APPLETON, WIS. — “And the Oscar goes to….”
Lawrence University student Garth Neustadter got a taste of the film industry awards scene — and perhaps a preview of things to come some day — during a recent three-day visit to Hollywood as one of five finalists in the 8th annual Young Film Composers Competition sponsored by the cable television network Turner Classic Movies.
A junior from Manitowoc, Neustadter was awarded first-prize honors (second place behind the grand prize winner) in the international film scoring competition when the results were announced July 25 at the Skirball Center in Hollywood in a gala ceremony featuring 250 guests, including many prominent composers and executives from the film music business.
The TCM film scoring competition is open to composers 18-35 years of age. This year’s competition drew more than 800 participants from throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. Each finalist had to score a 90-second clip from the 1924 silent movie classic “Beau Brummel.”
At 21 years old, Neustadter was easily the youngest of the five finalists, all of whom were post-graduate composition majors. He was awarded a MacBook Pro 17″ laptop computer and Logic Pro software worth approximately $4,000 for his second-place finish. James Schafer from Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., was named the competition’s grand-prize winner.
Acclaimed composer Hans Zimmer, whose credits include seven Academy and Golden Globe award nominations for his work on nearly 20 films, including “The Lion King,” “Gladiator,” “The Da Vinci Code” and two installments of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, served as judging chair for the competition.
“It was the experience of a lifetime to spend three days in Los Angeles, being treated like royalty, riding around in a limousine, surrounded by some of the biggest names in the film scoring business,” said Neustadter, a voice and violin performance major at Lawrence. “I had the opportunity to visit the archives at Warner Brothers Studios and was able to freely handle and examine all of the original hand-written music scores for classics such as ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘Casablanca.’ What a thrill.
“One of the trip highlights was meeting Hans Zimmer. He took time out of his busy schedule to show us around his personal studio and candidly talked with us one-on-one, answering all of our questions. Being from Germany, Zimmer told me he had to give the other competition judges a lesson in how to correctly pronounce my last name!”
Neustadter, who won a Downbeat magazine award in 2005 for best high school jazz composition, took his first crack at film composing for last year’s TCM competition after seeing a poster for the contest on campus. His entry earned him a spot in the top 20.
For the initial round of this year’s competition, Neustadter wrote and submitted a 60-second score in March for one of four available scenes from “Beau Brummel.” He was notified in late May he had been selected one of the five finalists. In early June, he received the 90-second film clip in the mail all the finalists had to score and was given three weeks to return a finished recording.
“After the initial shock of learning I was one of the finalists, I became very nervous and anxious waiting for the clip to arrive,” said Neustadter, who is currently in Boston taking classes at Berklee College of Music. “After receiving and watching the clip, I felt that the material was something that I could work with. It was suited toward my compositional tastes.
“It can be a bit intimidating starting out, though, because you know that you have three weeks to go from staring at a blank page to delivering a finished product. They give you a relatively short amount of time because they want to test your writing chops. Silent films present an additional challenge because, without any dialogue to support the story-line, you’re left with the task of communicating the plot entirely with music.”
The clip the five finalists had to work with turned out to be the final 90 seconds of “Beau Brummel,” in which the senile and ill title character is confined to a mental infirmary. As he reminisces over his long lost love, Margery, he envisions her presence and with his last breath toasts her and dies. As his loyal companion mourns his death, Brummel emerges from his deathbed as a young man, finally claiming the hand of his beloved Margery.
“The challenge of the clip was having to convey such a variety of contrasting emotions in such a short amount of time,” Neustadter explained. “I felt that I had effectively composed music that mirrored the emotional content of the characters on screen as they moved from delusion to despair, and finally from wonderment to ecstatic joy.
“Ninety seconds may seem like a relatively short amount of time for which to write music, but after deciding which musical cues will correspond to actions on screen, composing, orchestrating and recording, I had invested close to 100 hours in the project,” he added.
While some of the other composers relied on computer-generated music for their submissions, Neustadter had the luxury of using live musicians — including himself — to produce his film score. He solicited the talents of several Lawrence faculty members, classmates and other musical colleagues to produce a full orchestra sound.
Combining the acoustics and recording facilities of the Lawrence Memorial Chapel, Neustadter brought musicians in on an individual basis to record their parts. He replicated a full strings section solely himself by recording his own violin playing 40 separate times from different spots throughout the orchestra stage.
“I was fortunate to have so many talented musicians willing to help me record my score,” said Neustadter. “Very few composers have the chance to hear their compositions realized at such a high level by wonderful musicians like I did.
“It was truly exhilarating to have my clip played over a big screen for so many people the night of the ceremony,” he added. “All in all, the competition was an amazing experience and helped me to establish a lot of great connections.”
In addition to his moment in the spotlight as well as leaving Los Angeles with a job offer from a Nashville producer, Neustadter also experienced another side of celebrity. While staying at the swanky Loews Hotel in Santa Monica, he was unhappily awakened in the middle of the night one evening to police sirens and flashing emergency lights handling a commotion in the parking lot across the street from his room. It wasn’t until the next morning that he discovered he had been a sleepy witness to Lindsay Lohan’s latest encounter with law enforcement.
