around 2010?

CH: Right.  I left at the beginning of 2011.  And the intention was to set out to be a full-time special player, to play violin.  I still got hired once in a while by DreamWorks Animation by my old boss, Sunny Park, to do a few things during Puss in Boots (2011), and it was really easy for me, I could do it with my eyes closed.  Sunny was always throwing me a bone and just always helping me out. Like no matter where I was. She was like a huge mentor and supporter of mine.

CH: Someone at DreamWorks introduced me to a friend of hers named Paul Haslinger who was an Austrian composer, and he needed someone to do the score coordinating for him during Underworld Awakening (2012), so she recommended me for the job.  I worked on Underworld Awakening with Paul.  I was familiar enough with budgets and the core production of it all that it very easy to just step in and there’s kind of like, “wow, I don’t need to be with DreamWorks to do this kind of work.”  And that was pretty exhilarating.

JH: What exactly did you do on Underworld Awakening?

CH: My title for that project was score production manager.

JH: Score production manager.  Can you explain what that means?

CH: I did the music budget with Paul.  I figured out how much an orchestra in Seattle was going to cost.  It was more like he gave me a bottom line and I told him whether or not it was going to be able to be met by and sometimes in order to do that you might have to scale down your numbers in the orchestra.  You might have to cut down the number of scoring days.  Who are you using as your music copyist?  Can they get the better deal?  Like I said, it’s all about negotiating rates with your music team at that point.  And then just keeping him in mind with meetings and deliverables, really working with his tech team.  Usually, my role is in between the composer and the film studio.  I like the term “score wrangler.” 

JH: “Score wrangler”?

CH: That’s not my term, but I like it.  It was actually coined by Hans’s close friend and collaborator, Bob Badami.  He’s a music editor and music supervisor.  Badami coined the term “score wrangler.”  And the first time he used that word for like title for himself might have been for Pirates of the Caribbean, I'm not really sure.

JH: So, you did that for basically a year before you were promoted to a director of music?

CH: Yeah, correct.  In the middle of 2012, Sunny Park called me because she was actually pregnant with her second child.  She was exploring maternity leave, and would I consider coming back to DreamWorks to do her job as director of music while she was gone.  I waited a whole maybe five minutes, you know, before I said yes!  Sunny was doing some minimal work, but everything sort of went through me.  I came back right at the end of the Rise of the Guardians (2012).  My salary went up quite a bit except that I was still an independent consultant.  I learned a great deal about self-employment taxes and there’s a price that comes with a higher salary because you pay for your own health care and all that stuff.  And then a year and a half later, 2014, I was promoted to director of music and I stayed for another four and a half years.  Until the company was absorbed by Comcast Universal NBC in 2017.  Actually, I would say that the negotiations were already happening in 2016.

JH: DreamWorks was bought out by Comcast?

CH: Yeah.  The purchase was completed in 2017.  As the parent company for Universal NBC, Comcast, a cable network, was mainly interested in DreamWorks for its potential for other properties: an amusement park, maybe, or some attraction build-up, TV shows on Netflix.  An endless amount of things could be developed from DreamWorks!  As part of the DreamWorks deal, Comcast also got the studio’s Classic Media.  Classic Media has Casper the Friendly Ghost, My Little Pony, all these other things with even more potential as properties.

JH: So that was early 2017, something like that?

CH: Right.  My last job was Captain Underpants (2017).  I left DreamWorks in June 2017.  At its height when I was there, there were eight people as our A-team, in our department.  By May of 2017, I was the last person standing. I was the only person left, closing up shop.  I was working as the transition team with the Universal music department, which is headed by Mike Knobloch. He has about a twenty-person team.  Universal is responsible for the Pitch Perfect series, all the Transformer movies, the Fast and Furious—huge blockbusters.  So that’s what happened to DreamWorks Animation, and that’s how I left.

JH: Can you comment on the trend of corporate mergers and film studios getting bigger and bigger?

CH: You know, when I started with DreamWorks in 2004, Paramount had just made a big distribution deal with DreamWorks, and at that time Paramount was itself part of Viacom that owned MTV and many different other properties.  So, in hindsight, this is nothing new for a company, nor is the path that I went down new.  Ultimately if something like DreamWorks ends, it’s probably because something bigger took it over!  I would say that the major difference now is that the budgets have gotten way smaller.

JH: Why is that?

CH: With the advent of Netflix and streaming, and people bootlegging things and subscription services.  Netflix, like Amazon, put retail stores out of business since you can buy everything online now.  Once Netflix and Hulu started to do some great original programs, this affected the theatrical market and box-office numbers.  Thinking back the heyday of DreamWorks, when Shrek 2 (2004) was third highest grossing film of all time, something like $250 million on opening weekend.  By the time DreamWorks ended a decade later, if we could have like $50 to $70 million opening weekend that was a big deal.  So streaming services and subscription services have changed their whole business.  By the time I came back to DreamWorks, for Rise of the Guardians (2012) we had a less than half the budget than we had when I was there from 2006 to 2010.

JH: Thanks for agreeing to this interview.

CH: Thank you for asking me!