Max Steiner: Maestro of Movie Music

What does it take to make a movie? The auteur theory claims that one man makes it, usually the director. Perhaps that's true if you talking about Georges Melies, but I think that a movie is the most collaborative of the arts: thousands of people contribute to a movie. Some are more prominent, like the screenwriter, perhaps the producer, certainly the director, the performers, the cameramen, the set designer....

Max Steiner, born into a theatrical production background, formed the basis of movie music, drawing on the classics of European composition, particularly opera. Almost singlehandedly -- albeit with the collaboration of David Selznick, who backed him at RKO and later used him whenever he could -- he established the need for film scores. Yet while this movie is about Steiner, and the talking heads point out what he actually did (particularly Michael Feinstein) -- an endless flow of leitmotifs with an understanding of how to link them together in a way that communicated to the audience -- it's also an endless flow of collaborators: his orchestrators working off his cue sheets, the performers, directors, and producers who wrote rhapsodic letters praising his contributions to their work.

This is a fine documentary that not only shows what he did, but how he came to do it.